A Pint For The Ghost

I don’t know why, but I had to start it somewhere: Pulp, poetry and the pits.

2011-05-31T11:21:00.001-07:00

With Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday celebrated in style last week (amongst other things, the occasion was marked by a tribute poetry anthology,The Captain’s Tower), there’s been much talk of the links between poetry and song. I think it’s hard to convincingly argue that song lyrics are ever truly poetry – writing in 2007, Sam Leith put it nicely:

“Poetry and song - as the two main rhythmic uses of language - have the same origins and much in common. But that's not to say they're the same thing. We share an ancestor with the chimpanzee, and we both like bananas, but we're not the same creature.”

That doesn’t mean that lyrics can’t be poetic though, or inspire poetry. For me, it’s not Dylan who makes me want to pick up my pen but those Sheffield lads, Pulp. One dismal day in 2010, I was listening to ‘The Last Day of the Miners’ Strike’ (on repeat, staring at the ceiling), and marvelling at the sense of timelessness it conjures up:

Kids are spitting on the Town Hall steps & frightening old ladies.
I dreamt that I was living back in the mid 1980s,
People marching, people shouting, people wearing pastel leather.
The future's ours for the taking now, if we just stick together.

I was born in Sheffield in 1985, so I knew nothing about the strike when it was happening. But growing up in north east Derbyshire, its effects were always there. One of the most interesting (and frightening) things about the strike to me is its enduring legacy, how recent it still feels. In some ways, it’s still being reinvented: a few years ago, I watched a film about the strike that blew my mind. It was set in Orgreave – where one of the most iconic and controversial clashes of the whole strike took place in 1984 - and it was a documentary. In 2001, conceptual artist Jeremy Deller staged a re-enactment of the events of that fateful June on location in Orgreave, featuring 800 people, many of whom were ex-miners or police involved in the original encounter. The documentary I saw follows the re-enactment process and makes for powerful viewing; ex-miners playing the part of police officers, Medieval battle specialists eyeing the fray nervously…

I was so fascinated, appalled and touched by the different passions the re-enactment had awoken (in the people who took part and even in me, too young to remember those horrific events) I knew I wanted to try and write about it. Listening to Jarvis Cocker singing ‘The Last Day of The Miners’ Strike’ one rainy Friday a year later, I knew one day I would.

The sequence of poems I finally produced, ‘Scab’ is at the heart of my new pamphlet, ‘Lie of the Land’, published this week by The Wordsworth Trust. ‘Lie of the Land’ features poems written since the start of my residency here in Grasmere and started off as an attempt to ‘map’ my immediate surroundings in the Lake District. Instead, I found I was drawing on memory (and fantasy at times): my body was in Cumbria, but my mind was in South Yorkshire. If you’re interested in the result of that process, you can get copies of ‘Lie of the Land’ from The Wordsworth Trust online here.

Fittingly, this week sees the release of an excellent documentary about Sheffield’s music scene, with PULP at the centre of it. ‘The Beat is the Law' – Fanfare for the Common People’ is a film by Eve Wood, which charts how Sheffield bands like Pulp and Longpigs went from Steel City to headlining at Glastonbury, reaching the dizzy heights of pop stardom. Wood’s film is as much about how the political climate of the 80s shaped the music scene in Sheffield as anything else. In short, I like to think it’s about how the world changed Sheffield and how Sheffield changed the world… It features Richard Hawley, Jarvis Cocker, Mark Brydon, Russell Senior and many others and is sure to be worth a watch.

As Dylan might have muttered, the times have been a’changing. Or to put it the way Jarvis did:

‘87 socialism gave way to socialising,
So put your hands up in the air once more, the north is rising...

21st Century Messengers

2011-04-19T09:00:00.001-07:00

A lot of the time when I’m writing ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, I have my head in the clouds, looking for supernatural anecdotes, or idly searching out chilling and bizarre tales like this one.

Of course, you could say this airy-fairy tendency comes with the poet’s job description (along with our famous love of pubs, a myth which this blog works tirelessly to dispel) – poetry often seems like the realm of the liminal. In a soon-to-be-published issue of the fine Lancashire magazine CAKE, I can be found arguing (mostly with myself, it’s true) that, when I sit down to write a poem I’m intimidated by “…a desire to make sense of a world that’s just too big to fit into the poem… I think that’s why it’s sometimes easier to talk about the negative world, to things that didn’t happen, that we didn’t say or do, to the grand ‘nothing’ behind it all…”

Hanging up my other-worldly hat for the evening, I thought I’d mention a few hot-off-the-press publications that manage to do what I never can: tackle the world headfirst and make us look at things a bit differently. (NB. This isn’t intended to be a review of any kind – I only inflict those on the poor, unsuspecting readers of Poetry London – but a round up of what I’ve been reading lately that’s given me pause for thought.)

