Wenlock Poetry Festival, 25-27 April 2014

 

 

It's a great pleasure to be reading at Wenlock Poetry Festival this year, where at 5.30pm on Saturday 26 April I'll be sharing the stand with David Morley (a happy reprise of our reading in Birmingham last October - but with some different poems...). You can purchase tickets for the event here.

 

We'll be reading outdoors, too - at Wenlock Priory (pictured above) - with two other writers chosen from among the participants in the Outdoors Writing Workshop that David will be running that morning (also at the Priory), which is sponsored by the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing, Birmingham City University.

 

The whole Festival will, as ever, be one of Britain's foremost celebrations of poetry. I'll be there all weekend.

 

 

Beats and Birmingham: Poets and the City, 5.30pm, Friday 28 March 2014, Cafe Mezzanine, Library of Birmingham

presents Beats and Birmingham: Poets and the City – feat. Bohdan Piasecki, Luke Kennard and others – with music from The Beat Generation Cut-up & Fold-in     JOIN US AT Café Mezzanine, Library of Birmingham 5.30pm, Friday 28 March 2014 The Institute of Creative and Critical Writing warmly invite you to join us for a blast of poetry and music – part of the Frontiers+ Festival 2014. Bringing together the Beats, Birmingham and the poetry of city life, it will feature poetry from Bohdan Piasecki and Luke Kennard, with Roy McFarlane (Birmingham Poet Laureate 2010-11), Derek Littlewood, James Horrocks and Ben Titmus – performing both their own work and that of LeRoi Jones, Jackson Mac Low, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and poets of Birmingham Louis MacNeice and Roy Fisher. There will also be music from Simon King, Sid Peacock and Steve Tromans, performing their new settings of Beat legends Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso. This event is FREE – no need to book. I'll be hosting - and reading a little too. We look forward to seeing you there…

'Break, Blowe, Burn and Make Me New': John Donne and Benjamin Britten - Words into Music

     

You are warmly invited to join us for this special event next week, hosted by the Birmingham Conservatoire in collaboration with the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing, School of English:

 

'Break, Blowe, Burn and Make Me New': John Donne and Benjamin Britten - Words into Music

 

Venue:

Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire

Price:

£6.50 (£4 concessions)

Date:

18 Feb 2014 (7:30pm)

Booking Information

Tickets available on the door

James Geer tenor
Ronald Woodley piano
Kate Kennedy, David Roberts and Gregory Leadbetter speakers

 

Benjamin Britten The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Op.35

 

Benjamin Britten’s settings of nine of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne are some of the most intense, thoughtful, and at times disturbing of all his songs. They were composed in the summer of 1945 in the immediate aftermath of visits to the newly liberated concentration camps while he was on tour in Germany with Yehudi Menuhin. This evening’s event in music, words and images will explore these profound works from the perspectives of poetry, interpretation, musical setting, and the composer’s life, with contributions from Britten literary specialist Dr Kate Kennedy (Girton College, Cambridge), and Professor David Roberts and Dr Gregory Leadbetter from the School of English.

 

The settings will be performed by James Geer, former Britten-Pears School Young Artist, with Professor Ronald Woodley from the Conservatoire’s Research Department.

 

We very much hope to see you there.

 

______________________

 

Dr Gregory Leadbetter

Director, Institute of Creative and Critical Writing

Director, MA in Writing

 

School of English

Birmingham City University

Birmingham B42 2SU

 

www.gregoryleadbetter.blogspot.co.uk

www.bcu.ac.uk/iccw

http://blogs.bcu.ac.uk/thewriter

Poem for Remembrance Day: '6 June 1944'

I wrote this poem some years ago, though I have not republished it since its inclusion in the 2004 Arvon Poetry Competition prize-winners' anthology (it was commended in the competition that year).

