Live Poetry in Sheffield

With the shop’s back room packed and excellent readings from Helen Mort, Chris Jones and Frances Leviston, last week’s poetry event at the Oxfam bookshop on West Street, Sheffield was a modest success. It was a pleasant feeling to be promoting Sheffield poets while also making money for such a worthwhile cause – through a mixture of kind donations on the door and book sales, including Helen Mort’s new tall-lighthouse pamphlet, A Pint for the Ghost.

Her performance included a number of poems from this new collection - eerie and provocative pieces on the ghosts and pubs of Sheffield and Derbyshire, past and present - and a handful from her first, the shape of every box, including an atmospheric poem about Division Street, located only a stone’s throw from the venue. Unsurprisingly, copies of her new pamphlet were quickly snapped up after the reading.

Chris Jones also performed a wide selection of his published poetry to date, from affecting vignettes about his young son from his pamphlet Miniatures, to powerful poems on his time spent as writer-in-residence at a prison, as well as pieces on the themes of family, friends and home, from his first collection The Safe House.

The evening finished with a reading by Frances Leviston, who read a selection of thought-provoking and vivid poems mainly from her first collection, Public Dream, including the meditative ‘I Resolve to Live Chastely’ and ‘Scandinavia’, an unusual love poem entitled ‘Gliss’, and ‘The Fortune Teller’, an update to, and reworking of, Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Mind Reader’. We were also treated to a few new poems, including a short, suggestive lyric, ‘Two Owls’.

I also gave a shortish reading on the night, and since it seems to have become a bit of a feature on UK poetry blogs, here’s my ‘set list’:

1. Crux
2. Sunday
3. Filter
4. Home
5. The River Don
6. Familiar
7. Wednesday
8. Gesleham-on-Stour
9. Itch
10. Hex

Given the success of the night, I hope to help arrange something similar again with Oxfam – though perhaps in a bigger venue than the shop, as that back room can get quite stuffy at times. If I do, it’ll be posted up here closer to the time of course. For now, thanks again to everyone who read, and also to all who attended – a fun night.

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Tonight: Oxfam Poetry - Four Sheffield Poets

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Tonight (Wednesday 15th July), 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

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Maurice Riordan

Just a quick heads up to those interested - I notice that Faber poet Maurice Riordan's entry on the PoetCasting audio site is now online, including readings of his poems 'Fish', 'Silenus' and the excellent 'Southpaw'. Well worth checking out.

The recording was made on the same afternoon as my own, and along with another Sheffield poet, Chris Jones, whose readings are also now on the site - of the four poems featured, I'd recommend 'Work' in particular. Jones will also be reading at the Oxfam Poetry Night taking place at the Oxfam Bookshop on West St, Sheffield, alongside myself, Helen Mort and Frances Leviston.

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Oxfam Poetry Night - Four Sheffield Poets

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Wednesday 15th July, 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

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Current Issues

A little update on the mag front: I've poems in recent issues of Poetry London (No.61), The London Magazine (Aug/Sept 08) and the revamped Magma (no.42), which also has an impressive new website and blog.

In Poetry London, there're also excellent poems from Helen Mort and Jack Underwood, alongside Daljit Nagra, Andrew Motion and my fellow Hallam MA student, Susan Burns. Well worth a look. The London Magazine includes a wide selection of poems and reviews, including new work by Matthew Sweeney and an interesting review from Christopher Horton of new collections from Salt poets Chris McCabe and Simon Barraclough. And there's so much in the latest Magma it's hard to know where to start - highlights include a feature on the Gregory Award winners with a new poem from each, poems by Claire Crowther, Mark Waldron, Beverley Nadin and Vicki Feaver, and Blake Morrison's thoughts on Larkin's 'Poetry of Departures'.

Next Friday also sees the launch of mine and Emily Berry's debut tall-lighthouse collections: The Sparks and Stingray Fevers. I'll post an invitation up for it later this week, but for those interested, the Facebook group's here.

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Urgent Matter

For those of you reading this who're Sheffielders, I'm assured that Matter 8 has been published and is ready for launch: the annual showcase of new writing from Sheffield Hallam's MA Writing course.

Before I joined the MA, I'd quite often spot copies of the magazine - always beautifully designed and perfect-bound - in bookshops in and around Sheffield, and having enjoyed reading the diverse range of talent on display in each of them, it's been a real pleasure this year to have been involved in editing the publication's poetry.

As well as poems by MA students including myself, then, the issue contains new work by established guest contributors and an excerpt from the late E.A. Markham's memoirs.

Matter will be launched next Wedneday, 15th October @ Waterstones, Orchard Square, Sheffield, and it would be great to see as many people as possible there (it's a big sort of shop so space shouldn't be an issue). It will be followed by the launch of the Best Of MA Writing 2008, a selection of students' work by the tutors themselves, with details to follow.

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By Way Of An Update

Adding to the woeful pattern that's been developing around here this is just a short post and mini-update, so for those of you who do stick around the Wasteland, my thanks and also apologies; I promise I'll post something meatier in the future.

