Scriptophilia in the Heart Centre

Steve Ball writes:
What a marvellously entertaining evening Scriptophilia was at the Heart Centre, Headingley, last night! Wordsmith Peter Spafford made sure that there was a comforting and supportive atmosphere throughout the evening that complemented the intimacy of the Shire Oak Room; a lovely venue for such a showcase of talent.

Peter’s love of words was evident but the music was not left out due to the prodigious talent of multi-instrumentalist Richard Ormrod – is there any instrument he cannot play?

Helen Burke is the female equivalent of Ian McMillan, who had appeared at the LitFest on the previous evening, and her take on French cats was hilarious. There is always poignancy to her work and it was never more appropriately and eloquently displayed on St Patrick’s Night when she paid tribute to her mother and father, both born in Ireland. Helen is an inspiring poet.

Peter’s guest artistes, Seas-of-Green, raised their game and charmed the appreciative audience, most of whom had never heard of the young Leeds band. A very tight acoustic set was inventive and engaging and there is a special gift of being able to get an audience to sing along to an original song that the vast majority had not heard before. This was a performance that showed what promise they have.

Richard Ormrod is a virtuoso performer and his breadth of expertise provided an extra depth to Peter’s choice of song and poetry. It was obvious that there was a warmth and affection between Peter and Richard and this captured the audience from the off. There was humour, originality and poignancy that kept everyone enraptured through to the finale of their suite of poems set to music.

A very enjoyable evening: thank you one and all.

Helen Burke; http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/helenburkepage.html

Seas-of- Green; http://seas-of-green.com/s/Seas-Of-Green_-_Official_Website.html

Peter Spafford; http://www.peterspafford.co.uk/


Below, Helen Burke, Peter Spafford, Richard Ormrod and Seas of Green. Photos by Richard Wilcocks.

Telling stories with (funny) pictures

The cartoon workshop for children in Headingley Library on Saturday afternoon with local artist Kate Pankhurst was great fun. Kate has illustrated children's books by many very well-known authors, such as Judy Blume, Ian Whybrow, Marjorie Newman and Steve Hartley.

She began by showing some of her work and explaining a little of how the book-illustration process works. She then got her audience imagining their own weird and wonderful characters, thinking of how to illustrate strange story ideas and incidents, making funny flip-books and designing their very own comic-strips.

Everyone involved had a great time ... and also completed some highly-imaginative cartoons! As one parent said - ‘Be very happy to spend every Saturday afternoon like this.’

Below, Kate Pankhurst with Willow, Harry, Alice and Isaac. On the wall, a many-eyed alien monster.

World Story at New Headingley Club

June Diamond writes:

You are three feet tall. The room is crowded. You wrap your arms around the legs of someone in a coat like your mother’s. But it is not her. The room laughs, kindly, but you are humiliated.

Do all children have a similar experience? The group of us taking part in the world story workshop thought that we all had.

In the first workshop we explored the universals of story-telling; scars, epiphanies and transformative moments. Ice-breakers, games and props supported the experience. 'Inspiring', was the feedback.

The second workshop moved past plot (after all, Jeffrey Archer is the master of plot) to explore how moments are made vivid through language. The group turned to memory here . Perhaps not all groups would, but we did. Childhood cruelty and the tale of the solitary guineapig were the basis for some memorable story-telling. 

A terrific creative experience.

Talking Myself Home

Richard Wilcocks writes:

If priests could be as constantly, persistently entertaining as Ian McMillan, they would have no problems filling churches. People would come early and sit sleeplessly at the front, every week, and their responses would be toothy grins, laughs and sporadic shouts of recognition. He held us yesterday evening for an hour and a quarter, and we writhed with pleasure as he walked, hands flying, in front of the crossless altar in this magnificent, deconsecrated church in Cardigan Road, which still retains its name - St Margaret of Antioch - but which is now known as Left Bank Leeds, an award-winning venue for music and the arts brought into being by a group of hardworking volunteers, when the alternative would have been a decline and fall.

Ian McMillan is what a stereotype of a Yorkshireman should be, not a 'vinegar-faced' and narrow-minded character (like Joseph in Wuthering Heights?) but really friendly, warm-hearted and, yes, homely - the sort of bloke you wouldn't mind at all eating at your table with, or watching the match with, unless, of course, if it was Barnsley thrashing Leeds 5 - 2. He's the exact opposite of crabby, and he lets the imagination take the initiative.

He goes far beyond the homely and you only notice this afterwards, when you recollect his words in tranquillity. He transcends Darfield, you might add. Universal themes are in there. Love and affection?

To select gobbets of delight from his programme, in which well-worn, endlessly hilarious material (like his observations on new pupils in infant schools) was mixed with the newly-created, I would fish out his nursery rhymes, in which words are randomly replaced with 'fish', his stories about when he worked on a building site, his mention of Sir Alec Clegg, who founded Bretton Hall College and who ensured that the West Riding Education Authority was the most innovative in the country, and his poems and stories about his mother and her funeral which were so funny, so funny, and so poignant, so poignant. Love and affection.

