Personally Speaking

In the photo, Maggie Mash as Miss Brodie is speaking to Lynn Thornton as the headmistress in an extract from Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

It was difficult to squeeze into the capacious front room where the second house event took place, in spite of the fact that the chairs were “smaller than last year”. Knee-in-the-lower-back situations seem to have been rare, however, and the huge audience was very appreciative throughout – a happy genie that did not mind being bottled up. It was wonderfully entertained by Wordsong and by a number of guest performers.

Wordsong consists of Maggie Mash and Lynn Thornton with pianist John Holt. Their programme was divided up into five sections. Early family influences had poems by John Siddique, Philip Larkin (yes, that one), Carol Rumens, Grace Nichols, Lis Bertolla and Peter Spafford; Education and friends had a tale from Gervaise Phinn’s recollections, Juan taught me by Lucy Newlyn, extracts from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and Lynn Barber’s An Education, W H Auden’s O Tell Me the Truth about Love (music by Dankworth) and a poem by local lad Terry Simpson – Did Those Feet in Ancient Times Walk in Woodhouse?

Love and marriage featured the work of Wendy Cope, Vicki Feaver, Sophie Hannah, Dorothy Parker, Carol Ann Duffy, Bob Dorough and Imtiaz Dharker, Beliefs and attitudes began with an excerpt from Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams, continuing with Liz Lochhead’s Mo, Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mystic Fiddler by Terry Simpson, My Carbon Footprint by Lynn Thornton and Nigel Wears, arranged by John Holt, and a chunk of Trollope’s Barchester Towers.

Adrian Mitchell’s Human Beings was the only poem in the final section, and the show closed with Cole Porter’s Anything Goes

Efficiently organised and superbly performed!

Songs about love and shipwrecks

Richard Wilcocks writes:
There was far more love than shipwrecks in this event, the first of those held in people’s houses. Backed by a window framing a sunny garden scene, Peter Spafford read his poems and sang his songs with aplomb, displaying some of his many talents to excellent effect. He began with a poem inspired by a graveyard visit, and also by a recollection of Stanley Spencer’s 1926 masterpiece The Resurrection, Cookham. Tombs were flung open and the dead became quick as Peter asserted a passionate love of life which became increasingly apparent as his one-man performance progressed.

He sat at the keyboard to tell the story of a doomed ship in Cornwall, then moved on to the necessity of writing things down:

That idea you had yesterday

Write it up, write it down......

Because the ink of memory runs thin in the rain

He sang about love, then moved away from the keyboard to read about it: “These are love poems in a very broad sense,” he told us. He speculated on the origin of the name of the Hello Bridge which crosses the River Cover in the Yorkshire Dales. Did lovers once meet there? Yes they did, centuries ago.

My favourite was a song which seems to have come from a viewing of the film Waterloo on DVD, the version starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon. Two farms were destroyed in the battle – Hougoumont and La Haye Sante. Tacticians might focus on how one or the other was crucial to holding the line against the Bonapartist forces, but Peter Spafford focuses on two lovers who grew up around them. He sang partly in French to a French tune – Jean Petit qui danse – and ended with there’s rubies in the dew. Beautiful!

Towards the end of the session he was flipping through a ring binder containing the brief poems he has written for every year of his life, which I recognised from when he was in Café Lento a couple of years ago. He invited audience members to call out a year. 1968 brought forth a bearpit, 2005 a view from a high point in the Malvern Hills, 1973 his loss of virginity (in a dream, to an Indian goddess in a church), 1995 a delicious strawberry eaten in Portugal, and 1963 the death of his dog Bilko, when he (Peter) was seven years old. “Were you seven when you wrote that, daddy?” came a child’s voice.

“No no,” he replied. “I wrote most of them in 2005.”




>Peter performs with Edible Tent. See www.peterspafford.co.uk

Launch of Sky Burial by Genny Rahtz

 Sheila Chapman writes:

Flux Gallery is an enticing place: its walls are not parallel and they fly away from you at the front door into an expanded space laid out and lit by Julie with her artistic eye, and decorated with Dan’s excellent photographic art work. With wine, nibbles, sandwiches and great music from Des the Miner what more could you ask for, except the launch of a poetry collection, Sky Burial, by Genny Rahtz.

Genny was featured in the renowned A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull  which was published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd in 1982 and which featured a foreword by Phillip Larkin. She was supported last night by three of the other poets whose work appeared in the book and as T.F.Griffin explained in his introduction, they spent those years in Hull under the tutelage of Douglas Dunn and in the shade of Philip Larkin.

Ian Gregson’s poems included surprising juxtapositions of ideas and images as he invited us to consider a corpse and a parrot in the same room, and the The Paper Bag as the self which, as it falls from your grasp  'grazes its lips on the empty pavement,....mimes its unheard words’

Cartoonist influences were captured in poems such as Queen Victoria as an Owl ‘because she did actually look like one’ and The Elastic Band, where the English Empire is ‘snagged on peaks’ and ‘... snapped back in our faces’. Other poems considered the isolation of the individual (Traffic Island Desert) and Thomas the Tank Engine as a Cyborg at puberty. Ian continued the cyborg theme in The Breast  where Jordan’s breasts are cyborgs who are  trying for a new start away from her and ‘...have secretly acquired an agent’

Douglas Huston  treated us to a sometimes humorous and always interesting selection of poems, some in rhyme and some in free verse. In School Report an ageing school boy reflects on the past where a teacher was encased in his ‘black gown’s folded wings’ and indulged in ‘weapons grade rages’ and in Lines on Man’s dereliction ‘disintegration is where the big time starts’. Other poems included Report from up the Lane, The Quick One, Once Upon a Time (‘beyond mortgages’) and the Weather Regrets.  A poem, Poet Laureate Ritual Bath Murder, which is a skit on Ted Hughes poetic style and lifestyle, was received with great gusto by the audience especially when, after the murder, the poet ‘...went off to do things with your wife’.

Genny Rahtz told us that since childhood she has been greatly  influenced by American writers and by books about them. It also became apparent through her reading that she is influenced by cultural rituals such as sky burials. These burials take place where there is little or no wood to burn a body and the ground is undiggable so graves are not an option. The bodies are dismembered and offered up for buzzards to feed on and in the title poem of her collection she imagines her own sky burial where her brain

 ‘... is scooped out / and folded with ceremony / into my crushed skull’

... ‘as a feast for vultures, / kites, ravens.’

Genny also treated us to three animal poems: Rat Catcher, ‘I am my own rat catcher. / I let the beast go ... I allocate whole days to him’; Lambing, ‘You watch the sun rising as you walk home .. and fear that crows will come for the eyes of new born lambs.’; Desert Lion. ‘could you have known ... one day, Tate and Lyle / would embalm your story / on their syrup tin?’ She also read, in her simple and unassuming style, other poems from the collection including: Soft Fruit Harvest,  ‘the sound of canes rubbing / as I pull and let them go, ... I think of elephants / stripping leaves from acacia trees’; Self Portrait,  ‘I thought my true colours / required paint / and heavy paper’;

Before reading Geometry, Genny explained that there is scientific proof that  our ability to navigate and judge spaces is hard wired into our heads; the  poem starts with children  in US cities who ‘... learn asymmetry of 3D grids, / kaleidoscopic patterns / of concrete, metal/ glass’ and moves on to an isolated Amazonian tribe who know ‘... from childhood how timber falls / how shapes and angles / work in practice. They read / the time language of shadows’.

Genny spoke of her mother, who died thirty years before her father and who, because of that, was rather overshadowed in the present activity and memory family life. In  the poem My Mother Wendy – she says ‘I should light a candle / before it gets too dark’

Finally she paid  homage to her beloved  American painters and writers in Sky Windows celebrating  ‘the long grain / of Wyoming voices in Annie Proulx, / the laconic / slow transatlantic roll / of Black Mountain poets.’

Sky Burial by Genny Rahtz (Flux Gallery Press 2010)

An absolute delight

Sally Bavage writes:

35 Years of Loitering by Ray Brown was an absolute delight – a tour of a creative life in interviewing and writing plays for mainstream theatre, articles for magazines, radio scripts… the list was extensive, the many snippets both amusing and thought-provoking.

Ray was born and brought up on the edge of Thorner and although he has lived locally for most of his life he still feels like the ‘boy on the edge of the village’ wearing the ‘cloak of alienation.’  He has the quirky perspective of someone who can observe the ordinary and discern the extraordinary. Who else would be radicalised by the accounts department of Butlins?  Or move from an apprenticeship at Heathrow to an early academic career in Psychology? 

