The windmills of my mind

It's a little over a month since the European Poetry Festival rolled into town (well, the town of Liverpool). My collaborator – the marvellous Carolyn Hashimoto – was delayed en route from Scotland, wasps and wrong turns, but well in time for the intros, by Chris McCabe, in his LiPS (Liverpool Poetry Space) capacity, and EPF organiser extraordinaire SJ Fowler. The annual European Poetry Festival pairs up poets who have often never met, and many of whom cross borders to join the project, to produce brand-new work (to fit a seven-minute timeframe) to be performed at different events around the UK.

At the Liverpool leg, Carolyn and I were up third, mesmerising (I'm sure) the Open Eye Gallery crowd with what Carolyn named "the chant section", before launching into our piece properly. The chant section involved us wandering around in not quite dizzying circles and wittering what probably seemed to be random words and numbers. O ye of little faith, there's no randomness at EPF – there's always method to the madness! 

And much method was applied to mine and Carolyn's particular creation – a sestina inspired by spirals and vortices and maelstroms and eddies and whirlpools and whirlwinds. Carolyn landed on the theme, combining her current concerns with my own, emailing: "I’ve been writing around Nothingness and Vortex most recently. Spinning in circles and not getting very far, but I did wonder if there might be some way of connecting the work you are doing with rivers and seas with whirlpools and maelstroms...?" 

Next, I landed on the form, after lugging my well-thumbed copy of not insignificant-in-size The Penguin Book of Oulipo on a trip to London, where I happened to be seeing its editor Philip Terry, at the issue launch of Long Poem Magazine at the Barbican. As I dug into The Penny Borough of Ourselves (its alternative N+7 title), it dawned on me that the sestina would link nicely to our spirals and going round in a circle. The slightly elongated train journey from Manchester, meanwhile, meant I could go rabbitholing – a mention of “gidouille” led me to finding out this denotes the 11th month in the Pataphysical calendar, corresponding to the period June 15 to July 13 – the performance was chalked up for July 6 and I was soon going to be passing the Collège de Pataphysique on Boulevard Diderot in Paris. It all had a warm feeling of circular serendipity.

So, here's the science: a sestina incorporates six stanzas each six lines long, moving along following a pre-set pattern of end-words, culminating in a final stanza of three lines involving all six end-words, two per line. Phew. It’s super complicated, the old sestina, but as a collaborative effort, I thought it might work quite nicely. For the record, the pattern of the end-words, in stanza order, is: 123456 / 615243 / 364125 / 532614 / 451362 / 246531. The sixth stanza is then followed by a tercet that is known variably by the French term "envoi", the Occitan term "tornada", or, with reference to its size in relation to the preceding stanzas, a "half-stanza". It consists of three lines that should take the pattern of 2–5, 4–3, 6–1; the first end-word of each pair can occur anywhere in the line, while the second must end the line.

We decided that the best way forward would be to pick our six end-words between us, thinking about incorporating things to do with our thoughts of whirlpool, vortex, sea, tide, sun, moon and wotnot, and coming up with a longer list then whittling that down… After a bit of backwards and forwards, this became Flow / Pull / Swirl / City / Side / Blue – and this selection later on became the basis of the chant sections, which closed as well as opened our performance. The chant sections (pictured below) saw me recite? incant? the end-words in the order they appear in the sestina, while Carolyn came up with "a little bingo sheet", or "pull side / poolside bingo" of the numbers and words. Someone said they "got it", so that's good.

Our next job was embarking on the first stanza, which we both made a stab at, then I – by now on holiday in Provence, where the sestina was invented by a troubadour called Arnaut Daniel (who appears in Dante's Inferno) – fiddled about with the two resulting versions, so that one of the first stanzas could become the second. Each had its own feel, but the two teamed up nicely – Carolyn's with time zones and a sense of distance and proximity and "two minds", and mine tying in with that via the aforementioned Pataphysical calendar and foreign names and watery journeys... we both liked my stanza to open and Carolyn's redone as stanza 2, as it meant we started abroad and then came together in Liverpool, with the first beginning "Round and round" so we're spiralling from the get-go, and tying in with the performance movement ideas we were having, and the second stanza starting with "Always in two minds"... So our pattern was set and we continued building the poem like a tennis match.

Having slipped into the River Seine in the first stanza, in the third, I continued travelling via waterways and thinking about whirlpools, and brought us into the Irish Sea, with Liverpool in our sights, passing Anglesey's Menai Straits Swellies and the Hilbre archipelago, tidal islands just off the Wirral peninsula, where I grew up. More rabbithole research (my favourite kind) led me to discover the full moon in July is known as a buck moon and it reminded me about the legendary deer that swam from Wales to Hilbre (where my uncle John was a pioneer of the bird observatory).

