A Wilder Vein

I'm really thrilled to hear that I've had some work accepted for what promises to be a delicious new anthology of literary non-fiction, A Wilder Vein, edited by Linda Cracknell and due to be published by Two Ravens Press in November this year. Some of my favourite writers (Margaret Elphinstone and Sara Maitland) are also included in the anthology and another favourite, Robert Macfarlane, is writing the Foreword.

Here's the pre-publication info about the anthology from the Two Ravens Press website:

An anthology of new literary non-fiction that focuses on the relationship between people and the wild places of the British Isles: writing which animates a connection between humanity and the natural world where it is not obviously dominated by the human presence. Writing that articulates a discovery; a new way of seeing; an emotional response; a meditation on a place or who we are as people in a wild world. The anthology is edited by Linda Cracknell (collections of short fiction: Life Drawing, The Searching Glance). Robert Macfarlane (author of Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places) has provided a Foreword.

Contributors include Raja Shehadeh, Sara Maitland, Andrew Greig, Margaret Elphinstone, Gerry Loose, Mandy Haggith, Neil Hegarty, Lisa Samson, Alison Grant, Lesley Harrison, Marco Daane, Katharine Macrae, Michelle Cotter, Jane Alexander, Judith Thurley and Susan Richardson.

ISBN 978-1-906120-43-6; £10.99 Publication date November 2 2009

Ashes Poetry Prizes

I'm off to the Old Library in Cardiff soon for the prize-giving ceremony of the children's Ashes Poetry Competition, for which I was recently one of the judges. The competition was run by Glamorgan Cricket in conjunction with Academi and as a lover of both poetry and cricket, I feel very lucky to have been involved.

As part of the event, I've also been commissioned to write a new performance poem about the First Ashes Test Match between England and Australia, which gets underway in Cardiff on July 8th, so I'll be performing that at some stage today too. Dannie Abse, the head judge of the competition, will also be reading several of his cricket-themed poems.

IKEA Ecopoetry Pics

Here are a couple of photos from my World Environment Day ecopoetry gig at IKEA in Cardiff, courtesy of the co-organiser of the aMuse with IKEA project, Laura Evans.

The first shows some of the shoppers who chose to stop to listen, while in the second, Emily and I are looking extremely relieved that we didn't end up performing to rows of empty sofas!

Wicked Words and Witty Women

Though it's rather short notice, here's some info about a workshop and performance I'm offering later today at a Wicked Words and Witty Women event at Milgi's Lounge in Cardiff. The first of these events took place back in March for International Women's Day on a minimal budget - today's, though, is co-hosted by the Women's Arts Association and Leaf Books and funded by Academi!

My performance poetry workshop is at 5pm, while a storytelling session and a drop-in creative writing workshop are also being offered (the latter by Ivy Alvarez).

In the evening, I'm doing a poetry performance in Milgi's yurt at 9pm. There'll also be storytelling by Mary-Anne Roberts O'Reilly and an open mic. Hope to see you there!

Respond!

I'm delighted that my recent ecopoetry gig at IKEA in Cardiff on World Environment Day appears on the RSA Arts and Ecology website as part of Respond!, a project that's been developed to highlight and celebrate a month of nationwide events, performances, exhibitions and talks that demonstrate the arts’ engagement with environmental issues.

You can see my listing here. And do take time to browse all the other wonderful cultural eco-events that are taking place throughout the month of June. I wish I could attend every one of them!

Leamington Peace Festival

Enjoyed a lovely sunny day at the Leamington Peace Festival on Saturday. Had a half-hour ecopoetry slot on one of the stages, the bandstand, in the early afternoon and performed a selection of my environmental-themed poems from Creatures of the Intertidal Zone.