Kurt Vonnegut “wrote fiction in order to tell the truth” and this philosophy has informed Ray throughout his long professional life.  From first writing about an early (and unsuccessful) attempt to seduce his eighteen year-old naïve but “pretty” self (his own choice of adjective) – possibly by Quentin Crisp on later reflection – he found his voice for both the serious and the comic. The miners’ strike of the 70s was a significant benchmark in his perspective, as was the later civil war in the place once known as Yugoslavia, which he observed at first hand from many trips to a region he continues to love and visit.

He made his first visit to the region in 1985 and soon fell in love with the country and its people. He has returned once or twice a year ever since. In his play ...is normal! which was at the West Yorkshire Playhouse 2003, he worked with two actors to present a funny, moving and compelling mixture of fact, fiction, performance and dramatic readings which also featured music and voices recorded live in former Yugoslavia. “The title is a quote,” he told us. “It’s what everybody said in response to questions about the war and its horrors.”

In an early part of his career, writing for the groves of academe – including ghost writing a textbook he was later asked to peer review - he also taught locally, wrote pub guides, articles for magazines and scripts for successful plays performed nationwide.  A spell of creative writing residencies in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, British Rail workshops included a poignant one in a local hospice.  He clearly painted for us a picture in words of the black humour of chemotherapy patients who raised hairless eyebrows at revelations in the writers’ circle or else raised their hair (wigs) to reveal, in another way, their life history.

Radio scripts have formed a significant part of his life for decades and he treated the audience to some excerpts from shows on topics as diverse as flight and … duffle coats. Music became a key medium in his delivery of the message, and a delightful conflation of the jazz trumpet of Humphey Lyttelton with the sound of the machine attaching toggles to the likes of the 555TM duffle as worn by Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea was masterful.  Who amongst us did not call up an abiding memory of duffledom?

He spoke movingly about writing Living Pretty, the life story of Alfred Williams, who was his neighbour when he lived in Kirkstall in 1981. It is based on the autobiography which he co-wrote, To Live It Is To Know It, which moves from a childhood in Jamaica to retirement in Leeds. It tells of an ordinary man made extraordinary by resilience, intelligence and good humour. Alfred spoke in a blend of Jamaican patois and other dialects, but Ray was able to represent his speech with great authenticity, because dialect and the way people speak is one of his obvious fortes. Alfred Williams once cultivated a plot on Burley Model Allotments, and there was once (and still is) a plan to put it on outside the allotments hut.

His politics have always informed his work, although an over- bold use of a clip of the voice coach of Margaret Thatcher when prime minister persistently being told to lower her voice led to a period in radio wilderness. Not that this changed his perspective: his commitment always to use the interview and music links to “tell the truth” remains undimmed.  Ray has, and continues, to shine a light on life from his position “on the edge of the village”.

Valediction for John Jones

Richard Wilcocks writes:

John Jones died in December aged eighty-four. He was a long-term resident of Headingley and a strong supporter of the LitFest from the moment it started. His interests and areas of expertise were many and various: he lectured for many years in the Fine Art department at Leeds University, where he was in overall charge of studio instruction and where he created and ran a course in the history of film, an artist who thought deeply about life drawing and a brilliant conversationalist.

He was very knowledgeable about literature in general, and was especially interested in the works of James Joyce. He had an impressive collection of Joyce’s work, and exhibited a series of his own illustrations to Ulysses.

He collected Victorian optical toys and magic lantern slides, and was the founder of the International Magic Lantern Society. Last autumn I was suggesting to him that one of his magic lantern shows, on the damage done by the demon drink, could be performed as part of this year’s LitFest. I am sure it would have been greatly appreciated.

In 2009 he took part in what has become an annual short story evening in Café Lento: his contribution was part of his autobiography, which he had recorded on a number of audiotape cassettes shortly before he suffered a stroke. He spoke about the year in the States in 1965 during which he interviewed artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois and Yoko Ono. His interesting account of Yoko Ono’s stay with him (with her then partner and her daughter) in Rochester Terrace, and of the happening which she organised at Leeds College of Art in which she was tied up in a large black bag, was written up in local newspapers in 2009, then picked up by media around the world.