‘For The Messengers’ (Donut Press) attempts something bold and exciting – turning the news into art. Of course, there’s a well-established, strong tradition of poets commenting on global events – something that the current Poet Laureate takes in her stride – but Jude Cowan’s book does this in a way that’s entirely distinctive.

Working for Reuters news agency, Jude began writing poems in early 2008 in response to the varied daily news footage she was archiving, and continued throughout what turned out to be a turbulent year. As the project gathered momentum, Jude says she “became more aware of the recurring journalistic tropes – preparation, aftermath, conference, presser, interview, protest, funeral – and more conscious of the role played by selection and editing…”

The resulting poems are varied and often startling, whether considering economic crises, key global elections or natural disasters, sometimes from a more abstract standpoint, sometimes contextualised within the day to day work of archiving. Whether she’s writing about Japanese fertility rituals or death in Iraq, Jude Cowan manages to uncover both the humanity and horror behind the footage, and does so with gentle wit.

You can read some samples from the book here (including one of my favourites, ‘Germany: Zoo Christmas’. Highly recommended.

While I’m about it, a browse through the rest of the Donut Press catalogue reveals a wealth of other fine collections from the likes of Tim Turnbull, Tim Wells, Wayne Holloway Smith, Annie Freud, A.B. Jackson and others which all have their own distinctive worldliness… Go on, grab a Donut. You know you want to.

Alongside ‘For the Messengers’ I’ve been reading two debut collections from Mike Watts and Joe Hakim (who also perform together and host Hull’s ‘Write to Speak’). Mike’s book ‘Coming to a Street Near You’ (CreateSpace) is refreshingly in yer face; often hard-hitting, often funny, always frank. ‘The Decline of the Fishing Industry’ is a particularly beautiful poem: moving without being overly-sentimental. In it, the narrator brings his son to a place he used to fish, only to find that now he’s ‘fully-mortgaged / and hygienic’ , everything has changed here too: ‘he sank his net / Amongst bergs of polystyrene.’ Mike’s got a great eye for detail, whether describing dogs with ‘ice-pick teeth’ or eyelids ‘mussel-shut’. According to one reviewer, it’s a collection that’s ‘like the dodgem cars at Hull fair’ (having taken that out of context, I have to clarify that means it’s fast-paced and exciting, not something that makes you throw up!)

Just as Jude Cowan’s book offers a sideways look at the process of commentary, ‘Coming to a Street Near You’ has something to say about what it is to be a writer – in ‘The Slot’, Mike talks about ‘spilling your guts at the feet of strangers’ and elsewhere, mentions the guilt of wanting to turn everything into a poem.

Joe Hakim’s ‘No Light / Might Escape’ (Night Publishing) also engages subtly with what it means to be an author, whether of fiction, or your own life and how the two often overlap in surreal and surprising ways. Truth is always stranger than poetry.

From parodies of social networking sites (‘What’s On Your Mind?’) to encounters in a bar at the end of the world (‘Last Orders at the Apocalypse’), these are slant reflections on how bizarre our existence is – none of them heavy-handed. The theme of writers’ guilt is back again in poems like ‘Assignment’. Our obsession with the virtual world (what the writer Douglas Coupland would call ‘deselfing’) is sent up too: in ‘EPIC FAIL’, the narrator remarks of facebook:

‘Although I maintained some semblance of social interaction by posting increasingly obscure nonsensical status updates on my wall – example: REALITY IS NOTHING MORE THAN THE SPIN CYCLE ON A WASHING MACHINE – I had more or less alienated all my virtual friends along with my actual ones…I was the perfect consumer. I could share my burdens and burn-out with an audience of disinterested minor acquaintances.’

I defy any of you not to nod in recognition…

Like ‘Coming to a Street Near You’, the book’s rooted in Hull, but ‘No Light / Might Escape’ casts a line out to a parallel universe - as befits the title, a reference to the essence of a black hole. The collection mixes poems with short stories and the effect is arresting, a ‘genuine jig on the end of life’s rope’ as one review puts it. You can fit an overall narrative to the book if you’ve a mind to but, like all the truest stories, it isn’t a linear one. Incidentally, in the interests of preserving ‘A Pint for the Ghost’s’ beer credentials, I’m compelled to say that one of the prose pieces in the book contains the best description of hair of the dog I’ve come across…

Finally, I wanted to mention the intriguing prose book ‘Edgelands’ by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape), but Robert Macfarlane goes over it at length in The Guardian here, so suffice to say I was hooked.

