Words from the Vaults

This spring I’ve been working with a great group of people who’ve been attending ‘Creative Writing in the Museum Vaults’. Ludlow houses the county’s precious and extraordinary Museum Resources, and this series of workshops allowed us access to the ‘Vaults’ and the wonders they contain. Throughout all of this we were expertly supported by Ludlow Curator Abigail Cox, and by Fay Bailey at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery.

During April everyone can come to Ludlow Library and Museum Resources Centre, and read wonderful new poems inspired by some of the artefacts we met in the ‘Vaults’. And next week, there’s a special, one-off reading – open to the public. There will be cake.

Here’s a glimpse (too many reflections) of just some of the work on display in the foyer of Ludlow Library and Museum Resources Centre.

By Jane Brodley

By Tina Cole

By Ruth Anderson

And meet the handsome Dr Hickman, and Lizzie Prudence’s delicious words…

What a treat
warm intelligence lighting
strong brown eyes
shining out among the dull
bewhiskered dignitaries.

If Jane had seen you
dancing across the
Assembly Rooms floor
she might have chosen
you for Darcy.

In the darkness/ a bird makes its nest

Recently I spent two wonderful days at Hellens Manor, in Herefordshire, providing poetry workshops to local primary schools for Ledbury Poetry Festival. Ledbury PF have an acclaimed community and schools outreach programme, and Hellens Manor is a marvellous place. Chloe Garner, artistic director of Ledbury Poetry Festival, did a wonderful job welcoming and enthusing the children – a real effort aimed at demonstrating that poetry really was for them. We hope to see some of them at the Festival, which this year is 29 June to 8 July.

Then it was time for the first workshop. The children exclaimed in excitement as we walked on snowy cobbles under an arch, and I asked them to help carry in firewood. Our room was down a maze of flagged passages hung with iron breastplates, and once we’d arrived, on that first snowy Monday morning, everyone could see the point of lighting a fire.

Once we’d warmed up, we talked about nests. What they are, how they are, what they mean. We handled nests I’d brought in with me. And a very tiny, blown hen’s egg.

Then we played with cut up poems borrowed from Tom Pow’s beautiful pamphlet ‘Nest’, from Roncadora Press.

And then we wrote poems. Here are some of them.

For me, it was a very rewarding two days, and fantastic to be working alongside superb practitioners Sara Hirsch, Val Bloom and Matt Black. We had a lot of fun.

March 29, 2018 0

My poems in the Agenda T S Eliot issue

I really am very proud to have two poems in Agenda’s special T S Eliot issue this month. Thank you Patricia McCarthy for including them!

‘In Yellowhammer Weather’ was written at The Hurst, near Clun, a couple of years ago while on a week’s walking and writing retreat led by David Morley. We explored Clun’s tiny, idiosyncratic museum, in which I found an (early 20th century?) photograph of local farmer Frank Collins ‘on his favourite horse, Polliwig’. Walking later along the banks of the Clun river, and hearing the chatter of the yellowhammer in a hedge, the rhythms of the poem began to come together in my head.

‘How We Rode After Haytiming’ is a memory from my childhood in Cumbria, when I rode with the next door farmer’s grandchildren on a raggle-taggle of grass-fed ponies. After the hay had been cut in June, six acres of inviting stubble lured us down to race the ponies across Long Field. The poem was first written several years ago, and then it hung around because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

February 9, 2018 1

Shy Snowdrops & Trees Upon Trees

I’m just back from a most inspiring and exciting week at The Hurst, tutoring a band of marvellous young poets from Hargate Primary School. My co-tutor, Wajid Hussain, was just great to work with, and he has a lovely manner with the children. The staff from Hargate are just exceptional, and they worked their socks off encouraging and supporting the children, who are only 10 and 11 years old (there was the occasional bout of homesickness). Hargate Primary School, from West Bromwich, is the school where I’ve been poet in residence for the last three years, so it’s a special pleasure. All week, the house and grounds at The Hurst provided these urban children with an extraordinary and inspiring place in which to live and work: I could see it changing them by the hour.

Snowdrops come from winter.
Why so many?

Leah J

The first night, we all went out for a Night Walk, under a huge full moon. Once the children’s eyes had adapted, they were staggered by the brightness of the sky. I showed them their moon shadows, and we watched the snowdrops gleaming in moonlight. Back inside, Wajid and I collected oral descriptions of what the kids had just seen and experienced. So at 11pm I was scribing a twelve foot poem onto a roll of lining paper, using only their words, but editing them into order. Next morning I rolled it out on the breakfast table. Lovely to see the kids creeping along it, reading.

