Paul Evans’ The Song of Meeting and Parting is the current Bloc Projects billboard commission (the billboard can be viewed in Sylvester Street, Sheffield, until the end of May). It was also the title of the recent Sheffield poetry walk led by Matthew Clegg and Chris Jones (coinciding with the installation of the artwork). The billboard and the poetry walk offered a collective meditation on migration (and decline) in bird populations, with the murmurations of starlings being a recurrent theme. Our current Featured Poem presents Evans’ artwork alongside Chris Jones’ poem ‘Murmuration’; click here to view the image and read (and listen to) the poem. We’ve also uploaded a short film of Clegg and Jones reading the poems ‘Night City’ and ‘Lost’ during the latter stages of the walk; the film can be viewed here.

On a windy day in February 2011, poet Rob Hindle (and an audience of 30) took a walk through east Sheffield. The walk retraced the journey made by members of Sheffield’s notorious Park Brigade gang following the murder of a soldier in April 1925; a journey also retraced in Hindle’s poem ‘Princess Street to the Wicker’ (featured in the forthcoming Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing), from which he read along the route. The walk is documented in this short film (titled Ganglands):

We’ve also uploaded Line Break, a short film documenting the collaboration between poets James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Andrew Hirst and Chris Jones and visual artists Paul Evans and Brian Lewis at Site Studio, Sheffield, in November 2008. Poetry, painting, photography and performance.

The image at the top of this post is taken from Karl Hurst’s recent photo-series Learning to Let Go. Click here to view the full set of 45 photographs as a slideshow. Finally, the Longbarrow Blog has new posts from Mark Goodwin (discussing the ethics of poetry publishing) and Alistair Noon (in search of The Transsylvanians). Click here to read these (and other) pieces.