Saturday 18 September 2010

Bristol gig report

This was the first reading for a while to involve all three of us, and the first time we'd tried the full-on AV son et lumiere spectacular version of 3 Men ie, we included a slideshow and some MP3s, so thanks enormously to Colin Brown and Poetry Can for the opportunity.

This meant we could focus on set-list, edit some of the mass of materials the project had accumulated, and think a little about the mechanics of performing a number of quite short poems while three people stand in a line on stage. We didn't get all that all right, but it felt like a considerable step forward.

Here are the files used:












So now, if you want to recreate the reading experience in the comfort of your own treehouse, all you need is the setlist and to hit the 'play' buttons at the right moment. But I'm assuming no-one would be that bonkers.

Friday 3 September 2010

Park Kultury

I've been meaning to write something about the terrible bombings in the Moscow Metro back in March, and have been carrying fragments of a phrase or two around with me for a while -- if the image isn't too repellent, sometimes an inspiration feels like putting together something that arrives in bits and pieces, the imagination as the opposite of a bomb. Anyway, thinking about that tragedy and its origins in another tragedy, this is the stanza that eventually came:

Kultury is twelve marble roundels
displayed along a Metro wall.
Kultury is nails bagged in bundles
explosive pressed into a ball.
Kultury’s skaters, tennis players;
Kultury’s martyrs, random slayers.
Kultury is a model plane,
a future freed from debt and shame.
Kultury is a mushroom hunter
slaughtered in the forest snow:
it's what we can't and so must know.
It is our brief reply to winter:
a warm breath’s disc in a window’s frost;
ice-hole to rivers of the lost.