If you were driving up the M1 recently near Nottingham and noticed a figure with a black umbrella standing in the rain just outside the hard shoulder, that was me, capturing the sound of your engine for my Poems from the Road.

This Wednesday I’ll be giving the poems their second outing, after a set at the Luxury Goods Festival in London on 2 May, accompanied by some of the recordings I’ve made.

The Menace of the Road

I started writing them a couple of years ago because I felt that the road was the last place left where we regularly encounter a flight-or-flight mechanism in modern society. The road has a menace, it’s a place of danger, yet somewhere we frequent pretty much every day because, well, we have to; just like an animal that has to go out in search of food, in spite of the threat of predators.

I feel this constantly as a cyclist. On a bicycle in the city you are living through your senses in a hyper-alert state, scanning all around with your eyes and your ears, ready to react at any moment. This affects one’s experience of time. I used to enjoy catching the bus or underground into work in London years ago. The journey acted as a kind of buffer, a period of transition from one activity to the next, giving me time to think, read, write, or just take in my surroundings. By the time I arrived home I’d be feeling fresh, even at the end of a long day. On the bicycle there is no such buffer; you are catapulted from one state to the next without time to adjust. I leave work and suddenly I’m home, but my mind’s still restless, ticking over, like it’s impatient for the next task and not ready for a change of pace.

I also get this sense of menace from the road as a driver. Driving in the dark, pulling off a slip road, realising you’re in the wrong lane on a roundabout, facing oncoming traffic on a narrow country lane, driving in someone else’s car, in another country, on the wrong side of the road, off road, in snow and ice, oil slicks and water planing, luggage obscuring the rear view mirror, the first couple of years after passing your test, and those near misses that happen every so often.

One of the most terrifying driving experiences I had was driving a loaded estate car across Germany on the Autobahn at night in the rain, which resulted in this poem, available on SoundCloud.

Recording the Road

I wanted to see what it would be like reading Poems from the Road accompanied by the sound of the traffic, to give the audience a feeling for the menace and sheer physicality of the road, so the last few weeks I’ve been on a few sound-recording trips. I quickly discovered that not all roads sound alike. Doing 30mph about town sounds slow and uneventful. The stop-start movement feels much more drawn out when you listen to it than when you’re actually doing it. Even standing by an A-road with traffic racing past at 50mph didn’t have the energy I needed. I found the sound restful in fact, with more of a gentle swoosh than an explosion of sound.

At 70mph plus the sound is far more intense, with a low restless hum accompanied by higher pitched roars. The engines are working hard, and you can hear it. Standing on a bridge over the M1 though, the traffic was too distant and undifferentiated. I needed to get right down beside it. But the trouble with a motorway is that even if you’re right behind the barrier, you’ve still got the entire width of the hard shoulder between you and the traffic. In the end, the ideal spot was a lay-by beside a dual carriageway section of the A52, where I could wind down the window and capture the sounds of lorries and cars shooting by at 70mph, so close you can feel the air being punched out of the way as they pass.

Poetry at Lee Rosy’s

I’ll be reading alongside Wayne Burrows, Anna Robinson, and Georgina Lock at Lee Rosy’s, 17 Broad Street, Nottingham, NG1 3AJ, starting at 7pm on Wednesday 9 May 2012.

On 6 June 2012 the second and last transit of Venus across the face of the Sun this century will take place, not to be repeated again until 2117.

FOR:

It is the rarity of the crossing that makes it precious
but also the shared experience of seeing a spot

not just a shadow on the retina or weak-minded
figment, drift across the mother of all eyes

the tears caused by prolonged staring at a light source
and the camaraderie of fancy dress as we ask

workers of the world to drop their tools and don
their welding goggles, 3D glasses, bounty hunter

masks, whatever protection they can muster
to gaze and amaze. A story for their grandchildren!

AGAINST:

Any solar event is innately dangerous and risks
turning its observers stone blind. Moreover

because of their extreme low periodicity
transits of Venus penalise entire generations

who forfeit the opportunity of witnessing a small
black disc moving across the face of the sun

merely by dint of their birth. We favour solar
eclipses by the moon, which occur several

times a year across the globe and are really
rather spectacular. When has darkness ever fallen

and the birds folded their wings for Venus?
Such transits should be permanently abolished.

Anna Robinson, the author The Finders of London and editor of Long Poem Magazine, is visiting Nottingham on Wednesday 9 May, and will be reading downstairs at Lee Rosy’s Tea from 7pm that evening with Georgina Lock, Wayne Burrows, and myself (Robin Vaughan-Williams).

