Penelope by Anthony Howell

I have been listening to the Heroine episode of Words and Music on BBC Radio 3, 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0b5sz5m

and the following poem grabbed my attention

PENELOPE

To do what you undid
The night before
To undo what you did
The day before

To undo what you undid
Again the next night
To do what you did
As you do the next day

Only to undo it again
Just as you did
The night before
In order to do it again

Just as you did
The day before
The day before
Just as you did

In order to do it again
The night before
Just as you did
Only to undo it again

As you do the next day
To do what you did
Again the next night
To undo what you undid

Anthony Howell

It will take me some time to get my head around this poem, but it is reminding me of the act of compensation; how one may do something one day in order to compensate for the day before. For instance, "I needed to have a lie in this morning because yesterday I did not get a good night's sleep." This act of compensation could then lead to other compensatory behaviour being necessary. And so the cycle continues in a perpetual manner.

Body, you are not me - Oliver Doe at Abject 2 Gallery, Breeze Creatives as part of Curious 2018

Body, you are not me
Oliver Doe
Abject 2 Gallery
2nd Floor, Breeze Creatives

Exhibition open 3rd - 7th July, 11am - 5pm

'Newcastle based transmedia artist Oliver Doe presents an exhibition of new and recent works, accompanied by a limited mini-publication, as part of Curious Festival 2018's visual art programme.

Since 2014, Oliver's research and practice has been centred around queer visibility and representations of queer bodies, and he has previously partnered with organisations such as Northern Pride and The Albert Kennedy Trust. His work has been developed from personal experience of queer identity and the intersections between body and identity that lie in between binaries. Oliver's work takes transmedia forms, using painting, text, sculpture, and the found object (as well as the less well-defined spaces in between those) to explore ideas around the queer potential of abstraction. Reduced and abstracted bodily forms explore the changing boundaries of queer bodies and the possibility to recognise the body as a site of queer sexuality.

The accompanying mini-publication includes a selection of Oliver's new poems, which provide context for the paintings and objects.'

More info can be found online: http://www.oliverdoe.com

Opening of Great Exhibition of the North

Friday was the official opening of Great Exhibition of the North and Newcastle and Gateshead were bustling with people enjoying the sunshine and curious about what the festival has in store.

I was at the media call in the morning, and got a sneak preview of the UK's largest water sculpture in action.

Later that night the water sculptures came alive again accompanied by music, poetry, drones, lighting and fireworks.

Bodies publication has arrived

A few months ago I responded to the following Call for submissions for contributions to a zine called Bodies.

My submission was accepted and I have just received my copy of the completed zine. The variety of texts within the publication are unified by a consistent style of imagery. 

Frank Ormsby's poems used to help others understand Parkinson's Disease

Malachi O'Doherty writes,

"The Belfast writer, who suffers from hallucinations and twitching, is defiantly upbeat about his condition. He has turned his experiences into a new pamphlet which is being used as a teaching resource for student nurses learning about the degenerative disease.


The poet Frank Ormsby lives with hallucinations and with the prospect of the earth opening up and swallowing him. That is how he describes Parkinson's Disease in a pamphlet of new poems to be launched tomorrow night in Belfast at the famous No Alibis bookshop on Botanic Avenue.

One poem includes the lines: 'Who is that girl I sense at my shoulder? Who is that dancing lazily/on my table until I look up?'

He is surrounded by ghosts. They are no bother to him. He remarks on their lack of energy in one of the poems Hallucinations 3: 'They have the fearsome patience of invalids. Whatever it is they are waiting for, they will wait forever.'

Frank was hospitalised seven years ago with heart failure and diagnosed with diabetes. So he has two afflictions to deal with.

His response to Parkinson's in his poems is a mix of humour and horror. He says: "It is hard to beat humour as an instrument against disease or unhappiness. I suppose as a writer I have always had a strong sense of the absurd."

You might think he would be deeply pained at having to live with hallucinations. In fact, he seems more bemused than bothered. He writes about taking these ghosts for a walk every day round the Waterworks on the Antrim Road, near where he lives. He wonders if the dogs there will sense their auras.

He says: "I think that people just naturally have a certain disposition or temperament and I seem to have the kind of temperament that sets considerable store by jokes and what you call whimsy. I am very glad to have this approach to life. It certainly helps to make negative experience a lot more bearable."

But the story is a sad and shocking one.

"From time to time I would think of the limitations of having this temperament. In these poems there is a certain amount of humour but you could go through them and pull together an awareness of the darker side."

But Frank says he is looking forward to the day Billy Connolly makes his Parkinson's the subject of a stage act. "I think there was always a part of me that wanted to be a stand-up comic."

But is there not a danger that others who have Parkinson's might not appreciate this humour, might find it insensitive to their own experience?

He admits: "I've got certain niggling doubts about that. I could imagine somebody who had Parkinson's say for 10 years or 20 years more than I have had it might listen sceptically to poems like these and say he knows nothing about it.

"Ten years from now, if he survives, let's see if he's laughing then.

