In autumn 2021, the poets attending the first Poetry School course showcasing independent presses responded to five digital pamphlets – Outports, Night Walks, Working Landscapes, Soft Borders and Invisible Lines – prepared by Longbarrow Press and made available on this website. As an international reader who lives outside the UK, I came up with the idea of the course to counteract post-Brexit difficulties with supporting small UK publishers. Since Brian Lewis runs his Sheffield-based press on the principles of collaboration, craft and care, I was sure we could approach the Longbarrow selections of poetry, psychogeographic essays, photo sequences, sound recordings, short films, poetry walks and community projects with a similar commitment.
Over five fortnights, our reading, thinking, walking, writing, creating was inspired by the diverse craft of the Longbarrow authors. Guided by the five themes highlighted by the five pamphlets, we were learning what it takes to explore ‘the intersections of landscape, history and memory.’ In order to ‘vary the scale of our attention,’ we combined poem-making with construing and charting our selected places – real and imaginary – in flash nonfiction, photo essays, book structures, zines, double exposures, film poems and sound recordings.
Multiple Exposures invites its readers – in turn – to create, disturb, cut-up, reshuffle their own fairy tales of place, street narratives, memory maps, place diaries, fantasy worlds, translocal undergrounds. From such corners we can go anywhere! ‘We are itinerant: we are at a point between the journey recorded and the journey anticipated.’
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Click here to read and download the Multiple Exposures PDF. This digital pamphlet includes contributions from Nathaniel Chew, Carol Dalton, Hilary Dyer, Sylee Gore, Lydia Harris, Edwin Kelly, Anna Kisby, Agata Maslowska, Dani Salvadori, and Margaret Watson. Multiple Exposures will be launched with an online reading on Tuesday 31 May 2022 (5pm-6pm BST); click here to register (free). In addition to the work included in the PDF, Sylee Gore and Dani Salvadori have created short film-poems, which can be viewed below:
The earlier Longbarrow Press digital pamphlets (Outports, Night Walks, Working Landscapes, Soft Borders and Invisible Lines) can be downloaded here.
Longbarrow Press 