Superheroes at Spring Bank - with Poem Powers!

Sally Bavage writes:

James Nash and Jo Ward      Photo by Sally Bavage

Well, I could be describing the staff and visitors who worked so hard with a class of six-year-olds to get the Headingley LitFest poetry workshops and final performance assembly ready for the whole school, staff and a fantastic turnout from 40 visiting parents/grandparents to enjoy.

James Nash, local poet, has a superpower himself – the ability to get strong commitment, enthusiasm and joy from children in schools all over Leeds. Here, he was supported by Rachel Harkess, LitFest volunteer, both working with an age group new to LitFest. They got each of 27 young children, nervous and excited, to use a microphone with confidence to read out excerpts – or micropoems - from their original writing. Which they had typed out themselves to make reading out loud easier. At six. Crumbs. As James said: “I have loved working with my youngest-ever group. Their writing is less developed at this age, so the work involved more discussion and the ideas really flowed.”

Headteacher Michael Brawley was delighted that the poetry workshops “engage children with their learning and give them a love of poetry.” A sentiment heartily supported by the office staff, including office manager Miss Bonner: “Such a good thing; it inspires their creative writing which we then see them tackle more and more.” Lunchtime supervisor Juliette James agreed “it was lovely to see the poems they produced.” And as Margaret Ellis, on reception, commented: “We see the mundane every day, it's so good to see their imagination and confidence take off.”

Jo Ward, class 2 teacher, was also really really positive about the effect of the work that takes off way beyond the classroom. Like a superhero. Many of her class now wanted to be writers or poets, and they had felt privileged to be working with “a real writer” who taught them something about the process of writing.

Supermarket Trolley Man. Popcorn man. Diamond Girl. Chuckleman. Wolf Girl. And these superheroes had intriguing superpowers – shooting biscuits into milk, microwaving their enemies, capes that give you superspeed. Some funny, some beautiful, some expressive but all highly imaginative writing.

“This has inspired my son to use poetry and language; we have spent the past week writing limericks every day at home.” “This has made the children really interested in poem power. And, oh, the confidence with using the microphone!”

And to the children: “Best bit?” “Writing my own poem.” “Reading in front of the whole school.” “I enjoyed it all.”

Now that really IS super.

Spring Bank Primary School, Spring Road, Headingley, Leeds LS6 1AD

Friendly Fire on Saturday 5 March

This is one of a series of previews for the forthcoming LitFest, which begins on 29 February and ends on 22 March. Look out for the printed brochure, which is coming soon.

Bill Dean, recently married, along with his mates, decides to join a local Pals Regiment.  “All pals together”.  The lads go through basic training, ship off to France and find themselves in the hell of battle at the Somme. In the chaos Bill gets lost, or does he desert? And if he did, who will execute him?

Sound Company are seven men from the Lawnswood School Community Choir.  They tell the story script in hand, with songs from the First World War. Friendly Fire is based on a 1970 play, Killed July 17 1916 by the once-renowned Coventry Theatre in Education Company.  The performance will be followed by a discussion of the issues.

8pm  St Michael's Church Hall, St Michael's Road

£3

A Song for my Father - Ian Clayton Tuesday 8 March

This is one of a series of previews for the coming LitFest, which begins on 29 February and ends on 22 March. Printed brochure is on its way!

Tuesday 8 March
Ian Clayton
A Song for my Father 
Partnership event with Leeds Libraries

                             Photo by Richard Kenworthy

What happens when you only know your dad when you're a young boy and then, one day, when you are middle-aged, he phones to say he'd like to see you again before he dies? In the space of one year, Ian Clayton makes a voyage around China, America and his father to ponder the familiar questions: Is blood thicker than water? Does it matter who teaches us so long as we learn? How do we let go of something that we never really had in the first place? With characteristic storytelling, wit and good humour, Ian Clayton reflects on a lifelong search for a father figure, skipping across the generations to weave a tale of how we relate, what we do with what we've got and what happens when some things just don't work out the way we want them to




Ian Clayton has written on subjects as varied as the environment, homelessness, jazz and rugby league. His stories are about making sense of where we come from. He is a keen advocate of local libraries and often writes and speaks in support of the important role they play in community life. In his spare time, Ian likes the odd pint or two in tap rooms. Join us to hear Ian talk about his book A Song for my Father.

6.30pm  Headingley Library
Free

Andrew McMillan and Linda Black - Monday 21 March

This is one of a series of previews for the coming LitFest, which begins on 29 February and ends on 22 March. Printed brochure is on its way!

Andrew McMillan

In 2015 Andrew McMillan’s poetry collection physical won The Guardian First Book Award, the first to be awarded for a poetry collection. It also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. With three previous pamphlet collections published by Red Squirrel Press, his work also can be found in anthologies such as The Salt Book of Younger Poets, Best British Poetry 2013 and Best British Poetry 2015. Recent single poems can be found in the London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Guardian andModern Poetry in Translation. Andrew describes his recent work as attempting to look at masculinity, the body and intimacy in a straightforward, unadorned way. Born and brought up in South Yorkshire he currently lectures in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University and lives in Manchester.

