Friendship is the theme of this year’s Poetry Week, celebrated in The Netherlands and the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium through 400+ events. It starts on Thursday 26 January. Miriam Van Hee (B) and Hester Knibbe (NL), two poets who have been friends for almost 40 years were commissioned to write five poems each for a book. In a recent interview they said that trust and curiosity are key elements for a friendship to endure and last.
Anyone who spends over 12,50 Euro on poetry books during Poetry Week will be given a copy. It’s not hard to spend that sort of money, as poetry books are expensive in The Netherlands!
Here is my poem on the theme of friendship: memories of a long weekend in Vienna in 1994.
Vienna
I would gladly return, walk with Wendy through the rain to the museum, see the Hunters on the Hill – tired, wet dogs, in the Little Ice Age when frozen birds fell from the sky.
I would gladly go back there, view grey buildings slide past, hear the clanging bell. Schwedenplatz, umsteigen. A trolley bus securely attached to the two lines above.
It’s a pleasure to introduce Stephen Smythe. He has been involved with Speak Easy since it started (at the SIP Club in Stretford) and that’s where we met. The SIP Club closed during the lockdown and Speak Easy then moved online. I was able to take part from my caravan in The Netherlands, along with poets and writers from London and the US and elsewhere.
Stephen Smythe is a Manchester writer who achieved an MA in Creative Writing from Salford University, in 2018. He was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize, Flash Fiction category, in 2017, and was also longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, in 2018. He won The Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS Competition, in 2022, and was placed third in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition, in 2021, for his 1000-word story.
His book of forty x forty word stories published by Red Ceilings Press is due out later this year.
Here are two prize winners to give you a taste…
KLEPTO
Bridget took stuff from her work colleagues after they’d gone home. Pens, post-it pads, sweets, even family photos. People suspected her, but couldn’t prove anything. When the company introduced hot desking, Bridget became confused and sometimes stole from herself.
(Winner of the Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS Competition, 2022)
COLD CALL
‘Wait!’ Dad yelled down the phone. He put his specs on. ‘That’s better, I can hear you now.’ He listened intently, frowned deeply, then hung up. ‘A conservatory?’ He snorted. ‘Your mother would kill me– if she were alive.’
(Second place in the Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS Competition, 2019)
The Other has been running in Manchester since January 2016. Michael Conley and Eli Regan organise the event where writers are put in pairs to read and perform each other’s work, with plenty of time beforehand to prepare. It is a fascinating idea.
During the pandemic The Other moved online and I took part in a memorable Zoom session where I was paired up with Adam Farrer. The Other is now ‘live’ again. Dates are on Facebook and Twitter. Sessions also raise funds for Manchester Central Foodbank.
It’s a pleasure introducing Michael and a sample of his writing.
Michael Conley is a poet and prose writer from Manchester. His first prose collection, “Flare and Falter” was published by Splice and longlisted for the 2019 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His latest work is a poetry pamphlet published by Nine Pens, called “These Are Not My Dreams…”
At The Park, A Grown Man Has Got His Head Caught In The Railings
Possibly somebody loves, or at some point has loved, this man. But it’s hard to imagine right now. It’s hard to imagine that for most of his life he hasn’t been stuck at this ninety-degree angle, fists flailing, jeans sagging at the waist. He’s so angry with the railings, with the soft mud under his boots and especially with the teenagers who are laughing at him from the picnic benches.
You could empty a whole tub of vegetable oil onto his neck and tug him out by his belt loops but he wouldn’t thank you for it. And of course you can’t ask him what he was trying to do in the first place. He doesn’t know what his pain looks like from the outside.
My thanks to poet Annie Muir for this seasonal poem from her pamphlet New Year’s Eve. Best wishes for your own New Year’s Eve – wherever you are. See you in 2023.
Enxaneta
In Barcelona it is 38 degrees and a little girl screams with mimicked joy –
she is all eyelashes, all eyes, all teeth and gums and tongue.
