Before I set off for London I pack my stuff into boxes. I’m behind on my rent, so there’s always the chance I could be thrown out before I get back, so I figure it will be easier on the landlord if it’s all ready to go. I chuck some clothes into a bag and I’m ready. I also pack my chaos-magnet. It’s like my MacGuffin in the sense that it doesn’t have any real existence or meaning beyond its function to drive the plot forward. Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

I’m at Hull Station and the magnet kicks into life and the train to Doncaster is late, which means I miss my connection. Eventually, after waiting around for an hour, I get the London train.

I’m sat next to a little old lady with a beard comparable to my own. She’s approximately 158 years old. We get chatting and our conversation covers everything from the career of Ken Dodd, what makes a good nun, the merits of getting drunk on red wine vs. the merits of gettting drunk on white wine and weather conditions in Uganda. By the end of the journey I feel like we’ve bonded, so I feel an obligation to carry her luggage onto the tube and wave her off. She gives me a pack of biscuits as a token of her appreciation.

After a sweaty jaunt across London I manage to reach Shunt Vault. Amazingly I’m only five minutes late. I meet Byron, Joshua, Helen and Molly and we go for our first discussion/workshop. The Shunt Vault is a unique place. I like the way you can hear the drips of water and the muffled screams floating across from the London Dungeon, but unfortunately these noises cause the chaos-magnet to malfunction and we are set upon by hundreds of flies.

The Shunt experience can be a little jolting to people who aren’t used to it, but the whole process is supposed to be about getting spoken word performers out of their comfort zone. On the first night of performance the chaos-magnet picks up on the other performers nerves and misgivings, so I suggest de-camping to the nearest pub so we can have a chat, and if necessary get blind drunk. I’ve performed at the Shunt before as part of the Incubate process, so I do my best to put the others at ease.

We’re a funny bunch, us spoken word lot. And when you remove the confines and boundaries of the traditonal set, the flapping begins. I try to calm everyone down a bit; it is after all, just an experiment, and if all goes tits up… so what? We’ve tried something new…

As it goes, we all have a laugh with it. My biggest fear for spoken word and performance poetry is that it will become too stale and formulaic, and processes like this, while not always successful, at least try something new with the format. I feel the need to push the boundaries of my performances, both in content and location, whenever I can.  Personally, I like standing on a platform fifteen-foot above a bar shouting abuse thinly disguised as a poem at a bunch of unsuspecting punters. Makes the chaos-magnet go into a frenzy.

I also got see the amazing Oopise Mamushka sting quartet and TdC.

And by far the best thing about these residencies is that you start off with collaborators and leave with friends. And not even the chaos-magnet can disrupt that…

There is so much land in Northumberland. The sea
Taught me to sing
the river to hold my nose. When
it rains it rains glue.
Chatterton’s eyes were stuck to mountains.
He saw fires where other men saw firewood.
One step ahead in recognising signals.
And leapt into the fire.

I have recently returned from the North East – hence my absence from this blog – where I have been recording a documentary for Radio 4. It’s called The Poet of Sparty Lea: In Search of Barry MacSweeney. The quote above is taken from his poem ‘Brother Wolf’, republished in his posthumous Bloodaxe volume Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems.

Barry MacSweeney reading in the 1970s

Briefly then, MacSweeney was a Newcastle poet associated with the British avant-garde from the late 60s (when he published his first book at the age of 17 and was nominated for the Oxford Chair in Poetry) through to his premature death in 2000. His poems are sudden, terrifying and beautiful; darkly political, both extravagantly lyrical and harshly stripped back. He was a master of the long line, the breath beyond breath. I was present at his last ever reading, an extraordinary and moving event – I was 17 or 18 then. I have been a huge fan of his work ever since. In fact, I would say he is the presiding presence – if there is one – over my own poetry. In many ways, he would be an attractive figure to any teenage scribbler: a Romantic, haunted by the visions of doomed youth, like Rimbaud, Jim Morrison and Thomas Chatterton, the forger of mock-medieval poetry who committed suicide by arsenic poisoning at 17. Strange how these numbers keep coming round.