I’ll leave you with a far more elegant reflection on the relationship between the ‘real’ world and the poet’s world than I’m capable of. It’s from Charles Simic, writing for the New York Review of Books blog:

“As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open. Am I claiming, you are probably asking yourself, that most things that happen in poems are not true at all? Far from it. Of course they are true. It’s just that poets have to do a lot of time-wasting to get to the truth… I strain my ears and stare at the blank page until a word or an image comes to me. Nothing genuine in a poem, or so I have learned the hard way, can be willed. That makes writing poetry an uncertain and often exasperating undertaking. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but wait.”

Well then. I’m off. This window won’t stare out of itself…

The Hungry Ghost

2011-04-14T14:02:00.001-07:00

As the stalwarts amongst you may recall, ‘A Pint for the Ghost’ was first inspired by old legends that describe leaving milk on the hearthstone for ancestors or spirits. The question of how ghosts sustain themselves seems to be a vexing one: some maintain that they can’t eat solid food at all.

Eastern traditions, meanwhile, often celebrate the notion of the ‘hungry ghost’. In Buddhism, these are a metaphor for unfulfilled desires or emptiness – beings driven by intense emotional needs. In Tibetan Buddhism, they are described as having "mouths the size of a needle's eye and a stomach the size of a mountain". This is a metaphor for people trying (and failing) to fulfill their illusory physical needs.

On May 18th, I’m going down to London to taunt any hungry ghosts out there at an event that promises to be a feast for all the senses: ‘We Eat Poets!’ isn’t a morbid sacrificial ritual (I hope) but “an eclectic mix of poetry, excellent food and related performance and participation, surrounded by extraordinary antiques and architectural relics from London’s past.”

The venue is bonkers and beautiful LASSCo in Vauxhall, a den of curiosities which I visited in March. The room that will host the event is full of strange bits and pieces, all for sale. Walking into LASSCo is an experience in itself – you’re constantly assailed by strange and lovely things, hanging from the ceiling, inviting you to sit on them (er) or decorating the walls. It’ll be a great stage for a night of theatrics.

I’ve written some new material loosely based around the theme of ‘hunger’ to perform and will even be taking part in a quickfire poetic challenge on the night itself… If the poetry isn’t enough to tempt the Londoners / dedicated travellers amongst you, perhaps the prospect of food from Cannon & Cannon is. Either way, you can buy tickets here, before they’re all devoured (sorry, I’ll get my coat).

I’ll leave you with a short story from ‘A Pint from the Ghost’ that’s sure to put you off your dinner. It takes place on Gibbet Moor, in Derbyshire, close to Brampton and concerns a hungry visitor…

“Long, long ago – and no-one’s quite sure when – there was a tramp who wandered up from Brampton to the only cottage on the moor. A widow lived there, and he sneaked in through the door to beg for food, for he’d had none in weeks. He had a grisly face: a thin, black beard, a hat that he’d pull down so that you barely saw his bright blue eyes.

He found the widow frying bacon in her kitchen and he pleaded for a scrap. She said she had no food to give him, bid him go, she said there’d be no supper for the likes of him. That set him in a fearful rage, and the smell of the food was maddening to one who’d starved so long. He knocked the widow to the ground, then seized the frying pan and poured the scalding fat into her mouth.

They found him living in her house, the widow’s body in its twisted posture on the kitchen floor. The policemen set a gibbet up beside the cottage door. But rather than kick the stool away, and spare him with a quick death, the townsfolk strung him up to starve, or else to die at the hands of winter cold, or wind and rain. It took three dreadful weeks, and all day long the tramp would howl and scream. The sound was so piercing that it carried over the hill to Chatsworth House, disturbed the Duke himself from sleep. If you go walking over Gibbet Moor, you’ll hear his howl, and blame it on the fearful gale. Or else you’ll see that dark shape moving on the skyline, tell yourself it’s nothing but a swaying tree, tell yourself it isn’t drawing closer, following you home.”

Black Dogs

2011-03-21T06:16:00.001-07:00

Ever since Winston Churchill famously likened his struggle with depression to a ‘black dog’, the term has entered our culture as a popular metaphor. In 1992, Ian McEwan published a brilliantly sinister short novel, ‘Black Dogs’, playing on their totemic significance. Thanks to the marvels of technology, you can read an extract here.

As Megan McKinley, writing for the intriguingly named Black Dog Institute puts it:

“In modern parlance, we let sleeping dogs lie; we go to the dogs or die like a dog; we dog someone at every turn, or compete in a dog-eat-dog environment. And when we put a name to our depression, increasingly it is that of the black dog, lurking behind us, or clinging
tenaciously to our backs.”

The term has far older supernatural connotations, of course. In British folklore, the black dog is a nocturnal apparition, often said to be associated with the Devil, and its appearance was regarded as a portent of death. In my old stamping ground of East Anglia, some still fear the Black Shuck – a large creature with malevolent flaming eyes (or one eye, or eyes that change from red to green, depending on what takes your ghostly fancy), otherwise known as the ‘Doom Dog’.

