I added up the females on a bill,

they said I was unreasonable and over the top,

my problems would multiply

if I didn’t stop.

Number the women-

the smaller the amount,

you’re seeing what happens when we don’t count.

Count like maths teachers insane on Algebra,

Count like Dracula in his coffin,

Count like an abacus, like Carol Vorderman

Count like a mathematical Boffin.

It’s maths that even I can do,

females equal one in two.

Challenge the social long division,

expect support, expect derision

But in parliament and company boards,

on TV and on the radio,

the rule and not the exception

would be a fifty- fifty ratio.

This is the way to count;

add up the women you see and hear.

Then factor in the ones you can’t

to ensure they don’t disappear.

I made my maths public,

and was accused of asking for a token,

but an even bigger sum

would be the cost of not having spoken

I am no Pythagoras,

I’m more excited by cake than Pi,

but when equality fails to add up,

I’m going to keep asking why.

I had been musing on why my previous blog has suddenly got lots of hits on Sunday, why two critical comments were made and why Stamford Arts Centre suddenly reTweeted my critical blog on Monday. I pondered the words of one of the commenters and thought about how to reply, as he’d implied I was criticising the gender bias of the festival because I wanted to be on at it but wasn’t good enough. How can I say I’m a good poet without looking like a numpty I mused. Then clicked that his surname was the same as that of Stamford Arts Centre’s marketing manager. Could it be…? Her Facebook friends yielded a  man of the same name and same dog who liked Steven Segal films (Steven Seagal being his pen name). Could it be…? I didn’t want to jump with both feet so emailed Kimberley and her manager at the Arts Centre. Have now received the below. Feel sorry for Kimberley. She  just wants to put on  a festival. And, like me, is discovering the internet can make things messy… The main point is still that the Verse festival will be giving it’ adult audience only male poets and sees nothing wrong with that at all.

Hi Kate

I did not know my brother had commented on your blog until he telephoned me on Monday morning to tell me he had done so. He follows Stamford Arts Centre on twitter and had followed the links. I am not responsible for his actions and opinions and I certainly didn’t inspire or encourage any of his comments.

Once I was made aware of what he had done, I assumed that you may come to the conclusion that he was repeating information he had acquired from me which certainly wasn’t the case. I therefore felt compelled to make sure you knew that we at Stamford Arts Centre did not have that opinion of you and until you shared your blog we were not familiar with your work or achievements. I am sorry if you interpreted my comment as anything other than this.

I do not feel it is productive for us to communicate anymore and for you to continue with this personal angle on your blog is needless and achieves nothing. If I have shared opinions that you have interpreted as unreasonable I believe this has come from the fact we have worked so hard on Verse and believe it exists completely for the good of the community and offers all  poets, regardless of gender, age and race, the opportunity to share and develop their work. I was therefore understandably disheartened when the good intentions and excellent opportunities Verse provides were called into question. However, I never intended for you to be personally offended by our response or for this matter to be taken out of it’s original context, and so to ensure no further misunderstanding occurs I think it best we no longer make contact.

Graham has received your email and will formulate a response to you this afternoon.

I wish you all the best for the future.

Kind regards

Kimberley

I thought I should contact you as my blog about the line up of the “Verse” festival has a had a good response from readers and been ReTweeted and shared via Facebook quite alot.

I haven’t previously felt moved to comment on a venue or festival’s poetry line up because usually I think All Poetry Programming is Good Poetry Programming- and also that it’s none of my business!

However, perhaps because I had lived in Stamford, the festival struck a particular chord with me and I did feel a bit disappointed to see such a low proportion of women represented on the festival bill.

http://katefoxwriter.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/does-just-one-woman-on-a-poetry-festival-bill-matter/

I wanted to draw my blog to your attention- and also wondered whether you had any comment to make in response, or might take my thoughts into account in future programming?

All best

Kate

Date: 11 January 2012 10:01:33 GMT
To: <kate.fox@virgin.net>
Subject: Verse 2012

Hi Kate

Thank you for your email and it is great that you feel so passionately. However, we feel you have got this out of proportion and have been somewhat unreasonable in your comments. If we have been in any way gender-biased it was not intentional especially given that the organisers and promoters are all female. Furthermore, the judging panel for the Poet Laureate competition comprises of two women and two men.  