It was quite a challenging space in which to perform as the bandstand was fronted by a wide walkway through which crowds of people were continually moving, while beyond the walkway was a grassy area where festival-goers were sitting, picnicking and, hopefully, listening! Given the choice, I like to perform in an intimate space where it's possible to make eye contact with members of the audience and really connect with them - but having said that, I hugely enjoyed the experience, got some very positive feedback and sold some books to boot!

Spent the rest of the afternoon exploring more of the festival - listening to some of the bands and browsing the information stalls. It was such a well-organised, well-supported, friendly event that I wish I could have gone back for more on Sunday!

In the Telling is Published!

Very excited to have received my complimentary copies of In the Telling, the just-published anthology of narrative poetry that I co-edited with Gail Ashton for Cinnamon Press, through the post today!

It's been a two-year project from our initial proposal to this moment of holding the published book in my hand. In response to our call for submissions, we received over four thousand poems from all parts of the UK, USA, Canada, India, Bangladesh, Italy, France... There were comic poems, tales of personal and global disaster, poems of love between all kinds of different beings from Glaswegian teenagers to green peas! Image after image was spun, woven, unbuckled, unwrapped...

Not surprisingly, the selection process was long and challenging. My least favourite part was sending out all the rejection emails - mainly because we had to say 'no' to so many strong pieces of writing but also because I really don't enjoy being on the receiving end of rejection emails myself! It's all been worth it, though - Gail and I are feeling very chuffed with how the book reads and looks. After so many hours spent poring over so many poems, then doing all the ordering and layout, I can hardly believe it's actually published!

If you'd like to order a copy (£7.99 UK delivery; £8.99 elsewhere) please visit the Cinnamon Press anthologies page and scroll down until you get to In the Telling.

Ecopoetry Galore!

Friday's ecopoetry gig in 'the living room' at IKEA went very well! I'd expected it to be really difficult to persuade passing shoppers to listen - imagined lots of empty sofas and people zipping by with trolleys while I valiantly, and not a little desperately, ploughed on through my poems. But quite a few shoppers did actually stop, plonk themselves down on a sofa and tune in! Some even bought copies of Creatures of the Intertidal Zone to take away with them!

This weekend I've got another ecopoetry gig coming up - at the Leamington Peace Festival in Leamington Spa. Most of the other performers are bands/musicians, I think, so it would be great if you can come along and support a poetry event! I'm on between 1.55 and 2.30pm on Saturday 13th on the bandstand.

Ecopoetry at IKEA!

To celebrate World Environment Day tomorrow, I've been invited to do an ecopoetry performance, along with fellow poet Emily Hinshelwood, at IKEA in Cardiff! It's at 2 pm and we'll be in the Living Room Department so people will hopefully be persuaded to have a break from shopping and sprawl on the sofas while they listen!

Tomorrow's performance is part of the aMuse with IKEA project, developed by Oxford Muse. As the co-ordinators of the project indicate, the aim is 'to transcend the frontier between the consumer society and culture. We wish to enable shoppers to discover new interests and new kinds of people whom they would not normally meet. The IKEA store thus becomes a new kind of community centre.'

I love the idea of poetry popping up in unexpected places - it'll be interesting to see what the reaction is. I'll be performing poems from Creatures of the Intertidal Zone and possibly some brand-new ecopoems too, so if you happen to be in the area, do come along!

Saturday Live from Cardiff

Did another Radio 4 Saturday Live slot this past weekend. This time, I performed my poems 'down the line' from a BBC Wales studio here in Cardiff instead of travelling up to London - all the poets are apparently going to be using their local studios from now on so that the Beeb can save some money. It felt very different performing on my own in a tiny cupboard of a studio - yes, it was still live radio, but the frisson of excitement that comes from being live in the studio with presenter Fi Glover and whoever the guest of the week happens to be was missing. Still very much enjoyed it though!

