Hey, what happened? I started this blog with the fine intention of updating it at least every month, and a whole year has slipped by with no activity. Then with the year rushing towards its conclusion, I decided to give you a summary of my writing highlights of 2012 by New Year’s Eve, and it’s now the second week of January…
I began last year with a trip to Vietnam in February with Robbie. We were somewhat disappointed with the country - it’s a depressing part of the world to be bird-watchers in - but we did love the forest of Cat Tien National Park, and I got a couple of decent poems out of the experience. They are neither published nor online yet, because I cling to a slender hope that one or other of them might be a competition winner in the future. I have my dreams. Normally when we go tramping the world I keep a diary, but this year as an experiment I took my iPhone with me and wrote my diary as a daily blog so that a few select friends and family could follow our progress. I've edited the blog a little now and you can read it on this website under the title Dragons and Drongos.
Almost as soon as we got home in March I was appearing at Harrogate Theatre, reading a poem I'd written specially for them as a filling-in act at their second talent competition, me being the only one of the hopefuls from the first competition who's got his face on TV so far. It was far from my greatest composition, I know, but it got a few laughs and did what it was supposed to do, that is, give the theatre people a few more minutes to count up the audience votes. Performing to a full house at Harrogate Theatre is terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure; great to have a full sized stage to run about on and not worry about sending pints of beer flying in all directions, as is usual with performance poetry events in pubs and bars. You can read the text of my Talent Show poem here.
Also not long after Returning from Vietnam, my prize-winning poem The Musk of the Full Moon was published in the Huddersfield Grist anthology, “A Complicated Way of Being Ignored” edited by the Guardian newspaper’s Not The Booker Prize winner 2011, Michael Stewart. To be honest, this is the third time now that I have been featured in an anthology claiming to be showcasing up-and-coming Yorkshire writers, and the first time was in 1998, so I may have approached the thing with a certain amount of scepticism. But it's a great collection and it did put me into contact with a whole bunch of talented people. For a while I was on tour as part of a team that gave joint readings in Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds and Otley, as well as appearing on a Halifax community radio show hosted by the estimable poet-presenter Gaia Holmes. Total number of my own books sold as a result of all this effort: zero. A complicated way indeed.
My other performance highlights in 2012 were a guest set I gave at York's now sadly adjourned Speakers' Corner open mic in September; reading at a rather exclusive poetry evening in the Cafe Lento in Leeds in October; being the final act at the Malton Literature Festival opening ceremony in August entertaining town dignitaries and the almost-celebrity poet Kate Fox; and a gig at Harrogate's Dragongate music festival. Dragongate took place in a field near Harlow Carr gardens over a cataclysmically wet weekend in July. Ironically, this was fortuitous for me: usually when a poet steps onto the stage at a music festival the tent will rapidly empty, but on this occasion the rain was thudding down so hard outside that almost everyone on the site was taking shelter in the main marquee, so I got to read to a proper crowd for a change. It's always a challenge to interest music fans in spoken word, but I dispensed with the more cerebral poems of my oeuvre in favour of the loud, fast and funny ones, and I felt I was well received.
Publication-wise 2012 was quite a lean year for me. I had poems in two anthologies other than Grist: The Mystery of Keith Fowler appeared in a ghost anthology, “Pressed by Unseen Feet”, published by Stairwell Books a.k.a. my friends Rose and Alan; and a very old poem called The Jungles of Graball-Youcan was commended in the Ware Poets’ 2012 Competition, and published in their winners' anthology.
The bulk of my writing effort was directed towards completing an epic sonnet sequence called God The Banana. This started life as an outline for a novel that I'd drafted during a 24 hour train journey from Jaisalmer to Delhi in 2008. I made two abortive attempts at writing it as novel because I don't really do prose, but then sometime in early 2010 I was a bit desperate and as an experiment I tried writing each of the first few paragraphs as a sonnet, and it just sort of took off from there. For the next two years I was knocking out a fairly steady sonnet a day. On completion I'd notched up almost 50,000 words in 437 sonnets. That's almost three times as many as Shakespeare wrote. (Size is not important of course...just thought I'd mention it...) The plot is a kind of travelogue-cum-magic realist satire, spiced up with plenty of sex, violence and scatological humour.