Verse 2012 is a small scale festival for Stamford based solely at Stamford Arts Centre with a highlight of finding a Poet Laureate for the town. The town itself currently has no poetry scene compared to our thriving neighbour Peterborough, which has poetry coming out of its ears. It is unfair to compare Verse to the festivals mentioned in your blog as it is by no means as big as any of them – in all there are 4 live shows, 5 films and 4 workshops plus a day of schools workshops and a children’s exhibition in the gallery. There will be support acts for two shows which will be both male and female plus there is Pint of Poetry, an open mic evening which anyone can take part in.

The programme has been thoughtfully put together in partnership with Book a Poet to introduce our audiences to the spoken word.  As a district council funded project, we took advice from experts as to who we booked for the festival and very much wanted to focus on local successful poets with just two national names as headliners – one for adults and one for children.. This was based on availability and that particular act’s suitability to what the festival needed. In all honesty ensuring gender equality didn’t enter into our minds when booking, and we stand firm that it shouldn’t have – a talented poet is a talented poet, regardless of gender, and this will be reflected in our future Verse festivals which I am sure will involve plenty of talented female poets. We know our audiences very well – almost too well – and know this programme will work for them.

As I have previously said however, this seems an unnecessary argument considering the small amount of poets booked in for our festival – I could very well understand it if we had 20 poets and a tiny proportion were female, but our current ratio doesn’t seem outrageous, especially when emphasising my point on Twitter that we expect many female applicants for the Stamford Poet Laureate. 

We’re really looking forward to Verse in March/April and I hope you will participate and support the festival as it is clear you are passionate about both Stamford and Poetry. If you can make it down it would be good to meet you – perhaps at Pint of Poetry you could show us your material. Please feel free to quote this response in full on your blog, but please do not paraphrase.

Kind regards

Kimberley Taylor

Kimberley Taylor

Marketing & Publicity Officer

 stamford arts centre

Dear Kimberley,

Thanks for your response. It raises a couple of further points.

I am surprised you said that the organisers and promoters all being female in itself demonstrates that there could not be an intentional gender-bias- especially as you then admit that “Gender equality didn’t enter into our minds when booking and we stand firm that it shouldn’t have”.

The centre receives Arts Council funding and, in the words of someone I spoke to there today “We particularly champion diversity and equality in the arts and equal distributions of resources”. It is an essential condition of their funding in fact and is the reason I will be passing this correspondence on to them.

If your aim is to increase participation in, and audiences for, spoken word, then I strongly believe that gender equality should enter your minds. For the Laureateship you are asking people to submit both written work and then perform a piece. There has been much writing on how significantly fewer women submit work to poetry magazines. A recent example comes from the leading poet Linda France writing for Friction Magazine based at Newcastle University’s Centre of Literary Arts. She said “Many editors have mentioned the disparity between male and female submissions to magazines, despite the fact that at most writing workshops women far outnumber men”. An editorial in the national journal “Poetry Wales” made a similar point last spring; “We receive fewer unsolicited poetry submissions by women…there remains work to be done in drowning out the voices that…subtly inhibit many women writers”.  

You say “A talented poet is a talented poet” and I agree, but it seems that organisations such as yours who are explicitly receiving funding in order to increase participation and audiences have a particular responsibility to take account of these issues and make your statement that future Verse festivals will involve “plenty of talented female poets” something you are actively working toward rather than just hoping for.

Most of the research is about submission and publication (As another example a 2010 study by VIDA looked at publication ratios in literary journals. The London Review of Books featured 343 male authors, against 74 female authors, the international “Poetry” Journal featured 246 male poets and 165 female poets). There is an even greater gender disparity in the world of performance poetry and spoken word. A typical ratio on a bill or event is around 1 in 4 women and I have often been involved in competitive slams where the ratio is closer to 1 in 8 women.

In my own work as a professional poet since 2006, I believe I am usually booked because I do good work with a reasonably broad appeal. At the same time, I am glad when a booker or promoter has given thought to engaging more women as audience and participants by recognising that visible female performers can impact on this. I often work with disengaged boys and young men in schools and colleges because performance poetry is a particularly good means of engaging them in literacy- but I also then look for ways to introduce them to the work of male performance poets who may be more likely to act as gender role models for that demographic. I certainly do not believe gender is the only factor in finding role models- my way as a comic poet has been paved more by John Hegley say, than Pam Ayres- but I do believe that it is a significant one. A significant one that was worth factoring into a festival that is intended as an introduction to spoken word at a venue where you know your audiences “Almost too well” and are, in common with most arts centres looking to actively engage new people. Worth going the extra mile and finding at least one more female poet for your adult audiences and workshops and school workshops. There are several in the Midlands.