There was an experimental aspect, because our partners at Left Bank were trying things out, like the new PA system, which did not serve the back two rows very well. Accoustics are always a problem in churches. The cold was kept at bay efficiently, with two gas-powered tubes which fired warm air in to the space for hours before the performance. Choral music should work at future events.

On arriving home at ten, The Verb was on Radio 3, and Ian McMillan was interviewing our guest from last year, Ben Okri. 

Talking Myself Home at Left Bank

Paul Hudson writes:
Assault on Cardigan Road - were you there?


Have you ever been battered by words?

If not you missed a great evening when Ian McMillan assaulted a packed
audience at the Left Bank last night. The pauses were far and few between so breathing became rather difficult especially when the laughter was taken into account. It was never ever a 'poetry reading' more a glimpse into the life and experience of Ian.

He took us all to places he visits and people he meets as well as some
special moments.

A lot of people were tired at the end of the attack, tired from laughing so much on this whirlwind tour of everything and anything.



(More to follow on Talking Myself Home!)

Poetic Lingo from Headingley

A compère's response. Doug Sandle writes:

“Ladies and gentlemen of this pulsating parish of Headingley, we are proudly presenting a sumptuous stanza of pronouncing poets, a veritable versified evening of lingo-istic largesse to both edify and delight us!”

 So the introduction might have been if instead of the Heart café we were at the Leeds City Varieties.  However, I opened with the more conventional "it's my pleasure and privilege to be your host", which on paper seems boringly meaningless, yet in truth it was a genuine pleasure to see a ‘full house’ of expectation and to be able to compère a line- up of poets that in each of their own ‘genres’ were truly talented.

Having outlined in my introduction some of the rich and remarkable poetic historical precedents for the poetic lingo of Headingley and Leeds 6 - for example the likes of Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, Martin Bell, Geoffrey Hill, Ken Smith, Tony Harrison and George Szirtes as well as the contemporary buzz of poetic activity and talent taking place in Headingley and district - there was much for our present gathering to live up to. However from the very first warm up ‘prologue session’ that featured a ‘melody’ of expressed feelings, metaphors, images, and human experience and which included three generations sharing a bed, a rather smelly and badly behaved cat, and an account of unrequited ‘commercial’ love in a call-centre, there was no chance that our performers would not live up to such a provenance. Indeed they presented a varied and deeply rewarding experience that genuinely engaged an attentive and very appreciative audience.

The scene having been set, what followed in individual presentations by our poets was a moving, exciting and thought provoking evening that really did stir the imagination, move the soul, lift the heart and engross the mind. Different styles of poetic lingo, different cadences, some more cerebral than others, some more physically engaging, some more challenging, some more revealing and some more poetically fragile - but in their sum total came together to leave a satisfying sense of lingering engagement with what it is to be creatively human and to genuinely communicate with honesty, depth and a commitment to both the power and subtlety of words and both spoken and unspoken language.

While my compère’s  concluding ‘thank –yous’  to Paul Adrian, Lis Bertolla, Fatima El-Jack, Jasmine Joseph, James Nash, Lucy Newlyn and David Tait also look rather stilted on paper, they were nonetheless heartfelt, as quite evidently were those of the audience as expressed in their  final enthusiastic applause and expressions of gratitude.

Afterthought 1:  There was a special added poignancy to the evening with the visit of Lucy Newlyn, whose poems were so evocatively moving regarding her childhood upbringing in Headingley/Meanwood, and who was visiting for the first time the reconstructed Bennett Road School where she had attended as a child.

Afterthought 2: While my stated preference for expressions of appreciation by clapping to be at the end of each section or individual reading, rather than after each poem, was particular appreciated by some of the poets, there was a different view expressed by others, especially by some of the audience enthused by the energetic and thought provoking and gifted presentations by the Lawnswood school poetry slam winners. I think there are different ways of responding to different kinds of poetry and styles of presentation that evoke differing kinds of audience engagement and hence response. However, I accept that it might have been better to have allowed the audience responses to evolve naturally and to emerge as appropriate in response to such different genres and to the different cultures of performance, on the one hand, and of a more literary presentation on the other.  So I hold up my hand on that one.

    

Richard Wilcocks adds:

Lucy Newlyn, who is Professor of English Language and Literature, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, wondered whether she had ever been taught in the room which is now the café in the HEART Centre, and which was once part of Bennett Road School, at which she had been a pupil. She had moved on to become a pupil at Lawnswood School in the days when it was still in the old buildings, now demolished, and was anxious to greet two present-day pupils - Fatima El Jack and Jasmine Joseph - who must have felt a little overwhelmed at the idea of so much creative talent originating in Headingley, with themselves as the current representatives of it.

Overwhelmed or not, they were brave and confident next to the high-flown guest poets: Jasmine delivered her lighthearted Potty Park and Fatima her Motherland (all learned by heart) effectively, receiving much applause and a few whoops as well. 

Below, Doug Sandle, Jasmine and Fatima, David Tait, Lucy Newlyn, Paul Adrian: