You are stood at the bottom of Broad Lane. 16 people with pens and notebooks are spilling over the pavement, musing vaguely or jotting things down. One of their number stops. He points at the colour image of a newborn baby installed above the door of a small photo-business; then at the blank self-storage building further along. He talks about juxtaposition. He says something about Ezra Pound. The strange posse moves on; past the barking of a city kennels; an alien graffiti-montage by Phlegm. They stop again and the man is gesturing at what amounts to a wildflower garden in a central reservation; then at the clean lines and colour blocks of newbuilt hotels and offices. He’s talking about the romantic living side by side with the modern.
Matthew Clegg (from his reflections on the occursus / plastiCities walk and workshop Moving with thought)
On Saturday 23rd June, Matthew Clegg led a walk (and writing workshop) into the Neepsend /Parkwood area of North Sheffield. Moving with Thought was set up to explore the relationship between walking and poetry – between the body, the mind and the landscape. A short film of the walk (narrated by Matthew Clegg and edited by Brian Lewis) has been uploaded to our Vimeo site: you can watch the full-screen version here, or view the embedded film below:
Other short films by Longbarrow Press (including excerpts from Rob Hindle’s 2010 Blitz walk and a remarkable performance by Tria Kalistos at the 2011 Sheffield Poetry Festival) can be viewed on our Vimeo site.
Recordings of the poems written by participants in Moving with thought will be uploaded to SoundCloud in the near future; further updates will be posted on this site. The recordings will include poems from Matthew Clegg’s new tanka sequence, A Trancewalk with Satori:
Satori asks us:
If thought, like spilt mercury,
Always takes the path
Of least resistance, what then?
Is it ever enlightened?
Longbarrow Press 