Words Aloud, Sat 16 April, 2–4pm
Sutton Central Library
I’ll be at Words Aloud in Sutton this Saturday with guest Lewis Buxton. I’m doing a slot, and the open mic is always excellent. Compered by Rachel Sambrooks. See their Facebook page for further details:https://www.facebook.com/
Publications and Collaborations
Quick Shifts Dance Improvisation Collective
One area of poetry improvisation I’m keen on exploring is movement—in terms of building up a relationship between speech and movement to give performances a more physical dimension, but also how posture and movement affect the way we speak while improvising. Getting performers pacing up and down the room can add nervous energy to their verbal improvisation, and simple things like whether they are looking at one another or up at the ceiling can dramatically change the dynamics.
So I was pleased to be invited to take part in a workshop with Quick Shifts, a dance improvisation collective based in Leicester, in February. We explored ways of incorporating speech into their performances, and one of these ideas formed the basis of their show on 3 March. I also benefitted a lot from seeing how people use improvisation in another artform where it is more established; for example, how they use the number of performers (solo, duet, triplet, etc.) as a central structuring principe.
Nottingham Poetry Improvisation Group
Earlier in April I met with Mark Goodwin for a session in Nottingham, where we recorded some duets and alternating solos (usually I work in bigger groups, so this was a good chance to explore techniques for working as a pair). We’ve both got the recordings, so there may be some alternative versions surfacing once we’ve got round to editing them. There are plans for more in Nottingham over the next few months, with probably a scratch event coming out of it at some point.
Obsessed with Pipework and Open Minds Quarterly
I was excited to hear last week I’ve got three poems in one of my favourite magazines at the moment, Obsessed with Pipework. ‘Story’ and ‘Lay-by’ are from my Poems from the Road sequence, and ‘Trickster Wind’ is about noises in the back yard. ‘Pills’ (which riffs off William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just to Say’, but substitutes ‘pills’ for ‘plums’) appeared in Open Minds Quarterly 17:3.
Sutton Cultural Award
Next week I’m picking up an award, alongside Rachel Sambrooks, for our work on Sutton Stories, a project that ran from July to October last year as part of Imagine Festival of the Arts. It culminated in ‘a truly intergenerational event that gave the elderly a sense of connection to the community and emotionally moved many of the public’, in the words of the Festival Report. Thanks are also due to Joanna Steele, who put a huge amount of effort into the project and successfully managed to pull together all its different strands. There’s a blog post about the work I did with care home residents for the project here: http://www.zeroquality.
