Rommi Smith at Heart - evening of 26 March

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Poetry and Jazz is something which brings back memories of the sixties, which immediately dates me, of course. How well I remember my late teenage haunt, the old Peanuts Club, upstairs at the Kings Arms behind Liverpool Street station, where the likes of Mike Westbrook and Mike Osborne played and the likes of Bill Butler, Jeff Nuttall, Mike Horovitz and even myself blasted forth. Blending poetry and music (Coltrane-related Jazz a lot of the time) was a big scene in the sixties - I remember watching Danny Abse doing it with aplomb, and everyone knew that over in the States it happened in every smoky café. But enough of the nostalgia....

It's still going strong, and one of its most stunning practitioners in these parts is Rommi Smith, but to be accurate, we can't just say poetry and jazz in her case. She is a brilliant poet, musician and playwright whose work fuses spoken word and music. She has been performing since the age of fourteen and has achieved a reputation for sharp, socially conscious poetic imagery coupled with astute harmonies and jazz, funk and soul rhythms.

She has done so much that it is difficult to do her justice in a few paragraphs. My most recent view of her (through a camera lens) was in Leeds Civic Hall at the awards ceremony last October for the 2010 Leeds Peace Poetry Competition. For the second year running, she was the chief judge. After insightful and sympathetic comments, she called each winner in the primary and secondary school categories individually from the audience, and each one stepped forward bravely to read. Applause swelled, cameras flashed, smiles spread. If only all teachers (and judges) were like that...

Rommi performs her work regularly, both nationally and internationally at arts, music and literature festivals.  Rommi’s work has been broadcast on various media, including the BBC - print and audio versions of Rommi’s work are featured on the BBC website. Google her now!

During the bicentenary celebrations for the abolition of the slave trade, she was Poet in Residence at the Houses of Parliament, and she is currently in residence at John Keats's house in London. Use the link on the right to read more about her - there's plenty.

And if you haven't done so already,  get your ticket for the evening of  Saturday, 26 March, when she performs with the excellent Fruit Tree Project in the Shire Oak Room at Heart in Bennett Road. It is going to be something which will be remembered for a long time, so make sure you are there!

The Girl in the Polkadot Dress

Richard Wilcocks writes:

When Beryl Bainbridge (who sadly died last July) spoke in the New Headingley Club in 2009 (second Headingley LitFest, click on the link on your right), she read from her novel in progress The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. She dwelled at length on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, 1968, a key part of the plot. He had just won the California primary election for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, and investigators later tried to identify a mysterious young woman seen in the hotel pantry, wearing a polka dot dress. In the book, her name is Rose.

This is now just about published, to be released at the beginning of June this year close to the anniversary of the shooting by Sirhan Sirhan. It can be ordered from Radish Books in advance if you want to be the first on your street to have read it. Reference is ISBN-13: 978-0316728485

Strangely, the official blurb does not mention the assassination. It reads as follows:

In the rainswept summer of 1968, Rose sets off for the United States from Kentish Town to meet a man she knows as Washington Harold, in her suitcase a polka-dot dress and a one-way ticket. In a country rocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King and a rising groundswell of violence, they are to join forces in search of the charismatic and elusive Dr Wheeler - oracle, guru and redeemer - whom Rose credits with rescuing her from a terrible childhood, and against whom Harold nurses a silent grudge. As they trail their quarry, zigzagging through America in a camper van, the odd couple - Rose, damaged child of grey postwar Britain, and nervous, obsessive, driven Harold - encounter a ragged counter-cultural army of Wheeler's acolytes, eddying among dangerous currents of obscure dissent and rage. But somewhere in the wide American darkness, Dr Wheeler is waiting.

 

Thanks, Radish

Headingley has still got a library, but no real bookshop since Bookz closed down a few years ago (no offence, Oxfam Books...) so it is wonderful to be attended upon by the excellent Radish bookshop, which is situated far from the delights of God's Own Suburb in the alternative universe of Chapel Allerton. The Alan Bennett freebies which we were given by the World Book people arrived there, along with several cardboard boxes containing other titles. Apparently, Nigel Slater's Toast is popular in those parts.

Prominently displayed near the checkout desk this afternoon was The Battersea Park Road To Enlightenment, by Isabel Losada, who will be speaking/performing at the Headingley Heart Centre on Wednesday 16 March on How to get published, and who intends to sign copies of her best-seller not only at the event but also the following morning at Radish.

Remember Bookz? It was piled high with cheapo and remaindered tomes, but there was also plenty of good stuff. Pity it foundered. All the more reason to have a LitFest in the area. Let's fly the flag!

Below, Sally Thums at Radish:

When the Wind Changed

The excellent Leeds-based Theatre Company BlahBlahBlah  took part in the second Headingley LitFest in 2009, premiering their show When the Wind Changed to delighted parents and children in the library. It's still going strong:

Throughout March the Blahs will be spending a day at a time in schools across Yorkshire, performing When the Wind Changed four times in the morning for Reception children, each performance lasting half an hour. In the afternoon they will do two performances of their show Max for Yr 1 / Yr 2 children, each show lasting forty-five minutes.

When the Wind Changed is a story about a girl whose face gets stuck by the wind when it changes. All manner of people's faces have been stuck by this mysterious wind. When Gran realises that wiping that look off her granddaughter's face isn't going to work, her only advice is to "wait for the wind to change again". They wait... and they wait... and they wait. And then the wind begins to blow...

Max is based on the Maurice Sendak picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Max has been up to mischief and is sent to his room without any supper. We sit with the children around a blank canvas which becomes Max's bedroom that turns into a forest. They travel with him in and out of weeks to Where the Wild Things Are. The children meet Wild Things seven times bigger than themselves and must help Max find ways to tame them without hurting them.

If you can make it, you are invited to dip into the day and see the participatory work in action. Visitor places are limited to three a day. You can book your place by contacting Cas Bulmer on 0113 274 0030 or at cas@blahs.co.uk. Please give plenty of notice so that the necessary arrangements with the schools can be made.

Publish your own?

For fun and profit? Depressed by rejection slips? Fed up with being a would-be? You could come in with the tide - read this - or you could cheer yourself up on Wednesday 16 March when Isabel Losada addresses us in the Claremont Room at Heart. See the programme. More on Isabel later.

Our part in World Book Night

Headingley LitFest has been chosen by World Book Night to receive forty-eight free copies of Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's. These will be delivered about a fortnight before the LitFest starts, and as we have just received the news, we have yet to decide the mechanics of distribution. The official World Book Night is on Saturday 5 March.

Alan Bennett is, just in case you don't know, one of our local literary heroes, who attended the school which is now known as Lawnswood, and who lived over his father's butcher's shop opposite the Three Horseshoes pub, now known as Royale Dry Cleaning.

Lesley McDowell wrote in the Independent in May:

Alan Bennett's memoir of his parents' marriage and his mother's battles with depression is clear-eyed, touching, occasionally waspish, not always charitable, and ever honest. The discovery in later life that his maternal grandfather committed suicide is, he tells us, the kind of thing a writer longs for, to spice up a dull, normal family story. But, of course, no family is ever really dull or normal, and no family is ever "like other people's", however much one might strive for it to be so.

You can read the rest by clicking here.

Reviews from anyone else are welcome.