Sadly, my book has just come thudding back through my letterbox this morning, returned from the offices of Picador unread. This is disappointing since the poetry editor of Picador is Don Paterson, a renowned sonnet fan and someone who gave me some encouraging words when I’d sent him the manuscript of my first book quite a few years ago, so I’d invested a good deal of hope in him. The unsigned, standard rejection letter says they are not reading unsolicited manuscripts at the moment and only publishing poets already on their list. I’m trying to take it bravely since rejection is the norm in this game, but The Bird Bard is champing away in the corner, saying to me that publishers and booksellers are forever moaning that poetry doesn’t sell, so why do big publishing houses persist in publishing no-one but the same small group of poets “on their list”, who have already demonstrated themselves incapable of interesting the wider reading public? One day these stagnant old behemoths will all be dead, and there will be no new poets to take their place if publishers refuse to read the work of unknowns.
My local spoken word open mic, Poems Prose And Pints, approached a crisis point late last year when the team that have done such stirling work in creating and promoting the event - Nicola, Andy, and Jem - decided quite reasonably that they had done enough. Some of us regular readers decided we would try to keep it running on a more informal model, and since I'm possibly the only person in this town who absolutely cannot live without a local pub-located poetry night, and despite all my efforts not to be, I now seem to be the key pin in the structure. Disaster is inevitable...
But we did manage a successful meeting in December, hosted by the genial John Coopey, and the next one is scheduled for January 16th, hosted by my fellow Stairwell Books author John Walford. We're planning to have a different compere every month and all writers of prose and poetry are welcome to come along and read their stuff to a friendly and encouraging audience, 5-10 minutes recommended. It's at the Tap & Spile pub on Tower Street in Harrogate, every third Wednesday of the month, get there 7.30ish, £1 admittance.
So, you ask, what will The Bird Bard be up to in 2013? Well, I've already got two short performances lined up in Leeds, and one in Hull. One is very soon, on January 15th, the Tuesday straight before Poems Prose and Pints on the Wednesday. I'm part of a tribute show to the musician Captain Beefheart who died in 2010, and it's at Oporto bar in Call Lane, Leeds The other Leeds gig is at the Heart cafe in Headingly on March 27th, where I'll be performing along with four or five other top-notch Yorkshire poets. The Hull gig is at the Union Mash Up on Princes Avenue, on March 21st. Come along to any or all of these, and remember I'm always available to come and read at your own events. I don't cost very much.
I began last year with a trip to Vietnam in February with Robbie. We were somewhat disappointed with the country - it’s a depressing part of the world to be bird-watchers in - but we did love the forest of Cat Tien National Park, and I got a couple of decent poems out of the experience. They are neither published nor online yet, because I cling to a slender hope that one or other of them might be a competition winner in the future. I have my dreams. Normally when we go tramping the world I keep a diary, but this year as an experiment I took my iPhone with me and wrote my diary as a daily blog so that a few select friends and family could follow our progress. I've edited the blog a little now and you can read it on this website under the title Dragons and Drongos.
Almost as soon as we got home in March I was appearing at Harrogate Theatre, reading a poem I'd written specially for them as a filling-in act at their second talent competition, me being the only one of the hopefuls from the first competition who's got his face on TV so far. It was far from my greatest composition, I know, but it got a few laughs and did what it was supposed to do, that is, give the theatre people a few more minutes to count up the audience votes. Performing to a full house at Harrogate Theatre is terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure; great to have a full sized stage to run about on and not worry about sending pints of beer flying in all directions, as is usual with performance poetry events in pubs and bars. You can read the text of my Talent Show poem here.
Also not long after Returning from Vietnam, my prize-winning poem The Musk of the Full Moon was published in the Huddersfield Grist anthology, “A Complicated Way of Being Ignored” edited by the Guardian newspaper’s Not The Booker Prize winner 2011, Michael Stewart. To be honest, this is the third time now that I have been featured in an anthology claiming to be showcasing up-and-coming Yorkshire writers, and the first time was in 1998, so I may have approached the thing with a certain amount of scepticism. But it's a great collection and it did put me into contact with a whole bunch of talented people. For a while I was on tour as part of a team that gave joint readings in Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds and Otley, as well as appearing on a Halifax community radio show hosted by the estimable poet-presenter Gaia Holmes. Total number of my own books sold as a result of all this effort: zero. A complicated way indeed.