I feel strongly about this not because I am passionate about poetry or Stamford (lovely though it is- I have been based in the North East for most of the past 13 years and now live in North Yorkshire), but because I have been working toward increasing participation in live literature for several years- on the board of the national performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes, as a participant in the Cultural Leadership Programme, as an organiser of spoken word workshops and events and as an artist and mentor.

At a time of arts funding cuts, I fear that some of the wonderful work that has been done to increase the profile of live literature may fall by the wayside. Its particular strength as a platform for all sorts of voices will be diluted too. To hear of an arts centre that has the vision to invest in it is wonderful on the one hand- and then frustrating on the other, when that opportunity may not cast as wide a net as it could, or when programming without considering gender equality becomes a matter of pride. When that opportunity and the work of Stamford Arts Centre might stand as a model to inspire other arts centres of the viability of such a festival, and inspire even better practice in drawing in the many men, women and children who haven’t yet been introduced to the power and pleasure of poetry in performance.

I wish you well with the festival and am sorry that you consider my previous blog post to have been “Out of proportion” and “Unreasonable” in its highlighting of the apparent lack of consideration given to gender representation in the festival. I hope this letter further explains my position.

Best

Kate Fox  

www.katefox.co.uk

I lived in Stamford for a few months when I was a journalist at Rutland Radio. Burghley horse trials, the setting for telly’s “Middlemarch”, a swimming pool murder, a Tory MP and a total eclipse of the sun are what I remember. A place with a captive audience for poetry. Captive future poets ready to be inspired. If Stamford Arts Centre had staged the “Verse” poetry festival when I was there, it would have been the most exciting thing to happen to me apart from the eclipse. John Hegley, Ian Mcmillan, Joel Stickley and the Dead Poets (the splendid Mark and Mixy)?  “Poetry doesn’t get much better than this” I’d be saying in a Greg Wallace from Masterchef voice.

However, thirteen years later and many experiences of running events and workshops myself, something about the line up made my foot itch, as Hilary Dragon’s Den Devey might say. Apart from Camilla Mclean who will be “Reading poetry while children decorate cupcakes”, there are no women on the line up or running workshops. What’s the trouble with that? my 1999 self might have said, there’s enough that’s inspiring about this lot to mean my oestrogen is a secondary consideration.

Well…over the past few years I’ve discovered that, in a sort of osmosis, greater numbers of female performers, writers and, even audience members, are more likely to dip their toe in poetic waters when they see other women up there too. It is more subtle than the “I didn’t know poetry could be fun” conversions that are a happy ten a penny consequence of booking accessible, people-friendly poets, but just as prevalent. The “Verse” festival will be doing some school outreach work- and I find schools will often be really glad to book female poets because it gives their girls an additional role model (Just as they can be happy to book male poets who may be more likely to engage their boys). I know these are generalisations, I know it’s not possible or desirable to do “Representation” above wonderful artistic experiences, but I think, in these straitened times, when a small town arts centre is committing resources to showing “Poetry’s not boring” that it’s important to widen the net for its audiences and participants and display some-dread word-diversity- so as to pull in and inspire as many people as possible. Particularly since this seems to be a first chance to really show Stamford a sense of a multiply-voiced poetry world.

Focusing purely on gender diversity, I had a quick look at some statistics for bigger poetry festivals.  Stanza will have about 43 men billed this year and 33 women, Ledbury last year had 46 men, 35 women. Either way, with such a large line up, they both had more room for a wider cross section of poetics than a small festival could ever hope to achieve-nonetheless I’m sure Stamford Arts Centre could have booked at least one or two more of the many excellent female poets out there.

“At least the end of the world meant I finally stopped dreaming about the end of the world” The opening sentence of a novel I didn’t write last year. A year in whioh I devoured much Apocalyptica on paper and on screen, and pretty much got it out of my system. I now realise it was provoked by a collision of life circumstances making me feel more powerless than usual at a time when the Zeitgeist was happily reinforcing the illusions of the powerful and shattering the delusions of the power-challenged. Perfect Apocalypse-fodder. Without the consolation, scapegoat or Dawkinsian kicking-horse of religion, this is what I had instead. 

I am usually too squeamish to watch horror films, though a soft spot for the “28 Days” franchise prefigured the run that began when I bought Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” in November 2010. I now know that it operates on many a cliche of the genre, but his slightly literate plague Zombie/Vampire, New World reconstruction tome was all exciting and new to me. My favourite Apocalyptica, it turns out,also needs to have some good Empty Streets Wandering About from the protagonists to particularly do it for me,

I prefer small glimmers of implied hope, but thrill to them all being dashed.I like long, lingering close ups on the gradual meltdown of society and find too much focus on the reconstruction can come to feel more like a Historical Novel- although is very educational since I don’t know enough about how societies are formed.

