Dunstanburgh

Back in 2003-4, the brilliant BBC radio producer Julian May and I made a half-hour poem for BBC Radio 4 called Dunstanburgh Castle: a secret as old as the stones. I’ve always loved Dunstanburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast. It’s a ruin; not grand and inhabited like Bamburgh or Alnwick castle, but somehow in spring and summer – its cliffs populated by boisterous kittiwakes, its towers teeming with swallows and its acres of grassland blooming with wildflowers and moths – it is more alive than any human habitation. It is not accessible by road; you reach it by a half hour hike over fields or, from the north, across the sandy sweep of Embleton Bay. And it’s a mysterious place. A ruin on a high, black, basalt cliff, it stands alone, windswept, visible for miles around, the sea breaking at its foot. What is it doing there, so far from any settlement?

My idea was to write a history of the castle, human and natural. I wanted to write about it over the course of a year, tracing the seasonal changes in its wildlife and weather – things which would have been much the same when it was built in 1313. The idea was to summon ‘voices’ from its past, from the years when it offered shelter to local people from Scots raiders, or stood as an advertisement for the ‘good lordship’ of its creator, Thomas of Lancaster. It seems that Thomas built Dunstanburgh at least partly as visual propaganda – as an advertisement for his ability to provide justice and protection in a lawless country close to the Border, in rivalry to an ineffectual King. Surrounded by man-made ‘meres’, the castle referenced King Arthur’s Camelot – a subversive suggestion of entitlement to the throne within sight of the royal castle at Bamburgh.

Last month I revisited Dunstanburgh with another fantastic radio producer, Adam Fowler. Adam was making a programme called Fence Me In, in which he investigates how the acoustics of a space affect artists’ creativity. We talked about the varied spaces within and outside the ruin – from the imposing drum towers to tiny garderobes, to the 30-metre high basalt cliff on the castle’s north side – and about how I tried to evoke those spaces in the sound of words.

I wrote Dunstanburgh over the course of a year, during which I made many hours of audio recordings. Those recordings were often the starting-point for particular parts of the poem. Bursts of swallow-song in the drum towers gave rhythm and colour to one section. The pulse of seas breaking in a rocky inlet called the Egyncleugh punctuated another. Line-length, stanza form and rhythm were strongly shaped by the enclosed or open acoustics of spaces.

When Julian May and I recorded the poem on location, together with actor Trevor Fox, on a sleety February day in 2004, we tried to realise this mimesis by performing the poem in the actual spaces which had shaped it. So Trevor read the Egyncleugh section down among the rocks where the sea was breaking. It was reassuring to discover that the section I had written six months earlier still faithfully imitated the rhythm of the sea’s pulse. When I revisited the site with Adam Fowler more than 15 years later, that was still the case.

One thread that runs through the half hour poem is a chant, which alludes to the local folkloric story of Sir Guy the Seeker. Sir Guy arrives at the castle one stormy night, to be led down a staircase where he is shown the figure of a girl trapped inside a crystal. To release her, he must make a choice between a sword and a bugle. Sir Guy makes the wrong choice. I conflated this story with other folklore about the ghost of a child haunting the cliff, and wrote a chant which evokes the otherworldly, echoing sound of the city of kittiwakes on the ancient, shadowy basalt cliff beneath the castle. Julian May and I then recorded children from Seahouses First School reading that chant, and merged their voices with those of real kittiwakes recorded at the castle. The result both evokes that particular place in space and time, and paradoxically also gives a sense of timelessness.

I think of writing poetry as an act of listening. It can feel as if one is trying to translate an emotional resonance into actual physical sound architecture – as if one could turn an emotion into a place, something that could be revisited at any time. In the case of Dunstanburgh, I thought of it as a synaesthetic attempt to translate a place which spoke to all my senses into sound, both on the level of words, and as actual sound in the radio poem. Julian May and I worked together to weave the sounds I had collected over the year back into the recorded poem in the studio. You can hear the result as part of the eBook version of my Bloodaxe poetry collection, Two Countries, available HERE.

The full text of Dunstanburgh is published in Two Countries (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), available HERE.

Adam Fowler’s programme, Fence Me In, about the affects of the acoustics of a space on creativity, also features musicians Anna Clock and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, director Catherine Alexander of Complicité Theatre Company, and Chris Chafe of Stanford University. It is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday August 4^th at 13.30, and afterwards on BBC Sounds. You can read about it — and listen after broadcast — HERE.

