Longbarrow Press

Bempton Cliffs to Flamborough, pulling to sea,
climbing the wind, thermal by thermal…
A new short film for Matthew Clegg‘s ‘The Power-line’ (from his recent collection West North East) offers a mesmerising survey of some of the Flamborough Head locations that feature in the poem. Clegg reflects on the making of the film (and the poem’s themes of connection and conductivity) in ‘Rods, Lines and Digital Media’, a blog post for the Open College of the Arts.

The recent Occursus symposium on Microhabitats invited contributions on the themes of huts, sheds, dens, nests, children’s spaces, secret spaces and retreats (click here for the full programme). Among the presentations was ‘The Sandpit’, Brian Lewis‘s meditation on Heidegger, huts and homelessness, taking in Peter Reading’s Perduta Gente and a tour of the Isle of Sheppey. Click here to read this essay on the Longbarrow Blog.

Poems, Places & Soundscapes is an international exhibition of digitally produced sound-&-poetry focusing on place and soundscape, installed in Leicester’s Cube Gallery (part of The Phoenix arts complex) from Monday 7 April to Friday 25 April 2014. Poet Mark Goodwin and Brian Lewis (of Longbarrow Press) present a range of vivid, immersive sound-enhanced poetry made through various poet, musician and sound-designer collaborations, as well as by individual poet-sound-artists, and a selection of ‘place-entranced’ film-poems. Click here for more information about the exhibition.

Fay Musselwhite‘s Contra Flow walk through Sheffield’s Rivelin Valley earlier in March found her reading poems from The Footing alongside new and unpublished work that deepens her engagement with this territory. Musselwhite’s commentaries were supported by a wealth of observational detail from conservationist Graeme Hodgson and contributions from the audience. Click here to view a selection of Emma Bolland’s photos from the river walk. A new essay by Musselwhite, in which she discusses the natural and cultural forces that have shaped the river, and which, in turn, have helped to shape her poems, is our latest post on the Longbarrow Blog: click here to read the essay.

Photographer Karl Hurst launches his KHeditions imprint with a series of limited, handmade boxed editions of prints, available exclusively from his Etsy page. Each of the boxed editions offers a unique perspective on the development of Hurst’s practices since 2010; the editions range from the season-cycles of Sketches for Autumn and Sketches for Spring to the oblique taxonomies of Modern Icons and the self-interrogating Circus Impressions. Click here for more details about KHeditions.

We’ve revised and expanded some of the resources on the Longbarrow Press site, including the In Conversation page, which brings together text and audio interviews and discussions with Longbarrow Press poets and artists from 2006 to date (including recent interviews with Alistair Noon and Matthew Clegg). Click here for the full index. The Essays page has also been restructured, making room for some older pieces from the Longbarrow archive and enhancing several essays with images and audio podcasts (including ‘The Heart of the City’, Matthew Clegg’s commentary on the 2009 Sheffield poetry walk led by Andrew Hirst and Chris Jones). Finally, we’ve added a new Film page, which showcases the filmed performances, animations, film-poems and location-based documentaries created by Longbarrow Press in recent years.

On the Longbarrow Blog, Matthew Clegg discusses the displacements and readjustments of his ‘Chinese Lanterns’ sequence (featured in his recent collection West North East); click here to read ‘Streams and Nodes‘. We’ve also created a short, trancelike film for one of the ‘Chinese Lanterns’ poems:

Our current Featured Poem is ‘High Riggs’ by James Caruth (taken from our walking-themed anthology The Footing); click here to read the poem. You can also listen to Caruth reading the poem (on location in Bowcroft Cemetery, Stannington) below:

This year’s States of Independence one-day independent press fair takes place at De Montfort University in Leicester on Saturday 15 March (10.30am-4.30pm, admission free), with more than 70 writers presenting readings and workshops throughout the day. You are also welcome to visit the Longbarrow Press stall (with a full range of books, pamphlets and CDs). Click here to view the full programme of readings, workshops, displays and talks.