Longbarrow Press celebrates its tenth anniversary with a full month of readings, performances, walks and other events. Matthew Clegg and Fay Musselwhite headline the relaunched Jazz & Poetry series at The Polish Eagle Club, Nottingham, on Wednesday 8 June; a few days later, Clegg is joined by Mark Goodwin for a special collaborative reading at The Old Hall Hotel, Buxton, which follows the Digital Re-Enchantment: Place, Writing & Technology symposium in Great Hucklow earlier in the day (Saturday 11 June). On Saturday 18 June, Matthew Clegg and songwriter Ray Hearne reprise A Navigation, their Mexborough canal walk (part of this year’s Ted Hughes Poetry Festival, which also features a display of new photographs by Karl Hurst), while Fay Musselwhite discusses ‘Ruskin, Craftsmanship and Poetry’ with Sally Goldsmith, Rommi Smith and others at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, on Sunday 19 June. On the same weekend, Longbarrow Press joins more than 40 artists, bookmakers, zine artists and small publishers for the Artists’ Book Market at BALTIC, Gateshead (Sat 18 & Sun 19 June), returning to Sheffield for an evening with Matthew Clegg, Fay Musselwhite and Berlin-based poet Alistair Noon at The Fat Cat (Monday 20 June). Click here for full details of all events.
Crouched at the foot of the Cholera Monument, she feels its solidity against her back. This must be why she came here as a child, to rest against something more sure than herself, to look on the city shrunk to a manageable size. Our new podcast focuses on poems from Angelina D’Roza‘s new collection Envies the Birds, recorded at the foot of the Cholera Monument, Sheffield; D’Roza’s readings are interspersed with reflections on the vegetal layering of nearby Clay Wood, and the rapid layering of the city skyline. Listen to the podcast below:
‘It is the condition of these remains at this particular time that interests me. The future and the past are other photographs, other representations; any meaning here should be through what is visible as a surface.’ Photographer Karl Hurst reconsiders the former sites of the South Yorkshire coalfields, ‘caught between the sublime and the banal’, in a polemic on cultural value and ‘geopolitical dysmorphia’; click here to read ‘In Praise of the Ordinary’. ‘In writing, I want to make something that didn’t exist before, and I want it to cast my own light on a shared human experience. Crafting a poem isn’t taming timber or chipping away at marble: the material is word, the craft is in negotiating between sound and meaning, the only muscle to wield is the mind.’ Our second new piece on the Longbarrow Blog is ‘The Craft Muscle’, Fay Musselwhite‘s distillation of a lifetime’s learning and creative practice. Click here to read the essay. Musselwhite’s debut collection Contraflow is the source of our new Featured Poem; click here to read and listen to ‘How Rivers Begin’.
Photographs: Karl Hurst (1 & 3), Brian Lewis (2). Click here to view more images in Karl Hurst’s Recovered Landscapes series.