It recalls the D-Day landings of the last world war - and in particular, the landings on Juno Beach, which were conducted by Canadian and British forces. While we British may grumble that Hollywood renderings tend to focus solely on the American contribution to the assault, the role of Canadian troops tends to be overlooked far more often than that of the British - so one motivation behind this poem was to redress that (however modestly). Nevertheless, the poem is intended to commemorate all of the Allied soldiers who took part.

One of the warships that undertook naval bombardment of the coastal defences ahead of the landings, the cruiser HMS Belfast, is moored in London, on the Thames, to this day - a floating museum.

Like so many of us, my own family was involved in the terrible struggle of that war: my grandfather, who served in the Royal Navy, was twice torpedoed - his ships sunk - but thankfully, survived. The stories that came down from those days are deeply impressed within me, together with grief for what they went through, and awe for what we owe them.

6 June 1944

We knew something was up

when they cancelled our leave.

I sneaked a letter out to Evelyn

before they stopped that too.

When they gave us beer

vouchers and French francs –

two hundred to the pound –

we were sure it was on.

We left hidden in a tide

of ships. We didn’t know

our own secret. Thousands

of us, and even God

was in the dark that night.

We crossed the tar-black sea

like a floating constellation

out of synch with the sky.

We lurched on the waves

like drunks, navy strength

rum warming our bellies,

adding its fire to ours.

Some never got their sea-legs

and coughed their breakfast

into the drink with a curse.

We heard the fleet open up

to knock seven shades

out of the enemy’s sleeping

defences. Some of the lads

smiled. I kept my head down.

We blurred out of the English

horizon, crept up on France

behind the breakers and I thought,

why Juno? Where did she

come into this? Why here?

Why now? Was this her doing?

And the bullets broke across

the boat, its bow opened,

a one-way ticket to the cross-

fire. A mine lifted two men

into the air and put them back

all wrong. A pit-prop

left to trip the tanks up

was booby-trapped and blew out

the sergeant like a candle.

I ran headlong up a road

made by my own roar.

The earth burst open

here and there and I could smell

the sea, cordite, a dew

of blood. I heard the wounded

boys cheer us on,

and I saw the grey hoods

of bunkers shooting glances

from the slits of their eyes,

and I stared them out, shot

and bombed and stared them out.

Slowly, we emptied ourselves,

soaked into the beaches,

washed between each blade of grass.

 

‘Water, water, everywhere’: National Poetry Day, 3 October 2013

‘“What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?” is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people’. So wrote Robert Graves, as far back as the 1940s. The question is, in fact, an ancient one, and of course it still has currency – just as it did for Graves. I like to think that Graves was pointing out that the defence of poetry is only ‘silly’ if done ‘apologetically’.

National Poetry Day, which this year falls on 3 October 2013, is a very public opportunity for poetry to stake its claim, as well as for readers and audiences to come to poetry.

We are living in curious times for the craft, when the popularity of poetry so evident at readings, festivals and performances does not appear to be translating into book sales. According to Nielsen BookScan, 2012 saw a 15.9% drop in sales of single-authored poetry collections, leaving the total UK market for poetry books worth only £6.7m that year. No poet is in it for the money, but publishers – to some extent at least – have to be, and they are of course a vital link in the literary culture. Moreover, a good poetry book deserves to be valued as much as a good novel, or good non-fiction. As Heminge and Condell put it, when presenting the Shakespeare First Folio to readers in 1623: ‘the fate of all Bookes depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses’. Even a ‘gift’ culture – sometimes held up as an alternative to the market economy of contemporary publishing – depends upon the acknowledgement of value. However we achieve that, National Poetry Day is one way of recognising the value of poetry collectively, socially, in celebratory fashion – and across the country, the keen pleasures that poetry brings will be self-evident.