By stanza five, I'd remembered that the wee boat I sailed out of Liverpool and around the Irish Sea (and beyond) was a Twister, and, as Liverpool is often a bit on the blowy side, my thoughts turned to all things windy. The "tornada" of the sestina means turned or twisted, and the usual French word for whirlwind is "tourbillon", one of the words I'd already written in my notebook – they were fixing the windmill sitting at the top of the village where I was staying, so windmills had been on my mind (never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel). 

Also in search of inspiration in keeping with our project, Carolyn took herself off to the Crawick Multiverse in her home county of Dumfries and Galloway – a large land art project with distinctive snailing hills designed by Charles Jencks (see also The Garden Of Cosmic Speculation, Jupiter Artland and the art gallery in Edinburgh), and offering forth some immense physicality in the "upward swirl" as we are invited by Carolyn to "climb the spiral hillside".

Carolyn also tabled some brilliant plans (and even diagrams!) for the performance, talking Slinkys, Maypoles, Swingball, but my inability to turn quickly meant these had to be sidelined. We thought about having the person not speaking walking around the person speaking, reflecting the vortex and spiral idea, with maybe one of us going clockwise and the other going anticlockwise, then that might also represent time zones and calendars... but then we remembered the microphones. Those wires could have wreaked havoc. Anyway, you can see a film of what we did get up to here. 

The other performances can also be watched on YouTube, and the poets involved were, in this order: Lenni Sanders and David Spittle; Julia Rose Lewis and Alec Newman; Carolyn Hashimoto and Sarah-Clare Conlon; Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler; Endre Ruset and Stephen Sunderland; Sarah Dawson and Andrew Taylor; Chris McCabe reading for Thomas Ballhausen and Robert Sheppard, and, finally, Lena Chilari and Michael Sutton. More on the European Poetry Festival here and specifically the Liverpool leg, which closed EPF 2025, here.

(Apologies for the all-over-the-shop fonts – Blogger is ancient and creaking and I looked in the back end to organise the code and came straight back out again, it's so hideous in there.)

Photographic memory

Last weekend, I was back at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery for the eleventh, and final, instalment of this year's European Poetry Festival. More on that in a future post, however, as I have other thoughts to share right now. 

My visit to the Mann Island photography outpost in 2024 sparked me to write a piece to enter into a fancy art magazine competition. This pageant's details had been wafted under my nose by Roma Havers, who had been facilitating the Critics Collective, a Manchester Poetry Library initiative for which I was lucky enough to have been selected to join the ranks. Our six-week session series – which featured presentations and workshops led by guests including Khairani Barokka, Kit Fan and John McAuliffe – culminated in participants writing and placing (or attempting to place) reviews.

I have some incoming in PN Review (my second appearance sporting my jaunty new critic's hat) and The North. I've seen the proofs for both, so I guess they're imminent. I do not, on the other hand, have anything in the fancy art magazine. Unperturbed, I tinkered with the piece slightly and submitted it to another fancy prize, and that got me nowhere either. 

Hey-ho. It felt a shame, as the exhibition I'd reviewed was fab, but as it was taken down in September, I thought it best to forget about it. 

Then, as I say, last weekend, I was back at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery, and I noticed that the photographer whose show it was, Stephanie Wynne, is involved in another project, and you have until 24 July to catch it at Crosby Library. Not All Who Wander Are Lost, part of the Photo Here programme, sees Stephanie as artist in residence collaborate with members of Crosby Camera Club to explore the "feel" of Sefton by combining photography with psychogeography. Wandering and pondering, what's not to like? Check that out here.

So here's the review I wrote of Stephanie Wynne's The Erosion. Better later than never...

Stephanie Wynne's The Erosion, Open Eye Gallery.
Install photo: Rob Battersby June 2024

Littorally Speaking by Sarah-Clare Conlon

The naturally eroding sands of Crosby Beach are gradually revealing a hidden human history, as documented by Liverpool-based photographer Stephanie Wynne in an exhibition commissioned by Open Eye Gallery

It almost wasn’t meant to be. Arriving with minutes to spare, I whipped out the two pairs of binoculars I’d lugged via tram, taxi, train and tube, located my collaborator, handed her one, then grabbed a seat in the audience and took a breath. It was instantly cut short as I gasped at the photographs to my left.

Here were five evenly sized, evenly spaced studies, each setting wave-worked orange bricks and hand-carved blocks of white marble against a bright blue letterbox of sky. These were broken homes and collapsed cornershopfronts, factory facades and grandiose gravestones. These were smithereens of Liverpool after Second World War air raids. 