I first saw Anna reading alongside Jo Roach at the Torriano Meeting House in London in 2007, and was so impressed I promptly invited them both up to Sheffield for Spoken Word Antics. Songs from the Flats, her first pamphlet, weaves an urban dreamtime round a Waterloo housing estate as she explores the lives and voices of its inhabitants. The Finders of London, which builds on Songs, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre Prize for Poetry in 2011.

Entrance £4/£3 (concessions)
Lee Rosy’s Tea, 17 Broad Street, Hockley, Nottingham, NG1 3AJ
7pm start, Wednesday 9 May 2012

Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.

About the Poets

Anna Robinson

Anna Robinson was born and lives in London. As part of Poetry International and the South Bank Centre’s Trading Places project, Robinson was Poet in Residence in Lower Marsh in 2006. Her pamphlet, Songs from the flats (Hearing Eye, 2006), which draws on this experience, was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

Her first full-length collection, The Finders of London, was published by Enitharmon Press in 2010. Her work has also appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Poetry London, Magma, Brittle Star, the reater, In The Company of Poets (Hearing Eye 2003) and Oxford Poets 2007 (Oxford/Carcanet). She is a founding editor for Not Shut Up! and the newly established Long Poem Magazine.

Listen to Anna read on the Spoken Word Antics Sound Archive (you’ll need to enter the username and password displayed in the right-hand column on the Sound Archive page).

Wayne Burrows

Wayne Burrows has published three collections to date, Marginalia (Peterloo), Emblems (Shoestring) and The Apple Sequence (Orchard Editions). He was writer in residence at Nottingham Contemporary during Spring 2011, has edited Staple magazine since 2008, and is currently based at Primary Studios, Nottingham.

Georgina Lock

Georgina Lock’s one-act play Daddy’s Bed, was performed at Lee Rosy’s as part of Nottingham’s Triliteral Festival (2010). She has also written, directed and produced short films including The Unicyclist, Short, White Pleated and The Pick Up. Her short fiction is published in various anthologies and literary magazines.

Robin Vaughan-Williams

Robin’s sequence The Manager, which charts the backwaters of managerial reality, was published by Happenstance Press in 2010, and his work has also appeared in publications such as Fuselit, Under the Radar, and Long Poem Magazine. He has run numerous live literature events, such as Spoken Word Antics in Sheffield and Word of Mouth in Nottingham, has produced several collaborative poetry performances, and presented the Spoken Word Antics radio show for Sheffield Live. He is also Development Director at Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

I’ve just finished a review for Sphinx of Ian McMillan’s Smith/Doorstop pamphlet, This Lake Used to be Frozen: Lamps (2011), but it’s only 400 words and I’ve got more to say! So here are a few extra notes.

There’s a lot of everyday experience here, what the Russian Formalists would have called byt. Byt, derived from the same root as byt´, the verb ‘to be’, was usually placed in opposition to art. For Viktor Shklovskii, art was a means of refreshing our everyday experience by defamiliarising patterns of experience that had become habitual. By ‘making it strange’, it makes us look again.

These days, however, the everyday has more going for it. In contrast to the artificial construction and simulation of experience through the mass media, the everyday is seen as a refuge of genuine experience. So in addition to the opposition of art vs life, we’ve also got what might be called hype vs life.

One of my favourite poems from this collection is ‘The Evening of the Day Pavarotti Died’. The very first line, read after the title, primes us for an art/hype vs life showdown:

I poured some Carnation Milk into a cup of coffee

We appear to be confronted with two irreconcilably different cultural artefacts here; can there be any overlap between the worlds of Pavarotti and Carnation milk? A couple of verses later, however, it turns out that this showdown is itself a construction, as Pavarotti enters the back gardens of a South Yorkshire neighbourhood, replete with sheds and squirrels:

[...] from Mr Lowe’s house next door
And from Steve’s house up the street we heard
The last note of Nessum Dorma rising and hanging

There like light on a tree.

Admittedly, Pavarotti has made his entrance via the radio, so maybe what we’re witnessing here is an instance of the mechanism by which mass media phenomena install themselves in the fabric of our lives, yet at the same time this is clearly also a moment of genuine and universal pathos. Pavarotti might have become an over-familiar and automated icon for artistic experience—to the point where you didn’t have to actually listen to Pavarotti, because you knew you were listening to Pavarotti—but this poem shows Pavarotti doing, even if just for a moment, exactly what he’s supposed to do: transforming the perception of our everyday environment.