Although Barry lived all over the place, and drew his influences from many sources, he was always a poet of the North East… not an officially-prescribed “poet of place”, but a shamanic figure whose poetry is invested and infected with the landscape of Northumberland. In his stunning sequence, Pearl (1995/7), he returns to childhood memories of Sparty Lea – a remote hamlet an hour’s drive from Newcastle where his grandmother lived. These poems are lyrical invocations of an idealised landscape:

Up a height or down the dale in mist or shine
in heather or heifer-trampled marigold
the curlew-broken silence sang its volumes.
Leaning on the lichen on the Leadgate Road,
Pearl said: a-a-a-a-a-, pointing with perfectly poised
index finger towards the rusty coloured dry stone wall
which contrasted so strongly with her milky skin.

Barry remembers a childhood romance with a local girl he calls “Pearl”, whose palate is cleft: she cannot speak. The “a-a-a-a-a-” in the poem becomes an agonised utterance in the powerful theatre of Barry’s live readings.

Sparty Lea, Northumberland

The Pearl sequence is more than mere nostalgia for place. Much more. It is memory passed through the gauze of lived experience, the demons that taunted the poet’s psyche. The demons of drink that would eventually catch up with him, mouths rustling with knives. Innocence crushed. Spoilt beauty. A broken landscape, populated by ‘the turbo-mob, weird souls dreaming of car-reg / numbers and mobile phone codes’.

The documentary I’m presenting is in the form of a kind of pilgrimage, a journey of (re)discovery. From Newcastle, where we had visited the famous Morden Tower and Barry’s archive at the University, we drove out into the countryside to find Sparty Lea. It was as I imagined from the poems. I kept thinking of the language Barry used – the landscape became a fictional universe of curlews, brown trout, ‘the rim of the law’. Barry’s former partner, the poet SJ Litherland, had told of a return journey they had made to the area, to find the land enclosed… this experience is documented in the poem ‘Bare Feet in Marigolds’, where Barry reimagines Sparty Lea as ‘a barbed wire compound. / Wild freedom of Sparty Lea turned into a Nazi camp.’

From ‘Brother Wolf’:

Chatterton knew
you may not return to the source
when you’re
it and
died.
At Sparty Lea the trees don’t want Orpheus
to invoke any magic
they dance by themselves.

For Barry too, the source was ‘it’ – was him. Sparty Lea as a psychological landscape. “North”, as with Heaney in his 1975 collection, was not just a real place: it was a mental state.

I learned in Florence how to poison flowers
& sheath this quill in absolute commitment
to a language going north
without maps.

The First Voice by Emma McGordon

I’ve just finished watching Emma McGordon’s unsettling video of ‘The First Voice’ (see above). Beyond some obviously exceptional individual lines such as ‘I was Billy Goat’s Gruff rough’ and ‘bone lonely’, it’s a great piece of writing and videomaking. It reminds me a bit of a short vid I made to accompany my pamphlet of ‘imagined emails’, The Terrors.

I think this notion of ‘voices’ is central to what you might term ‘place-making’ – that expression of space as social, true human geography or pyschogeography. The voices Emma conjures in her poem seem ghostly to me. The poet inhabits the place like a spectre, moving through the shadows (as she does, literally, towards the end of the video). It is a dissenter’s poem, a marginal force. The poem should tell an alternative narrative.

I’m sure we’ve all had those experiences of walking through a city at night and imagining voices whispering behind us, in dark corners, alleyways, the vacant spaces developers forgot. Are these voices pure fantasy or are they in any way real? Do we create reality when we create a poem. Or is this all just sub-Sinclairian bluff and waffle?

I’m at Shift Happens with Geraldine and George from Apples & Snakes and Chris Unitt from Meshed Media.

Now the talk I was going to give this afternoon for Shift Happens has slightly changed and what we’re going to do now is make some poems together.  It’s an idea we’ve been working on with Andrew Wilson from Blink Media, we’re exploring some ideas on making poetry together.