I hate her through the eyes of her big sister: half a plastic broken heart tied around my neck,
I climb a fence to watch the castellers. They huddle, arms up as if reaching for a throat,
others climb them like stairs, feet clinging to backs like tadpoles on their first legs,
it doesn’t stop, more like ants than people but with muscle and bone and white trousers,
two little girls heading for top, one takes her place below, the other
is no longer a child but the star at the top of a Christmas tree,
her arm pointing up is the man on the moon, a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve.
She slides down the legs of her supporters, relieving the mountains of tension from their shoulders.
Biography
Annie Muir lives in Glasgow. Her debut pamphlet New Year’s Eve was published by Broken Sleep Books. Pre-pandemic she handed out poems on the street outside local libraries, and has a podcast – Time for one Poem – aimed at complete beginners to poetry. @time41poem
A Christmas Day poem with my best wishes for the day and with my thanks to Matthew Stewart. In his pamphlet Tasting Notes (Happenstance Press) he pairs poems with notes about the Zaleo wines from Extremadura, a region with several UNESCO heritage sites.
Food Match
It glistens on the wooden stand, a black trotter pointed upwards as if offering a hoofprint. Now cut a slice so thin that steel is visible below the meat.
Place it across your tongue and wait for the marbled fat to melt. Sip un vino tinto. The tannin grips, hugging the ham — both of them start, suddenly, to magnify.
Credit: GerardBarcelona, on Pixabay
Biography:
Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. His second full collection is due from HappenStance Press in November 2023.
There are a few copies left of Tasting Notes. Contact Matthew direct via social media.
I am delighted to feature the poem Winter Sun Speaks by Maggie Reed. We first met on a residential workshop several years ago. The picture of winter sun is also by Maggie.
Winter Sun Speaks
I birth my cry through cloud layers push my weight low over the southern horizon, strident, desperate, slanting over the hills forking through trees, splintering ice. I blind drivers on the school run.
How I ache for summer skies, to leap and arch over the earth, spread light, energy and love.
But for now my shriek, my low level beam, insists my right for the few hours I’m allowed to crisp up these dark winter days.
Biography:
Maggie Reed lives in the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire, having spent much of her life in Cumbria. Her current collection Let Small Wings Fly was self-published in 2021 to accompany the Arts Council funded travelling art exhibition ‘Mappa Marches’ that visited libraries and art centres across Herefordshire throughout 2022.
She has been published in several journals, including The North, Orbis, PoetryBirmingham, Pennine Platform, Three Drops from a Cauldron and Poetry Village, and has been included in anthologies such as This Place I Know (Handstand Press, 2018), Places of Poetry (One World, 2019), When All This is Over (Calder Valley Poetry, 2020), Poetry of Worcestershire (Offas Press, 2019) and In the Sticks (Offas Press, 2021). She won the Poem and a Pint competition (judge, Carrie Etter) in 2019.
Each Sunday in December there will be seasonal poems on the blog. For a few years I lived in the Withington area of Manchester, so I recognised the shop mentioned in Annie Muir’s poem. It’s from her pamphlet New Year’s Eve, published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.
Crab Snowglobe
Thrown in with shoelaces and paracetamol, a souvenir from Copson Street pound shop –
this rusty orange crab on a rock with specks of glitter resting
in every nook and cranny. Around the base there are footprints in sand
and another, smaller crab, exactly alike except I can touch it.
Inside your hard, glass globe you seem to be in some other dimension
like the reflection in a mirror, or memory.
Either dormant or ecstatic – when I shake you up
it is for a moment New Year’s Eve, your pincers grasping to catch the confetti
that floats around your head in kaleidoscope slow motion.
Then, when each piece has fallen, you wait for something else to happen.
Biography
Annie Muir lives in Glasgow. Her debut pamphlet New Year’s Eve was published by Broken Sleep Books. Pre-pandemic she handed out poems on the street outside local libraries, and she has a podcast – Time for one Poem – aimed at complete beginners to poetry. @time41poem
Another quote from Claes Oldenburg’s famous Ode to Possibilities ‘I’m for …’ from 1961. It reads like a long list poem. Oldenburg said it was a statement, not a manifesto.
Risham Syed, The Tent of Darius
My poem Wearable Narratives, from my second collection, Nothing serious, nothing dangerous, published by Indigo Dreams in 2019, is in two parts. The poem was inspired by art in the Manchester Art Gallery. Last week I posted part i (Scarf).