…as seen on the 16:15 London to Nottingham.

At first a blank, but the moment I begin to write
a sheep appears from behind the rooftop
chewing on greased-up blades
licking its lips longer than usual

while below a tanker pulls in
viking at the wheel, shakes his gold ring
tambourine of an arm at the attendants
to unscrew his caps and drain the trailer.

Satisfied, he leans forward and pulls out
a scalded sheep’s head, plucks an eye
tugs a cheek with his oily finger.

I’ll be doing an extract from Part I of ‘Time Is Running Out! (restart your system now)’ at Say Sum Thin III on Saturday 31 October at Nottingham Playhouse. This is the first time I’ve performed anything from this piece since originally putting it on in Sheffield in October 2009. We got an amazing reception that night, with some wonderful comments afterwards, my favourite of which was, “I could go on listening to it all night”. At twenty minutes, I was slightly concerned that it might be a bit long, but clearly no need to worry.

This’ll just be a short extract at the Playhouse, with no musical support from Ella Luk this time. However, we hope to get together to put on the full performance again soon, either in the UK or possibly in Berlin.

Say Sum Thin III also features former UK slam champion Kayo Chingonyi and a group piece by Mouthy Poets which, judging by a snippet I caught at Speech Therapy the other day, looks very promising indeed.

Here’s the info (below) about ‘Time Is Running Out!’ first time round. I’ve pinched it off Google Calendar, which seems to be getting a bit buggy at the moment. An extract from the rehearsal (naturally, I forgot to press ‘record’ when it came to the actual performance!) is available to listen to on the Spoken Word Antics Sound Archive.

Time Is Running Out! A performance of words and music

Text and Music, The Riverside Cafe Bar, Sheffield, 27 Oct 2009, 8–10pm

Time Is Running Out! is a new collaboration for Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival of Writing and Reading, mixing poetry by Robin Vaughan-Williams with the deep rhythms and ambient textures of the Ella Luk music project.

Time Is Running Out! follows two people on the run from the all-devouring trappings of modern life. As they are propelled through a world of home improvements, burgeoning inboxes, and work-related stress, their trajectories accelerate until one day their paths cross, and suddenly time expands.

Now based in Iceland, Robin spent 9 years in Sheffield where he ran Spoken Word Antics for five years, developed the Antics radio show, and organised a series of site-specific sound and poetry performances. More recently he started exploring collaborative poetry improvisation, and first worked with Ella Luk on the poetry-collage performances ‘Verbiage’ (2004) and ‘Demolition’ (2005).

Ella Luk is a solo project of Reykjavik based Andraya, the singer and bassist of ambient noisecore group L.Minygwal. For this performance she will be joined by Berlin instrumentalist Thomas (Arc Twin, L.Minygwal). Their music creates surreal stories and bizarre landscapes using lo-fi samples, voices, and unusual instrumentation.

Also appearing on the same night will be Linda Lee Welch performing Beyond Childhood with her band, Jackalope Tales. Beyond Childhood is a multi-media performance that was commissioned by Signposts for Off the Shelf in 2001. Linda Lee Welch has written a chronicle comprised of poetry, script and songs, which looks at growing up and the childhood memories we take with us into an adult world. She will read and sing, accompanied by Jackalope Tales.

Linda Lee Welch is a prize-winning poet, novelist and musician and a lecturer in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. As well as the novels ‘The Leader of the Swans’ (2003) and ‘The Artist of Eikando’ (2005), published by Virago, she has contributed to a number of poetry and short story collections and has performed regularly at Off the Shelf and other spoken word events in Sheffield.

This will be the second of two text and music nights; the first will take place a week earlier on 20 October, and will feature Bat Detector from Elizabeth Barrett and Robin Ireland, and a collaboration between Shelley Roche-Jacques and The Only Michael.

Organised by Signposts.

Ella Luk: www.myspace.com/ellaluk
Off the Shelf: www.offtheshelf.org.uk
Riverside Cafe Bar: www.riversidesheffield.co.uk
Signposts: www.signpostsonline.org

It’s a recent, steel-frame building, and inside the space is vast and light—far more impressive than on the outside. In the foyer you have to queue at reception for a visitor pass that will let you past the gates. Once through, you can get anywhere.