Creatively exploring Crosby Beach climbed into my must-dos in 2020 when I heard about its secrets gradually being revealed by time and tide, simultaneously learning that family had grown up within spitting distance, on the sandblasted terraced streets of Waterloo. But we were in lockdown and the coast seemed a long way from Manchester.

Stephanie Wynne, however, is local and has photographed the beach for years, she tells me when I get in touch. I’d outlined my encounter with The Erosion; that I was one of 14 European Poetry Festival performers reading in pairs at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery, that I was taken by our backdrop. I ask about the five warm-hued shots with light surrounds, a contrast to the strand’s dark story.

“The day images were taken on different days in different seasons,” Wynne tells me. “Most photography projects that have value are long term – you need to photograph and re-photograph. You need knowledge of a place to be able to represent it.”

On the opposite wall, beyond which the River Mersey flows out to the Irish Sea, eight black-mounted views elicit an ethereal, other-worldliness, and a sense of nature taking things back – spume-slippery seaweed slicking over once-windowsills, creeping gale-thrashed marram grass grasping footholds in crumbling mortar. “It is a poignant landscape,” notes the exhibition blurb. “Man-made but sculpted by nature.”

Wynne elaborates: “The night pictures were the first in the project, taken between 1 and 8 May 2021, to mirror the week of nightly bombing in May 1941 – the May Blitz. They are all long exposures with torchlight – referencing searchlights – exposing the foreground details.”

Eighty years before Wynne took her camera to the beach, the Luftwaffe pounded Liverpool. Nearly one-third of houses were damaged or destroyed, thousands of buildings in the strategically vital port city flattened. The resulting rubble was dumped on a mile-long stretch of shoreline, part coastal defence, part collective memory wipe. 

Wynne researched war waste on Merseyside and beyond during a six-month residency with Open Eye in spring 2023, and, to give context to The Erosion, picked four black-and-white archive images from Sefton Library Service and Imperial War Museum, which oversee the exhibition. 

At the far end of the room, I find myself drawn to two larger, unframed prints, very much focused brinewards. Watery themes run through my poetry (I used to keep a little yacht upstream at Brunswick Dock), and, to me, these feel different to the other groupings and their land-based gaze. It turns out they are part of a new series of pictures, explains Wynne: “To further the project since January I decided to look at how the water and intertidal life is affected by our interventions.”

This pairing – one calm, half-submerged; one rippled, kinetic, as if the swash is rushing in – was chosen by curator Max Gorbatskyi. “He felt two was enough to tell the story,” says Wynne, continuing: “Max wanted to create a narrative throughout the exhibition – the daylight wall shows the archaeological details, shifting bricks, plantlife, how people use the beach and construct playful ‘artworks’ – and I decided to create one of these makeshift sculptures.”

Spying this 3-D pile of debris – cobbled masonry necklace-linked with a ribbon of rusting steel reinforcement rod – was another highlight at our event, one of the poets hiding behind it, then reappearing. My poetry partner and I delivered our ebbing and flowing piece about the ocean, squinted through our binoculars, The Erosion around us also providing a long view through its close-ups.

Stephanie Wynne’s The Erosion was part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight, 28 June-1 September 2024, at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. 

Wandering and pondering

A couple of weeks back, on Thursday 24 April, I launched my latest poetry pamphlet, Wanderland, a Poetry Book Society Summer 2025 Listing and nominated for the prestigious Wainwright Prize. We celebrated with a wonderful evening of readings, including kinepoetics from Scott Thurston and poems about concrete (but not concrete poems) by Lydia Unsworth, who even agreed to revisit the Oulipian collaboration we made for European Poetry Festival a bit back.

So Wanderland is out with Red Ceilings Press (the same publisher as Lune), as they make lovely little A6 numbers, perfect for popping in your pocket and taking for a wander and a ponder, which is what Wanderland was inspired by and what it aims to inspire in its readers. Wanderland brings together three sequences about wandering and pondering. It lifts off with ‘Flight Patterns’, inspired by the RSPB’s Manchester origins and a pioneering ornithologist uncle, tours the watery world of Ilkley’s moorland spas and springs (from my Ilkley Literature Festival residency), and ends up visiting various urban-rural edgelands via a series of 100-word prose poems, which appeared last spring in the special Urban/Rural edition of Spelt Magazine.

Anyway, the Red Ceilings online store has already sold out of their copies of Wanderland, but I ordered extra, so numbered and signed limited editions are still available direct from me. Indeed, this weekend, I'll be reading from the book at this year’s Weaver Words Literature Festival in Frodsham, where I went to high school, so you can snag a copy then; I'll bring my best pens. 