Linda Black

Linda Black is a poet and an artist. She received the 2004/5 Poetry School Scholarship and won the 2006 New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry. The beating of wings (Hearing Eye, 2006) was the PBS Pamphlet Choice for spring 2007, when she also received an Arts Council Writer's Award. Her collections are Inventory and Root, (Shearsman 2008 & 2011) and The Son of a Shoemaker (Hearing Eye 2012). The latter consists of collaged prose poems based on the early life of Hans Christian Andersen, plus the author’s pen and ink illustrations. It was the subject of a Poetry Society exhibition in 2013. Her collection Slant is due for publication in spring this year.  She is co-editor of Long Poem Magazine.

Monday 21 March
7.15pm  Headingley Library, North Lane
£6

LitFest 2016 preview - Sankakei

This is one of a series of previews for the coming LitFest, which begins on 29 February and ends on 22 March. Printed brochure is on its way!

Sankakei is a trio featuring poets Amina Alyal, Oz Hardwick and musician Michael Graham. The group formed whilst working with York-based Japanese drumming group Kaminari Taiko, in a dynamic performance of Japanese style words and music built upon the thundering beats of taiko drumming.       

In September 2013 the opportunity arose to play inside The Maze, a temporary art installation in Wakefield. Due to space limitations, Amina, Oz and Michael devised a more intimate show, and Sankakei – the name is a contraction of ‘sankakukei,’ the Japanese word for triangle – was born.  On an Eastern Breeze is a piece for two voices and the stringed instruments, koto and shamisen. Sankakei have performed it in bars, boats and chapels, as well as in more conventional concert settings. It has been released as a CD (Catchment Recordings), and the poems have been published as Close as Second Skins (IDP, 2015), earning Amina and Oz a place on the shortlist for Best Collaborative Work in the 2015 Saboteur Awards.

Sunday 6 March 3pm

House event          Book now with Richard Wilcocks : 0113 225 7397
Free entry, with collection - humanitarian relief for refugees

Great Songs Great Poets - in partnership with Leeds Lieder

Lieder? Songs? Poetry? It’s all the same kettle of fish, really, a fact recognized at Great Songs Great Poets on Saturday evening at the Heart Centre in Headingley, where the emphasis was on performance. Call it a recital if you like. It’s a word which might please them down at Leeds Lieder+, the co-organisers with the LitFest, and to whose founder, Jane Anthony, the whole thing was dedicated. It had everything necessary to transform the kettle of fish into a perfect, satisfying bouillabaisse, with not just smart chefs but a subtle blend of themes: war and peace, love and death, the well established and the fresh and new.

Jonathan Fisher, Richard Wilcocks, Kimberley Raw, James Berry, Hollie-Anne Bangham, Jane Oakshott                             Photo by Ian Garvey

Headingley resident Jane Anthony, who died so tragically last year, would have approved of this event, which was originally intended for autumn last year. At a meeting which turned out to be final, she agreed a general outline of a programme with LitFest secretary Richard Wilcocks in July 2014, and it was this draft which was taken up in 2015 in meetings between Wilcocks and Jonathan Fisher, who is pianist-in-residence at the University of Huddersfield and staff pianist at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He is also an honorary fellow of the Association of English Singers and Speakers. The result was a programme of singing and speaking which included some Shakespeare along with the relatively new and the relatively old.

The singers - all of them from the RNCM - could be described as “relatively new” because they are students there, but they performed like seasoned virtuosi, with great maturity and with a force which would impress on any stage or in any grand theatre. Music which was sometimes tricky and difficult gave them few problems. Baritone James Berry was particularly masterly in delivering War Scenes , composed in 1969 with the dedication “To those who died in Vietnam, both sides, during the composition: 20 – 30 June 1969”.  Ned Rorem used texts from Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, a memoir of his time as a nurse in the American Civil War, and Whitman’s words, describing the grotesque sights and sounds in a field hospital, were very effectively conveyed to the audience (an intimate one, around tables) through Rorem’s modern recitative style. The diction was excellent, the voice rich.  The same voice became more lyrical when it came to Let Us Garlands Bring, five songs by Gerald Finzi taken from various Shakespeare texts. Mezzo Hollie-Anne Bangham was strong on the diction too, dealing with Robert Schumann’s Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart as if she had just spent the last six months in some conservatoire in Germany. Die Sängerin sang mit echtes Gefühl. Her tones were mellow, just right for the story of the Queen of Scots who lost her head, and her engagement was intense. Abschied von der Welt was especially moving. Soprano Kimberley Raw really lived the songs which resulted from a collaboration between Benjamin Britten and W H Auden, as if she was singing operatic arias, and she gave the audience a really passionate finale with three of the pair’s Cabaret Songs. The last one of the evening was Funeral Blues, well known to anyone who has watched the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

Throughout, the songs were interspersed with poems. Each of the singers also read (or rather performed) these beautifully. Hollie-Anne read Emily Dickinson’s Nature, the gentlest mother and Sara Teasdale’s There Will Come Soft Rains (with Kimberley), and James read a series of Shakespeare lines (from Hamlet, Richard II and Measure for Measure) alongside Richard Wilcocks.

