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At Saltmarsh Poetry on Monday 7 October I’ll be reading a selection of poems, including The Manager and a new sequence I’m working on called My Daughter Is an Alien, and taking questions from the audience. There will also be floorspots available on the night.

Saltmarsh takes place at the village hall in Burnham Market (Beacon Hill Road, PE31 8ET) near the north Norfolk coastline, 7–9pm, and is run by Sally Festing. If you have any questions about Saltmarsh, you can contact Sally on sallyfes@aol.com. There’s an optional £6 donation to cover wine and venue hire.

About Robin

Robin Vaughan-Williams is a poet, poetry producer, and author of The Manager (Happenstance, 2010). He’s organised live literature events in Nottingham, Sheffield and London, pioneered Skype-poetry, and instigated Nottingham’s first Festival of Words in 2013. His poetry has appeared in various places, including Poems Underwater, Under the Radar, and Long Poem Magazine, and has been described as ‘grim, funny, haunting, beautiful’ (Helena Nelson).

About The Manager

Charting the backwaters of managerial reality, with its penchant for injustice and absurdity, The Manager hovers somewhere between the fantastic and the everyday.

In the valley tower blocks have broken free of their foundations
and are ringing roses in the sky
rippling their pastel bodywork.

They have heard
the manager is coming.

(Manager #14)

‘From satire on an organisation to pure surrealism, the sequence mutates as madly as the manager, and provides a joyful object-lesson in how to mine genuine poetry from the most banal depths of modern life.’ (George Simmer)

Here’s the final poetry line-up for the SEND World Vibes tent at Sneinton Festival (Trickett’s Park) on Saturday 7 July 2012:

13:45 – Aly Stoneman and Milk Milkovich (poetry and music)
14:15 – MulletProof Poet
16:00 – Panya Banjoko
16:45 – Robin Vaughan-Williams

…with loads of music before, after, and in between.

It’s all free. Let me know if you’re coming along.

Trickett’s Park is behind the Greenway Community Centre on Trent Lane, NG2 4DF.

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.

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’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