I'm going to perform the sequence of poems from the collection called ‘Flight Patterns’, featuring endangered British birds, written in tribute to Emily Williamson, who, 135 years ago, launched her Wear No Feathers campaign and subsequently set up the forerunner to the RSPB near to where I now live in South Manchester. I was commissioned to write ‘Flight Patterns’ for Didsbury Arts Festival and premiered the 12 poems (one for each month of the year, and for each of the 11 newly red-listed birds at that time, plus one for "all the birds") to a packed room at the Old Parsonage on a sweltering day in the summer of 2023. The performance, complete with birdsong and church bells and Ladybird books and poetry map and a bit of background on the process of making it, went down really well and received lots of lovely comments. I'm not yet quite sure how I'm going to squish it into half an hour, but I'm sure it'll work out fine.

So a bit more about the book. Wanderland is a meditation on getting lost in nature without venturing too far from the North of England’s urban sprawl. From the feathered friends of Manchester to the watery world of Ilkley’s moorland spas and springs, these poems urge you to take a moment to breathe. Welcome to the Wanderland journey – two poetry maps reconnect you with the hidden wonders sharing our towns and cities; a third sequence is for wherever you find yourself in the edgelands. Pop the book in your pocket and discover the paths yourself or escape from that bus commute with a virtual wander in the great outdoors.

I said on the Red Ceilings mailout: “I’m inspired by nature and the North, and fascinated by place and language. I’d like everyone to feel welcome on the Wanderland journey – follow in my footsteps and read the pieces in situ or join me for a virtual wander, getting lost in the great outdoors from the comfort of your own armchair.” Here are some rare ducks I spotted on the River Mersey down the road.

Wanderland has had a fabulous reception, with me offering lots of little sneak peeks into it at different readings, trying to keep it so noone has to hear the same thing twice. Last night, we were in Prestwich, at Crooked Poets, where there were, happily, some paintings of birds hanging just to the right-hand side of the microphone as I wittered on to the audience. 

Will Mackie, in New Writing North’s New and Recent Poetry from the North: Spring 2025 round-up, said: “Sarah-Clare Conlon’s Wanderland is full of gorgeous observational poems about nature that are lovely to read and greatly skilled. Poems like ‘Colour by Numbers’ and ‘Thoughts on Silence’ have beautiful, memorable lines that conjure precise visual images.”

I garnered a cover blurb from Rachel Bower: "This is an intricate collection of wonder and maps and journeys. Some of the poems carry us through the year; others guide us through rivers and woods; streets and skies; birds and storms. The series of poems anchored by the specific site of Ilkley Moor brings the landscape vividly to life. Beautiful poems of treasure and nature and light." 

And another from Jennifer Lee Tsai: "In Wanderland, Sarah-Clare Conlon takes us on an odyssey through nature and the edgelands of the North West. In these lyrical poems, we encounter ‘heartening aerial sights’, ‘sikes and sandbanks, marshes and margins’. There’s a sense of playfulness in these sequences of sudden reveries as Conlon invites us to ‘close your eyes and listen’, to see ‘starshine/in the gutter’. Her arresting use of language exhorts us to ‘imprint a pattern’ and ‘create our own ripple effect’. This is a gorgeous pamphlet – stylishly crafted, attentive and attuned to the surprises of the world around us, mindful of our place within it."

And as for the cover itself, the watercolour is by Susan Platt, who called it Poetic Nuthatch. The nuthatch is the second bird to feature in the book, "all disco eyeliner". Sue studied Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic in the 1980s and has worked extensively within gallery education, lecturing in Graphic Design at Manchester Metropolitan University for over 20 years. I'd been following Sue's Instagram account intently during lockdown as she painted and posted bird upon bird, so I knew she was the person for the job. She's a mad keen birdwatcher and recently exhibited in “Fledge - A Year of Birds” at Contemporary Six gallery in Manchester. Be sure to go and see when she next has a show! 

And check out my "Live" section for my own upcoming readings. (And apologies for the state of these fonts. Even with my ability to code, now ageing Blogger is full of glitchiness.)

A record of records

To celebrate Record Store Day 2025 (Saturday 12 April), writers and musicians have teamed up to pen ten tracks for Sleeve Notes, a unique collaborative project and live performance. I'm one of the writers.

The artists have responded to how records have shaped their lives and thinking, each creating a brand-new track combining spoken word and music. The pieces will be available as a limited-edition cassette and premiered live by the writers and musicians at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation on the evening of Record Store Day (doors 6.30pm, £5; tickets here) – giving you plenty of time to head shopwards beforehand to get that all-important vinyl. You can also hear a preview of the album via Bandcamp here.