My other performance highlights in 2012 were a guest set I gave at York's now sadly adjourned Speakers' Corner open mic in September; reading at a rather exclusive poetry evening in the Cafe Lento in Leeds in October; being the final act at the Malton Literature Festival opening ceremony in August entertaining town dignitaries and the almost-celebrity poet Kate Fox; and a gig at Harrogate's Dragongate music festival. Dragongate took place in a field near Harlow Carr gardens over a cataclysmically wet weekend in July. Ironically, this was fortuitous for me: usually when a poet steps onto the stage at a music festival the tent will rapidly empty, but on this occasion the rain was thudding down so hard outside that almost everyone on the site was taking shelter in the main marquee, so I got to read to a proper crowd for a change. It's always a challenge to interest music fans in spoken word, but I dispensed with the more cerebral poems of my oeuvre in favour of the loud, fast and funny ones, and I felt I was well received.
Publication-wise 2012 was quite a lean year for me. I had poems in two anthologies other than Grist: The Mystery of Keith Fowler appeared in a ghost anthology, “Pressed by Unseen Feet”, published by Stairwell Books a.k.a. my friends Rose and Alan; and a very old poem called The Jungles of Graball-Youcan was commended in the Ware Poets’ 2012 Competition, and published in their winners' anthology.
The bulk of my writing effort was directed towards completing an epic sonnet sequence called God The Banana. This started life as an outline for a novel that I'd drafted during a 24 hour train journey from Jaisalmer to Delhi in 2008. I made two abortive attempts at writing it as novel because I don't really do prose, but then sometime in early 2010 I was a bit desperate and as an experiment I tried writing each of the first few paragraphs as a sonnet, and it just sort of took off from there. For the next two years I was knocking out a fairly steady sonnet a day. On completion I'd notched up almost 50,000 words in 437 sonnets. That's almost three times as many as Shakespeare wrote. (Size is not important of course...just thought I'd mention it...) The plot is a kind of travelogue-cum-magic realist satire, spiced up with plenty of sex, violence and scatological humour.
Sadly, my book has just come thudding back through my letterbox this morning, returned from the offices of Picador unread. This is disappointing since the poetry editor of Picador is Don Paterson, a renowned sonnet fan and someone who gave me some encouraging words when I’d sent him the manuscript of my first book quite a few years ago, so I’d invested a good deal of hope in him. The unsigned, standard rejection letter says they are not reading unsolicited manuscripts at the moment and only publishing poets already on their list. I’m trying to take it bravely since rejection is the norm in this game, but The Bird Bard is champing away in the corner, saying to me that publishers and booksellers are forever moaning that poetry doesn’t sell, so why do big publishing houses persist in publishing no-one but the same small group of poets “on their list”, who have already demonstrated themselves incapable of interesting the wider reading public? One day these stagnant old behemoths will all be dead, and there will be no new poets to take their place if publishers refuse to read the work of unknowns.
My local spoken word open mic, Poems Prose And Pints, approached a crisis point late last year when the team that have done such stirling work in creating and promoting the event - Nicola, Andy, and Jem - decided quite reasonably that they had done enough. Some of us regular readers decided we would try to keep it running on a more informal model, and since I'm possibly the only person in this town who absolutely cannot live without a local pub-located poetry night, and despite all my efforts not to be, I now seem to be the key pin in the structure. Disaster is inevitable...
But we did manage a successful meeting in December, hosted by the genial John Coopey, and the next one is scheduled for January 16th, hosted by my fellow Stairwell Books author John Walford. We're planning to have a different compere every month and all writers of prose and poetry are welcome to come along and read their stuff to a friendly and encouraging audience, 5-10 minutes recommended. It's at the Tap & Spile pub on Tower Street in Harrogate, every third Wednesday of the month, get there 7.30ish, £1 admittance.
So, you ask, what will The Bird Bard be up to in 2013? Well, I've already got two short performances lined up in Leeds, and one in Hull. One is very soon, on January 15th, the Tuesday straight before Poems Prose and Pints on the Wednesday. I'm part of a tribute show to the musician Captain Beefheart who died in 2010, and it's at Oporto bar in Call Lane, Leeds The other Leeds gig is at the Heart cafe in Headingly on March 27th, where I'll be performing along with four or five other top-notch Yorkshire poets. The Hull gig is at the Union Mash Up on Princes Avenue, on March 21st. Come along to any or all of these, and remember I'm always available to come and read at your own events. I don't cost very much.