Later, we explored the woods, making poem notes on a small folded booklet.

We wrote about magical objects found in the wood, and we searched out doors and portals to write about changing spaces and new surprises. We looked closely at bark, and discovered storm-torn trees with fragrant heartwood newly exposed. We listened to the birds and stared into the pond.

A mixture of leaves and mud
turned into a bowl of soup.

We walked and there I found
my magical object.
If you throw it, it comes back.
It is made out of wood.
Do you know what it is?

Simran

Here’s the Crow workshop – my Crow is about to be lifted out of his cardboard box to ooohs and ahhs. We swopped crow lore and stories, then I gave the children tiny stapled books to write their crow poem into.

On Thursday we wrote about nests, inspired by Tom Pow’s pamphlet from Roncadora Press. The children held the nests very delicately, and wrote inventive poems.

When the nest came to me
it was very fragile.
The smell of nature
coming into my body
soothed my mind.
The little egg contained inside
was the smallest egg I’ve ever seen
and it made the tiniest of rattles.

Alfie

On the last morning, I admitted that I am also the Spellwright, and encouraged the children to write a Spell for the Making of Poetry for themselves. They took the very fabric of The Hurst as their inspiration, and investigated fireplaces, doorways, sinks and old glass. Then I dripped hot sealing wax onto their spells, and they applied the brass Seal which makes the spell work.

Take –

the soot from the chimney
the spines from the books
and a mile of stripes from John Osborne’s scarf…

And here is the feedback sheet gathered in by Hurst Director, Natasha (while Wajid and I had a much needed coffee).

Truly, it was a marvellous week. I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to work at The Hurst again, and especially with Hargate Primary School.

February 3, 2018 0

The Spellwright at Ludlow Medieval Christmas Fayre

On a bright cold morning I walked in my best medieval cloak through the already packed streets of Ludlow to the Castle, unpacked my basket of skulls/snails/parchment etc and was writing my first spell (for Swordsmanship) all before I could get the Thermos undone.

People lined up, asked me if the sheep’s skull was real, whether the pocket watch was also an alethiometer, where such big pine cones came from, lifted the lid of the cauldron to check on the snails. One live snail and three ‘ghost snails’. It was hard to find live snails after a frost in late November.

I wrote spells, spells to remember things, spells against indecision, a spell to unlock all doors, a spell to see a goshawk, a spell to get a man out of a bar, a spell to get a man, a spell to get into an oak tree… got inkier and inkier, didn’t notice I’d missed lunch…

Back again tomorrow!

November 25, 2017 0

The impact of a distinguisher at a vaseboard

Cafe Writing is once again under way in lovely Ludlow Kitchen at the Food Centre, Bromfield. I run these workshops for people who wish to write poetry or prose while enjoying a good coffee, and sometimes a pastry too. This morning a dozen ingenious minds created a Dicsaurus.

I had asked everyone to invent a new word using two words handily hanging around the beautiful conservatory in which we’re working in Ludlow Kitchen. So – a vaseboard derives from a cupboard. And a vase.

Then all new words were passed to the left (or right, or somewhere, this bit was creatively chaotic) and a definition invented for the new word. Which we then shared, through raucous laughter, fine coffee and cake.

The word Dicsaurus was duly invented to explain what we’d done. Here it is:

November 8, 2017 0

A blog for ‘The Dark Farms’

Some years ago, I became fascinated with the Galloway Forest. It’s a remote, depopulated region in south west Scotland, hundreds of square miles with scarcely a road across it, and a diminishing number of working farms on its inhospitable hills and moors. It’s become a place famed now for its dark skies, and it’s visited by astronomers and those curious to see a sky without neon. I’ve very belatedly set up a blog to record my explorations and the poems that came out of them. Click here to have a look.

I grew up in rural Cumbria, among small family farms, and so recognised that what I saw in 2011 in the Galloway Forest was disappearance. The disappearance of the hills under the conifer forests which were mass planted there in the 1950s and 60s, and the disappearance of small farms, some overwhelmed by the new conifer forests, and many more slowly abandoned as hill farming has become so uneconomic that only the oldest are still farming, often without the assets to retire.