"It's not as if I am putting myself forward as the laureate of Parkinson's but I am aware that it could seem like that, especially to someone who had suffered and really suffered for it for much longer than I have."

People who haven't met Frank in recent years but maybe knew him as their teacher when he was head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution will see that he has slowed down, that he speaks much more softly, and that his left arm twitches. He hasn't lost the whimsicality they will be familiar with but they might feel instinctively a bit more protective towards him.

Parkinson's does not kill but it erodes a person progressively.

And the damage shows.

Yet he says: "Funnily enough, I wouldn't describe it as a bad time. That would seem to me to be an exaggeration. I think if I am going to have a bad time it is going to be in the future at some point.

"At the moment, I suppose I have a tremor in my left arm, I have certainly got a lot clumsier when it comes to doing or undoing buttons or tying shoelaces or the ordinary little things that you do in the course of the day. I certainly got slower there.

"Neither of the diseases - I'm talking about the diabetes and Parkinson's - that I have got involve pain, or at least they haven't so far. I suppose the real damage that they do is that they soften you up for heart attacks and strokes and so on, but it's about seven years since I have come out of hospital and in that time I haven't had a single day's illness.

"So I suppose, I feel lucky because of that and maybe that is something that feeds the optimism."

Poets often talk of their ideas coming to them rather than them going out looking for them. They don't sit down in the morning like a working journalist with a job to finish before lunch; though some journalists might think that some poets would be more productive if they did.

Frank says: "I'm always surprised that there are certain subjects that almost put a pressure on you to write about them and there are other subjects that don't. In 2009, I spent three weeks in hospital with heart failure and I went home fully expecting to get a quarter of a book of poems out of this experience but, in fact, I never wrote about it at all.

"Yet when it emerged that I had Parkinson's disease I found myself reading articles watching material about it on TV, discussing it with a few people I knew who were my age and writing this sequence of poems and they came quite quickly over about a month or so."

A psychologist might ask at this point if the poems helped him cope, might assume they were therapeutic.

"I suppose I had some kind of half idea (that they would help me to cope with Parkinson's) but only a half idea.

"I think to sit down with some sort of intention to help yourself or of writing poems as a form of therapy I think would be detrimental to the poems themselves.

"You'd end up with something forced, something jerry built, something that didn't come naturally or had no lightness of touch about it. As it turned out these poems did come fairly easily and I didn't allow myself to become too conscious of them as therapy but I have no doubt that they helped."

In the poems he reflects on the changes in him.

In Side Effects 2 he writes, 'Gone my teacherly gulder. …The voice that broke at thirteen has again broken.'

His former Inst pupils remember him as a teacher who could take charge of a class and be a commanding presence in it. Several senior figures in the Northern Ireland media have sat in front of him while he explained poetry to them. They include BBC NI's Stephen Nolan, the music writer Stuart Bailie and Peter Rainey, who is picture editor at the Belfast Telegraph.

The new poems are already being used in Scotland to train nurses who will be working with patients with Parkinson's, for they bring to life the internal experience of the person you see shuffling and shaking, the arm twitching, the distracted look on the face.

He says: "It all began with a poetry reading I did at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh and two things happened as a result of that reading. One was that the two people who were on Mariscat Press, Hamish White and Diane Hendry, offered to do this pamphlet of the Parkinson's poems and one look at the beautiful pamphlets they had previously done and I was accepting the offer immediately.

"The other, to me, surprising development was that a teaching nurse from the Queen Margaret University approached me. She was teaching a class about neurological diseases and she had the idea previously that she might be able to use poems as a teaching aid. It would be a way of stimulating interest and emphasising certain priorities."

That nurse gave her class the poems "to read and discuss and to explore the various themes and apply them to their own work". She then challenged the student nurses to write poetry in response, using the Japanese haiku form that Frank writes a lot in himself, where each poem has only 17 syllables.

How did that go down with students who were expecting a more practical and scientific education?

Frank says: "I suddenly in the mail had 16 haiku poems arrive. And it was pleasingly evident that they had responded to the main points in the poems and I could suddenly realise how the poems might teach them something."

The connection with the hospital is ongoing.

"I am writing an essay about their responses to the poems. The essay may or may not be published in a journal of nursing research. All this was unexpected but exciting as well."

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/therapeutic-no-but-writing-about-it-definitely-has-helped-frank-ormsby-on-how-he-used-his-struggles-with-parkinsons-to-inspire-his-latest-collection-of-poems-35023793.html

Spoken Word in the news

"The rising popularity of spoken word poetry is giving a voice to artists like Dylema.

She tells the BBC's Izin Akhabau that it's "so amazing" to have platforms to be on stage and say her truth."

Torn between her Nigerian roots and upbringing in Britain, she didn't know where to call home and so she decided to make poetry her home.

When asked how Spoken Word differs from written poetry, she explains that Spoken Word takes more of a performative stance than more conventional poetry on a page.




