January
Publication and launch of Mark Goodwin’s Distance a Sudden pamphlet and CD at The Fat Cat, Sheffield. Goodwin alternates between live readings from the pamphlet, recomposed versions of the poems, and playback of recordings with ‘live’ vocal accompaniment. Brian Lewis contributes an arrangement of Goodwin’s ‘Dark Bird with Corner’ for two tape players, CD and dictaphone (a recording of which appears here).
April
The Seven Wonders, artist Paul Evans’ collaboration with Caruth, Clegg, Goodwin, Hindle and Jones, opens at Cupola Contemporary Art, Sheffield. The poems in the series are recorded (on location in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire) by Goodwin and Lewis and issued on a illustrated CD to mark the reading and discussion that closes the exhibition. Several limited edition cards (each comprising a poem and a drawing) are also produced for the event.
June
Publication of Alistair Noon’s Animals and Places and his translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. The pamphlets are launched in Berlin on 19 June, where Lewis makes several recordings of Noon reading his poems in or near locations referenced in the work (including waste ground near the old east-west border and at the base of the partly demolished Humboldthain flak tower). You can listen to Noon’s ‘Filling the Triangle’ (recorded on waste ground near the S-Bahn line) here.
August
Clegg and Lewis travel to Flamborough, East Yorkshire, to make preparatory recordings for a new audio project based on Clegg’s poems about the chalk headland. The visit (which leads them from cliffs to sea caves) is documented here.
12 December
The 70th anniversary of the Sheffield Blitz: Rob Hindle leads a small audience on a four-hour walk from Dore Moor to the Marples Hotel (the route taken by the Luftwaffe in Hindle’s eponymous sequence of poems). The focus shifts from the city’s quiet, sparsely populated outskirts to its crowded centre, and from afternoon light to the urban night. Hindle prefaces his readings from the Dore Moor poems with contemporary accounts of the Blitz and his own imaginative explorations of the territory.
Longbarrow Press 