The project has been featured on BBC Radio 6 Music by both Guy Garvey and Marc Riley, and there's a write-up, including the full line-up of writers and musicians involved, on Creative Tourist here. I was asked to write a bit for Joyzine about the inspiration and process behind my contribution, "Breathe Silence", with artist and musician Jez Dolan. Obviously, I wrote probably way too much and it's unlikely to all get published*, so here you go...

Sarah-Clare Conlon x Jez Dolan “Breathe Silence”
When I was asked to be one of the contributing writers to Sleeve Notes, I began by nailing down a narrative, which led me to think about the ritual of selecting and playing records, especially in the context of growing up and going round to friends’ houses to listen to music. 
My jumping-off point then was messing about with the sounds of words – my aim is to imbue my poetry with an aural quality, for example through assonance and alliteration, percussion and sibilance, to create an evocative soundscape. I’ve been performing regularly since 2010, and I love creating work that will have impact on both page and stage. 
I invited artist and musician Jez Dolan to work with me, as I thought his double bass would provide the perfect backdrop to my words, and, after an initial chat about influences and ideas, I spent an evening riffling through my vinyl collection, picking out artists I listened to as a teenager – Talking Heads, OMD, Prince, Kate Bush – and making notes on the noises of putting on a record, not just the songs themselves. I have a Pro-Ject deck and it doesn’t have an automatic arm lift, so the stylus just goes round and round at the end of a side, and it turned out each LP had a different kind of rhythmic quality. 
I sent Jez a draft of the text – which I’d approached slightly as a song, with I suppose verses and a chorus, and a refrainy thing – and a quick recording so he could get an idea of how I sounded reading the words. Jez then spent a bit of time with the words coming up with some options, including a riff and some drone, and the next step was me meeting Helga (the double bass) and spending an afternoon playing around and nailing down a firmer direction for Jez to go down and develop. One thing we agreed was that my words needed to be edited down, while Jez wanted to create an extra musical element, so at our next get-together we had a more streamlined version of the written piece and a more sophisticated composition. We practised this and once happy with the end result – called “Breathe Silence” – we recorded it, then drank some wine to celebrate.

Update: *indeed (also I note I did more than one "nailing down" in the original) – you can read the Joyzine article here. It says mine and Jez's track has a "beat-generation, jazz-vibe". Niiiiice.

Tootally Wired lives on

Thrilled to have ‘Repetitions and Pauses’, originally dreamed up for the Tootally Wired project in September (thanks to Nic Chapman for the photographic evidence of part of the creative process as well as the performance event, which I also compèred), accepted for publication by Long Poem Magazine.

Issue 33 is due out in May. I was asked to send the editors an introduction to the writing process of the poem, which I think is a great idea! Sometimes I spend ages doing research and working out how to approach the actual piece – what it should look like, what it should sound like, what will stand it apart from the other pieces being written for a project – and that whole teeth-pulling procrastination part is often lost in time, like tears in rain...

‘Repetitions and Pauses’ was conceived for a commissioned performance project as part of Manchester Histories Festival. Six writers and a sound artist were each invited to respond to the Tootal scarf, a Manchester export, premiering their pieces live in September 2024 at Manchester’s Central Library for a sold-out event called Tootally Wired. I enjoy working within constraints and my approach to writing the piece was to consider the construction of the garment, and how this might be applied to my own creation. Traditionally Tootal scarves are woven and repeat printed silk with hand-applied tassels, and I wanted to incorporate this into the fabric of the poem – the ‘choruses’ not only evoke the process and the product, but also the musicality of the looms and machinery used in the manufacture, and the rhythmic back and forth of the supply and distribution network involved. As a former journalist on fashion glossies, I was interested in exploring both the history of the brand and the craftsmanship involved, so I spent some time at Edinburgh’s world-renowned tapestry studio Dovecot and with a textile artist at Manchester’s Rogue Studios, who explained the intricacies of passementerie and other weaving practices. As they require a hands-on, human skill, and with silk a natural product, I was also compelled to consider the industry’s impact on, or implication in, the landscape, where, even in the most urbanised and polluted of settings, nature manages to creep into the cracks. This in turn had me thinking, and writing, in a circle.

The Tootally Wired writers were, in performance order, Emily Oldfield, Tom Jenks, Wendy Allen, David Gaffney, me and Nicholas Royle, with a musical interlude from sound artist Gary Fisher. We had a Tootally Wired ident created by Zoe McLean, Tootal-related footage from the North West Film Archive, and mannequins sporting Tootal scarves. It was funded by Arts Council England.

Blah! Blah!! Blah!!!