Her favourite Spoken Word artists are "those that are the bravest, that say it and deliver it in a way that is entertaining, striking and forges a connection between the performer and the audience."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-41770258/spoken-word-poetry-is-one-of-the-purest-artforms

Introducing Dr Afua Cooper

A poet, performer, scholar, historian, and social and cultural commentator, Dr. Afua Cooper’s expertise in and contributions to the arts, history, and education were recognised when she was presented in 2015 with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Award from the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.

A celebrated poet she is the author of five books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Copper Woman and Other Poems. She has also recorded two poetry CD’s. Her poetry has a strong sense of memory, history, place, and spirituality. Further, Afua has published two historical novels, which have garnered Canadian and American awards. Her work in the creative arts has been recognised with the Premier of Ontario Award for Excellence in the Arts, a Governor General’s Award nomination, and internationally with the Beacon of Freedom Award (recently awarded for her book My Name is Phillis Wheatley). A founder of the Canadian Dub poetry movement, Afua Cooper was instrumental in organising three international dub poetry festivals between 2004 and 2009.

Banff Spoken Word Residency - Day 8

Monday, April 24 

Workshop 6, Led by Janet Rogers
WHAT CAME FIRST? 

Workshop 7, Led by Buddy Wakefield 

DON’T FAKE CRY

Individual Meeting - Buddy Wakefield

Workshop 6, Led by Janet Rogers
WHAT CAME FIRST? 

In this workshop Janet Rogers shared the evolution of her media poetry from page to screen and the possibilities beyond. I gained a greater understanding of literary and media processes and where multi-media projects can live. Janet shared the possibilities that exist between literary, media and performance. She showed us how one piece of work exists in print, as a spoken performance and as an audio track on a CD, and we compared the effect that these different formats had on the work.

Workshop 7, Led by Buddy Wakefield
DON’T FAKE CRY 

In this workshop we each presented a performance piece that we would appreciate feedback on. Buddy provided in-the-moment coaching and feedback on our presentation and performance.


Individual Meeting - Buddy Wakefield

Buddy and I discussed my work for the forthcoming performance at the Spoken Word Flash Forward event. I had changed the tense from 'you' to 'I', and Buddy agreed that this made it seem a lot more genuine.
He mentioned that my writing often relates to 'moments' in time, and that he could imagine them becoming part of some more extended writing such as a novel.

Akala at The NewBridge Project as part of Hidden Civil War

On Saturday I was fortunate enough to listen to Akala speak at The NewBridge Project as part of the Hidden Civil War programme.



I must admit that a few weeks ago, the name Akala meant nothing to me. I apologise now!

"This fiercely independent artist has performed in over 30 countries, released 6 albums, two books, presented the seminal Life of Rhyme for Channel 4, founded The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company and has been a tireless voice for education and social justice in the UK and all over the world.

Akala is a MOBO Award Winning artist, an outspoken rapper, spoken word artist and writer. In 2008 Akala founded the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company (Ian McKellen is a patron), a touring troupe performing Akala’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. His aim was to underline the similarity between the plays and the poetry of the best rappers, or, as he put it, “the lyricism that transcends all the revenge-tragedy, Tarantino violence”.



The ‘Doublethink’ diaries is a collection of dystopian poetry, the lyrics taken from the Doublethink album and selected other writings from one of the most interesting, informed and challenging voices to emerge from the British music scene in recent years. ‘The Ruins Of Empires’ — an epic poem and graphic novel features illustrations by Tokio Aoyama and follows ‘The Knowledge Seeker’ through the course of human history, via astral travel and multiple re-incarnations, in an attempt to discover the causes of the rise and fall of empires."

The event was sold out, additional tickets were released and there were people on the day coming into the gallery hoping that they would be able to get to see Akala in action.



For me, one of the best things about the Hidden Civil War programme is that it is attracting people who would not normally be contemporary art gallery visitors. I often go to art events and look in the room to see the same faces and wonder whether as artists we are just talking to other artists. But as I scanned the project space on Saturday, I was delighted to see many new faces I did not recognise from the art scene, and talk to a bunch of people who were new to NewBridge, but genuinely wanted to come back after this, their first experience. Surely that alone is an achievement in itself.

As for Akala, he spoke with passion, intelligence, wit, and responded to questions in a thoughtful and open manner. Politicians sure could learn some things from him!

Hidden Door Festival

As Glasgow counts down to the opening of Glasgow International 2014, the world-renowned biennial festival of contemporary art, Edinburgh is host to its very own festival, Hidden Door.

Hidden Door is a not-for-profit arts production company. It was set up in 2010 by David Martin to provide exciting and inspiring opportunities for emerging and breakthrough talent in Scotland that would encourage a D.I.Y attitude to arts production that didn’t depend on government funding to operate.

From 28 March to 5 April 2014 the 24 Rediscovered vaults on Market Street, Edinburgh will be unlocked to showcase some of Scotland’s best breakthrough talent

80 visual artists, 50 live music acts, 40 film makers, 30 poets, 30 performers, 20 animators, 9 unique parties, 2 live music vaults, 2 bars, 1 theatre, 1 cinema, 1 secret music venue, 1 site, 1 chance.

For more information, please visit http://hiddendoorblog.org