Beechey Island

This poem was greatly admired by a number of people at the Let Me Speak event on 22 March. Campion Rollinson has now sent it, and you can read it on Headingley LitFest Originals.

Food for thought

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Food appears to be playing an increasingly important part in the LitFest. We began in a restaurant this year, compliments about the home-made cakes and dainties provided last year were commonplace, and similar praise has been drizzled upon us this time around. Perhaps we should finish in a restaurant as well. Or in a house with a good cook in residence.

This particular house event on Sunday afternoon was so successful that there had to be a repeat performance. Fortunately, the first lot through the door did not scoff everything, and there was plenty of Oyster Bay left to drink, because I was there for the second session. Lis Bertolla and Doug Sandle performed a well thought-out poetry programme, Maria Sandle sang and played guitar, and a couple called The Retrolettes sang and played the ukelele. At one point, Doug played a Jew’s Harp!

There were poems written by Lis and Doug themselves and by the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, John Keats, Edward Lear and Roger McGough, and occasional ventures into prose, with short extracts from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Maria was particularly charming with her rendition of Junk Food Junkie, and the Retrolettes brought us Trinidadian sunshine with the Andrews Sisters’ version of Rum and Coca Cola.

The session concluded with Lis’s own beautiful poem After the Poetry Reading. Then it was time for the nosh. We’ll have to do this every Sunday afternoon now.

Words and music melted together

Sheila Chapman writes:

A member of the audience said that The Shire Oak Room at HEART ‘had the enticing atmosphere of a New York Jazz Club’ on Saturday night and thus the stage was set for a very special event .

When I was researching the evening I had checked out reviews of The Fruit Tree Project jazz band  (Dave Evans on keys, Colin Sutton on Bass and Alex Wibrow on drums), and came across this comment:  ‘...they take on grooves and at times semi-free excitement equally to create a thrilling array of sounds’. Not knowing a great deal about jazz I was a bit puzzled by these words, but as the band kicked off the night, playing compositions by Dave Evans, I began to understand exactly what they meant. As one member of the audience (Terry Bridges) commented, they were ‘polished and consummate performers’. They entranced the audience and I, for one, found their array of sounds both thrilling and absorbing.

After a few numbers they were joined by the poet Rommi Smith, who explained that her poems for the night were taken from her pamphlet Mornings and Midnights. These poems are based on the lives of female legends such as Billie Holliday, Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker. They do not seek to tell the biography of these women, because that would demand too much ‘truth’, but rather to illuminate and narrate their lives through the life of Gloria Silver, a mythical diva whose experience and history is the backbone of the book.

Rommi’s collection of mornings and midnights poems is growing. We were treated to some poems from the pamphlet such as: Any Old Death Will Do, ‘...and maggots are the jewels against my skin’,  which explores Gloria’s reaction when she reads her own obituary while still very much alive (apparently something that actually happened to Peggy Lee); and when Bessie Smith Came Face to Face with the Klan ‘... stark white hooded exclamation marks’. We also heard new poems such as Fur Coat, Moonsong Jelly, and Rain  - where the musical rendition of the sound of rain in the intro was restrained, and incredibly evocative.

The poems, whether spoken or sung, were interwoven with the music with power and passion, and true musicality. Some written comments from the audience will tell you what it was like:

Words and music melted together like an ice-cream fruit sundae. But do not be misled as the core is as hard-hitting as a bullet (Glo Simons)

Moving, angry, engaged. The coherence of music & word & song was the best I’ve heard. (Murray Edscer)

Such professionalism in the execution of performance. Such knowledge in the poetry and background itself. (Jane Austwick)

It was a brilliant night. Once again some members of the audience say it all:

A moving and exciting performance ... more please.  (Anon)

Overall, a wonderful & moving performance – very inspiring! (Anon)

What a fantastic combination of the spoken word and fab music. (Bev Robinson)

Rommi so soulful. (Selina)

This event was absolutely outstanding. (Jane Austwick)

An inspiring evening and wonderful to have this on our doorstep! (Anon)

Inspired – a great addition to a literary festival. (Beatrice Schofield)

As Murray Edsecar said: "This was inspirational. ... an entrancing evening."

The Fruit Tree Project: Mornings and Midnights by Rommi Smith is published by Peepal Tree Press, Leeds (2005, 2008)

Ben Okri in Headingley

Cocktail in the Café

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Trio Literati provided plenty of gourmet material on Friday evening. Everything was professionally prepared and served up stylishly.

The key word for it? Zingy, like the excellent cocktail, which had something of everything appropriate in it, along with an ingredient which can not, should not be identified. The venue – Hawker’s Green Café in the Heart Centre – was ideal, lacking only a few directional lights, but that didn’t matter because this was delicious entertainment for a discerning audience.

I arrived from the evening with Persephone Books in the nearby library, accompanied by the speaker and several others, to find people already browsing on the delicacies on every table, waiting for the main courses from the group. Here is an idea of what they were like:

The first course was poems from Wendy Cope, June Carruthers, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith and Frank Polite. Frank Polite? His Carmen Miranda was beautifully, fruitfully performed by Maggie Mash. We saw the pineapples and the bananas. The second course was about acting, stage uncertainties and thinking on your feet as the boards are trodden, with pieces by Nicolas Craig, Hugo Williams (Richard Rastell in Waiting to Go On... “they recast the suit”), George Burns (on faking sincerity), Victoria Wood (advice to the Piecrust Players... Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on a tandem) and Hillaire Belloc.