These terrifying beings are often supposed to appear in mist or on lonely stretches of moor (as in the legend of The Hound of the Baskervilles, famously encountered by Sherlock Holmes), but almost always at night. In ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, I wrote a poem about Derbyshire sightings of Gabriel Hounds, who bring bad fortune to all who see them:

Each time I read a cloud’s dark countenance
or watch two crows stitch out a warning
in the clear blue air, I can’t forget

the Bradwell miners, bound for home
without a lamp to guide them, night as heavy
as the earth they’d toiled beneath all day.

They heard the long grass stir. They stood
dead still. A beam, sharp as a skinning knife
shone from the moon down to the hill

and carved the huge shape of a hound; a dog so quick
they’d barely taken flight before they heard it bay
and felt its harsh breath at their heels. They ran

full speed with burning lungs until the dawn,
until the daylight overtook them and they went,
grim-faced, down to the mine

to meet their certain fate. Remember them
as you lie in bed, when the empty house
has fallen still, and you stare through open curtains

at a starless sky, imagine it’s a dog’s
black flank that passes you, bound
for somewhere else tonight.

(from ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, tall-lighthouse, 2010)

Imagine my terror as I lay in bed in Grasmere the other night, listening to the silence outside – the A591 quiet at last, the lights off in all the other houses – and, through the shadows on my floor, saw the shape of a sleek black dog stalking towards me.

Luckily, the spectre leapt on to the bed and proceeded to lick my ear enthusiastically. It wasn’t a Hell Hound at all. It was Bell, my 6 year old rescue whippet. Bell comes from Animal Rescue Cumbria near Kendal, a charity supported by one of the Lake District’s most famous residents, Alfred Wainwright. She’s a real character and fast-attempting to become the most cultured pooch in the village, having attended several poetry readings with me around the country.

In fact, Bell was pretty chuffed to get her first ever poetry review after accompanying me to ‘Word Life’ in Bradford recently. She was even more chuffed to be described as ‘gorgeous’…

I can’t imagine a less sinister creature than the one who curls up next to me on the sofa, trots around on the fells or sits in on Dove Cottage poetry workshops. But, none the less, whenever there’s a full moon over Grasmere, I find myself eyeing her nervously as she pads around in the darkness… Well, actually, I don’t. But I can’t think of a suitably chilling conclusion to this blog. Perhaps I’ll let Bell have the last word. Here she is, windswept in Shetland.

It’s Nice Up North

2011-03-07T13:27:00.001-08:00

In 2006, John Shuttleworth (alter ego of comedian Graham Fellows) went to Shetland to prove his theory that, the further north you go, the nicer people get. On a bleak day in February 2011, I found myself on Unst, the most northerly part of the Shetland Isles enjoying a blissful solitude – nice or not, there aren’t many people to be found on the islands once you’ve left Lerwick. Grasmere began to assume the status of a bustling metropolis as I thought about it, staring out to the Muckle Flugga lighthouse.

Muckle Flugga is now an automatic lighthouse, but was manned until the 1970s. What a singularly lonely existence it must have been, surrounded by sea and seabirds, operating a single beacon in the darkness every night. No job for the superstitious. In fact, it would be surprising if tales of the supernatural didn’t abound on Shetland. The isles’ Viking history, combined with their isolation, make for thriving legends and I was interested to find out more about rumoured encounters with the UK’s most northerly spirits.

On our first day, en route from Lerwick to Unst, we stopped to visit Windhoose, reputed to be the most haunted house on Shetland. The wind tried to crumple us as we left the car and set off up a balding hill (there are few trees on Shetland – the weather scours them all off). Windhoose was roofless and bare. I’ve often heard derelict houses compared to toothless mouths, but Windhoose was more like a mouth curled into a snarl. Fenced off on all sides, it stood glowering over the road below. We clambered over the barbed wire. I once read somewhere that animals are particularly sensitive to spirits and was anxiously eyeing Bell the whippet as we crept towards the house. Bell sniffed the ground. We waited, hearts in our mouths. Then she crouched down and pissed all over the grass. A collective sigh of relief was breathed, except by Bell, who was scanning the field for rabbits and yowling about the cold.

I’d expected Windhoose to be empty, but the spaces inside it that had once been rooms were crossed with planks of rotting, green timber, a detritus of stones and smaller logs carpeting the floor. It was as if what had once been the house had caved in on itself. There was something strangely still about the interior, barely protected from the weather as it was. Above the ruined front door, a worn-down coat of arms. We ducked into the main chamber and flinched to see a sheep’s spine, attached to a length of twine and hanging from a stone lintel, turning in the wind. It should almost have been a comfort – the presence of evidence that connected to the human world – but something about the way it had been arranged and hung there made us flinch. It was enough to send us hastily back down the slope, Bell lagging behind, sticking her nose into the grass.