So I went looking for the ghosts of stables, and cart-sheds, and sheep rees (the Galloway word for a sheepfold). I went looking for the ghosts of placenames and farm names. I found places where the severe weather has reduced cottages to a threshold stone and a hearth stone. Cottages overtaken now by birches and brambles. I found a rural museum with a black leather bull mask and a necklace of horse’s teeth. A farmhouse with its windows bricked up – truly a Dark Farm.

Dark Farms Glenhead and Holm Wood 027 oak growing from stone lr bw

I took the photographs at the time, on days of being savaged by midges, falling into peat clefts, wading upland burns where the O.S. map still marks the place as a ford, long since washed away. The poems were published in 2012 in pamphlet form by Roncadora Press, enhanced by Hugh Bryden’s rich artwork.

November 3, 2017 0

‘My friend thinks the bombs have stopped’

All too soon, it’s my last poetry workshop for Shropshire Council’s imaginative project ‘In The Hands of the Boys’, which focusses on World War I. This morning I went to Severndale Specialist Academy in Shrewsbury and worked with an enthusiastic and energetic group of students.

I read ‘The Sentry’ with them, and we acted out what happens in the poem – so we all cowered in the Boche dugout, holding just three candles in the darkness, and sent one ‘soldier’ up to be the sentry at the top of the mud-covered steps. Deafening shelling was going on all the time, we imagined the din in our ears – and then the sentry is blown back by a whizz bang and hurled down the steps into the mud at the bottom of the dugout. We acted out how we dragged him from the mud, only to discover that he thinks he is blind…

We tackled another poem in much the same way, then gathered in a circle. I asked everyone to close their eyes. I did a visualisation exercise with the group, asking them to imagine a cold morning, waiting for breakfast in the muddy trench, knowing they were going over the top into No Man’s Land later on. Then I encouraged them to contribute words and lines towards a class poem. The children were hugely focussed on this, and very thoughtful. We read back the first draft of it, and I promised to edit a second draft and – here it is:

It’s a cold, frosty morning
on 19th January 1918
and the whizz-bangs are flying over.

Over the top it’s dangerous.
No matter what you do out there
you can easily get hit.

I hear a scream and someone
throwing up.
I see killed soldiers in deep mud.

The sky is black as soot. It’s rainy now.
The mud is grey and brown.
Smoke blows towards us.

I feel shattered, I’ve had no sleep.
I’ve been on sentry duty, watching for biplanes.
The rats are eating our food.

There’s frost on the tap, frost
on my mug and on my metal plate.
I see a tank in No Man’s Land.

In my ears the banging and the bombing
are like thunder
but I can hear someone dying.

Later on, I handed out the browned and tattered ‘trench paper’ and they all wrote their own work – and we remembered the fragments of poetry left by Wilfred Owen on his death in action, ninety-nine years ago. Here’s just some of the work the children produced:

And here’s a sample of their thoughts on the workshop as they headed off for their lunch. What a lovely group!

Thank you to Katherine Webb and the classroom assistants for supporting me so well. ‘In the Hands of the Boys’ uses dance, poetry and photography to explore and share stories about Shropshire’s involvement in the war. Young people aged 7 to 14 are working as researchers, creative interpreters and performers.

“In The Hands of the Boys” has been funded by a National Lottery grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund ‘Then and Now’ programme (commemorating the centenary of the First World War), Shropshire Council and participating schools.

October 31, 2017 0

Rifle fire rattles like a ball bearing in a can

I arrived at St Mary’s Primary School in Shawbury this morning, all ready for our Wilfred Owen workshop, part of Shropshire Council’s imaginative project ‘In The Hands of the Boys’, which focusses on World War I. The project uses dance, poetry and photography to explore and share stories about Shropshire’s involvement in the war. Young people aged 7 to 14 are working as researchers, creative interpreters and performers.

This was a great class to work with. They listened really well to each other, and most attentively to Wilfred Owen’s work. Here’s just a sample of their responses, written up on battered fragments of aged ‘trench’ paper, reminiscent of the fragments of poetry left by Wilfred Owen on his death in action, ninety-nine years ago.

It was great reading through the poems with class teacher Janet Turner afterwards. Then I took down the post-it evaluations the children had stuck speedily to the classroom door as they went out to lunch. Here’s a few. What a mercy I was quite kind.

October 30, 2017 0