Longbarrow Press

Sirs, please don’t brick up
The useless hole in the wall
Or knock down the frame:
Let it stand as a jetty
To land or leap into dream.

Longbarrow Press has created a new website to showcase poems by participants in the recent Moving with Thought workshop and walk. The poems are rich and rewarding in their freshness, invention and variety; collectively, they offer a sustained meditation on the Kelham Island, Neepsend and Parkwood districts of Sheffield. Click here to read poems by John Barron, Emma Bolland, Matthew Clegg, Mark Doyle, Chris Jones, Oliver Mantell, Mary Marken, Julie Mellor, Gareth Parry, Karl Riordan, Steve Sawyer and Zoe Walkington; you can also listen to many of the poets reading their work on the Moving with Thought SoundCloud site (the recording programme will continue through August, and further recordings will be uploaded to the site).

Phase Two of The Seven Wonders continues with a double vision of Hen Cloud (part of a gritstone escarpment above the Leek and Tittesworth Reservoir): a new poem by Mark Goodwin (‘Hen Prayer’) is paired with a new painting by Paul Evans. You can view the painting and the poem here. New recordings of ‘Hen Prayer’ (on location in the Peak District) and Fay Musselwhite‘s poem for Kinder Downfall (‘Phlegmatic’) are also available to hear on The Seven Wonders SoundCloud site. Angelina Ayers‘ essay ‘Graffiti’ (on Evans and Musselwhite’s collaboration and Sheffield’s Park Hill) appears here; click here to listen to Ayers and Evans discussing the Seven Wonders project.

Brian Lewis has made a new film to accompany the second poem in Matthew Clegg’s Lost Between Stations. Click here for the full-screen film on Vimeo, or watch it via the embedded link below:

Ahead of a new performance (and the republication) of his 2009 sequence The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman this October, Rob Hindle considers the legacy of its eponymous antihero in this fascinating post. The threads of Spence Broughton’s life and afterlife are also picked up by Simon Newton, whose excellent audio documentary on Broughton (featuring contributions from Hindle and others) can be found here. You can hear Rob Hindle reading ‘Sea Battle off Cape Trafalgar’ (from XII Fragments, a collection of poems included with The Purging of Spence Broughton) in Sheffield’s Hill Top Chapel (built in 1629, and the site of the 2009 performance of Hindle’s work) here.

Andrew Hirst (aka Karl Hurst), whose current photographic series Sketches for Summer lends this post its title (and its header image), is profiled in the new edition of the online visual arts journal The 22 Magazine. Click here to view their wide-ranging selection of 33 images from Sketches for Summer. On the Longbarrow Blog, Chris Jones ruminates on poetry and place names (and his decision to avoid ‘naming names’ in his forthcoming sequence Death and the Gallant), while Luke Bennett offers a new slant on Mark Goodwin‘s practice (as poet and climber) in his ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’. Finally, we’ve uploaded a further extract from last year’s memorable debut performance by Tria Kalistos (Kelvin Corcoran, Maria Pavlidou, Howard Wright); click here to listen to their unique blend of lyric poetry and traditional Greek music in a setting of Corcoran’s ‘Helen Mania’.

You are stood at the bottom of Broad Lane.  16 people with pens and notebooks are spilling over the pavement, musing vaguely or jotting things down.  One of their number stops.  He points at the colour image of a newborn baby installed above the door of a small photo-business; then at the blank self-storage building further along.  He talks about juxtaposition.  He says something about Ezra Pound.  The strange posse moves on; past the barking of a city kennels; an alien graffiti-montage by Phlegm.  They stop again and the man is gesturing at what amounts to a wildflower garden in a central reservation; then at the clean lines and colour blocks of newbuilt hotels and offices.  He’s talking about the romantic living side by side with the modern.
Matthew Clegg (from his reflections on the occursus / plastiCities walk and workshop Moving with thought)

On Saturday 23^rd June, Matthew Clegg led a walk (and writing workshop) into the Neepsend /Parkwood area of North Sheffield. Moving with Thought was set up to explore the relationship between walking and poetry – between the body, the mind and the landscape. A short film of the walk (narrated by Matthew Clegg and edited by Brian Lewis) has been uploaded to our Vimeo site: you can watch the full-screen version here, or view the embedded film below:

Other short films by Longbarrow Press (including excerpts from Rob Hindle’s 2010 Blitz walk and a remarkable performance by Tria Kalistos at the 2011 Sheffield Poetry Festival) can be viewed on our Vimeo site.

Recordings of the poems written by participants in Moving with thought will be uploaded to SoundCloud in the near future; further updates will be posted on this site. The recordings will include poems from Matthew Clegg’s new tanka sequence, A Trancewalk with Satori:

Satori asks us:
If thought, like spilt mercury,
Always takes the path
Of least resistance, what then?
Is it ever enlightened?