I prefer that the Psychologically negative effect of being a survivor is acknowledged- and found “Earth Abides”, “Zone One” and “On The Third Day” best for this.

So, for those looking for some Apocalyptica of their own, here’s lists of the page and screen End of Worlds I most remember from the past year. This misses out much of the gorier, Supernatural stuff which seems to be proliferating currently. 

BOOKS

1. Stephen King’s The Stand; I do like a plague-ridden end of the world. This one made me see America very differently subsequently, as the Reconstruction of Society bits are particularly well thought out. I haven’t read much Stephen King, but fans seem to feel this is one of his most lovingly written and crafted works. I went on to another of his Apocalypses; “Cell” when Good Phones Go Bad, but wasn’t as rewarded.

2. Nevil Shute’s On The Beach. I prefer a more hysterical End myself. It would be nice to think everyone took it so calmly and kept on drinking Martinins. Images from this 1950s cosy Apocalyspe have stayed with me though.

3. George R Stewart’s “Earth Abides”. A 1949 classic. Beautifully psychologically astute I think. Plenty of lonely street wandering from “Ish” the intellectual hero. One of many American Apocalypses in which the Golden Gate Bridge features. Lots of tentative society building.

4. Margaret Atwood’s Year of The Flood and Oryx and Crake. Satirical, corporate, all-too-true gradual World-Breakdown. Loved discovering her through these books. Much preferred them to the Handmaid’s Tale- which anyway is Dystopian not Apocalyptic

5. Liz Jensen’s The Rapture;  Wonderfully written and great sense of foreboding throughout as a young asylum patient predicts the end of the world and messes with her therapist’s head. I have recycled more committedly since…

6. A Canticle for Laibowitz, Walter M Miller Junior. Very different and more layered than most World Ends- set thousands of years post-Holocaust when we’re back to Monks illuminating manuscripts again. Would also love to have read the novel I think is buried within here about the time of the nuclear Apocalypse and the physicist who caused it (The Leibowitz whose papers are excavated from a bunker).

7. Warm Bodies, Isaac Marion. I do not love all Zombie apocalyspes. However, this is a clever, funny, poignant first person Zombie narrative. Currently being made into a film.

8. On The Third Day, Rhys Thomas. Recent, slightly schlocky but ultimately drawing you in through it’s take on survival in a crap world- instead of Zombies and Vampires threatening the survivors you have randomly angry, destructive people banding together- which felt psychologically feasible. 

9. The Road- Cormac Mccarthy. Epitomising the Lonely Wanderers apocalypse. Beautifully, bleakly written and miserable. Second only to “Threads” in its refusal of consolation.

10.  The Death of Grass- John Christopher. Economical, easy read about a 40s British apocalypse. By the time I got to this one, I had finally absorbed the fact that humans will not necessarily all be nice to each other in the End Times. It was beginning to make me think I should watch Bear Grylls. And take notes.

11. Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now. Straight through, voicey narrative from the p.o.v of a teenage girl. Short (purposely) on Holocaust-detail, good on relationships under stress.

12. Zone One, Colson Whitehead. Another literary novelist overwriting his socks off, but good on work and colleagues and memory as ways of providing meaning which still ultimately proves pointless in the face of the end of the world (A nicely described plague/Zombie apocalypse).

13. Outpost, Adam Baker. Out in paperback now, this would usually be too much of a horror Zombie apocalyspe for my tastes but I liked the protagonist- an overweight female Vicar who takes up running round the oil platform she works on, to become fit enough to take on the scary, bitey people.

14. The Drowned World. J.G Ballard. Dreamy and floaty, and reminiscent of Nevil Shute in it’s refusal of hysteria. Several images from this have also stayed with me.

I would have liked to have read “I Am Legend”, but will wait til longer time has passed since I saw the film, have Christopher Priests reissue of “Fugue for a Darkening Island on my Amazon Wish List, and also devoured Adam Roberts’ recent “The Snow” and Alex Scarrow’s “Last Light” so fast they didn’t touch the sides, but did fill an Apocalypse-shaped hole. I read Julie Myerson’s “Then” while sat in Waterstones and found it too depressing even for me and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium was a fine young adult Dystopia rather than Apocalypse. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is still unread on my iPad.

SCREEN

1. Jericho- American TV series I watched on DVD. Small town survives a nuclear attack on 12 American cities. In many ways a cosy Apocalypse, but nice conspiracy sub-plots give it more weight, even if it is never much elevated above the Waltons in terms of script/acting.

