Middlesbrough Calling

Andy Willoughby
Sunday, June 14th, 2009

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way place and writing work so was glad to get asked to blog about my work in that context, both in the sense of the work I do in the community and educational settings, often with my fellow poet and compadre in Ek Zuban Literature development Bob Beagrie, and in my own creative work which is heavily influenced by my locale here near the iron drained Cleveland hills and bAndy on the mic at the Hydrogen Jukebox Cabaret of the Spoken Word.y the travels I’ve been able to make because of my poetry; most intensely in recent years to Finland which gives you a different means of looking at home. Beyond considering the way place can mutate and split open your discourse, its interesting to draw on the kind of projects I work on with groups at the edge of society – in the last twelve months I’ve worked with refugees and asylum seekers, recovering addicts, substance abusers, young offenders, kids in care, young people in danger of sexual exploitation on the streets, young carers and young people in danger of exclusion and offending  – which prompts me often to consider how place can dictate your boundaries and your way of communicating to a large extent - how it can in fact help to tie your tongue and restrict your possibilities. Nearly everything I do as a poet and project leader  is based on the fact that I firmly believe in the value of untieing your tongue enough to resist definition only from the outside, that in this poetry and the arts CAN change the world especially in the toughest places, which the likes of revisonist Auden and patrician Eliot knew  virtually nothing about. As I move around the North East in the next two weeks I’m going to stack up the evidence on place as source of pride, as a kind of prison and as a battleground where the ability to define and remember whats happened in distant and recent memory can offer us alternative identitys to those foisted upon us by the powers that be, the media and the forgetful regenerators. I grew up in  a steelworking community surrounded by stark and beautiful nature that often is forgotten in national sterotypes of my place and exotic words were like lava bubbling under a crust of the kind of language that allows you to survive when your life’s mapped out in shifts. In my forty years, although the place still can look the same, so much has happened to affect all that was sure in language and lifestyle, the works that defined our identity here are in their final throes now, the social barriers are still there but much less easy to define, there’s a battle on for identity in the regeneration arena between the relentlessly positive movers and shakers who have renamed Teesside the Tees Valley and those of us who feel there is older identities and histories we need to hold onto. All this in a generation that’s seen an ongoing half invisible war conducted by a Prime minister and President who have wilfully dismissed what history can teach us about who we are. I think even in a blog it’s worthwhile sometimes just reporting on what’s going on in front of my eyes in a kind of daily travelogue as I move around from project to project for the next two weeks in my poetry ronin existence and how this fits or contradicts what national readers may expect of “my place. ” I’m also going to reflect on my work on progress “Necklace of Tongues” which attempts to explore place and identity in a mythic framework whilst not losing focus on contemporary post industrial realities.

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ABOUT THIS AUTHOR


Andy Willoughby
I'm a freelance Poetry Ronin, Promoter, Director and Educational Playwright from Middlesbrough and work on various community, social and educational projects in the schools and communities of the North East and North Yorkshire. My work as a teacher and as a writer is deeply rooted in place whether it be my native North East or the places I've encountered on my many travels. I'm particularly interested in the way place is an arena for the struggle for identity in this post industrial region with communities having to redefine who they are in the aftermath of economic decimation and in the face of the various aspects of attempted regeneration. I'm also engaging in my work with the idea of reclaiming lost and hidden historys of place "things silently gone out of mind" with a particular interest in the power of myth and folktale to connect to a sense of self whilst not losing a feeling of being plugged into contemporary realities. I work mostly with the Independent Press and Literature Development Organisation EK ZUBAN ( it means one voice in Urdu or one langauge) along with my fellow Boro Bard Bob Beagrie. We work in a vast variety of settings across the region in a variety of social contexts often collaborating with other agencies like Apples and Snakes, New Writing North, Creative Partenrships,Tees Valley Arts, Helix Arts Newcastle, The Poetry Society and various borough council projects and particularly enjoy working with difficult to reach and excluded groups helping young people in particular to find expressive means to have their voice heard about their realities and challenges. I'm going to blog in a gonzo way what we do in the next couple of weeks to give a feeling of different perspectives as well as chat about how I'm engaged with place in my own work as I am in the process of putting together my second full collection Necklace of Tongues which is firmly rooted in the nearby abandoned ironmines of the Cleveland hills, also about the way an ongoing involvement with another culture can make you re-imagine how you see your own place based on the 8 year ongoing exchange project I instigated between Finnish and Teesside poets. I am currently also involved in setting up a national and international tour of a spoken work and music CD - Sampo:Heading Further North which I have collaboratively created with Bob Beagrie and world music duo Gobbleracket. The piece is based on the Finnish myth cycle Kalevela and connects it to Teesside realities and personal history. ( you can check out samples on www.myspace.com/ekzuban live. I've been going back and forth to Finland for ten years now ans have even travelled to siberia with Finn beat poets to a finno-ugric lietrature conference so I'll include a bit of travel blogging and reflection on the various wonderful mthical and real characters I've met along the way... If you want to read my work I've got two pamphlets "The Wrong California - Middlesbrough Poet Laureate poems (Mudfog 2004) Peripheries/Peripheroita - a bilingual collaborative pamphlet with the Finnish writer Riina Katajavuori( Ek Zuban Press 2006) and one full collection "Tough" (smokestack books 2005) and am featured in various anthologies including "Oral - an anthlogy of British Performance poetry ( Sceptre 1999) "The Flesh of the Bear - a bilingual anthology of poets from South West Finland and the North East of England" (Ek Zuban 2004) and "Smelter - an anthology of Teeside Poetry" (Mudfog 2003)

  1. Sarah Butler
    June 17th, 2009

    Hi Andy,
    I really enjoyed this post, thank you. This sentence particularly struck me:

    “I grew up in a steelworking community surrounded by stark and beautiful nature that often is forgotten in national sterotypes of my place and exotic words were like lava bubbling under a crust of the kind of language that allows you to survive when your life’s mapped out in shifts”.
    That contrast between the richness of a place and the way it is stereotyped, and how that relates to language, made me think of an interview I did with a writer/consultant/lead artist, Denna Jones (www.dennajones.com) for an article about writing and the public realm, which will be published in the next edition of Mslexia. Denna spent some of her childhood in the desert of Southern California; she says: ‘I’m very aware of the language used to erroneously describe the desert – bleak, empty, etc. – and I notice similar pejorative language used about areas designated for regeneration too. But, in reality, the desert is a hugely rich and complex place. I get very concerned about projects which assume places with problems are just blank pages.’
    (http://aplaceforwordsuw.blogspot.com/2009/05/blank-pages.html)

    Sarah

    Reply

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