A year ago, for the third Headingley LitFest, he contributed with Gaby Jones to one of the first house events, in his front room in Hollin Lane. Gaby and John are pictured below at this event, which was called Déja-Vu. Gaby spoke of her return to the villa by Lake Como which she had known as a small child, and John spoke (again, on tape) about when he was a young soldier in 1945, who had been conscripted into the Royal Engineers and sent to recently-liberated Ostend in Belgium.

His obituary, written by one of his devoted ex-students, the cartoonist Steve Bell, can be found in the Guardian online.

So, farewell to an old friend.

 

Launched

Sheila Chapman writes:

The LitFest launch happened in HEART last night in the Shire Oak Room, a ‘large spacious and bright space’ (Bill Fitzsimons) which had been thoughtfully set out by the HEART volunteers and staff. The room was filled with people who sat at round tables clutching their drinks, raffle tickets and a ‘golden ticket’ entry into the free book draw for one of the twenty-four copies of Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People's. As Richard Wilcocks explained, the LitFest had received these books courtesy of World Book Day. He also read out his valediction for John Jones, which will appear on this blog separately.

So, we were off to a good start and James Nash, our compère for the evening, explained to us that the literary quiz on the tables was to be completed as a team effort by each table and the results announced at the end of the break – more of this later.

We settled down then to hear the Word Birds, a group of female poets - Sue Vickerman, Jean Harrison and Sue Butler - who were accompanied by a male musician, Robin Fishwick.

Robin started us off with a Song for Headingley and after songs about Croatia, Croatian Wedding Song, and Hungary, he finished with Green Man, a song inspired by standing at the pedestrian crossing outside Mike’s Carpets in Armley. He played a timple (have I got the name right Robin?) and also a tenor recorder through which he hummed at the same time as playing. This produced a very different sound which, as Ruth Wynne said, ‘was adventurous, interesting and original’.

Sue Vickerman’s  first poems reflected her time in China: she mused on the fragility of the skyscrapers which have grown up during current economic boom – something which has particular resonance given the devastation of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She then treated us to a series of poems drawn from her experience as a life model which she thinks allows her time to muse and compose poems and ‘hang out with artists’.  She spoke of the continuing rounding and softening of a woman’s body charted by an artist as he draws her through her developing pregnancy, and ‘the nicotine finger ‘of the drawing instructor as he gets intimately close to demonstrate the lines and angle of her body and her ‘pelt rises’ . This Bird weighs her words carefully and builds her evocative  images to entrance and enlighten her audience.

James Nash rounded off this first half with a humorous and well observed poem about his experience as a gooseberry in The Lounge cinema. He had gone there with two friends, who were a couple, obviously, and their casual intimacy, when one of them stroked the other’s leg, set him off on a desperate search for a leg of his own to stroke.

The audience worked hard during the break to complete the quiz. There was a great deal of muttering, sly glancing over shoulders and desperate argument and counter argument. Was A Touch of Frost filmed in Leeds , or was it Banks? I don’t know! The results were announced. Had anyone got the maximum twenty-two?. No. Twenty-one? No. Twenty? No. ... sixteen? Yes! A draw! Two tables were entitled to the prize - drinks for the whole table. But were there enough drinks to go round? Yes, phew, what a quiz.

There was more of the Word Birds for the second half. Jean Harrison described her place poems as ‘not romantic’ and yet there was romance in her description of a Zen garden where there were bushes with ‘meditative shoulders’ and in the ice-cream chimes which made a fragment of Greensleeves run through her head for days. Sue Butler who has lived all over the world, spoke of the hardships of Russia in 1937, of joyriding in someone else’s glasses and of using poetry as a weapon, particularly against her rich and handsome brother. Sue Vickerman spoke of her return to Bradford and the tree outside her new Bradford flat ‘which will never dapple anything’ and of her days as a student in Headingley when she was a ‘rock dove’ The evening was rounded off by more music from Robin and by a very welcome sonnet of love from James Nash.

The audience set off home clutching raffle prizes, books and drinks. As one of them said ’Thanks for a lovely evening! Nice blend of words and music!’ (Sue LS6)

The evening was filmed by two students from Leeds Metropolitan University (Joe and Matt) who also conducted interviews with performers and some members of the audience.

Below - two of the Word Birds - Sue Vickerman and Jean Harrison