2. Survivors, BBC. I didn’t see the Terry Nation original, just the 2010/11 remake. Apart from some lonely-streets wandering in the very first episode, this also never reached the Bleak that 80s telly could-ditto the Day of the Triffids remake.

3. “I Am Legend”. Will Smith stars in this excellently pared down One Man Hopelessly Surviving in a Plague City film. Epitomises a pure, lonely end of world with flashes of false hope. Imagine the original Richard Matheson book is even better.

4. Threads. The original nuclear-Sheffield 80s BBC film. Milk bottles melting on doorsteps, council leaders likely to choke on their own cigarette smoke before the nukes get them. Realistic, close to home and with no redeeming hope or joy implied even years later. Humanity at it’s worst. So near the knuckle I had to have an Apocalyse-break for quite a while afterwards.

5. Children of Men. Probably more of a Dystopia- but loved this film based on the PD James book. Just the right flavour of “Everything’s Wrong And Will Never Be Right” but still with good folks like Michael Caine trying to make a post-fertile women world better, Really clever direction from Alfonso Cuaron.

6. War of the Worlds (remake), The Day After Tomorrow, The Numbers- all recentish Hollywood films with good building-collapsing bits but not much else to recommend them.

7. The Walking Dead- American TV series starring Andrew Lincoln from This Life as a Sheriff in a Zombie-infested world. S’alright. Nothing really lived up to the series-advert image of him walking into a deserted city on his own, or waking up  in a deserted-wrecked hospital. I think there’s a really good HBO Apocalypse series still to be made (Mad Men Post Plague?)

8. Contagion- This year’ disease film with Gwyneth Paltrow as the Index victim. Yes there was supermarket stockpiling and mass grave-digging, but the actual survival of humanity/the planet never seemed in doubt, so this was an average Apocalypse-lite for me, 

I haven’t yet seen Lars Von Triers Melancholia, which sounds like a nice floaty Apocalypse with added family misery.

So, this isn’t an exhaustive list, just a record of one person’s EndTime diet over a year- but to summarise, here’s my top three bleakest and top three cheeriest;

TOP THREE “APOCALYPSES ARE BAD, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE, BUT IT’S PROBABLY FOR THE BEST BECAUSE THERE IS NO MEANING”;

1. Threads

2. The Road

3. The Death of Grass

TOP THREE “APOCALYPSES MIGHT ACTUALLY BE A GOOD THING BECAUSE,AW SHUCKS,HUMANS AIN’T SO BAD”;

1. The Stand

2. Earth Abides

3. Jericho

What I love about it is that it’s people talking honestly about what they’re passionate about. The random and unpolished nature of it is important. I enjoy seeing the large audiences, attentive and open and receptive to conversations that flip from nuclear phsyics to forgiveness to ghosts in the shift of a slide. It’s more like real life than the poetry and comedy events I’m usually involved in- though I love them too for how they are also rare examples of person speaking directly to person in our increasingly mediated culture.

I wonder a bit if I had an element of Bad Faith in my performance last night-because it was more that- a performance- than my first two BK presentations in which I was trying to convey a particular idea. I think I was impacted by it being a Christmas party gig, not wanting to repeat what I’d done before and still finding it easier (and safer) to wrap my beliefs and feelings up in a comic performance which adds a bit of safe distance.  My sense would be that there were also at least three other performances during the Christmas Bettakultcha. I enjoyed all of them- for their content and skill- and for the different type of listening and thinking they required from the audience. Martin Carter’s beauiful burlesque Maria Millionaire’s rendering of an Amanda Palmer song (Vegemite; The Black Death) was entertaining and strange and moving and both helped break up and underscore the strange realities of the other presentations. Lydia Slack slightly makes my head explode in a good way. She comes across as neither solely a farmer nor a rural Derbyshire after dinner/public speaker of the Old School nor a modern stand up comic, but combines elements of all of these things to funny and clever effect. Nigel Vardy swapped hats, hinted at the frostbitten fate of his fingers and toes and made mountaineering with him sound as eccentrically English as Peg Alexander’s lucky dog of Todmorden. The Random Slide presentations also allow for, in fact encourage, a more “Performance” feel and all the presenters did it proud- particularly Sue Everett and Dinesh Kaulgaud who could almost have pre-written theirs as comedy monologues but were doing it on the hoof. I suppose that shows how “Performance” is an essential and invited element in the recipe that makes up the Bettakultcha stew, but one that needs to simmer in balance with other ingredients. Ivor helps this happen as a comedic compere- so that even after a powerfully moving presentation like Richard Mccann’s about the impact of his mother’s murder, the tone can be lifted and shifted and re set for whoever comes next.