The workspaces are open plan, with glass meeting rooms of different sizes around the outside and the central atrium. Endless rooms, open to the viewer, none belonging to anyone, none with any determinate function. The whole space has been designed with flexibility in mind, and it consequently feels like it might be about to collapse.

You’d never feel secure working here, never entirely sure that your desk would still be there in the morning. The furniture is ephemeral and portable, ready to be picked up and carted off at any moment. The workers on flexi-time come and go, each replaceble by the next, the pattern of their appearances entirely lacking in regularity. Even the walls seem to have moved every time you look at them.

But what about the plumbing, plumbing isn’t mobile? I wander about looking for toilets, but they are nowhere to be found. Eventually a cleaner shows me the way. They’re round the corner, behind a screen, through a set of double doors, along a corridor with a low ceiling and…walls. Walls? These are the first things I’ve seen in over two hours that really look like walls. There has been glass, partitions, legs, and furniture. But walls, no.

When I leave there are people on cycling machines in the lower atrium level. Someone is shouting at them. “Faster”, he says, “go on, you can do it. Faster!”. They’re straining to break free. If only, I think, they had real bicycles.

It’s time for States of Independence again, the wonderful book-fair-cum-festival at De Montfort University in Leicester, now in it’s fourth year.

Last year I ran a Happenstance stall, which I enjoyed so much I ran another at the Lowdham Book Festival and States of Independence West in Birmingham, though neither quite matched the buzz of the original, so I’m back for another go. There were stalls from all kinds of independent publishers—Nine Arches, Five Leaves, Shoestring, Templar, to name but a few—and panels, readings, and talks throughout the day. I somehow ended up on one entitled ‘Show Me the Money’, where I talked about applying for funding for community writing programmes.

This year we’ve got a 45-minute Happenstance slot to go with the stall, which will feature readings from Sally Festing, Tim Love, Peter Daniels, and myself. I’m calling it ‘Deleted Scenes’ because I’ve asked each of the readers to include one poem that was not included in their Happenstance pamphlet, whether it was discarded during the editing process or perhaps written later on as a sequel or something that could have gone into the collection. I hope this’ll encourage a bit of reflection on the process of putting together a collection, working with an editor, and the afterlife it can have.

There’s tonnes of other stuff happening on the day, including Aly Stoneman and Mulletproof Poet launching their debut collections from Crystal Clear, and a reading from Mark Goodwin and Chris Jones of Longbarrow Press. You can find the full programme on the States of Independence website.

I was just listening to a programme about the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle on Radio 4, which was interesting but spoiled by terrible readings of the poet’s work. Why on earth does the BBC repeatedly air acted readings of poems that tend to smother the poem beneath a veneer of theatricality? So often the voice comes across as pompous, precious, and suggestive of a nervous, agitated disposition. Are they deliberately trying to reproduce a stereotype of the poetic psyche?

It’s not so much that the BBC hires bad actors. In this case the actor was Sara Kestelman, who has a distinguished career behind her. Poets themselves are often not the best readers of their work, though in many cases they are, and actors are in possession of an array of techniques that would help many poets improve their delivery. So actors ought to be able to do poetry a service. If they don’t manage this, it must be something to do with the approach they or their directors take, rather than with their ability.

In this particular case, Hilda Doolittle’s poems were read in a breathy, dramatic whisper that was probably supposed to sound atmospheric. But I just sat there thinking, ‘What on earth are you doing? Nobody reads poetry like this!’. I was unable to focus on the words. Any atmosphere the poetry might have conjured up was obscured by the atmosphere of the voice. And whatever accents and tones the words might have possessed were squashed by the reader’s tone of voice.

It’s as if actors are more concerned with exhibiting their performance skills than with conveying the material they are supposed to be delivering. Or are directors perhaps not convinced that anyone is really interested in poetry, so instruct their actors to compensate for what they perceive as the lack of content in the words?

This is something I’ve been wondering about for years. My main theory is that actors are used to acting dramatic dialogue, where conventionally every line belongs to a character, i.e. it is the product of a unified personality. Moreover, when scriptwriters write dialogue, they will often be thinking about things like the situation in which the lines are uttered, the objectives of the character, and their relation to the character they are being addressed to.

While some poetry is characterised by these features of dramatic dialogue, very often it isn’t. It’s not always clear who the speaker is in a poem, what the context of its utterance is, and who it’s being addressed to. A lot of the time poetry is multi-accented, that is, its meaning can seem to pull in several different directions, and much of its effect may come from the tension or play between those different orientations. If someone tries to read poetry as dramatic dialogue, they are likely to end up fixing the context and meaning, and therefore lose this kind of tension or play.