We’re putting this idea out there early because we’d like to share our process with you and do some creating.  Have a go…….

Journey Poems is a creative writing game about journeys and destinations.

It can be played by anyone. We don’t have rules but here are some instructions.

1- When you make a journey, start a text message with the name of your destination (all one word, no spaces, e.g. Oxfordroad) then a space

2- Write about whatever’s interesting – where you are going, or where you’ve come from, or what you are passing, or the other people on the journey with you

3- Write a poem that’s as long as a text

4- Send it to Sarah on +44 7545 596603

Poems will be posted together as comments here on the My Place Or Yours blog www.myplaceoryours.org.uk

This is a partnership project with Blink Media and www.thumbprintcity.com/

Costs and Privacy – It only costs the same as sending a normal text to your friend’s phone. You will not be signed up for anything, ever.

Interesting programme about poetry and places around Britain fronted by Owen Shears. Starts with Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge.

Poetry season coming soon on BBC – watch that space!

There are some good tips here from Simon Armitage on what to look for when reading poetry.

http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/PBS/pbs_new_to_poetry.asp

Geraldine

When we started thinking about this project I realised that I love the idea of place.  I can recall memories by where I was rather than who I was with or when it was and one of my favourite things to do is to explore new places or to discover unknown things about familiar places.  I have spent many happy hours reading poetry about place, from Wordsworth to Linton Kwesi Johnson, it’s a familiar and successful theme.  One of my favourite contemporary writers is Alice Oswald whose poetry is so rooted in place.  I’ve posted some links to work by these writers and a few other good resources on my delicious page – http://delicious.com/tomandgerry

Much performance poetry is about the individual and their response to situations, feelings or politics.  The work that Apples & Snakes has commissioned over the past few years has often involved a personal story such as in Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark, or has dealt with responses to personal emotions such as in Exposed or Things that can’t be said.  I am really excited about work that now looks at place and how our poets relate to that in their work.  I recently commissioned new work from four UK based writers and five writers from South East Asia and commissioned them to write on the theme of freedom of expression.  The work is all posted on the blog http://speechlesstour.wordpress.com/ if you want to read it, or more about the discoveries of a group of poets on the road.   One of the most interesting things of that commission was how the different poets brought in their sense of place and how that shaped their personal idea of freedom of expression.  By poets being in residence in different places I think that the writing they produce will be different and the very inspiration of the place itself will bring new influences.  I see it as an opportunity to stretch the writers involved to create their very best work and to set a challenge for the future of performance poetry.  This isn’t about creating work with participants in places but about a residency and a chance for poets to have time to write in a new setting.  It jumps off from the Poetry Society’s Poetry Places project but has an entirely different dimension, the online one.

The residencies will all be shared online through the My Place or Yours site which will track the experiences of the poets and others involved in the project and will then host the work created by the poets as we do it.  One of the things that I like most about performance poetry is its democratic nature, the sense of ‘I can do that’ that you get from shows and the fact that you can go to a local open mic and participate for free.  To me this is the same online (I concede you need to get online which isn’t yet universal) and I think performance poetry has an opportunity to explore this shared democratic space. 

We want our audiences to be part of this process.  To read, comment and add to the work as it is posted, to share your experiences of place and what it means to you.  If you had a residency where might you go?

I realise we are asking poets to do something daunting to share their work as they develop it and I don’t under-estimate that.  Neither do I underestimate where that sharing of work might take us and what possibilities it opens up.

Geraldine Collinge

My Place or Yours podcast

Hi all,
as part of the workshop setting the scene for this event, Apples and Snakes asked me if I’d podcast some of their writers.

I started by recording the thoughts of many of the artists and co-ordinators over a period of three days, as everyone got to know each other.

I intend to get at least two more shows a month over the length of this programme and to go into a bit more depth with the writers in future interviews.

If you want to get involved, join us on Skype for a chat sometime – my contact details is dominicorourke

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