The theme for this year’s National Poetry Day is ‘Water, water, everywhere’: a line taken from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, where it is followed by that withering realisation, ‘Nor any drop to drink’ – capturing the terrible paradox of drought on board a ship at sea. Water is so essential to us, so ubiquitous in our habitat, that we might not notice it except through its absence – dehydration, thirst – and our visceral pleasure when that thirst is slaked. An absence of poetry may not kill you, quite – though this is debatable, given its fundamental relationship to articulate thought. An encounter with poetry, however, can certainly be as refreshing as and as vital as drinking the water that the body craves – the sense of being suddenly awash with life, as Coleridge’s Mariner felt, when the rain fell again: ‘Sure I had drunken in my dreams, / And still my body drank’. What’s more – with poetry – you might not realise how thirsty you were, until you have taken the drink.

So – seek out poetry this National Poetry Day – and let poetry seek you out. Perhaps join the Poetry Book Society, too – free to students – and/or the Poetry Society.

I will be attending a reading by the current Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and Imtiaz Dharker, at Birmingham Literature Festival – an event sponsored by the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing. I am told that it sold out well in advance.

 

Poetry abides.

This blogpost also appears at http://blogs.bcu.ac.uk/views/2013/10/01/national-poetry-day-2013 and http://blogs.bcu.ac.uk/thewriter

The New Library of Birmingham and the Library of the Future

 

 



3 September 2013 saw the opening of the largest public library in Europe: the new Library of Birmingham. It has received a good deal of media interest – and rightly so: it’s a splendid achievement. Its stylish interior is reminiscent of the old British Library Reading Room, and the building boasts not one but two roof terraces, both of which give superb views of the city, and provide enticing places to read on fine days. Have a look for yourself.

 

This week I was interviewed about the new building and its place in the history of Birmingham’s libraries for BBC Midlands Today, and here I set out a few thoughts prompted by that.
 

Birmingham’s new library is a triumph of long-term thinking over short-term cutbacks – and as such flies in the face of the withering mood that radiates from the present national administration. That in itself is something to be thankful for.
 

The poet Roy Fisher, who was born and raised in the city, once wrote ‘Birmingham’s what I think with’. Well, a library like this is what the city thinks with. It’s an investment by the people of Birmingham in the people of Birmingham: both a symbol of self-education – a demotic culture of self-improvement – and its most practical aid.

 

Alongside universities and museums, public libraries remain the guardians of our collective cultural inheritance – literary and otherwise – and hence a mark of civilisation itself. That is an ancient and on-going role.
 

Libraries, however, are no longer simply the storehouses and lenders of books. This does not mean the end of print and pages. Books retain significant advantages as a technology: they don’t need batteries – and they are tactile objects, with an experiential quiddity of their own. But in addition to that role, the library is now a meeting-place – a place where things happen, and that makes things happen – as well as a global junction of information, image, and literature, through the internet. In the digital age, it is often assumed that we are gradually doing away with the need to meet, or come together as a community. On the contrary: one unintended consequence of the digital age has been to confirm the value of physical presence – what we might call the theatre of space.
 

The new Library of Birmingham achieves that sense of theatre, and the possibilities of new contact – and rightly so, for a library should also be a pleasure-house. Whether its users are studying alone and quietly, or gathering for a crowded public event, a library is a realm of the mind, of the imagination, of possibility. Like a book, a picture, a film or a piece of music, the library itself is an organ of mental space. It was apt that Malala Yousafzai should have opened the new library: shot by the Taliban for her fearless defence of the right to education, she now lives in Birmingham, the city where she made her recovery. As both its defenders and its enemies know, the mental space that a library serves – the realm of possibility – is the realm of freedom, and of true democracy. Through the reading mind, a library is somewhere you can go to be free, for free.
 

For more reflections on the Library of Birmingham, see the excellent blog by my colleague at Birmingham City University, Dr Serena Trowbridge.
 

Finally: don’t forget that the superb Birmingham Literature Festival (3-12 October 2013) will be held in the new library itself. See you there.



After Hawthornden...

I spent the month of June at Hawthornden Castle – once the home of the poet and scholar William Drummond, now owned by the literary patron Drue Heinz and run as a retreat for writers, through the Hawthornden Fellowship.

 

As the pictures I’ve included here show, it is an outstandingly beautiful place – an intriguing combination of fourteenth-century ruins and a seventeenth-century house, ravishingly situated on a sandstone outcrop overlooking the wooded gorge of the River North Esk.