I think the venue added to the Performance element in itself. The Corn Exchange has the wow factor and,on balance, I think worked as a Christmas venue for that reason. Yes, the acoustics are a bit dodgy and sound and atmosphere can escape down the big hole where the revellers noises were drifting up from the restaurant, but it felt like we were somewhere special- a bit out of the normal way of things. Purely for speaking and listening and creating an intimate amosphere purposes, I think the Brudenell Social Club has worked best for me as a more general Bettakultcha venue.

I think maybe I’ve argued myself round there a bit. To the point that, actually, BK is a great mixture of things and that performance and presenting are fairly intertwined, as are truth and fiction and illustrated fact and hyperbole and theory and conjecture and all of the wonderful things that made up a night that saw an explanation of Falling Down Drunk (and ended up with several chairs falling down and taking their people with them), Dr Chris out-Coxing Brian with a new development in Neutrons travelling faster than light, Irna Qureshi’s funny and compelling survey of biscuits (I always knew I was a Bourbon Socialist) , a live DJ demonstration, Steve Manthorp showing us the Ghosts in the Machine and Ivor having kicked us off with top tips on how to present.

I left the night with the “Merchandise” of the rather splendid Bettakultcha mug, with washer attached and wooden spoon included. Reflected that as a speaker, treading the path between what you really want to say, the structural challenges of slides and time and the awareness of having an audience and an event is worth wrestling with, for the fulfilling cup of tea feeling that comes at the end.  

Actually, I have simplified the Leonard Rating. Pain or sadness or darkness or confusion combined with the more simply pleasurable elements is necessary to create the “melting in the middle” of high Leonardness. 

I am often disappointed in my search for high Leonard ratings at poetry events (Recent enjoyable ones were Martin Figura’s Whistle and the Apples and Snakes Amuse Bouche event at ARC) . This week however I have been fortunate enough to see three poets with high Leonard ratings. 

Andrew Mcmillan combines a wonderful way with an audience and splendid flat Yorkhire vowels with an animated delivery of elliptical, imagistic and deft poems from his pamphlet “the moon is a supporting player”. Striking pictures are delivered then wafted away again; “a waitress had a voice like cold coffee/the day sweated/the day wrung itself out and left/itself to dry between the streets.” I think I would have laughed out loud twice as many times as the rest of the audience, had I been listening on my own- though that was still many times. They were seduced into listening mode though, tuning in for those sharp needles of insight.  Andrew also has a way with glasses tweaking of a much older man. I became mesmerised by this at some point- but it did add to the Leonard rating. 

Ira Lightman does a thousand things at once as a poet. As a “conceptual poet” in fact. This would not usually provide high Leonardness for me, but Ira’s honesty, musicality and endearing Mad Professor persona mean that his reading from new collection “Mustard Tart As Lemon” produced a gut reaction in me and pleasurably confused brain swirling. I grasped and clung to lines like “The scarcity of public space/is the scarcity of wise management” and happily let them float away amidst his iTunes random accompaniment, gorgeous ukulele playing and concrete poetry read from a projection screen and accompanied by Andrew.

The following night, in the same room at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle, Moodswing editor Steve Urwin launched his collection of ”Dreams, diaries and debris”- Shades of Grey. He brought his usual kinetic energy to the prose poems- but also a warmth in between the dark pieces of real and surreal grittiness which meant the pieces were really shared with us and kept us close, even when the subject was breakdown and despair; “Ask the Talking Pen what these words are trying to convey. I’ll agree with almost everything it says. I’m nothing. I have no choice in the matter. I will leave you here”  

To summarise a high Leonard rating then; It will have you leaving a poetry reading with both head and body invigorated in some way. Also, as if you have had some sort of exchange of energy with the poet provoking it.

Both Steve and Ira acknowledged the importance of Crista Ermiya’s role as editor in helping order and bring coherence to their books. They both supplemented this with their performances of the work within. Lovely. Red Squirrel press week continues at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle and all three books can be ordered at www.redsquirrelpress.com

I see a man carrying a fridge,

humpbacked as the Tyne Bridge.

Like water, emergency loo roll, bananas,

it represents the inner burdens that we bear

and wondering could just one more run

have helped us properly prepare?

We’re off with a slap of Mo Farah’s hand,

laces untied we fall, silver blanket wrapped we stand.