Two of our favourite hangouts have closed their doors in recent weeks: one due to the decision to discontinue trading at one of their two sites (so at least they're not gone forever); the other after their estate agent landlords turfed them out unfairly (and likely unlawfully). This latter, Café Blah, were evicted with no warning (and right after paying their rent), and, following a sit-in protest and a take-to-the-streets demonstration, a Just Giving campaign is ongoing to help them get set up in a new space as soon as possible. 

A vital part of Manchester’s creative community, the folks at Café Blah regularly put on bands and DJs and sound artists and films and spoken word and art shows and all sorts of fabulous necessary cultural activity – scant days before their locks were unjustly changed, Blah co-hosted the third Party For The People and a literary quiz for the first-ever Withington Book Festival. While making our way to the demo just a week on from making our way to read at WBF, David and I decided to try and make sure Café Blah can host many more great events!

As a flurry of gigs were organised by bands at the likes of Peer Hat and Withy Public Hall, we've been busy behind the scenes setting up our own #SaveCaféBlah Fundraiser, a reading event bringing together loads of fantastic writers serving up wonderful words to contribute to the #SaveCaféBlah campaign. 

Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! Writers For Café Blah – poetry and prose for the people – will take place on Saturday 23 November, 5-7pm, upstairs at Withington Public Hall Institute, at the village end of Burton Road, between The Orion and Sainsbury's. Tickets are £10 and are on sale now – you need a ticket to get in, but if you can’t make the event and want to donate please use the Save Café Blah Just Giving link (see below for all the links).

LINE-UP: The Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! #SaveCafeBlah wordy fundraiser readers will include purveyor of fine flash fiction David Gaffney, reading from his pamphlet Whale, and Professor of Poetry at the Centre for New Writing John McAuliffe, reading from his latest collection National Gallery. The Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! line-up will also include Joey Francis and Tim Allen of Peter Barlow's Cigarette, Steven Waling and Pam Galloway oft spotted at Manchester Poets, and Anna Percy of the newly reinvigorated Beatification. We’ll also be hearing from Broken Sleep Books poet Nóra Blascsók, Confingo storyist Nathan Bailey, Dry River author Alicia Rouverol and death of workers/Red Ceilings/many other published writer Lydia Unsworth. Joining the party are The Emma Press-pamphleted Lenni Sanders, of Manchester Critics Collective, Red Ceilings Press-pamphleted Steve Smythe, of Speakeasy, Guillemot Press-pamphleted Jazmine Linklater, of No Matter, and Sublunary Editions-pamphleted Tom Jenks, of zimZalla and formerly The Other Room. I will be compèring and might read something too.

Bagsy your ticket quick, it’s less than a week away!

* Tickets are £10pp. Eventbrite will add a fee to each ticket price. Here's the ticket link.

** All proceeds go to the Save Café Blah fund. Big thanks to the artists for giving up their time and super big thanks to the Withington Public Hall Institute peeps for their support in the effort to raise funds for Café Blah, letting us have the venue for free.

*** Please note, if you'd like to contribute to the Save Café Blah fund, but can't make this event (or you'd like to contribute more than £10pp), you can donate direct to Blah's Just Giving crowdfunder here. 

Day tripper

July has just whizzed by, and I'm only just getting round to making inroads with my European Poetry Festival follow-up activities. I was teamed up with Julia Rose Lewis for the Liverpool Camarade event in the Open Eye photography gallery on the waterfront, organised by the ever-energetic SJ Fowler. Seven pairs of poets collaborated, so 14 poets in total, and we got together to perform on a Merseyside-typical sunny-windy afternoon on Saturday 6 July. It was the final date for this year's EPF on an, as usual, whistlestop tour of the UK and even, I believe, further afield.

Anyway since May, Julia and I had been chatting over email about our usual styles and themes and so on and so forth, and decided to write about the ocean between us, imagining that I was standing in the footsteps of my late ornithologist not-quite uncle (my mum's first cousin) John, on Hilbre Island, off the tip of the Wirral over the Mersey from Liverpool, where I lived until I was 10, while Julia was standing at the foreshore of Nantucket Island, off the US east coast, where she's been resident. 

I considered shorebirds coming and going, Julia thought about migratory whales; I wrote a melting snowball and Julia a snowball, and we interspersed the lines to create a sort of to-and-fro, wave-like motion. It seemed to work, members of the audience later saying they got the ebb-and-flow movement, and our props of a pair of binoculars each – a last-minute idea – also went down well. There's a video here, if you fancy seeing/hearing it. We had a great time meeting in real life and talking about the project to LiPs (Liverpool Poetry Space), and we're just about to submit our collaboration with a view to getting it published. Fingers crossed...