But by far the most supernatural experience I had on Unst was the result of an entirely natural phenomenon. True to form, I failed to appreciate the beauty of what I’d seen at the time. And, true to form, I went back to the cottage and wrote a poem about it:

Aurora Borealis

How typical of us: thinking that pale green corridor
cutting across the blacked-out Baliasta road
must be a searchlight, hunting us.
We clutched each other as we never would again

then skittered towards home, imagining we were
extras in a B movie: the Shetland hills huge UFOs,
or the whole island a slumbering beast whose back
we clung to, this the beam of his mate’s eye.

We looked down from that slender radiance
to watch our steps along the track,
and missed the sky’s brief fire, the North
lighting its own touchpaper and standing back.

(Helen Mort, February 2011)

I’d like to dedicate that poem to Gordon, Penny, Hunter, Wilma, Edna and all the other remarkable people who were so kind to us during our visit to Unst. The sage John Shuttleworth was right – it really is nice up north.

Travelling ghosts

2010-12-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

There's a chill running down my spine as I sit down to type this... It isn't ghosts that are to blame, however, but Cumbrian snowfall and a broken boiler. Nonetheless, I've had the privilege of reading in a number of haunted places recently: a few weeks ago, I performed a selection of pieces from 'A Pint...' in the grand setting of Marlborough College, the school attended by Betjeman, Nick Drake and others. Students murmured about strange sightings in the library, a ghostly child in the grounds and other stories, but I was too busy staring at the imposing buildings to take much of it in. Besides, never mind the opulent grounds of the school, the highlight of my trip to Swindon's environs was encountering the world's weirdest roundabout.

On November 20th, myself and seven other poets arrived at sleepy Aspinall Street in Mytholmroyd to take part in an exciting project organised by Andrew McMillan. Our destination was Ted Hughes' childhood house, a black brick terrace that now has a thoroughly (and surprisingly) modern interior. The day-long event, 'Crossing Borders' saw four poets with Lancashire connections (Mike Barlow, Sarah Hymas, Clare Shaw and Steve Waling) and four with Yorkshire links (myself, Joe Hakim, Ben Wilkinson and Sally Baker) divided into pairs and challenged to produce new, collaborative poems exploring the idea of landscape and its borders. I was paired with Mike Barlow and we set out on a muddy walk with some trepidation, only to find ourselves quickly agreeing that we'd like to write something that explored the way a hill seems different depending on which side you approach it from. Our piece adopted the voices of two mountaineers, one from the east and one from the west who meet at the summit of the peak and swap routes.

The day produced a striking variety of collaborations, which Sarah Hymas has described much more articulately here. I also had high hopes of startling a ghost or two from the Aspinall Street house where some of us spent the night. After muttering about ouija boards, we went to an excellent real ale pub instead and stumbled back after last orders for a night's sleep, undisturbed by the spirits of Ted and Sylvia... Now there's a surprise.

On Sunday, I performed at Maryport literature festival and a trip to the Senhouse Roman Museum surely unsettled a centurian ghost or two: the venue was right next to the museum with its variety of relics and murals.In between visiting these ghostly locations, I've also recently been to Peterborough to perform at 'Speakeasy' in the Brewery Tap. You couldn't ask for a better organised evening of poetry, or a more responsive, friendly audience. A big thank you to Mark Grist and everyone else who made the evening such a pleasure.

Later this week, snow permitting, I'll be appearing at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden on Thursday as part of a tall-lighthouse event, then for the fantastic 'Wordlife' in Bradford on Friday night at the Theatre in the Mill, Sheffield Saturday night and Sheffield again on Monday.

The last month has been dominated by a bit of exciting news from Picador: myself and nine other poets (including Alan Buckley and Ben Wilkinson, also published by tall-lighthouse) have made the shortlist for the inaugural Picador Prize for a first collection. The shortlist was mentioned in The Guardian here. You can read poems by all the shortlisted entrants here.

Now, back to building a fire and trying to keep the chill at bay! If all else fails, there's always the whisky...

The decay of lying: a pseudo-scientific blog post

2010-10-24T03:58:00.001-07:00

‘In modern days, while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute.’

So claims Oscar Wilde in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), a typically witty account of the ‘proper aim of art’, which he describes as ‘the telling of beautiful, untrue things.’ Recent and inevitable news of cuts to the Arts Council budget, might prompt us to question anew what art is really for, where it fits into the rest of our fragmented society. Commenting on Wednesday in response to the announcement of a 29.6% funding cut, Arts Council Chief Executive Alan Davey said: 'These cuts will inevitably have a significant impact on the cultural life of the country. There will be some tough decisions…’. But what does the term ‘cultural life’ really mean and where do art forms like poetry fit in?

