Midsummer is a month-long poetry festival (6 – 28 June) at Bank Street Arts (32-40 Bank Street, Sheffield S1 2DS), featuring a varied programme of performances, workshops, a symposium and an exhibition. Longbarrow Press has devised two special events for the evening of Saturday 14 June:

Matthew Clegg and Andrew Hirst present Chinese Lanterns | 6.30 – 7.30pm
Matthew Clegg presents a one-off event focusing on new arrangements of poems from his sequence ‘Chinese Lanterns’ (featured in his collection West North East), in which the classical Chinese poet Li Po finds himself resurrected and at large in 21st Century Hillsborough. Clegg will be joined by poet Andrew Hirst (aka photographer Karl Hurst) for a memorable evening of ritual, performance and multimedia. Listen to the ‘Chinese Lanterns’ audio trailer:

Pilgrimage: a walk through The Footing with Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones, Fay Musselwhite
8.00 – 9.00pm
A specially-devised presentation of poems from the walking-themed anthology The Footing (with appearances from all 7 poets featured in the anthology), with the accent on memory and memorial. This crafted, continuous performance, weaving live readings with ambient soundscapes and projected images with short films, offers a unique route through the landscapes of the book: a trance and a traverse. Watch the film trailer:

Rob Hindle will also present a new arrangement of his Spanish Civil War poem-drama Yoke and Arrows at Bank Street Arts earlier in the evening (5pm-6pm). All 3 events are £4 each (£3 concessions); click here for more information (and to order tickets through Eventbrite). The Midsummer symposium on ‘Anthologies and Anthologising in Contemporary Poetry’ takes place at Bank Street Arts on Friday 20 June (11am-4.30pm); speakers will include Chris Jones and Brian Lewis of Longbarrow Press. Click here for more information about the symposium.

Two new Longbarrow Press films were screened as part of the recent Laugharne Castle Poetry and Film Festival. The first of these, Matthew Clegg‘s Fugue #3, focuses on the fields east of the Leeds suburb of Crossgates, the setting for Clegg’s poem ‘Because I was Nobody’; the second, Angelina Ayers‘ Aseptic Technique, sets a recording of Ayers’ poem (made in the wind-strafed lift area of a hospital) to a spare visual treatment (punctuated by two brief stills by photographer Karl Hurst). Watch the films below: