Following the presentation of Pilgrimage: a walk through The Footing at Sheffield’s Bank Street Arts earlier in June, we’ve uploaded an audio recording of the first of the evening’s three parts. A specially curated performance focusing on the relationship between movement and memorial, Pilgrimage included readings from all seven poets featured in The Footing: Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite. Part One: Three Night Walks: III (Andrew Hirst); The Bench (Angelina Ayers); Death and the Gallant I: The Adoration of the Magi (Chris Jones); From from a St Juliot to Beyond a Beeny: Kilometre 2 (Mark Goodwin); Parish (James Caruth).

Pilgrimage was preceded by Chinese Lanterns, a bold new interpretation of a recent sequence by Matthew Clegg (featured in his collection West North East), devised and performed by Clegg and Andrew Hirst. Here’s a short film of the two poets negotiating the streets of 21st century Hillsborough (via the ‘displaced’ personae of the classical Chinese poets Li Po and Tu Fu) in ‘Moving with Thought’:

On the Longbarrow Blog, Brian Lewis reflects on the five-year development of the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing, and the central roles of craft and collaboration in determining the routes toward (and beyond) the book: click here to read ‘The pace of The Footing‘ (originally presented at the Midsummer Poetry Festival Symposium on Anthologies and Anthologising). The anthology also provides us with our new ‘Featured Poem’: James Caruth‘s ‘Memorial’ (featured in his sequence ‘Tithes’, with which The Footing opens). Click here to read the poem; you can also listen to Caruth reading the poem (on location in Bowcroft Cemetery, Stannington, Sheffield) below.