For news of my forthcoming poetry collection from Bloodaxe, Edge, published in October, please click HERE.

For Katrina Porteous and Alexis Bennett in Dartington Great Hall 2019, please click HERE.

To hear Sea, Sky, Stars, a recording developed from a performance with Alexis Bennett in Dartington Great Hall, 2018, please click HERE.

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Deranged Poetesses: Space / Exploration

Saturday July 20^th 7-9pm

ARC Theatre, Stockton Arts Centre

Deranged Poetesses? That’s quite a title. Must be ironic, I thought. A reflection on how poets have traditionally been associated with madness, from poor Thomas Chatterton and Lord Byron, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’, to female poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Isn’t this a stereotype my generation of women struggled to leave behind?

Well, maybe it’s time to re-examine those ideas. Last year Apples and Snakes performance poetry group Deranged Poetesses presented three events at ARC Theatre, Stockton, all about female identity: Maidens, Mothers and Crones. This year, they’ve invited ‘female-identifying or non-binary poets’ to take part in an event to celebrate Space and Exploration, on the 50^th anniversary of humans landing on the Moon. I’m old enough to remember that historic event, which didn’t seem so extraordinary to a child who had grown up watching blurry black and white TV images of Apollo spacecraft. There were no women astronauts on any of them.

I’ve never defined myself as a ‘poetess’. When I was the only female among four winners of the Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1989, an interviewer asked me how it felt to be a woman poet. I couldn’t answer. I thought of myself as a poet before I thought of myself as a woman. But my female identity has become more important to me as I’ve aged. There are many more women poets writing and publishing now than there were 30 or 40 years ago, and sex and gender are explored with greater complexity and fluidity than I remember from 1970s feminism.

As for ‘deranged’, I’d refer you to Emily Dickinson: ‘Much madness is divinest sense’. Creativity always resists the constraints of convention, or perhaps rather subverts convention, using it in unconventional ways. Poets don’t always fit well with society when it’s difficult to be paid for our work. The value of what we do is not commensurate to the price. So perhaps it’s time to reclaim that word, ‘deranged’ – at least to think about why and by whom it might be applied.

I’m thrilled to be performing as part of Deranged Poetesses in Stockton ARC Theatre on July 20^th. My work has always been for the ear; it occupies the edge between the page and the cave-fire, or the hearth, or any theatre space. I write to be heard out loud, to share with a group, which is why I love writing for radio, and working with musicians. But I’m new to the Performance Poetry circuit. What will the audience and other performers think of my work?

The Space / Exploration evening blends poetry, performance, music and projected visuals in the Japanese PechaKucha tradition. There are six performers, and each creation lasts 13 minutes. In Lunar, Manchester Theatre Award winning Keisha Thompson mixes space exploration with afro-futurism. Other performers include Isabelle Kenyon, with a piece about women in space, Hannah Lasagne, Lisa Louise Lovebucket and Katie Greenbrown. You can read about their presentations HERE.

I’ll be performing Field, an astonishing blend of poetry, music, science and space photographs which explores the strange quantum worlds created at the Big Bang. This is a reconfigured version of a piece which I made with computer music pioneer Peter Zinovieff for the Planetarium at Life Science Centre, Newcastle in 2015. You don’t need to know anything about physics to enjoy it – Field is about the mysterious, beautiful realities which underlie the world as we understand it, and the music and visuals are awesome. Please come along on July 20^th to experience it.

Photo: NASA Hubble Space Telescope

Astonishing that, across
Immense distance,
It should speak,

Cold and articulate
As zigzags of light…  

Deranged Poetesses: Space / Exploration

Saturday July 20^th 7-9pm

ARC Theatre

Stockton Arts Centre

TS18 1LL

Age 14+

Free but ticketed. Book HERE

The Wund an’ the Wetter

IRON Press Festival of Words and Music

Peter Mortimer has been running the excellent IRON Press for 46 years, and he writes that the IRON Festival is ‘As far as I know…the country’s only literary festival built around a small press.’ June 20th – 23rd will be a fabulous weekend, packed, not with celebrity names from a national touring list, but with real working writers associated with the press or the region or both.

