Month: September 2019

Episode 10: Michael Brown – Poems in Pictures and Pictures in Poems

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Michael Brown by Thom Atkinson

Cambridge-based poet Michael Brown discusses ekphrastic poetry. He reads poems inspired by various pictures and other artworks particularly the work of Francis Bacon. Michael explains how he translates pictures into words and invites listeners to write an ekphrastic poem:

Go to a gallery or find a piece of artwork that really speaks volumes to you in an art book. Perhaps wonder in the gallery first then read what you can about the piece and have it visually present when you write. The traditional way would be to recreate the image or imagery through the written word. However whatever the piece inspires let the poem take you to where it needs to.

Patrick responds to the prompt with a poem inspired by Melancholy III by Edvard Munch.

Please share your ekphrastic poems via email or on social media using #poetrynonstop. Please also use the same hash tag to share pictures which would be good for ekphrastic poems. Who knows what poems they might inspire.

Michael also reads poems from his upcoming collection Meet Me at the Harbour which evoke memorable images with a few well chosen words.

Michael Brown was born in Manchester in 1983. He completed Meet Me at the Harbour whilst staying in his favourite place in the world, Charlestown, Cornwall, and in lighthouses owned by Trinity House. He lives in Cambridge with his husband and their adopted son. Michael is currently working on his short novel on climate change The Cage.

poetbrownie.com

If you have enjoyed this episode please help me make more by donating via Patreon or Paypal. All contributions gratefully received.

Michael Brown – 200 Buttons

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Michael Brown by Thom Atkinson

Coming up this week Michael Brown talks about ekphrastic poetry and reads from his upcoming collection Meet Me at the Harbour.

Here is a poem inspired by an exhibit in the Queer British Art at Tate Britain exhibition.

200 buttons
for Richard Chopping and Denis Worth Miller
Queer British Art at Tate Britain

Local legend has it
that every time a soldier pays a ‘visit’
they collect from him a button
stored in an old Christmas biscuit tin.

Bohemia round here is like
a fat man with eyebrows like furry caterpillars and an oily voice
so Richard said on the phone to Francis Bacon.

Denis was a cute little button
he’d spend his days painting boys down at the cruising ground.

They invited me to their house in Cornwall
and I spent summer writing poems in the harbour
and undoing many buttons.

Michael Brown

Episode 9: Sally Festing – Poems from a Family Archive

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Twenty years after he died, Sally Festing inherited an archive of her father’s letters and diaries. Through these she learnt how her aunt and uncle, who she never knew, had been destroyed by schizophrenia. The suffering of his brother and sister drove her father, the neuroscientist Derek Richter, to establish the Mental Health Foundation. Sally talks with familiarity, respect and affection for relatives she got to know largely through studying her father’s records. Her poems vividly capture the lives of people whose suffering led to greater understanding and support for those suffering mental illness.

Sally also offers a writing exercise for writing poems from letters:

“Look at a few letters from the same person. He or she doesn’t need to be family, lots of poets write letters. I suppose they could equally well be emails.

“I’ve books of letters by Keats, and WS Graham. The last has always been an inspiration to me. His letters are pure poetry.

“A method I suggest to come up with a poem, is to copy out lines that interest, on a large page and read through until gradually, a form suggests itself that sends a message.”

So find some letters, see where it takes you and do share the results. Email here or share on social media using #poetrynonstop. The best will be featured on the blog and future podcasts.

Find out more about Sally Festing on her website: sallyfesting.info

My Darling Derry can be purchased here with all proceeds going to the Mental Health Foundation.

If you have enjoyed this episode please help me make more by donating via Patreon or Paypal. All contributions gratefully received.

Sally Festing – A Poetry of Release

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On this week’s podcast Sally Festing discusses her latest collection My Darling Derry. It’s a sequence of poems based on an archive of Sally’s father’s letters and diaries which she inherited 20 years after he died. It explores the impact of mental illness on her family which led her father, the neuroscientist Derek Richter, to establish the Mental Health Foundation.

Here is a poem from the collection.

A Poetry of Release
with a debt to WS Graham 

My father’s efforts ran unhindered as the rain.
Those dearest to him from childhood

gone, he thought grief a gift he should earn.
There’s relatively little words can do for grief

but what else did he have?
There were, he knew, huge worlds to share. Explore.

                                *

Let this poem be a still thing, a mountain
constructed from glass. I begin with

the ghost of an intension which blasts itself
to nurture a  new collision.

Perhaps the shape of us – the wreckage,
the shame and the dance – is in our language.