The poem with the longest title was performed during the third course – On seeing a collection of ironmongery in the Tate Gallery labelled “Woman” – written by Richard Rastell’s father, performed by his son. Other poems were by Frank O’Hara, Steve Ellis, Helen Burke, Roger McGough, and William Carlos Williams (The Artist, an inspired choice).

After a chatty interval, there were substantial servings in fourth and fifth courses of Paul Munden, head chef Carol Ann Duffy (Big Sue and Now Voyager), Roger McGough, Liz Lochhead, Lee L Berkson (the shade of Humphrey Bogart appeared), Linda France, Louis McNeice, Margaret Hobbs, Peter Spafford, Elizabeth Alexander and Alfred Brendel, who turns out to have been a closet poet as well as a rather famous pianist: his The Coughers of Cologne proves that he was rather good at it as well.

By the end, we were all happily pogged. Jane Oakshott, Richard Rastell and Maggi Mash (pictured below) were exquisite. See their website here.

An evening with Persephone Books

Mary Francis writes:

Persephone Books reprints neglected novels, diaries, short stories and cookery books by women writers such as Dorothy Whipple and Katherine Mansfield. They are all carefully designed with a clear typeface, a dove-grey jacket, a ‘fabric’ endpaper and bookmark and a preface by writers such as Jilly Cooper, Adam Gopnik and Jacqueline Wilson.

Founder Nicola Beauman was due to talk to us on Friday, at Headingley Library, about the origins of Persephone, how books are chosen and about some of the authors. Unfortunately, Nicola then had a pressing commitment across the Atlantic, but in her place came one of her team, Miki Footman.

Miki told us something of the beginnings of Persephone - of how Nicola Beauman, while researching for her own book - A very great profession: the women’s novel 1914-39 - realised how very many titles from that period were out of print. She founded Persephone Books in 1998 to reprint (mostly) women writers and (mostly) of the inter-war period - and now has 90 titles in print.

Persephone is an unusual publishing house. It has remained small and independent - and its books are distinctive. For those who love the feel and the look of a well-produced book, they are a delight. The quality paper and the jacket, the typeface and those beautiful endpapers - and also the wonderful binding (apparently called Dispersion Binding - I hope I have that right) that enables the book to lie quite flat when open, without any cracking of the spine. 

There is now also the Persephone Classics series, with illustrated jackets, which may appeal more to those who are slightly unnerved by a plain dove-grey cover.

Waxing lyrical about book production is wont to provoke some puzzled looks from e-book enthusiasts - and, indeed, it was a surprise to hear from Miki that nowadays Persephone is not only producing audiobooks (very worthwhile) - but is venturing into the field of e-books also, in response to at least five email requests per day. So it seems there is definitely a demand for these titles, written so long ago, to be read with the current technology.

Miki told us a bit about working for Persephone. The staff consists of just five people, including Nicola, and the office where they work is also a shop, in Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, where passers-by are ‘encouraged to come in and take notice’. It sounds a delightful place to work, with everyone doing a bit of everything ... actually, Miki referred to painting the toilet floor as one job she’d undertaken recently!

Persephone also produces a free magazine twice a year. Called Biannually, it contains articles, reviews, details of forthcoming titles and any events - and usually a short story.

So how do Persephone choose their titles? They concentrate mainly on books that reflect women’s everyday lives. Their titles are ‘realistic, not idealistic,’ ‘more accessible, more domestic’ and they see the feminism in them as ‘softer’ than that from the other feminist publishers. They try to have many different genres, they do include books by men (generally ones concerning women’s lives) and they don’t overlap with other publishing houses. They also have to love every book they publish. There is no hope of a book selling well ‘unless someone is passionately behind it’.

Miki talked about some of their titles, such as the best-selling Miss Pettigrew lives for a day. There were Monica Dickens and Marghanita Laski - names I knew - and others, like Mollie Panter-Downes, that I did not. Nor did I know about Noel Streatfield, other than as a writer for children, or Betty Miller, mother of Jonathan. And I must read some Dorothy Whipple sometime .... she is a favourite of Nicola’s, it seems.

The session ended with lots of interesting questions from the audience - and only the slightest whiff of controversy as to whether their list might be a little middle-class and why works such as Phyllis Bentley’s Inheritance (that featured in one of the LitFest events last year) were still out of print. Or might it be that such works simply don’t fit with the criteria? But it was obvious there was a lot of interest in the great work that Persephone is doing in rescuing some splendid titles from obscurity and bringing them to our attention.

Many thanks to Miki. Thanks also to Radish Bookshop, who regularly stock Persephone titles, for bringing along some books for us to buy. And for anyone who couldn’t get to the talk, do take a look at www.persephonebooks.co.uk - and maybe, if one day you have some spare time in London, why not visit that intriguing shop in Lamb's Conduit Street?