Longbarrow Press

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?

Phase Two of The Seven Wonders, an ongoing series of collaborative works based on  spectacular landmarks from the Derbyshire Peak District, begins with a reimagining of Kinder Downfall, in which Fay Musselwhite’s poem ‘Phlegmatic’ is paired with a new painting by Paul Evans. You can view the painting and the poem here. The site also features the work that comprised Phase One of the project: drawings and paintings by Paul Evans accompanied by poems by James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle and Chris Jones. A new painting and a new poem will be posted on The Seven Wonders site every month from June 2012.

Among the contributors to Phase Two of The Seven Wonders will be Alistair Noon, whose poem ‘Hill with Bunker and Flak Tower’ (from the recent Longbarrow Press pamphlet Swamp Area) introduces a fascinating piece by Luke Bennett on the fate of Berlin’s ‘heap-parks and zoo-arks’. The sequence from which the poem is taken (‘Six Structures’) profiles several of Berlin’s notable man-made features, including the sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky (installed on the River Spree) that gives its name to the poem ‘The Molecule Man’. Listen to Noon reading this poem here; for his reading of ‘Hill with Bunker and Flak Tower’, please click here.

Noon’s ‘Top Five Strange Poetry Readings’ is among the recent additions to our Longbarrow Blog; also featured is Matthew Clegg‘s appreciation of the work of poet Josephine Dickinson. Finally, Clegg and Fay Musselwhite will read a selection of walking-themed poems at 7 Garden Street, Sheffield on Saturday 23rd June as part of the Occursus/plastiCities summer programme (6pm prompt start; admission free; further details and directions here). Clegg will be reading from Edgelands, Nobody Sonnets and other sequences; click here to listen to excerpts from Edgelands and some brief comments on the art of walking.