Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (4) by Jon Wilkins

What a wonderful way to spend a weekend, indulging in the impressive poets featured in the Sheaf Poetry Festival held on YouTube and accessible to all via Zoom, Twitter @SheafPoetryFest, and on www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival. The performances from all poets will be available on YouTube. Search Sheaf Poetry.

Having earlier attended their Ecopoetry and Found Poetry workshop, I ended my Sheaf Poetry Festival experience by listening to a performance of poetry about climate change with Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin. I was not disappointed. Using many of the techniques described in their workshops they proceeded to eviscerate climate change deniers with their powerful words and performances. Words can deliver change. The right words that is. Poetry can make a difference in raising awareness of matters of vital importance and we see this here.

Caleb Parkin read from work looking at gendered aspects of ecology. He talked about writing as if in drag. Taking on another persona to get your message across. And what a message.

Caleb thinks that who we have in charge is important in climate change. He read from poems welcoming change. 

Caleb felt that using schlocky pop culture in your writing means you can have fun writing your own works with ecological themes.

Inspired by Dylan Thomas he was able to combine the memory of Thomas and his work for a petrochemical giant. ‘By the Writing shed at Laugharne’:

          unliving water
          Neither fresh nor salty nor brackish
          Water which once had fierce appetites
          Now shredding like cellophane
          Popped like a dot of bubble wrap …

... giving us the sense of pollution of the ocean as we allow it to be damaged beyond repair. Simple writing, full of the horror of pollution and climate damage.

Carrie Etter read from her collection The Weather in Normal about her hometown in Illinois. She divided the book into three arcs about the loss of where she comes from. This started with the death of her parents, then the sale of the family house, and then the effect of climate change in Illinois. Throughout the collection, she shows a widening arc of loss. Not just her family, but the environment she loved and the loss of the ecology she had known. She is angry. She is disappointed. She is not sure if we can overcome the problems, but in her writing, she highlights them and brings the issue to new audiences. 

She performed a ten-minute prose poem from the collection and the images are etched in my mind. She is well worth a read and her readings tonight ended on a hopeful note as she described happy memories of her hometown. Beautifully written:

          … A song in the body
          The body in Illinois.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (3) by Jon Wilkins

It was a real pleasure to listen to the work of three poets; Tom Sastry, Phoebe Stuckes & Will Harris at the Sheaf Poetry Festival via Facebook.

Tom Sastry told us that reading his work was a pleasure for him. It was also a pleasure for us as he read a section from ‘a man’s house catches fire.’ He told us that 'the fire in the book is the worst thing in the world happening without being named …' He wrote about experiences that are unmentionable. His house is a furnace but he didn’t get burnt. We heard him tell us that suffering is isolation as he spoke about Covid. He had an interesting look at the situation in his poem 'Screening interview Bristol 2032' where he was asked 'Did you think it was enough to be kind?' and we have to ask ourselves: was it? 'The fire still raging and me not dead' perhaps sums up his outlook on life. A poignant look at contemporary Britain.

Phoebe Stuckes read some beautiful poems from her latest book Platinum Blonde as well as others from her catalogue. She conveys a cruel version of her life as in the poem which included the line 'My life is the joke and everyone is pointing.' Her narrator does not play the victim, she is too strong for that, but she does lay herself open to disappointment in relationships which she describes openly. The to and fro in her life is documented cleverly. In ‘Bad Girls Club’ she reminisces:

           How could you really know yourself
           If you’ve never had that fake hair extension
           Ripped from the back of your head.

So much is going on in those three lines about life and the social bubble she lived in. The sadness of love and loss is exemplified by the lines:

           Is it too late to tell you this is what love looks like
           Holding her name like a cough sweet …

It's a strange allusion but one we understand as the numbness pervades her mouth then heart.

In ‘Paris’ she tells us: 'All I think about is love and money, marrying for money and falling in love…' Then: 'I don’t want that kind of love or money. I want to be stinking drunk in a restaurant.' She knows what she wants and is tough enough to get it despite the tender nature of much of her work.

Finally Will Harris read some of his work. He found it strange reading to his computer. In ‘My Name is Dai’ we see a man disintegrating after the death of his wife:

          Try a little tenderness, mmm nuh uh uh. That was when Susie saw
          the haze descend. Like an explosion in a quarry the inward collapse
          rippled out across his face, throwing clouds of dust into the sky.
          I’m sorry. A man shouldn’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was a boy.
          I haven’t ...

He read from ‘The white jumper’:

          We were sitting upstairs and in the whitest end-of-day light
          the walls white too it felt not just like we were above
          ground but that in spite of being in Covent
          Garden we were on a ridge above a
          forest looking down our feet in
          thicket dark our heads
          in thickest
          stars.