I’m lucky to be one of them. Twenty years ago, IRON commissioned me to write a poem in Northumbrian dialect, to celebrate the launch of the collected works of the Northumbrian Bard, Fred Reed. At the same time, they commissioned Chris Ormston to write a pipe tune. The result was The Wund an’ the Wetter, a collaboration in the dialect of the dwindling fishing community of north Northumberland, which was published by IRON Press as a book and CD with the support of the Northumbrian Language Society.

Please come along to St George’s Church, Cullercoats, on Saturday June 22^nd, to hear me perform the poem with Chris, together with some of my other locally-based poems and Chris’ music, old and new. It will be a night to remember!

More info and bookings HERE

The Wund an’ the Wetter at The 4th IRON Press Festival of Words and Music,

Saturday June 22^nd, 7.30pm

St George’s Church,

1 Beverley Gardens,

Cullercoats,

NE30 4NS

£7

 

 

Sea, Sky, Stars

Cutty Sark

I’m just back from a wonderful event on board the sailing clipper Cutty Sark in Greenwich. The evening was called From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay and took place in the intimate pop-up theatre in the ship’s hold, to celebrate her 150^th anniversary. With the support of the London Irish Centre, Greenwich-based poet and sailor Mick Delap organised the event, which featured his exuberant sound piece, Bantry Bay. This fascinating piece tells the story of the Bantry Bay longboat from the attempted French and Irish landing of 1796 to the present day. It’s published in Mick’s second collection, Opening Time. The parts were read by Mick, radio and voice artist Doireann Ni Bhriain, and two leading Irish poets, Theo Dorgan and Paddy Bushe, with music by the wonderful Greenwich folk fiddler, Alexis Bennett.

I loved meeting the Irish visitors, and was privileged to contribute the ‘coble’ element to the evening, reading poems about the traditional Northumbrian boat from The Blue Lonnen (including from my two Bloodaxe collections, The Lost Music and Two Countries). Throughout the performance, Alexis played live and electronically-processed fiddle music — both his own composition and traditional tunes. I’m very grateful to Mick, Alexis and the Irish poets for making it possible. It was a powerful feeling, to summon the memory of my Northumbrian fisher friends, Charlie Douglas, Cathy and Redford Armstrong and many others, within the iron frames and elm planks of that magnificent ship. I think they would have loved it.

Alexis and I met at Dartington International Summer School last year. You can hear Sea, Sky, Stars, our 10-minute radio piece developed from our Dartington performance, HERE. We filmed From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay, so I hope to put some of our performance onto my You Tube channel soon. We’d love to perform The Blue Lonnen again, so do please contact us via this site if you’re interested in a booking. Meanwhile, we’ll be performing a new set in August at the event below.

 

Dartington International Summer School and Festival

Dartington Great Hall, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 6EL

Sunday 4^th August 2019, 5.15pm

£10 (students 50%)

You can hear me with Alexis Bennett in this lovely setting, in a new concert of Northumbrian landscape-based poetry and fiddle music. I’ll also be performing a short excerpt from Horse, a very different piece, about the 3,000 year old Uffington chalk figure, with music by the electronic composer and inventor, Peter Zinovieff.

Book HERE.

For more information about my writing course at Dartington on the poetry of place, click HERE.

 

The Fourth IRON Press Festival of Words and Music

St George’s Church, Cullercoats, NE30 4NS

Saturday 22^nd June, 7.30pm (doors open 7.15)               

£7

I’m appearing with my old associate, the brilliant Northumbrian piper Chris Ormston, in The Wund an’ the Wetter, our Northumbrian dialect collaboration, as part of The Fourth IRON Press Festival of Words and Music.  We’re celebrating the 20^th anniversary of The Wund an’ the Wetter this year, and we’ll perform it together with other music and new poems about the North East fishing community and the sea. 

Book HERE.

 

Deranged Poetesses: Space / Exploration

ARC Theatre, Stockton Arts Centre, TS18 1LL

Saturday 20^th July, 7-9pm

Free but ticketed.

July 20^th marks the 50^th anniversary of the first humans to land on the Moon. Alongside Keisha Thompson, Isabelle Kenyon, Hannah Lasagne, Lisa Louise Lovebucket and Katie Greenbrown, I’ll be taking to the stage to celebrate the wonders of space and exploration. I’ll deliver a 13-minute extract from a longer piece, Field, an astonishing performance of poetry, music (by Peter Zinovieff), science and space photographs, that explores the strange quantum worlds created at the Big Bang.