(1.1 A bit of science)

In his new book ‘The Master and his Emissary’, psychiatrist and writer Ian McGilchrist looks at the segregated hemispheres of the human brain and their asymmetrical relationship. To vastly simplify one aspect of his infinitely complex argument, McGilchrist suggests that the left and right hemispheres deal with incompatible versions of the world: the left specialising in quantitative information, individual components and the right in holistic connections, intuition and metaphor – the domain of poetry. For all the left hemisphere depends on the right for its functionality, the information it deals in is highly-prized: ‘we live in a society where the indirect, the difficult, the implicit are not valued.’ (McGilchrist, October 2010)

The author relies on a rather neat metaphor himself when he says:

‘The left hemisphere, though unaware of its dependence, could be thought of as an 'emissary' of the right hemisphere, valuable for taking on a role that the right hemisphere - the 'Master' - cannot itself afford to undertake. However it turns out that the emissary has his own will, and secretly believes himself to be superior to the Master. And he has the means to betray him.’

In an interview for ‘Poetry’ magazine, McGilchrist outlines his ideas in relation to poetic expression. Metaphor is of key importance to society and the brain (indeed he characterises it as ‘the only way of understanding anything’) and yet it is marginalised. We live in a society that prefers instant gratification and quantifiable information (which we can constantly access through technology) over intuitive thinking and, as a result, poetry is bound to be marginalised too.

It’s an interesting theory which, in turn, provokes questions of what we mean by ‘truth’ in society and in art. It’s clear that the intuitive, deep truths of poetry are different from our social concepts of literal , informative truth: the facts, just the facts and nothing but the facts. Information versus knowledge. So how should we approach ‘truth’ within an individual poem? Is Wilde right when he argues that we should shun ‘careless habits of accuracy’ and realise instead that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’? In early November, Jacob Polley and I will be leading a weekend workshop here at The Wordsworth Trust about poetic fictions, whether poetry can do justice to reality through the unreal, though who knows what conclusions we’ll reach!

(1.2 A bit more science)

Positivism, of course, holds that statements are senseless if they cannot be verified or falsified. However, outlining his theory of falsifiability, Karl Popper famously asserted that unfalsifiable statements are ‘unscientific’ but not without relevance (having cultural or spiritual meaning) and equally a theory cannot be guaranteed true by past corroboration, even after rigorous and repeated testing. For his part, McGilchrist suggests that the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world at a given time changes the nature of the world we attend to and there is no single way of thinking which can be proved true. All the same, science ‘purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object, onto which our feelings and desires are later painted…’

A traditional approach: science first, poetry later. We’re familiar with the idea of art as embellishment, as ‘alternative’, entertainment in its truest sense. When we speak about ‘truth’ in art, we aren’t applying the exacting standards of the positivist and its assumed that we’re dealing with a far more tenuous concept. Yet McGilchrist writes that science ‘is just one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such causes does not make it truer, more real, closer to the nature of things.’

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently in relation to Richard Dawkins’ book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ and his remarks on the relationship between science and the arts. My article ‘Re-weaving the Rainbow’ is a review of three recent poetry collections by Jo Shapcott, Pascal Petit and Patrick McGuinness. I’m no scientist, to state the bleedin’ obvious. My selective, biased response to some of Dawkins’ points is very tentative, just as my understanding of neuroscience is limited (expect a possible blog entry from the far more qualified poet Niall O’Sullivan about McGilchrist’s book at some point!).

(1.3 A bit less science)

Nonetheless, it seems to this amateur that the questions McGilchrist raises in ‘The Master and His Emissary’ about ‘truth’ are fascinating. They strike at the heart of what the domain of metaphor and, by implication, the domain of poetry is for at a time when cuts to arts funding make is ever more paranoid and defensive about what it is we do, what poetry is ‘for’. In some ways, he argues that the issue doesn’t even need answering, such is the significance of metaphor to human life. But doesn’t poetry (and art) thrive on marginalisation? Rumours of demise are always greatly exaggerated and, like it or not, the best work usually comes unbidden and asserts itself against the odds – not an argument for increasing the odds, of course.