There are caves beneath the castle – as there are all along the river – said to have been cut out by the Picts. Each month of the year (save July and August) the castle welcomes five or six writers – poets, novelists, short story writers, non-fiction authors, translators – and provides them with the space and time to write. Such retreats are far less common in the United Kingdom than they are in the United States, where writing retreats have been established more widely and for longer than here, so Hawthornden fills a special role, and the experience it provides – if all goes well, as it did for me – is invaluable.

 

The writers’ bedrooms are all named after various authors of the past: I stayed in ‘Boswell’. Each bedroom door is painted with the names of some of those who’ve stayed in that room – Ian Rankin and Peter Porter had stayed in ‘Boswell’, for example – but the castle has discontinued the practice of adding names now (because we are Too Many, probably).

 

There is a daily routine to nudge the Fellows into the necessary discipline: a self-service breakfast 8-9.30am, then (officially) silence throughout the castle until 6.30pm. Lunch is left outside your bedroom door in a small hamper: a flask of soup, a sandwich, a piece of fruit. In practice, and partly because (on the whole) the weather was so unusually good for Scotland, a few of us used to meet up for a picnic outside and a whispered conversation. Dinner was 7-8.30pm, followed (usually) by convivial discourse in the drawing room.

 

I went to Hawthornden with the simple intention of producing more poems – and hence with a whole range of beckoning ideas and loose plans for the writing that might follow. But for the first few days I found myself responding to my new environment – the sheer life-force coming from the woods and the river and the night air. (Bats, badgers, roe deer, mayflies, kestrels, woodpeckers, peregrine falcons...) As happens in such circumstances, this in fact resonated with my imaginative life, and the poetry to which I was tending with those vague plans and anticipations.

I soon settled into unforced patterns that shaped my days – generally reading after breakfast, on the hunt for something that was asking to be realised, circling and summoning what might happen – then drafting until lunch – then drafting again – and then heading out for a walk to explore the surrounding countryside between 4.30pm and 6.30pm. I covered a lot of ground during that month, both literally and figuratively. Occasionally I’d write or make notes or revise in the evenings, though most of the time between dinner and sleep was spent in conversation with some or all of my fellow Fellows.

 

Writing intensively, day after day, with a keen sense of something at stake both inwardly and in point of craft and technique, is bound to exert a strange pressure after a while – and evolve a mood characterised by the nature of the materials one is working on. In my case, this meant that I became somewhat too haunted by what was happening in the poems. There can be a fine line between the poetically-productive ‘trance’, as Goethe put it, and a burnt-out nervous system.

 

That may sound dramatic – but in practice it simply meant spotting when I needed to go for an energetic walk, and let my body sort things out. As well as exploring the gorge, walking to Wallace’s Cave, a ruined bothy in the castle grounds, or the Bronze Age settlement across the river, I also walked to the beguiling Rosslyn Chapel, and one day walked the ridge of the superb Pentland Hills with two co-explorers. Having Edinburgh and all its delights only forty-five minutes away by bus was also a boon.

Of course, the company of the other Fellows is a huge part of the experience at Hawthornden, and I was lucky with mine, making new friends, learning a good deal and having great fun. We read some of our work to each other, which was intimate and memorable. The guest books that the castle holds are a testament to the unique and yet similar experiences of previous Fellows – and a treasure-trove of human interest in themselves. Hamish, poet and director of the castle, Alasdair the cook, and Mary and Georgina the housekeepers, all looked after us impeccably and with great humour. And I have to mention how grateful I am to Mary’s partner Billy, of the Royal Scots Pipe Band, whose bagpipes I played.

 

 

Hawthornden Fellowship

Well, the year has hurried on, and here I am about to begin my Hawthornden Fellowship, which falls in the month of June. I'm braced for intensity - and the poems that will come.

I'll write here about my stay upon my return home (though I might not give quite everything away...).