The event is organised by Apples and Snakes and is free but ticketed.

Book HERE.

From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay, Cutty Sark, May 24th 2019

Katrina Porteous, Doireann Ni Bhriain, Theo Dorgan and Paddy Bushe

(photo by Mick Delap)

 

From Geoffrey Hill to Patti Smith

Last week I spent an enjoyable couple of hours in Newcastle with Tyneside documentary film-maker Gary Alikivi, whose blog features interviews with a great variety of North East musicians, as well as artists and writers. Gary’s own work covers a wide range of Tyneside themes, including Irish, Russian and other international Tyneside connections, such as the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, South Shields born Eileen O’ Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, and writer and artist Baron Avro Manhattan.

Gary skilfully compressed two hours of chat into a blog interview, ‘Some Kind of Magic’, which you can read HERE. He asked me about my early influences. There wasn’t time to go into great detail, but I did tell him about a few. Poetry – or playing with words as all children do – has been important to me all my life, and became more so in my teens. I had fantastic encouragement from my first English teacher at Durham High School, Mrs Wood. She was a great role model to me. Her son, the novelist and critic James Wood, has written about her in his New Yorker essay, ‘Lessons from My Mother’.

In the months between my university entrance exams and my first term at Cambridge in September 1979, I was still living with my parents, near Consett, where I grew up. In April 1979, Northern Arts paid for my place on a weekend ‘writer’s workshop’ in the Lake District. One of the tutors was the distinguished poet Geoffrey Hill. I was the youngest student there, shy, intense, writing awful, archaic, highly formal verse about unrequited love and feeling lonely in Consett. I’d never met any writers before. The heady mix of students and tutors was fantastic – I was discovering for the first time that there were other people out there with a compulsion to write.

Geoffrey Hill was immensely encouraging; gentle, paternal and patient. He read my awful poems and found things of value in them. He took me almost as seriously as I took myself. When he heard that I was preparing to read History at university rather than English he approved, although he added: ‘Better if it was quantum physics’. He told me that I was ‘much too thin-skinned’ to go into theatre, which I was considering; and, understanding my commitment to poetry, gave me the wisest advice of all: ‘Don’t teach!’ On the last night of the course he read from Mercian Hymns and his finest work, King Log, during a mighty thunderstorm. It was like listening to Zeus. Hill was an enormous influence on me at a very impressionable age, and we remained in touch for several years afterwards. I’ll always be grateful to him.

Around the same time I earned some spare cash shifting scenery, running errands and acting as an usher for the RSC during their first visits to Newcastle, at the Gulbenkian Studio in what is now Northern Stage. It wasn’t all Shakespeare. There were plays by Brecht, Edward Bond, David Edgar and Pam Gems, and I met many well-known actors, including Ian McKellen and Judy Dench, and others, like Ruby Wax, who later became famous names. The pay packet was tiny; but can you imagine an 18-year-old today being paid to run errands for a prestigious theatre company? There seemed to be more money for the arts in those days.

In August 1979 I had another errand-running job, on a summer school course for American students visiting Edinburgh Festival. I was given free board and lodgings in return for showing people how to get around the city, and standing in endless queues to buy show tickets for them. For me, the highlight of the whole Festival was hearing Patti Smith read from her poetry collection Babel, then being among a small group of girls who hung out with her briefly before her evening gig. Babel couldn’t have been much further from King Log¸ or Patti from Geoffrey Hill, if they had inhabited different planets; but they each represented something vital to me. Here I am, aged 18 and star-struck:

It’s striking to me, looking back, how few of the ‘big names’ who inspired me were women. Plenty of women and girls studied poetry and wrote it. Few, it seemed, qualified as ‘leading poets’ in those days — whatever ‘leading poets’ might mean. The late ‘70s and early ‘80s were a very different time for young women. Patti Smith was therefore particularly important to me. From her album Horses onward she was one of my favourite poets — and she rocked.

Gary Alikivi brings all this together in his interview. He also touches on my two years in America, during which I encountered several other inspirational poets. At Berkeley I studied Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts with Thom Gunn and was taught poetry by the wonderful Robert Pinsky, whose ear for music helped me tune my own.