Behind us, and surrounding us on all four walls (and even the floor) during the performances, were some great photos of Crosby Beach, which is gradually being stripped of its top layers to reveal the war rubble dumped there after Liverpool's May Blitz in 1941. It's something I'd like to explore, especially as I recently found out that some of my dad's side grew up a stone's throw from there, in and around Waterloo, but I've been too busy until now with other projects to get time to make the trip, so as part of my recent foray into review-writing, I decided to put together a piece about the exhibition, chatting to the photographer Stephanie Wynne, and I've just submitted it to a competition. Again, fingers crossed...

The exhibition is called The Erosion, and continues until 1 September, so I'd urge you to pop in if you're passing – it's free and is part of a bigger show for the LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight programme.

Holiday reading

I'm not long back from holiday, in which time I produced a villanelle (I was in France, after all!) and a melting snowball (it was hot, after all!). Here I am, sitting beneath a chestnut tree next to an old castle, wearing a kaftan (ever the pro) and knocking out a little watercolour of a nearby garden, which prompted an old fella to pop down from his very high-up balcony to find out what I was up to. I showed him the picture and explained that I'm really bad at painting, but that it's good for my <<bien-être>>, pointing to my noggin.

I also read a ton of poetry and some quite strange prose, maybe autofiction, maybe memoir, maybe a little of both or indeed neither. I bought some French books, including Michel Butor's Collation, which I've yet to start as it's quite the hefty tome, so I left it à Paris while I trained and bussed it to relax en Provence. I also bought (for the second time, accidentally) Nathalie Sarraute's L'usage de la parole (1986), a collection of short texts à la Tropismes, her first book from 1939. Not to worry, it made me read some more and brought to mind Roland Barthes' Mythologies, of which I'm a fan. On my perusal of Parisian secondhand bookshops (the first was Oxfam and the next one near Odéon with a picture of a cat on the door, this third – just down the road from a lovely little square now infested with Emily in Paris fans, sacre bleu! – was manned by a very intense young bloke, who made absolutely no comment on a blatantly English person buying a blatantly fairly difficult French text), I also picked up an illustrated copy of Françoise Sagan's Toxique (2009). This is the account of the writer's three-month stay in rehab after getting addicted to morphine following a car crash in 1957, three years after she found fame with Bonjour Tristesse, aged just 19. It's fascinating, nothing at all like her slightly romcom-y novels (which I do like, don't get me wrong – partly because they're so lovely and short), and quite an eye-opener. Perhaps I should watch the biopic, after all. 

I interspersed the two French women with – all four on rotation – some English language poetry: Denise Riley's Lurex (2022), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Mirror Trade (2004), the first full-length poetry collection by Zoë Skoulding. I also read Sphinx by Anne Garréta, the first novel by a female member of the Oulipo to be translated and published in English. I've tried and failed to get the original French version in a real bricks-and-mortar independent bookstore, so the internet might have to be called upon – now I've read the English, I can see that it's going to be actually a very different read again, due to a very specific constraint. I'm currently reading Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal, to keep my head in France for as long as possible. Once that is done, I will return to her Boat, which I'd left moored at the side of my bed as it was quite cumbersome for travelling. But the to-read pile is still blocking the view from my desk to the street, so...

Critical mass

The first months of 2024 have seen me step out of my new comfort zone of writing poetry, and turn my hand to poetry criticism. If I didn't feel imposter syndrome before, imagine the fear in my eyes now. (The fear in my eyes above is that I am taking a selfie.)

First, I was invited to contribute to PN Review, and commissioned to review a couple of poetry collections, which was an honour, if somewhat daunting, although the comments back were on the whole pretty positive and the amends (well, really additions – expand on what you really think) were minimal. I subsequently found out that my contribution was "typically stylish and brilliant", which is nice, and that PNR (to his friends) "will be hoping to publish her work again in future". The issue in which my two reviews appear has just hit the shelves, and you can find out more here.

So in between the writing of the PN Review reviews and the feedback, I applied for a six-week workshop series facilitated by Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University for a tight band of eight new and emerging critics – and subsequently became a member of The Critic Collective.

Over the course of my career writing and editing for magazines and newspapers and culture websites and wotnot, I've written my fair share of reviews and previews of different art forms (literature, theatre, dance, cinema, visual arts, and even pantos; oh yes I did!), but I thought it would be beneficial to get more of insight into the "art" of criticism.

The aim of these workshops was to challenge expectations about what criticism is and can do, and consider criticism as a creative practice – drawing on art-writing and performance criticism, as well as using poetry as part of reviewing writing, events, recordings and exhibitions. 

