Hello, and a look forward to Owen Sheers

Hello Ledbury fans on Blogspot! My name's Ben Norris, and I'm one of four interns working to help deliver this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival. As part of my job at the festival, I’m responsible for blogging about some of the acts that will be performing: reviewing snippets of their work and whipping up a media storm (or, more likely, some mild interest) surrounding their Ledbury appearance.

After Tony Harrison’s reading on Jubilee weekend (coming up this Saturday), the first event of the festival proper (number 1 in our swanky new programme) is Owen Sheers, a truly 21st Century poet; by which I mean he’s not exclusively a poet at all, but has also presented television documentaries (‘A Poet’s Guide to Britain’, BBC 4), written travel journals (‘The Dust Diaries’, 2005 Welsh Book of the Year), novels (‘Resistance’, later adapted for film), plays (including ‘Fair & Tender’, a contribution to Bush Theatre’s recent ’66 Books’), radio poems (‘Pink Mist’, BBC Radio 4), as well as publishing more conventional poetry collections (his most recent being ‘Skirrid Hill’). He is also the first ever Writer in Residence to be appointed by any National Rugby Union (Wales, in this case).

To-ing and fro-ing on various trains around Birmingham and Ledbury over the last few days, I took a look at ‘Skirrid Hill’ to get to know Sheers as a writer and what we might expect from him when he kicks us off on 29th June in Ledbury’s Community Hall.

‘Skirrid’, from the Welsh Ysgyrid meaning divorce or separation, is a collection concerned with rifts and distance, gaps between expectation and actuality; in its language and images it traces a ‘vernacular of borders’ (from ‘Skirrid Fawr’, the book’s final poem). As I mentioned in a post on my own blog about ‘Voices Over Water’ (http://bennorrispoet.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/voices-over-water-d-nurkse-and-the-through-narrative/), I’ve recently discovered the joy of reading a collection straight through. Though Sheers’s has a much less prominent narrative arc, it is laced with subtle internal references that reward the receptive reader. The authorial voice is never far from the surface here, and one gets a real sense of Sheers’s journey, tracing his humble Welsh agricultural roots, and his relationships with his parents, the land, and with lovers. His writing is at once effortless and painfully cathartic, and his autobiographical honesty is often genuinely breathtaking. Indeed, all of the relationships in ‘Skirrid Hill’, whether beginning or ending, are acutely aware of their own fragility, and this gives rise to some exquisite moments. Like ‘Valentine’, which presents three memories of a woman, each a single, well-wrought instant that leaves the reader, like the speaker, unsure of ‘whether to laugh or weep.’

Owen Sheers’s reading will doubtless also be a tumultuous but rewarding emotional roller-coaster, and a superb way to begin a fine 10 days of poetry at Ledbury 2012.

You can book tickets for Tony Harrison, Owen Sheers, and all the other fantastic acts at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2012 on http://www.poetry-festival.com/bookings.html or by calling 0845 458 1743. The full programme of events is here: http://poetry-festival.com/calendar.html

Don't Wave a Flag, Wave a Poem! by Chloe Garner

As I walk past the union jack flags and bunting hanging up outside shops and homes in Ledbury, I think that as an emblem a flag is so vague - what does your flag mean? Why do you care about having had the same queen for 60 years? Do you want to participate in a ‘historical occasion’? What kind of Britain are you proud to be part of? Are you anti-Europe? Do you like the red, white and blue colour combination? By contrast – a poem, many of which can fit very neatly onto the average flag, is an emblem that can communicate something very distinctly about you and your unique take on the world, the United Kingdom, the Jubilee or whatever you choose. Ozymandias by Shelley might be my flag of choice for this weekend, but that is just me.

Poems that I read over and over become like emblems to me – they symbolise how I feel about certain key events in my life or parts of myself and somehow crystallise things for me. I emblazon them by hand into a special book. But I am constantly discovering new poems that I want to wave like flags. Most lately I am reading over and over Elegy by Sean O’Brien in his new collection, November. It is full of sadness and anger for a life finished and perhaps for a life not quite fulfilled, as in the partial refrain that runs through the poem, “There was a book you always meant to write.” In this poem Sean O’Brien says “But let me do it honour and repay your gift of words.” I am moved by the sacrifice of a mother and a wife and the child trying to repay this through the use of the same gift never realised in his mother. It is a poems about dreams put aside and hints in a veiled way about even worse endured in a marriage, yet at the same time it brings up vivid memories – “The dark was in the orchard now, scarf-soaking fog/Among the fallen fruit.” The sense of a proud woman revealed in snippets of her words spoken and heard still in the poet’s memory “There’s nothing worse, You used to say, than scratting after coppers.” I think that perhaps as a mum and as a woman this poem hits me with how life can slip by, that we can perhaps endure too much and for too long, until it is too late. Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book is the only book of poetry to have won both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes. As I read November I feel at times immersed in the world of a gorgeous black and white film. I am really looking forward to hearing Sean O’Brien for the first time when he returns to read at Ledbury with Katharine Towers.

Sean O'Brien ph. Caroline Forbes

'Ringing' poetry in schools this week!

Chatting to the Headteacher of Ledbury Primary School, she mentioned that their teachers aim to make their lesson 'ringing' not 'minging'! Ringing means relevant, interesting, a bit naughty and a giggle. So I relished the chance to watch poet Terry Caffrey deliver what was roundly considered a 'ringing' performance of his poetry for 300 pupils. He made them laugh, got pupils, teachers and parents involved and without anyone even noticing wove in the message that good listening is key to good writing and good learning, that words are fun and making up new words even more fun. And yes, we could all have listened to his gorgeous Liverpudlian accent all day long!

Yesterday was such a pristine summer day and I had the good fortune to be driving past some of Herefordshire's finest orchards, pink and white with blossom, up and down hills opening onto sweeping vales. I was on my way to St Peter's Primary School in Bromyard, where Julie Boden was working with pupils to create imaginative lines of poetry about rivers. With the Olympics on our minds, children compared the river to the lines of a race track or a cycle track, as well as to the roots of trees and to steam rising from a cooking pot. All these were added to a long river poem, which pupils were to perform at the end of the day, along with other poems written by other year groups.

During this week of poetry in schools Philip Wells, also known as the Fire Poet, was working with pupils in Colwall and Eastnor Primary Schools. That evening I had the pleasure of making up a bedtime poem with my 6 year old daughter (at her insistence), as she tapped out a rhythm on her chest, just as Philip had shown her, and improvised crazy lines and words around 'dolphins diving in the shimmering sea'.


Julie Boden in action at Out Loud!



Why do I Like Tony Harrison so much? by Chloe Garner

Perhaps it is because he was one of the first poets I ever heard, at an event at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. He was reading from Laureate’s Block, the hall was packed and he was extremely charismatic. After the reading I came home and read the book again cover to cover. And read it again the next morning before going to work. I found poems that are sensual and vivid. And I still can’t visit Northumberland without recalling one of my favourite of his lines, “Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks/ Shower fishscale confetti on a shining sea.” The controversy that surrounded his uncompromising rejection, in verse, in The Guardian of any possibility that he would ever accept the position of poet laureate, coincided with a time when it seemed there was a real possibility that the monarchy would somehow implode! Not long after a friend read V. to me and that was an eye-opening occasion. It knocked my socks off. I have since seen The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, at the National Theatre and found it incredibly moving and heartbreaking. To me he is simply a great poet, who writes with great passion and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to hear him again.

Tony Harrison appearing at Ledbury on 2 June in his 75th year!