Then in the summer of 1983 in California I met Seamus Heaney, who became my tutor on the East Coast at Harvard in 1983-4. Boundlessly generous with his time and attention, Seamus read and commented on my still-awful poems with enormous care. It was at this time, aged 23, that I wrote the earliest poem in The Lost Music, ‘If My Train Will Come’. Seamus recognised it as ‘one of those poems that comes as a gift, from nowhere’. At the end of my time in the States, when I was trying to decide my future, his advice to me was formative: ‘I think if you go home you might write the Northumbrian Under Milk Wood’.

I didn’t manage anything so ground-breaking or grand; but I did gravitate towards the fishermen and women’s dialect voices, and the authentic speech patterns of my chosen place. Thinking about all this, I feel extremely lucky to have received university education at a time when it was free, and to have travelled and encountered so many gifted poets, thanks first to Northern Arts, then to the Commonwealth Fund which supported my Harkness Fellowship, and to the Society of Authors, which funded my later Eric Gregory Award. I’ve had a great deal of support over the years, without which I would not have been able to develop my work.

          Coffee with Seamus Heaney and students, including poet Amy Bartlett (right), Harvard Square 1984

Gary brings the story up to date at the end of his interview, by asking about my upcoming gigs. One I’m particularly looking forward to with fiddler Alexis Bennett takes place on board the 150-year-old clipper ship Cutty Sark at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on Friday May 24th. It’s called ‘From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay: the poetry and music of the Sea’, and you can book tickets HERE.

Cutty Sark, where I’m performing with Alexis Bennett, Mick Delap and others on May 24th

Do please look at Gary Alikivi’s site. It contains some great interviews. And do please read ‘Some Kind of Magic’. Thanks, Gary, for giving me the space and the opportunity to think about some of the people who’ve been important to me along the way.

 

 

 

 

 

Cuddy Ducks and Little Pickies

It’s 20 years since small-pipe virtuoso Chris Ormston and I wrote our Northumbrian music and dialect poetry collaboration The Wund an’ the Wetter for the launch of the collected poems of Fred Reed (Iron Press) at the Northumbrian Language Society’s annual Reed Neet celebration. Chris’s tune for our piece is called Mind Yor Language. Since then it’s been featured on BBC Radio 3, we’ve performed it together across two countries, from my Scottish birth city of Aberdeen, to village halls in Lincolnshire, and I’ve taken the words farther afield, from the Fisher Poets’ Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, USA, to a cafe poetry event in Prague.

When The Wund an’ the Wetter was first published as a book and CD by Iron Press, (with a beautiful cover painting by Seahouses fisherman-artist Andrew Rutter), one reviewer claimed that I had invented most of the words. In fact, those words were collected from transcripts of interviews with Northumbrian fishermen which I’d made over the previous ten years. The rhythm and structure of the poem were derived from common phrases, such as ‘Theer’s no much wetter gans ower their heeds’ (meaning, ‘They don’t miss much’) and ‘Come wi’ the wund an’ gan wi’ the wetter’ (meaning, ‘Easy come, easy go’). There is probably more directly quoted speech in that poem than in any other I’ve written.

Since then I’ve continued to write in dialect from time to time, particularly when quoting conversation with a Northumbrian speaker. Although I’ve never pretended to be a native speaker myself, I love the expressive sounds of the dialect, which often make you feel the meaning of the word before you understand it intellectually. I’ve often written and spoken of two birds, for example. Of the ‘gormer’ and the ‘pickie’, which is the light, deft tern, and which the cumbersome, dark cormorant? It’s obvious: the quick, sharp vowel sounds and plosive ‘p’ and ‘k’ evoke the tern, the drawn-out vowels and ‘heavy’ ‘g’ and ‘m’ sounds, the cormorant. It is as if some kind of synaesthetic sound-sense mapping occurs in the brain.

We are all aware of the erosion of local dialect in the late 20^th and early 21^st century, through the ubiquity of national and global media – TV, music, the web – and the disappearance of traditional ways of life, like shepherding and coble fishing. I have no nostalgia for what was an often intolerable past, particularly for women. But I do feel that, along with the old words, we are losing something vital of our history, our sensitivity to our environment and our sense of identity – of who we are and where we are heading. The Wund an’ the Wetter explores this.