This is a wonderful story, telling us of his search for his white jumper. The format changes throughout the narrative and his reading caught this perfectly. You need to have a look at the full work.

Indeed all three poets deserve more attention. As a taster this was a wonderful introduction to their work.

Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her Team Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner have done an amazing job curating the performances and events over the weekend of November 20-22. This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone on YouTube! To access: follow the poetry on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (2) by Jon Wilkins

After yesterday’s wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival, I was lucky enough to take part in an "Ecopoetry and Found Poetry" workshop held by Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin.

As I stated yesterday one thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world of poetry, in this case through Zoom. The Sheaf Poetry Festival is led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her fantastically hardworking team of Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner and held over the weekend of November 20-22, 2020.

Prior to the workshop, we were sent some downloadable documents about the threats of climate change and oil development to Alaska.

I will concentrate on Carrie Etter's workshop. Immediately she engaged with the audience and a conversation was started. She explained to me and 24 other participants what Eco Poetry and Found Poetry was.

Ecopoetry is any poetry with an ecological basis.

She spoke of Found Poetry and gave us a definition to work from by the Academy of American Poets (a great resource in itself). They thought Found Poetry was a refashioning of existing text, the literary equivalent of a collage, which is a beautiful thought.

Bringing these two concepts together, Carrie showed examples from the work of Wendy Mulford, Kathleen Jamie, and Peter Reading - all poets I will now engage with as their work seems to be innovative and extremely readable.

Carrie spoke of the four techniques to be used in Found Poetry: Erasure, Interspersal, Dramatic Monologue and Shape and described how they worked in the context of the poem.

Caleb brought up the question of plagiarism and told us we had to be careful but in most cases, we would be covered by free use. The exception was song lyrics as they could cost a fortune if used, but song titles were in the public domain.

Carrie spoke of changing the music of words which is a beautiful phrase and if you contemplate writing some Found Poetry, it is what you should keep in your head.

So we had the Alaskan documents in front of us and the writing began!

This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (1) by Jon Wilkins

One thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world that I would never have thought of before. Visiting a poetry festival online for one. I took the opportunity of visiting the Sheaf Poetry Festival led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her Festival Team Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner over the weekend of November 20-22. This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. Oh, the beauty of Zoom and YouTube! Covid has certainly been a boon to both these platforms! To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished. The website for Sheaf Poetry Festival is here.

Saturday I watched performances by three Carcanet Press poets, namely Isabel Galleymore, Mina Gorji & Kei Miller.

Mina Gorji is an emigrant from Iran and her poems echo her upbringing and her travel. She read short poems full of simple rhymes and rhythms with haunting echoes of where she had come from. The unusual “Tenacity of Dust” is short and sweet and to the point. She wrote of the migration of Pinkfoot Geese in Norfolk in “Writing into Winter”:

          Across the sky …
          V M V W M V I
          More foreign than Icelandic runes.
          The skein of geese is spelling out a secret song.

As she read those words I could see the geese fly. A beautiful description. She talked of the relationship between nature and the natural. To highlight this she talked of the Oak Gall Wasp another emigrant to our country brought here to use their gall to make ink. Something else I learnt today! "Smuggled in Aleppo Oak / An alien acorn.”

She moved to the UK when five and her poems reflect this idea of migration and immigration of spiders in fruit or dandelions to the New World. Her story is all connected to this feeling of being an alien in a foreign world.

I don’t suppose you could be more of an alien than as a resident poet in the Amazon, but that is what Isabel Galleymore did and the poems she read showcased this.

Her prose poem on spider monkeys told us “ … each limb an animal of its own.”

When discussing the moth trap she captured the atmosphere of the Jungle when she wore a blouse that acted as a second moth trap. She found the atmosphere of the jungle full of sex and death, She had mixed and matching feelings of past and present of home and in Brazil. Her language is sensual. “I can’t stop the air indulging in me.”

She knows that “ … the more I let myself be touched the less I will be bitten.” We see and feel the crawl of insects upon flesh in hair, on clothes.

We meet the scarlet macaws and the visitors give them names, humanising them and then watching them argue and flirt as if they really were human. They try to communicate but fail and then they cant bear to look into each other’s eyes when they leave, having failed to connect with the birds.

She has however connected with the reader and as with Miona Gorij I think you should read more of Isabel's work.

Kei Miller read several poems and his final one about homophobia in Jamaica is stunning. His protagonist had to leave his village when he was outed. He said, “When I left I went through the bushes because if I’d taken the road they’d have killed me.”

Miller had hoped he'd never hear that again. Unfortunately, it was not to be. A dark and eloquently tragic anti-paean to homophobic attitudes.

What a wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here.