In the midst of this, I’ve been cheered this week to attend a series of different events that variously demonstrated to me how poetry is alive and vigorously kicking in all its forms (a sestina, I’m told, delivers a lethal karate chop). On Tuesday, I was a guest reader on Felix Dennis’ ‘Did I Mention The Free Wine’ which saw an audience of hundreds gathering outside Windermere to hear several hours of poetry and, er, neck free booze. The next evening, performing with the very talented Luke Wright, I read at Hull’s ‘Write to Speak’: a vibrant and exciting spoken word night fast making an impact with its warm atmosphere and mix of new and established voices – I definitely recommend a look at their programme for the coming months. Friday saw the gala of the second Manchester Poetry Prize at MMU, a generous award for new work won this year by Judy Brown and Michelle Kern, proving that good poems will out.

(1.4 A slapdash conclusion)

And perhaps poetry is even more tenacious than we often think. To quote McGilchrist a final time, ‘poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex as language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning.’ In other words, better get used to it - there’s no bloody chance of getting rid of us.

Below: the author, engaged in a highly scientific experiment about the optimum consumption of Budweiser (picture by Andrew Marshall)

The green grass of home

2010-10-06T09:07:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow morning, the UK will wake up to National Poetry Day: an annual celebration of the written and spoken word. Across the country, there’ll be edible poetry cakes (better than inedible ones, no doubt), limericks and readings a’plenty, and the South Bank Centre will host a daunting ‘thousand poem challenge’.

Each year, the day has a different theme and this time around, it’s the deceptively simple idea of ‘home’. Deceptive because we all instinctively know what ‘home’ is, but its a far more elusive concept than it first seems – home can mean almost anything; a long-abandoned birthplace, a landscape, a set of four walls. To many, home is more to do with people than place.

I often find I have a clearer sense of being away from home than ‘at home’. Returning to the town where I grew up this weekend, I encountered my dad in the kitchen, grimly muttering the words of Robert Frost: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Well, who can blame him…

Likewise, anywhere can be a home-from-home: just ask the barman of my local pub. Home is where the heart is, after all… Daljit Nagra, Dreadlockalien and others have all been blogging about personal notions of home and homesickness on the National Poetry Day website and you can read their thoughts here, including Ian McMillan’s ‘home as a haven’, Jo Shapcott’s ‘home, a baggy old coat’ and my meditation on mountains, Larkin and whisky.

Ironically, I’ll have little chance to put my feet up at home throughout October: you can catch me on the road at a series of forthcoming readings, notably Hull Truck Theatre (with Luke Wright) on October 20th and at The Low Wood Hotel with Felix Dennis on October 19th – did anyone mention the free wine? Next month; Peterborough, Cambridge and a pennine poetry extravaganza…

Meanwhile, tomorrow afternoon from 1-4, The Wordsworth Trust will be hosting poetry readings every hour, with readers including Mark Ward, Penny Boxall, Andrew Forster and myself. We’ll be exploring the theme of ‘home’ within spitting distance of Wordsworth’s own homely cottage… Do drop in if you’re in the area!

Ghost train

2010-09-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

Having recently ordered the Selected works of the American poet Galway Kinnell, I'm finding myself drawn back to the same poem over and over again, unable to let it be. Appropriate enough: the piece, 'Fire in Luna Park' is about a terrible accident in a theme park and its haunting ending resists clear resolution.

The poem hinges on the idea of 'crying wolf' - the narrator relates how neighbours of Luna Park would often be kept awake by 'the screaming produced by the great freight machines', until 'it seemed the same big-lunged screamer cried out in mock terror / each night across the water, and we hardly heard and took no notice'. I was reminded of the children up the road from my house in Chesterfield, whose screams as they played in the garden would momentarily terrify me, assuming some accident, until I became so accustomed to them I almost blocked them out. Anyone who has ever held on for dear life and screamed on a rollercoaster or been on the kind of ride Kinnell describes that 'holds its riders upside down and pummels them until the screams pour out freely' will know that half-laugh, half-scream that fairgrounds produce.

In this case, it's the Ghost Train, jerking 'through dark tunnels / here and there suddenly lighted by fluorescent bones' that carries its passengers through the ground into a true nightmare, which we presume to be a fire:

'...last night the shrieks of actual terror pierced through our
laughter, and kept at it, until we sat up startled.

The Ghost Train, now carrying seven souls and the baffled grief of families
has no special destination,
but must worm forward, twist, backtrack, looking for forgetfulness,
through the natural world,
where all are born, all suffer, and many scream
and no-one is healed but gathered and used again.'

It's an ending typical of Galway Kinnell's lyrically dexterous style, an almost apocalyptic note that would seem heavy in the hands of another writer, but retains a certain lightness here, though the words themselves are incredibly poignant, appropriately weighty. There's something horrifying about the juxtaposition of fairground glee and mortal terror, an awareness of how the macabre often lurks behind the faintly ridiculous.