Besides The Wund an’ the Wetter, other fishing poems in The Lost Music and Two Countries, and the interviews I edited in The Bonny Fisher Lad, I’ve also written several essays about Northumbrian coastal dialect, and contributed my 30-page word-list to the late Dr Bill Griffiths (Northumbria University), which he used extensively in his book Fishing and Folk. He included it as Appendix 1 of that book. In addition, I have the honour of being President of the Northumbrian Language Society, which exists ‘to promote, preserve, research, publish and enjoy’ the dialects of Northumberland, Tyneside and NW Durham.

You can hear me perform The Wund an’ the Wetter with Chris Ormston at this year’s 52^nd Northumbrian Gathering in the Chantry Museum, Morpeth, on Saturday April 27^th 4-5pm. Do please come along if you can and, if you care about the dialect, please consider joining the Northumbrian Language Society. You might even try entering one of the dialect writing or speaking competitions.

If you can’t make that date, you can catch us again at ‘Iron Or’, the Fourth Iron Press Festival, in St George’s Church, Cullercoats at 7.30 on Saturday June 22^nd.

Arctic Tern, from The Lost Music (Katrina Porteous)

In the meantime, here’s another, much shorter and more recent, dialect poem. It was Highly Commended in the 2018 Winchester Poetry Festival, judged by the wonderful Black Country poet Liz Berry, and appears in the competition anthology ‘The Blaze in Father’s Breath’. It’s about another Northumbrian bird, the eider or Cuddy duck. Said to be named after St Cuthbert, who protected the birds when he lived on Farne, they were known to Beadnell fishermen as ‘Culbert duck’ or ‘Cubby’. At this time of year the smart black and white drakes pair up with the females, wooing them with soft, camp cries: ‘Whooo!’ Later, all the drakes sail off to sea, leaving the females to bring up their offspring communally. In years gone by I would sometimes see a dozen or so Cubbies with a nursery of around a hundred ducklings bobbing in the sea outside my window. But in recent years their numbers have declined. I’ll be lucky to see two or three ducks with a dozen or so young this spring. It’s still a very special sight, and I wrote this poem, Cubby, to celebrate them:

 

 

In Collaboration

I love working with other artists. Collaborations are inspiring, allowing different perspectives and insights into other ways of working. I’ve been really lucky to have worked closely with a wide range of exceptional artists, from writing the Northumberland Millennium musical Tam Lin with composer and English concertina player Alistair Anderson, to creating radio poems like Dunstanburgh and The Refuge Box with BBC Senior Producer Julian May, to visual collaborations with photographers like Nigel Shuttleworth (The Blue Lonnen) and Jose Snook (Many Hands) and artists and print-makers like James Dodds (Longshore Drift) and Olivia Lomenech Gill (Horse).

It’s also lovely when old work is given new life by other artists. I’ve enjoyed watching dancers interpret The Refuge Box (Dansformation’s Northumbriana), and hearing the National Youth Choir of Great Britain sing my words in John Casken’s setting, Uncertain Sea. Czech composer and jazz pianist Jakub Zahradnik has made memorable settings of my Five Sea Songs, and I’ve had lines inscribed in stone, bronze, pottery and stained glass by several artists, including Michael Johnson, Graham Taylor, Catrin Jones and Bridget Jones.

There are certain artists with whom I’ve worked often over many years. This year is the 20^th anniversary of The Wund an’ the Wetter, a collaboration with Northumbrian piper Chris Ormston. You can see us together in Morpeth Chantry at 4pm on Saturday April 27^th (part of the 52^nd Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering), and at ‘Iron Or’, the Fourth Iron Press Festival, in St George’s Church, Cullercoats at 7.30pm on Saturday June 22^nd.

Since 2011, I’ve created four performance pieces and an installation with electronic composer Peter Zinovieff, and we’re about to embark on our sixth piece, Under the Ice for NUSTEM’s ‘Exploring Extreme Environments’. For this, I’ll also be working in collaboration with Antarctic scientists. Our piece will premier at the end of 2020.

This year I also look forward to further performances with composer and folk fiddler Alexis Bennett, whom I met at last year’s Dartington International Summer School. We’ll be performing there again on August 4^th, as well as on board the Cutty Sark at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, on 24^th May.

I have two further exciting collaborations in the offing. First, I’ve written some words in Northumbrian dialect for electronic composer Trevor Wishart, for one movement of his latest large-scale work. I can’t say too much about this yet, as it won’t premier for some time; but I have heard Trevor’s setting and I love it.