We looked at and discussed various examples and approaches, and were treated to workshops from three guests: writer, translator and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation Khairani Barokka, TS Eliot and Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Kit Fan, and John McAuliffe, Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester and co-director of the Centre of New Writing, and Associate Publisher of Carcanet Press and co-editor of PN Review.

The Critic Collective lives on, is the aim, and the culmination of the six weeks is the commission of a review from each of us who took part. I'm still gathering source material for my piece, having decided to review not only Jos Charles's collection a Year & other poems just out with Broken Sleep Books (whose "A Call To Arms" campaign you should totally support – browse the bookshop here), but also her brilliant reading (and chat with Manchester Writing School's Andrew McMillan, below, as part of the new and very welcome live series – keep your peelers peeled on Creative Tourist for regular updates) at the Poetry Library round the end of April, bookending her residency there. As such, there is more to be studied, and I'm just waiting on getting eyes on that.

Magical surrealism

I've just had a "writing week" in Shropshire and picked up this book on Chagall in a charity bookshop on my travels, for the princely sum of £1.50, and since poured out 1,000 words in a sort of experimental style (not poetry nor prose) inspired by his “magical surrealism” and taking as its start (and end) point my encounter with the ceiling he painted in the main auditorium at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, which was unveiled 60 years ago to, of course, both acclaim and derision. 

It (the ceiling) has his signature flying folk and funny animals and embracing lovers and bright colours and circus motifs and also sights in my favourite city, including le Tour Eiffel and l’Arc de Triomphe and Sacre Coeur. I don't have a photo of the ceiling, I don't think, as when I visited it was all film, baby, and I was young and skint and couldn’t afford much in the way of development so didn’t take tons of pictures aside from my arty stuff (City & Guilds in photography, I’ll have you know).

I do remember snapping the other Paris opera, the one at Bastille, as I really liked the juxtaposition of old and new architecture, and Paris really was falling down in parts at that time (the 90s, since you're asking), but with these big shiny edifices plonked in the middle of the crumbling masonry. I'll have to dig out the photo; I feel it was in black and white for extra contrast.

My mum's just dropped off another Chagall book, so I'll be having a leaf through that when I get a chance. Right now, I'm trying to finish the latest novel in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series, as it's due back at the library. He swore the Anna Madrigal one was the last, but then snuck this in ten years or so later. You'd have thought he might have been able to find a decent proofreader in all that time...

Thinking big

Following on from my last post, "Confluence" has been written and it's had its world premiere! The first of two Stockport Stories showcases took place last Thursday at the rather wonderful Rare Mags bookshop in Stockport Underbanks (I snaffled Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries while I was there, and can't wait to read it) and lots of lovely comments ensued. 

The second airing is this Saturday at Marple's marvellous Mura Ma art gallery, which is in an old bank, complete with baffled vault, from where I'm pondering meandering out and among the audience to perform my piece. Grab one of the few remaining free tickets here... 

I've really enjoyed working on this commission, which from the offset I knew had to be about the River Mersey and early on decided needed to be a poem rather than a story, with the form reflecting both the subject and the shape, if you will, of the performance. I decided one longer poem would fit the bill and took a little inspiration from the opening of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, describing a peopled but peopleless waterfront Llareggub and its night-time nature and landscape. In "Confluence", we start with a snapshot of the point where the Goyt meets the Tame, from where we, writer and reader, set off on a journey under the Merseyway shopping centre before being daylighted beneath the famous viaduct.

After working on "Lune", my water erosion-themed title poem to Lune, my most recent pamphlet – btw, there's just one remaining copy from the limited-edition printrun in the Red Ceilings Press online store here; snap it up, yes? – as well as some short sequences – including five linked urban-rural 100-word prose poems called "Roars", out soon in the acclaimed Spelt Magazine, launching online on Friday 3 May – I've been enjoying the scope that longer poetry may offer. 

I'm keen to explore further longer forms of poetry, like poetic sequences, long poems, book-length poems and linked collections, and I'm seeking out more reading matter along the lines of, for example, Alice Oswald's riverine Dart, Bernadette Mayer's 24-hour experiment Midwinter Day and Hope Mirrlees' early modernist city guide Paris, so hit me up with suggestions to add to my reading list!

In the meantime, I'm pondering my own way in to an experimental text about the City of Lights. As keen readers will know, Paris is my favourite place, and I've spotted a callout for work about it – and since it's where Oulipo was established, it seems rude to not at least try out some ideas, especially as April – as per – began with my annual Perecian observation exercise, despite (for the second year running) being sick. I'm also working on something short about shadows and swallows (I'm hoping to catch a glimpse of one soon!) for my workshop group and I'm also (I know, stop it) thinking about another bird-based project, so let's see if that, er, takes off...