Last weekend I went down to London, and had a very useful (and entirely painless*) editorial meeting with Roddy Lumsden, going through the poems that'll be included in my forthcoming tall-lighthouse pamphlet, The Sparks, to be published alongside Emily Berry's with a launch on November 14th - details on the TL website. I'm feeling slightly more confident about the whole thing, as the meet helped to re-shape certain poems into what - after rewriting - will hopefully be tighter, stronger pieces, and tidy up weaknesses in others that are closer to completion. It was also great to see Roddy perform his own work at the Betsey Trotwood in the evening, and meet other tall-lighthouse Pilot poets who also gave good readings, Retta Bowen in particular. For those interested, my reading 'set list' was as follows:

1. Sunday
2. Byroads
3. The Tesla Coil
4. Filter
5. Lights Out
6. Reflections
7. Hex

It was good to catch up with old friends in the capital, too, not least a school pal who happened to be down for the day before he travels to the States for a few months, who I met by total coincidence on the tube. Unfortunately however, this weekend promises to be less enjoyable, as I've an increasing pile of editing, writing and menial tasks on my to-do-list. Still, I'm enjoying getting properly stuck into Leontia Flynn and Zoe Skoulding's work for critical perspectives I'm writing of them, so it's not all bad...

In the meantime then, before I get around to writing something substantial here, I'll mention that my critical perspective of Faber poet Hugo Williams is now up, and my review of Stephanie Norgate's Forward Prize-shortlisted first collection, Hidden River, is in this week's TLS. Now I'm off to shop for socks and a new pair of trousers. At least it's sunny out...


*Which is to say no poems, or poets, were harmed in the process.

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Reading Down t'South

Friday 19th September at The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, London @ 7.30pm: £5



BroadCast presents a reading by poets from the tall-lighthouse Pilot Series, pamphlets by poets aged 30 and under. Readings from Gareth Jones, Kate Potts and Retta Bowen, plus the next two poets in the series Emily Berry and Ben Wilkinson, and series editor Roddy Lumsden.

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The Kambourines @ Listen, 25/06/08

Last night at Opus's weekly spoken word and live music, Listen, held at the Green Room, a Norwegian-cum-Scouser folk-pop outfit by the name of The Kambourines (pictured above) played a pretty good acoustic set. I checked their MySpace earlier this morning and the songs are damn catchy on recording, too. Well worth a listen. Find them at the web address below:

http://www.myspace.com/thekambourines

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Poetry at The Runaway Girl

This took place last night (should've posted it up yesterday for Sheffield-based readers but never got around to it) and was a fun, entertaining evening. So I may do a write-up / review thingy of it in the near-ish future.

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Spoken Word Sheffield

What with events organisers Opus’s Now Then magazine having been recently launched as a platform for their various nights and Word Life returning to the University of Sheffield’s Raynor Lounge, poetry, spoken word and live music performances in Sheffield seem to be going from strength to strength. Wanting to get back into the swing of reading in public, then, I attended two spoken word nights in Sheffield on Tuesday and Wednesday evening.

First was Spoken Word Antics, which has been running for just over 5 years now, drawing together a decent and varied crowd every second Tuesday of the month in the homely upstairs function room of The Red Deer. This offers an extended performance from a guest reader and a mixture of poems, short fiction, novel extracts and songs that quickly fill up the open mic slots.

The featured performance this month was Linda Lee Welch’s new poem sequence, Flossie Paper Doll, a haunting and atmospheric narrative set to guitar and pre-recorded laptop-mixed samples, interspersed with songs. It was an impressive and moving piece that everyone seemed to enjoy. In the open mic section there was also a genuinely funny and off-the-wall reading of a novel-in-progress from Charlotte Wetton, centred around a fictional porn empire and its dealings with a group of religious vigilantes. Brilliantly weird. There were also plenty of other good readers including Corinne Salisbury and organiser Robin Vaughan-Williams, but the last stand out performance came in the form of two poems from Joe Kriss: the first a short, cryptic and funny skit about a man’s identity crisis, the second a heartfelt and unflinchingly honest appraisal of his moving from London to live and study in Sheffield.

I read four poems – ‘CV’, ‘Across the Way’, ‘Snipe Hunt’ and ‘Hex’ – all of which seemed to go down quite well, particularly the ridiculous and outlandish comedy of the first. A few of these are edited versions of very recent poems. So thanks to NaPoWriMo, as it turns out that writing a poem-a-day for a month isn’t as draining as you might expect, and can even help you to turn out some pretty decent work…

As for Wednesday, and there was a new spoken word night at The Runaway Girl called 'Runaway with Words', featuring a mixture of poetry and songs by Sheffield poets Chloe Balcomb & Seni Seneviratne. It also featured poems and songs read and sung by Hallam MA Writing poets Val Binney, Jude Brown, Sally Goldsmith and Fay Musselwhite. I missed the first half but enjoyed Jude’s set of poems and Seni Seneviratne’s performance, which effortlessly switched between moving, often soaring songs and a good range of poems, the highlight being a witty and darkly humorous dramatic monologue in the voice of an elderly woman, reflecting on her past whilst in the confines of a care home. There was also a short open mic section towards the end of the evening which featured six readers including myself: this included a good variety of different voices and I ended up reading the same poems as I had at Antics, which again got a fair few laughs in the right places. It will certainly be good to see this event grow and develop in the coming months now that previous Runaway night 'Words Aloud' has moved on to the Lescar (something else I keep meaning to attend).

Which brings things to tonight, then, when Word Life returns after its holiday break. I’ll no doubt head along, with readings from Andy Craven-Griffiths and a handful of others, plus live music and DJ sets. There’s also a new ‘Poems & Pints’ night at the Roebuck Tavern next Monday which might be worth checking out. In the meantime, though, its back to working on a tenth poem for NaPo, which when completed means I’m a reassuring third of the way through…

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