Secondly, I’m one of the writers contributing to a limited edition series of essays inspired by poet Elizabeth Bishop, produced by fine-art bookbinder Kate Holland with prints by Tom Hammick. This lovely project has allowed me the opportunity to spend time re-reading and thinking about Bishop’s work, especially her magnificent poem At the Fishhouses, the subject of my essay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wild Northumberland

Lots of exciting things are happening in 2019. Although some details are still provisional, here are a few of them:

Saturday February 16^th, 6pm-9pm

Wild Northumberland

Exhibition opening at Niche Gallery @ The Old Bath House

I’ll be reading poetry and signing books at the invitation of artists Paul and Katie Henery, at the opening of their latest exhibition, ‘Wild Northumberland’.

Paul is an award-winning wildlife painter and printmaker – he has won the BBC Wildlife Magazine Art Award and the RSPB Fine Art Award. Katie, his daughter, is a printmaker who also uses vintage maps, pen and ink and photography in her work. Their work is inspired by the wildlife, landscape and marine environment, with a particular focus on the Northumberland coast. 

My poems for the evening will reflect themes from their new work created this winter.

For more information, please see:

https://www.nichegallery11.com/

Niche Gallery, The Old Bath House, Radar Close, North Broomhill, NE65 9UJ

 

Saturday, March 9^th, 11am – noon

Can She Bait a Line?

The unsung heroines of the North East’s fishing communities

Until the mid 20^th century North East coble fishermen relied on their wives and daughters for the unpaid, land-based tasks that kept the boat at sea. This included gathering bait and preparing the long lines, each of which carried 1,400 mussel-baited hooks. It was also the women’s job to sell fish in neighbouring villages.

From the early 19^th century some women gained economic independence in the more industrial summer herring fishery. Fisher lasses worked in teams, gutting and packing herring into barrels with layers of salt.

My talk will include some real-life examples, and we’ll consider what we can learn from fisher women’s lives about human relations to nature, place and sustainability.

 http://www.oldlowlight.co.uk/

Old Low Light, Clifford’s Fort, Fish Quay, North Shields, NE30 1JA

Coble Sunbeam, Beadnell 1938 (photo credit David Horsley)

Friday May 24^th

From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay – Poetry and Music of the Sea

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

The Blue Lonnen by Katrina Porteous with original music by Alexis Bennett.

The Blue Lonnen is an elegy in words and music for the coble, the traditional wooden boat of the English North East coast. Poet Katrina Porteous celebrates the last working examples of this lovely craft, and the traditions, culture and community which it embodied. In this newly-devised performance, her words are interspersed with original music by Alexis Bennett, created entirely from sounds made by the fiddle, played live and processed electronically.

Alexis Bennett lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, has performed widely as a viola player with early music ensembles, and is well-known on the folk scene as a ceilidh caller and fiddler. As a composer he works primarily with poets, filmmakers and animators, and his music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Channel 4, TCM and at major film festivals throughout the world.

Bantry Bay by Mick Delap

Bantry Bay is an exuberant sound piece for poetry and music that tells the story of the Bantry Long Boat, the oldest surviving ship in the French Navy, captured in Ireland in 1796 when a French invasion fleet was beaten back by the weather. Mick Delap traces this remarkable story from 1796 to the Bantry Long Boat’s 21^st century successors, the Atlantic Challenge Gigs, via Commander James Wolfe, the Woolwich hydrographical surveyor who first charted Bantry Bay in the 1840’s. Bantry Bay uses a series of contemporary voices, mixed with the music of the time, to capture the feel of the sea 150 years ago. As well as Mick Delap, readers will include two leading Irish poets, Paddy Bushe and Theo Dorgan, in Greenwich specially for the Bantry Bay performance.

Mick Delap, long time Greenwich resident, is a poet and sailor who has first-hand experience of the waters of the West of Ireland, where the Bantry Bay sequence is set. He has published two collections of poetry, “River Turning Tidal” in 2003, and “Opening Time”, which includes his Bantry Bay sequence, in 2015.

 

August 3^rd – 10^th

Dartington International Summer School and Festival, Devon.

I’m delighted to be running my popular Poetry of Place course again this year, and to be performing in The Great Hall with Alexis Bennett on Sunday 4^th at 5.15pm. Tickets go on sale in February. More details to follow.

 https://www.dartington.org/whats-on/programme/summer-school/

Coble the Golden Gate leaves Beadnell Harbour, 1994. (Photo K. Porteous)