From Park to Brewery!

Yesterday was wall-to-wall poetry, starting with Poetry in the Park in Worcester and finishing with our Picaresque performance at Writers in the Brewery in Cirencester. The morning session was part of the fourth Worcestershire LitFest, under the direction of Polly Robinson; the creative writing tutor Sue Johnson has run several workshops based in local parks over the last twelve months and participants brought along and read the poems and short prose inspired by their history or layouts. An enjoyable morning - especially as I discovered that I was sitting next to someone who had lived five doors down the road from me fifty years ago! A fair bit of catching up to do there ......

Polly Robinson with Sue Johnson and two "park poets".

Writers in the Brewery, run by Rona Lacock once a month at the New Brewery Arts Centre, is always an interesting evening with an open mic alongside a presentation from an invited guest or guests. It was a great pleasure for all of us in Picaresque to be invited last night - we had a lovely appreciative audience and thoroughly enjoyed reading for them. Between us we also managed to win three out of the four raffle prizes!

A Centenary To Celebrate

A busy week coming up with lots of writing related activity. I'm really looking forward to seeing Theatr Cymru's production of "Under Milkwood" on Tuesday and on Thursday Picaresque will be guesting at Writers in the Brewery in Cirencester (at 7.30pm, in the New Brewery Arts Centre Theatre if you're free to join us). This week also sees Worcester LitFest and I shall be at two poetry sessions there, my old home town - they certainly didn't have anything so interesting going on when I lived there in the 50s and 60s though!

Consequently I shalln't be able to participate in a formal event being celebrated by the Friends of Dymock Poets on Tuesday. A hundred years ago on that day the poet Edward Thomas was on his way to meet Robert Frost when his train drew up "unwontedly" at Adlestrop, prompting the penning of what has to be one of the best loved poems in the English language. I have always enjoyed it and have made a pilgrimage to the village on more than one occasion (the station no longer exists but the station name plate is preserved in the bus shelter).  A couple of years ago I read "Now All Roads Lead To France", the wonderful biography of Thomas written by Matthew Hollis, and I have started reading much more of the poetry since. So even though I can't be at the commemoration in person, I shall definitely be there with "all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire" in spirit.

                      

Adlestrop

Edward Thomas

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June. 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas

A Day Without Love .....

Our hosts for the evening

 
 "A day without love is a year without a summer ..." - the sentiment expressed at the opening of the lovely evening I spent on Friday at Deep Space Artworks here in Cheltenham. Jennie Farley and Eley Furrell were hosting an evening of Love Poetry which certainly caught the imagination of all those present. Jennie and Eley read a selection of their favourite love poems and then some of their own before inviting members of the audience to do the same, sharing another poet's work and then one of their compositions. The breadth was tremendous - from the amusing to the heartbreakingly sad - but my favourite had to be "A Woman To Her Lover" by Christina Walsh, superbly performed by Kathy Alderman. Almost impossible to believe that this was written in the late 1700s!

A Woman To Her Lover

Do you come to me to bend me to your will
as conqueror to the vanquished
to make of me a bondslave
to bear you children, wearing out my life
in drudgery and silence?
No servant will I be
if that be what you ask. O lover I refuse you!

Or if you think to wed with one from heaven sent
whose every deed and word and wish is golden
a wingless angel who can do no wrong
go! - I am no doll to dress and sit for feeble worship
if that be what you ask, fool, I refuse you!

Or if you think in me to find
a creature who will have no greater joy
than gratify your clamorous desire,
my skin soft only for your fond caresses
my body supple only for your sense delight.
Oh shame, and pity and abasement.
Not for you the hand of any wakened woman of our time.

But lover, if you ask of me
that I shall be your comrade, friend, and mate,
to live and work, to love and die with you,
that so together we may know the purity and height
of passion, and of joy and sorrow,
then o husband, I am yours forever
and our co-equal love will make the stars to laugh with joy
and to its circling fugue pass, hand holding hand
until we reach the very heart of God.

Christina Walsh (1750 - 1800)

Pictures and poems

Those were the days!

Under the auspices of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, I'm running three workshops at an AgeUK Day Centre with service users who have  communication and / or memory problems. Our first session today centred on childhood holidays. Using photographs from the 1920s to the 1940s as memory prompts, it was aimed to work at several levels - a combination of reminiscence therapy, group interaction and language stimulation. But more than anything it was a fun afternoon! And the resultant poem covered everything from bad tempered boarding house landladies to the vagaries of the tide in the Bristol Channel ..... I don't know who enjoyed the session more, the service users or me.