The Tent of Darius, an installation from 2009, is a complex work by the Lahore-based Risham Syed. It consists of five embroidered vintage European Army Coats with a small painting. This is a copy, painted by her, of the Charles Le Brun work of the same name. Syed describes her inspiration for it:
“I imagined these five coats to have travelled all over the world, with women having contributed to them by adding a piece of embroidery. They are like these tired, old worn-out soldiers who have dreamt of coming back home. On the one hand, they symbolize the imperial power, but on the other hand, there is another aspect to this work; how soldiers from the colonies were made to fight for the Imperial powers. It’s true for any army including the Pakistan army, where most soldiers are from Jehlum, Potowar region, from poor, lower middle-class families and end up with the army because of their physique/tradition, in the hope of making a romantic/glamorous career. This work, compares the romance/glamor to the actual reality of war, the aim of it and the beneficiaries of it. I juxtapose the embroidered coats with an ‘Oriental’ painting called The Tent of Darius, a seventeenth-century painting by Charles Le Brun that provides the title for the installation. In it, the Queen of Persia bows to Alexander the Great who has conquered the land. It serves as a metaphor for the West making incisions in the East.”
I was very moved by the sight of these five coats and the details of the embroideries which inspired the last stanza.
The tent of Darius
The ornate faux-Chinese frame holds a cropped copy on acrylic: The Queen of Persia draped at the feet of Alexander.
Below, an array of five overcoats, donated by European soldiers, appliquéd and embroidered by women’s hands.
Under the lapel, a stilled windmill, peach-coloured vanes. A green tree above a button hole. Death comes like blue geese.
On Monday, my journey to the other side of the North Sea involved five different modes of transport: taxi from Aldeburgh to Ipswich, National Express coach to Standsted Airport, Easyjet flight to Schiphol, Intercity to Den Haag Centraal, tram to the flat. All clockwork, no delays. It was dark when I got back home.
Taking part in the ‘live’ Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival has been a joyous experience. The highlight was the reading Our Whole Selves with poet friends. Poet Kathy Pimlott and I wrote several blog pieces about the readings, workshops, performances, open mic. These will soon be on the official website. A big thank you to the small organising team which managed to arrange a wonderful programme.
The poems I read were from my new collection Remembering / Disease, published by Broken Sleep Books last month. I opened my set with Nautical Miles (from my collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous). When I looked at an old photo, I saw that only Hoek van Holland is ‘less than a hundred’ nautical miles. Good reminder that poetic truth matters more than the accurate facts…
Nautical miles
Outside the Sailors’ Reading Room, the sign:
thin wooden planks, painted white: Den Helder, IJmuiden, Hoek van Holland.
Across the horizon, they are less than a hundred nautical miles from Southwold in Suffolk
where the narrow beach of pebbles – grey, brown, black mostly –
is held together by couplets of groynes, slimy green.
Both our languages have the word strand.
Note: The Sailors’ Reading Room, Southwold is a Grade II listed building from 1864 and still a refuge for sailors and fishermen.
I am very glad to introduce this month’s guest poet Sheila Butterworth. We met many years ago, in that Yorks/Lancs Branch of the BHS. I let Sheila introduce herself and her haiku.
“Winning the Leeds Waterstones Haiku Competition in 2000, organised by the Yorks/Lancs Branch of the British Haiku Society, introduced me to the world of haiku poets, workshops, journals and a network of local poets with whom to chew the haiku fat. I have since had poems published in Blithe Spirit, Presence, The Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar, Wales Haiku Journal and The Red Moon Anthology.
Most of my haiku come out of the everyday experiences of life within a mile of my edge of village doorstep where I have lived for 40 years. This is where I notice those things that have most meaning to make haiku. The familiar environment highlights the nuances of change in place, in time and in me and this is when haiku happen.”
coming light the bubble and trill of robin and wren
high street dawn the smell of sweet dough folds into the fog
morning mizzle molehills spatter the spring pasture
planting potatoes startled sparrows scatter in the quickthorn
summer rain the shining bole of a sapling ash
evening sun the shadow of the wood fills the field
Acacia Publications 