The two readers representing the LitFest were Richard Wilcocks and Jane Oakshott. Richard read an extract from Whitman’s Specimen Days (The Battle of Chancellorsville) and delivered passionately a poem famous in the United States since the nineteenth century and made even more famous because of its misuse in the film Dead Poets Society – O Captain! My Captain!  He explained that this was dedicated to Abraham Lincoln by the poet, but that some people thought it was originally written after Whitman had finished Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He also read W H Auden’s emotive Refugee Blues, written in 1939 but with an obvious relevance to the world of today. Jane brought a considerable amount of dramatic finesse to both Sonnet 129, bringing all its nuanced feelings to the fore, and to the last letter written by poor Mary. For this Jane entered completely into the role, even beginning with a line of the original French, becoming a royal woman trying to come to terms with the fact that she was just about to meet the headsman. Tears glistened in plenty of eyes.

Jonathan Fisher was an adept accompanist for all the pieces, and we owe him our sincere thanks and appreciation for all his work rehearsing with the singers over in Manchester and generally sorting the music out. Hopefully, there will be another occasion in the future when the participants can get together again. 

Audience comments

A nice varied programme with splendid performers. It was especially good to hear a   trio of very capable young singers, and I’m sure that we shall hear more of them.         Altogether a fitting memorial to Jane Anthony too.

An enriching evening’s entertainment that provided a rare and valued opportunity to relate to poetry in the context of music and a lovely tribute to Jane Anthony.

A thoroughly enjoyable concert/recital – splendid singing and an interesting variety of interpretation and performance. Difficult to specify a single performance – all were most professional and I hope will have very long and successful careers. Thanks must also go to the Arts Council and its support.

While Leeds has a reputation for fine music, such quality doesn’t often filter down to

 the suburbs. I hope there are many more great performances by trained singers as 

at this evening’s event.

As I’ve not come to any previous Leeds Lieder performances – I found this 

informative and mostly enjoyable. Good to have my cultural life extended. I was 

sitting near the front and thought maybe I would have heard the words of some 

Lieder more clearly from further back. Perhaps that is because I am not used to this 

medium. The Shakespeare were wonderful - the Schumann fascinating (I may now 

read them) and the Britten caught you ‘unawares’ – at time amusing and the pianist 

was a treat to listen to as an accompanist.

A challenging evening themed around war and death! A real commitment from all 

the performers who presented a high standard of musical and poetic talent. Good to

 experience something different!

An enjoyable programme with uncluttered presentation of poetry, not overpowered

 but enhanced by the simple musical accompaniment. Excellent performances.

Intimate event. Singers sang with great emotion in a largely somber programme! 

And readers showed great expression. Just enough ‘lighter’ content to lift tone of the 

evening!

Much enjoyed the mix of composers esp. cabaret turns. We should have a few more 

recitals like this in the wide open spaces between Lieder festivals. PS. We didn’t need 

the printed copies of Death, though the words of some soprano songs didn’t come 

over clearly.  

A script or copy of the translation (in English) of Schumann’s Final cycle of songs for 

voice ….(1,2,3,4,5) would have been useful as I don’t speak or understand German. 

Enjoyed the reading of Auden’s Refugee blues by Richard Wilcocks -

 read/performed with real feeling and understanding. A surprising evening!! Not

 quite what I expected. 

I wasn’t sure what to expect but I thoroughly enjoyed the evening –some outstanding 

performances, both reading and singing. Hope the HLF put on more events like 

this: very different!

Classical and classy, this programme was top notch. Personally, I find it very hard to

 follow words that are sung and would have been glad if more songs were prefaced 

by Richard and Jane reading the text out first. Or else, another time, the texts can be 

given in the programme. However, an evening of brilliant talent.  

Pianist, singers and readers all excellent. Loved the Britten sings. The subject matter

 was really dark mostly – a bit of lightness would have been welcome – but lovely 

evening.

Very good quality of singers and poetry readers. Not very happy about the theme

which was about death in the first half and a bit gruesome. Second Half – execution 

of Mary Queen of Scots, Refugees. Problem of words in Cabaret songs.

Great singing by all and lovely readings. Particularly enjoyed Finzi and cabaret 

songs. Jane was very vivid and really brought her scenes to life!

Great performance of Britten especially and Jane Oakshott was a fantastic reader

Singers were technically brilliant. Pianist was great. Refugee poem and male 

reader were fantastic.  

Wonderful to see young singers given an opportunity to perform.

Very enjoyable esp. Schumann and Britten.

 Amazing performances by all. I particularly enjoyed the music.

A most appropriate and intimate venue for chamber music.

Great evening. Thanks!