Our chippings bipping us over the start line

as if we’re on a conveyor belt;

Indiana Jones! A Sunflower! A Cuddly Toy!

We run like water through the tunnels

with an “Oggy Oggy Oggy, Oy, Oy, Oy!”.

Shovers and shufflers,

hoofers and hustlers.

And my calves are already weak

when we reach the Tyne Bridge

but I think again of the man with the fridge,

and I think I’m going to have to fake it,

but someone bellowing my name

as if I’m a runner,

makes me think that I could make it.

Then the Red Arrows zoom on by,

coloured trails of smoke hang like spectres in the sky.

The missing man formation.

Shadow army of ghosts running with all of us,

giving a what and a why.

Then the band strikes up the Blaydon Races,

a spectrum of puce, shading our faces.

Crowds give whistles, cheers, bam bam clacks,

they are an outstretched hand,

and the way they wait

makes me think it’s as witnesses they stand.

And that speed camera can’t be for us,

I fantasise a ride on that charity bus.

Either I feel really ill,

or this is yet another bloomin hill.

Jelly babies, I’m Dr Who,

can I time travel to the end?

and every stranger shouting your name

becomes a friend.

Sun then rain then sun

in the blinking of an eye bridge,

light on and off

with the opening and shutting of that fridge.

Arrows pierce blue with white through a heart

and you can only get to finish

if you’re prepared to start.

The miles are longer and longer,

and there’s muttering around me

saying the worst to run

is the final strait, that final one point one.

Thigh to thigh, knee to knee,

clacking down along the sea.

the cacophony gets louder,

the crowd still on our side,

and is that a busted knee or a burst of pride?

Everything hurts,

I’m out of words.

The race has been ours

but the end is mine,

I need something from that fridge

to write this finishing line.  

*I made notes while at the start line, then was going to run with notebook and pencil out but soon discovered that wouldn’t work, so wrote the rest in my head and kept muttering it to myself like a madwoman as I added lines, until after I did some of it on live telly to lovely Denise Lewis. Then it got a bit blurrier after seven miles, but I kept adding lines and did the full thing (apart from the lines I forgot) at the end to the telly (who used about 5 lines and cut the poetic bits out) and over the PA at the finish. I like that the rhythm reflects the running- although I can definitely tell that I was less observant and more insular and delirious after the first few miles, Things I didn’t get in were; how nice when fellow runners patted your back in encouragement, the sound of all those feet at once, how I was jogging at the same speed as people walking by the end but felt like I couldn’t stop or carry on, how the man carrying the fridge told me he wrote hundreds of poems and was being kept going on Anadin Extra and beer, the man ahead of me who’d lost twenty stone, tutus, Peppa Pig and a dinosaur, the orange segments, the diabetic woman dressed as Minnie mouse who’d done every run, the jumble sale of chucked away clothes and the grass bottle banks of discarded water and Powerade and people struggling and sweating up hills towards the end, chatting on their mobile phones about how they were nearly there…

Written and performed by Martin Figura,

Produced by Sarah Ellis,

Directed by James Grieve.

1.45pm. Zoo Venue, 140 Pleasance, until August 29^th.

(Book, “Whistle” published by Arrowhead Press, £10)

I was so relieved when I heard Tim Crouch, an actor and director, say that he doesn’t like seeing actors acting. If you want to illustrate someone lifting up their arm it is not necessary to lift your actual arm. People might be able to imagine it, in their actual heads. I like watching people pretending on screen, but I don’t like it when they’re in the room with me. That’s why I tend to prefer watching comedians, performance poets and poets. They may take me somewhere else but they don’t have to pretend we’ve all disappeared first.

“Whistle” evokes disappearances powerfully though; A happy boyhood, A Mother who is murdered by her husband, a father obscured by mental illness, the vanished worlds of a certain sort of sixties suburban childhood and an exiled Catholic’s life in pre war Silesia.  

Martin Figura tells his astonishing family story through poetic narrative and a slide show of family photographs and slide images constructed with the same humour and eye for exact detail that permeate his words.  He stands centre stage between the screen and projector and a table where a box brownie camera is half in shadow. The family images represent both what is present and not present, what will always be preserved. Figura is a photographer too, and a poem, titled in the accompanying book “Born”, describes; my first focus/an iris/an aperture dilating/a click, whilst “Vanishing Point”, after he is taken from the family home following his mother’s murder, ends “Then there is just white light/and the loose flapping sound/of a film escaping its gate”.

For me, the choices he made about different types of language to use to convey different points of the narrative, were pitch perfect and an example of live literature operating at its very highest level; where the marrying of form and content in the differences between spoken and written, public and private language means that you have a piece which works brilliantly live and on the page. I think this also happened, in a different way, in Molly Naylor’s “Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You”, also produced by Sarah Ellis.

I loved, for example, the heightening of language into more intense metaphor just after the murder; “I begin a shadowless rotation/through the silence, heads are planets/the doctor’s few thin hairs/the rings of Saturn/…my sisters and I small lost moons” , the joyous rhythmic list of “The Piggotts” who come to the rescue as he’s abandoned by relatives, cathartic just when he and, we as the audience, needed it to be; “Taken prisoner by this bashing clouting clan/Jammed between Danny and John” and the plaintive, angry child rhyme thanking the aforementioned relatives for emigrating without telling him, Thank You “for not troubling us with regret/for not giving comfort your address/for bothering to care less/for going to Canada on a jet”.  The repeating form of the villanelle “Exile” is perfect for conveying his father’s alienation from both his old and new lives, how “He comes home with pickled cabbage” but “Snapshots have kept him hostage”.

The poem “Victor” won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize and perfectly encapsulates the tension between the continuing reminders of war, in the form of children’s games, and their parents  attempts to bury it; “The pavement is so littered with Germans/that men must pick a way through/to reach their gates and take their sons/down paths into quiet houses.”

 I also loved the audio interjections of extracts from his mother’s letters. It really gives poignant flesh to what could have been quite a vague sense of an archetypal, whit e gloved, lost Mum. She is present as the hopeful young fiancé “I want it to be nice, to go to bed without curlers”, making a devotion of domestic duties “As it’s representative on earth she sets/the lemon meringue onto the cloth” and poignantly and heartbreakingly, as she would have been on her seventieth birthday in the poem that ends the live show and the book “June’s Birthday Waltz”; “Take my arm, my arm, my arm/seventy verses of wishes/ seventy verses of ghosts/let us step through these mirror-ball stars” . Against black and white movie footage of couples dancing, this was another crescendo of poignancy in the live show and I’m sure I wasn’t the only audience member desperately fumbling for a tissue before being ejected back into the bright lights of Edinburgh.

Martin told his story so skilfully that it didn’t evoke sympathy for him, rather empathic identification. Anyone who has ever felt like a lost child, a lonely child, a child between two or more incompatible worlds, a child trying to make sense of the obscure and obscured world of adults, a child who is trying to evoke and reconcile with their memories of their parents, can hear, see and viscerally feel echoes here.

The story doesn’t end, as real life stories often don’t, with an apology and full redemption, though there is a reconciliation of sorts with his father who continues not to be able to confront what he has done and is portrayed with more heightened metaphor as a fish “All I get is maggoty river-breath. The gilt/of your scales dull in the air”.  It is testament to Figura’s ability to speak the words clearly enough without performing them out of existence that the word “gilt” stands out in the live show even without the benefit of the enjambment on the page. Truly however, he fulfils the promise given in the poetic prologue that this will not be “pity, cold as a gun” but “mercy, and I a good son”

There was only one thing I could have wanted to be here that wasn’t, and since I had exactly the same thought in the same room a year ago when watching Molly Naylor’s show, I wonder whether this is purely subjective, or a consequence of a live literature show that hinges on an cataclysmic event that takes place off stage and “off book”. In Molly’s show, a tube explosion, in Martin’s show, the murder of his mother. This is prefaced and succeeded beautifully here, but I could have done with a longer moment of silence or black screen or something to absorb the event, before resuming with how “The whole thing tips upside down at the news”.  A moment perhaps where the audience and performer share or imagine or fail to imagine what is not possible to convey in words.

“Whistle” is one for the most powerful and coherent pieces of work I’ve ever had the privilege to see and that is due to Martin’s enormous skill, versatility and honesty as a poet, and the staging that showcased this. For me, it is a landmark and a masterclass in what can be done in the live literature at a time when collaborations in theatre, comedy, film, music and dance call their siren songs. Poems and images done as well as this can be the most simple, and yet the most beautiful of what can possibly be achieved.

something’s got to give.

Clearing Up

Beat eggs not people,
Draw trees not guns,
Set fire to your imagination,
Smash taboos, steal puns.
Harness hordes with Haiku
on BBM and Twitter,
Join in the fluting,
set the streets on glitter.
Don’t waste 9 grand on a Uni course
with Martin Amis and A.S Byatt in,
shell out for the next vocational must,
an MA in Creative Rioting.