My choice of theme for the short top-of-the-show poem inspired by one of the major news stories of the week was obvious - the Ruth Padel/Derek Walcott Oxford Poetry Professor shenanigans. The second, longer poem in response to one of the topics covered in the show proved to be trickier. Fi conducted a lengthy interview with Lynndie England who was one of several military personnel convicted in connection with the torture and abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison back in 2005 - not exactly suitable subject-matter for a witty performance poem. My only other option was to write a poem loosely inspired by a piece about bookmakers at a greyhound racetrack. Hmmmm.....

If you want to hear what I finally came up with, you can listen again for one week only by clicking on the link on the Saturday Live website.

Housmans Radical Bookshop

Was up in London again on Saturday to do an ecopoetry reading - a selection of poems from Creatures of the Intertidal Zone - at Housmans Radical Bookshop, just round the corner from King's Cross. What a wonderful venue and what a fantastic programme of talks, readings and music they offer - often two events a week!

Here's some blurb on the shop from the website:

Housmans Bookshop continues to see its role as it has since its foundation. Whilst acknowledging its roots in the peace movement - and, specifically, in the radical pacifist end of the movement - it aims to be a broad-based, non-sectarian shop, encouraging the dissemination of a wide range of progressive and alternative ideas. As the shop's founders recognised, opposing injustice and oppression and the degradation of our planet are prerequisites of a more peaceful society.

And here's some info on what they stock:

• Wide coverage of politics, political theory, peace studies, and world current affairs.
• Material about - and in support of - campaigns for peace, the environment, human rights, sexual freedom, equitable and sustainable development, and a great deal more.
• General fiction and non-fiction.
• Many hard-to-find radical publications - and we can obtain most books to order within a few days.

As well as really enjoying the reading, I went to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich beforehand, specifically to see the North-West Passage exhibition that had just opened. As an Arctic obsessive, I was in my element viewing old maps and expedition artefacts like tins of now-mouldy pemmican, ships' biscuits and letters from Lady Jane Franklin to her missing husband....

I'm sure that, in time, my visit will spark some new poems for Up There Where the Air is Rarefied, the North-inspired collaboration I'm still involved in with visual artist, Pat Gregory. Hope to return to the exhibition before it closes in January too.

Chelsea Flower Show Poetry (2)

I'm finally catching up with everything which means I can at last write a few lines about my one-day poetry residency with BBC 2 at the Chelsea Flower Show last week.

I really enjoyed the whole experience in spite of it being quite high-pressured and compressed! I arrived at the Show mid-morning, whizzed around the gardens (there was already a bit of a poetry theme going on, with the QVC Garden, pictured above, containing engraved quotes from Keats and Tennyson), grabbed some lunch from the BBC catering van and then got to work on writing my minute-long performance piece in response to what I'd seen. I was then escorted to one of the show gardens to perform it to camera in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd (they'd seen all the tecchie people in BBC jackets and were probably hoping Alan Titchmarsh was due to arrive for some filming rather than me!)

Later, I went up on the terrace from which the 8 pm evening show is broadcast to speak with Alan T. and the other presenter, Joe Swift, and to perform the second, shorter poem that I'd been asked to write. Strangely enough, I felt quite relaxed at this point (or maybe I was just exhausted!). Since I'm more used to doing gigs in front of a live audience, the fact that there were just cameras watching made it much less edgy for me; it felt more like I was there for a friendly chat!

You can watch the result for one week only on the BBC's Listen Again facility (I'm on about two-thirds of the way through and then again right at the end). I feel so lucky to have had this experience and it's certainly whetted my appetite to do more TV work, should I ever have the chance.

Poetry at the Chelsea Flower Show

I have some exciting news!

I've been asked to be poet-in-residence for BBC2's coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show next Tuesday (19th May). Have to visit the show during the morning, write a performance poem in response to what I see, then perform it in one of the show gardens on BBC2's evening programme at 8pm! At the end of the show I'll apparently be joining the two presenters, Alan Titchmarsh and Joe Swift, for a chat and another short poem.

It's going to be challenging, that's for sure. But I really want to try and savour the experience and enjoy.