This week I welcome poet, storyteller, musician and registered logophile Fay Roberts to the podcast. Fay is at the heart of the poetry and spoken word scene in Cambridge, endlessly creating opportunities for poets to perform and publish their work. They are also a prolific writer and performer with strong reputation on the national scene having performed at Edinburgh Fringe, Glastonbury Festival and Hammer and Tongue National Finals to name a few.
Enjoy this performance blending words and music before tuning into the podcast to hear Fay talk about their latest projects and read some new poems.
This week poet and artist Wesley Freeman-Smith talks about recent projects and the works he has created and curated through collaboration with artists working across a variety of discipline. His latest project Catching Shadows sees him sharing his poetry for the first time on a series of spoken word tracks accompanied by music from Leipzig-based experimental pop artist Anna SchuSchu with production from fellow Leipzig-based musician Theresa Elflein. The three artists shared recordings back and forth across the border ‘like pass the parcel’. You can listen to the results on debut EP Fuse now.
Coming up this week Luke Wright looks back on 20 years in the poetry business from discovering spoken word through a love of Blur and seeing Ross Sutherland and John Cooper Clarke perform to taking his own shows to Edinburgh and around the world. Here’s Luke in action showing his lyrical skills with a univocalism – a poem written using only one vowel, in this case O.
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.
This week’s podcast guest is Julia Webb. Here is a poem from her second collection Threat published by Nine Arches Press.
She was a biscuit barrel or barrel shaped at least
as he kept reminding her the bucket he kicked splashed lemony water up the wall her face a crumpled tissue on the floor the dog was whining outside the locked back door the TV was querulous and mundane the shopping was waiting to be packed away the kettle was whistling on the stove a child was shuffling on their bottom down the stairs
She was a biscuit barrel though whether empty or full was unclear he was a barrel full of vinegary homemade beer his contents leaking out across the floor a child had shuffled down the stairs and let the dog in in the other room the TV blared the shopping was defrosting in the pushchair’s tray the kettle was still whistling on the stove
She was a biscuit barrel mopping the kitchen floor he was cursing the kettle and the dog shouting through to turn the TV off or else his mood was vinegary and cold the shopping was scattered across the floor the dog was whining in the hall a child was crying in the downstairs loo the house was quarrelsome and sly
I closed roads to cars leading into my heart and have found more space for couples to stroll and kids to mark the streets with chalk birds and lions. The number of people whispering secrets has also increased three-fold, but that may be from more people meeting without needing to not pause. I may begin closing my heart’s skies to plane traffic, just because I’d like to hear the sun’s motors whirring again.
