Readings and Records

It was a really good evening at Smokey Joes on Wednesday at Poetry Cafe Refreshed. Jennie Farley read beautifully from her collection "My Grandmother Skating". Her poems are alive with lovers and wolves, cousins and monkeys, riding in horse-drawn carriages, seeking sanctuary in churches, playing with peg dolls in allotments - closely drawn characters in richly imagined landscapes as disparate as pre-revolutionary Russia and the family home territory of Lincolnshire. But I particularly enjoyed a preview of her new "gymslip" poems about her boarding school days; I look forward to hearing, and eventually reading, many more of those.

Jennie Farley

Then yesterday morning saw a group of us examining material from the Gloucester archives - a fascinating exercise. The documents (including court records, school logbooks, county asylum admission registers) are invaluable resources for historians, of course - but have so much potential for creative writers too. In the prison and asylum records from the early Victorian period - the days before photography and the "mug shots" with which we're all familiar - physical descriptions were carefully noted down. These added "flesh" to the names - the Josiahs and Felicias, the Malachis and the Emmelines - and a small leap of the imagination took you into their worlds of truanting, petty theft, acute mania or "moral danger". Rich pickings indeed for poets and story-tellers!

World Poetry Day

Happy World Poetry Day! Irina Bokova, the Director General of UNESCO, which nominated March 21st for the annual celebration back in 1999, writes that "Poetry is a window into the breath-taking diversity of humanity". Certainly every culture on the planet has its poetic tradition and practice, oral or written. Sadly, in Britain we seem to be less concerned with poetry in our everyday lives today than were our predecessors; perhaps days like today, appropriately acknowledged in the media, in our schools and community centres could go some way towards redressing this?

A small step yesterday was Radio 4's broadcasts of short poems at intervals throughout the day to celebrate the spring equinox. Perhaps someone turning on the news caught a few lines that made them think - maybe Philip Larkin's "The recent buds relax and spread / their greenness in a kind of grief" or Alice Oswald's "Birch, oak, rowan,ash / Chinese-whispering the change". You can hear all of the poems there were broadcast at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3yfnHlQT7vscVl7N2Zl9nYm/four-seasons-poetry-for-the-spring-equinox

And tomorrow evening at Smokey Joes in Bennington Street here in Cheltenham, Jennie Farley will be the guest poet at Poetry Cafe Refreshed. A really atmospheric venue and the promise of some great poems - 7pm if you can make it. Come and celebrate poetry with us!

"Can I believe there is a heavenlier world
than this?" Charlotte Mew

International Women's Day 2017

Yesterday saw women unite worldwide for International Women's Day. In many places this was to protest, to strike - against economic inequality, domestic violence, withholding of reproductive rights and so many more gender-based issues - but it was also to celebrate female achievement in all spheres of life. Events great and small brought women together and to the fore - in Italy they were given free access to all museums and cultural sites showcasing art by and about women; on a more local level, here in Cheltenham women gave a celebratory poetry reading at the University of Gloucestershire.

I was very struck by a quote from Malala Yousafzai: "I raise up my voice - not so I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard .. we cannot succeed when half of us are held back." It seems to me that women writers have a particular responsibility here, to use their skills and opportunities to bring out those voices that will not otherwise be heard. We may think that it's hard enough sometimes in countries that do boast "equality" to get our own voices acknowledged (even if they are heard!), but finding ways to help others speak, to raise their profile too, is surely a duty we should be only too pleased and ready to shoulder.

 

Poems and stories

A thoroughly enjoyable evening at Buzzwords on Sunday with the poet and writer Maggie Butt reading and running a short workshop. I was especially taken with some of her poems about the "enemy aliens" imprisoned in Alexandra Palace during the First World War - and amused by some from "Sancti Clandestini - Undercover Saints". I can't say I've ever given much thought before to the patron saints of ugly towns or careless cyclists!

And it was lovely to see so many schools celebrating World Book Day last week, with lots of children going to school dressed as characters from their favourite books. I think I was so fortunate in having a childhood steeped in stories, a bookcase groaning under the weight of children's classics and a well-stocked local library to visit every Saturday afternoon. I still have many of the books from my childhood, read to my children in turn - and held on to perhaps for their children too! Fashions may have changed a bit in content, but many stories are timeless and still give as much pleasure now as they did decades ago - Wind in the Willows, the Beatrix Potter books, the Tolkien sagas (the latter given a tremendous boost of course by the film versions). With the breadth of the curriculum required of them now, some schools seem to find little time to encourage reading for pleasure, which is such a tragedy. I feel that we really impoverish children's lives if that opportunity is lost.