This reminds me of Valentin Voloshinov’s discussion of ‘quasi-direct speech’ (nesobstvennaia priamaia rech´, a Russian translation of Gertrude Lerch’s uneigentlich direkte Rede) in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. In quasi-direct speech a single linguistic construction conveys the meanings of two differently oriented voices. An example might be a sentence in a novel that seems to convey the meanings of both the author and a character, and where neither is dominant over the other.

In a discussion of the use of this form of speech in Russian modernism, Voloshinov describes quasi-direct speech as a linguistic phenomenon that is specific to the written word and which cannot be effectively conveyed through speaking:

In the majority of cases, and namely there, where quasi-direct speech becomes a mass phenomenon in the new artistic prose, the acoustic transfer of evaluational interference is not possible. What’s more, the very development of quasi-direct speech is connected with the transition of the major prose genres to a silent register. Only this silencing of prose made possible that multi-levelled and orally unconveyable complexity of intonational structures, which is so characteristic of the new literature. (Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka, 1929, p. 377, my translation. See Part III, ch. 4 in the English edition.)

If you believe Voloshinov, then you might conclude that the reason the BBC broadcasts such terrible acted versions of poems is that it simply isn’t possible to read a lot of poetry out loud properly; oral reading fixes the voice one way or the other, and loses what isn’t fixed.

I disagree. Poets have been finding ways of performing their work in ways that do manage to preserve the lack of centredness and multiple accents their words sometimes carry for decades, possibly centuries (although it’s more of a modern phenomenon). It doesn’t necessarily mean reading in a straight, uninflected way at all, and the more acting skills a speaker has the better they’ll probably be able to carry it off. But it does mean ditching the notion that poetry should be uttered as if spoken by an individual character.

I’ve been working with an aphasia group in Nottingham recently, which has thrown up some interesting challenges, as not everyone in the group can write well enough to be able to handle individual writing exercises. So I’m exploring alternatives like collaborative group poems and getting them to work in pairs.

Last week we had an inspiring session working on a collaborative poem to do with war. In the past, some of the best sessions I’ve facilitated have been the most spontaneous ones, which haven’t relied much on preparation and where the participants have had a lot of input into the content of the class or workshop. This was one of those sessions.

We’d planned to base the session around memory and I’d prepared a number of exercises working with this theme. However, I’d just started explaining what we were going to do for the first exercise when, after barely two minutes had passed, the bells started ringing. It was 11am on Remembrance Day, 11 November, and we’d agreed beforehand we were going to observe the two minutes silence.

While we were sitting there quietly I started thinking this would make a great subject for the session, so when the silence was over I changed the plan and asked people what they’d been thinking about during the two minutes. I then got them talking in more detail about their thoughts or any memories they associated with war, and started writing lines up on the board based on what they were telling us.

We had a whole range of responses from very general sentiments about war to specific memories of childhood during the blitz and friends who’d served as soldiers. One woman remembered how she’d been lucky to live on a farm where there was plenty of food even during rationing. One man remembered someone who’d come back from service a completely different person, clearly traumatised, highly reclusive, but was able to find peace in mending watches.

Someone else had a bit of an adventure story from an uncle (I think), who’d been captured by the German army during WWII and held captive as a POW. One day they discovered loads of gems on a job they were doing and started hiding them in their pockets, but the soldiers found out and had them lined up against a wall to shoot anyone found with the stolen gems on them. I think they managed to ditch the precious stones just in time. And another person described how she lives near an airfield where Lancaster bombers still occasionally take off, and the Red Arrows practise their manouvres.

Once we had a selection of lines on the board, with something contributed by everyone, I asked the group to arrange the line order to form a poem. Which line comes first, which is second, and so on? We could easily have ended up with a disparate set of experiences, but the lines seem to gel and build upon one another, constructing a narrative out of different people’s thoughts and memories. There are also some nice examples of contradiction in the first verse, which show how contrasting sentiments can be combined for rhetorical effect.

‘Pegasus Bridge’

Quiet across the country
people still talking
the noise of planes trailing flags in the air
sometimes cut short
but we must stay alive.

We were lucky, always enough food
gas-powered buses
came back a changed man, mending watches
going home in the blackout—moonlit streets
stolen gems, spoils of battle
white poppies—no more war.

(by Frances, Paula, Beryl, Emma, Cliff, and the three Davids at Aphasia Nottingham, and myself)