Kinnell is a singularly compassionate poet and his work recalls the poems of Robert Frost to me - a poet who he addresses a homage to in his 1964 collection 'Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock'. 'Fire in Luna Park' achieved for me that kind of rare memorability that, paradoxically, has the reader going back to the poem over and over as if they're scared they might forget its essence.

It set me thinking about the way a poem can immortalise its subject or, to take a bleaker view, keep the subject trapped in a kind of purgatory, separated from the real world, occupying the mirror-world of the poem forever. In April this year, I published my pamphlet 'Parallax' with Forest Publications; a series of poems about bidding leave and the secret lives of inanimate things, dedicated to the memory of Justin Wand who died in April 2009. You can never adequately capture somebody's memory in a poem, so I suppose the best the poet can do is to reflect on that - the poetry book becomes a kind of strange, Pandora's box of memories. In a sense, it could be seen as a selfish act, creating a character within the confines of the poem to keep them there, a dull imitation of the person you once new, a kind of Coppelia.

As Seamus Heaney says - far more eloquently - in an interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, memory occupies a strange place in poetry:

"You end up dropping back through your own trapdoors, with a kind of 'they-can't-take-this-away-from-me' feeling. There's a paradox, of course, since the poems that provide the recompense are the very ones that turn your private possessions into images that are - as Yeats once said - 'all on show'. Yet a poem saves as well as shows."

For some far less eloquent (but hopefully interesting) musings, you can buy my new pamphlet, 'Parallax' here.

The Last Barman Poet

2010-09-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

I'm growing mildly concerned that 'A Pint for the Ghost' has been a bit heavy on the 'ghost' recently and a bit light on the 'pint'. Relish that sentence - it's probably the only time you'll hear me utter the word 'light' in relation to beer drinking. To redress the balance, I considered going for a heavy session down at Tweedies, (which, incidentally, has my nemesis, Old Rosie on tap again today) but instead I thought I'd plug a fantastic ongoing pub-themed poetry project, organised by Ross Sutherland.

'The Last Barman Poet' is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the piss-poor poem Tom Cruise performs at the end of the 1981 film Cocktail, gyrating his way around the bar and proclaiming the superior quality of his Sex on the Beach. If you were lucky enough to escape that episode the first time round, you can watch Tom in all his Youtube glory here. Ross has been inviting poets to contribute homages, covers and remixes of the Cruise poem for a special 'Homework' event in London on September 29th.

The idea for the event originally came from the Aristocrats joke. To quote Ross' site, this is "a (pretty unfunny) joke that US comedians use to show off their stagecraft. The joke itself is a test pattern; it’s down to the comic telling the joke to add their own brand of flair, and hopefully make it funny. The organisers of Homework wondered—is it possible to create an Aristocrats for poets? A poem so bad that the writer would have to use all their ingenuity and talent to make it worthwhile?" Only the evening of the 29th will tell...

So far, the project blog has seen an enticing array of poetic cocktails, from poets such as Luke Kennard, Tim Wells, Niall O'Sullivan and many, many more. There's even a Last Barman rap. I couldn't let the opportunity to write about a bar pass me by, so I've contributed a few verses too. My piece is about the Last Poet Bar, narrated in the voice of a grumpy Yorkshire drinking establishment. No idea where the inspiration for that could have come from.You can read my efforts here. And if you're in London on September 29th, you can attend the Homework extravaganza!

What are you waiting for? The bar is open...

Brief ghosts

2010-09-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a gift from a friend, I recently became the proud owner of Tony Walker's spooky volume 'The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District', published back in 1999. As well as being a tireless listener (some of the stories related in the book were 'hours old', he claims, at the time of writing) Walker is highly attuned to the connection between landscape and legend; an idea that formed the starting point for 'A Pint for the Ghost' - Derbyshire and Sheffield ghost stories are very much a product of the industries that once thrived there. In the introduction to the Ghostly Guide, Tony sums it up neatly when he says:

'To our ancestors, the world was mysterious and haunted by spirits of all sorts. On a bright day in a city centre, that might be hard to believe, but when you hear the wind in the trees on a dark night, or see the moonlight on a frozen lake, the Otherworld is much closer."

Ghosts are a symbol of the unseen and therefore unknown - those things that could be explained rationally, but invite a compelling alternative story. To me, ghostly tales compliment our understanding of the world in the same way that poetry coexists alongside science - offering a parallel narrative, relying on intuition rather than seeking to offer absolute truth.

Nonetheless, 'The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District' is a very grounded book which acts as a useful guide to the local area too, encouraging the reader to tour around lesser known spots on the periphery of the lakes. It offers a comprehensive catalogue of legends and popular stories which takes in the whole region. Flicking immediately to the section marked 'Ambleside', I was disappointed to see that Grasmere has one of the most anti-climactic ghost stories you could imagine, reduced to a few terse sentences:

"Grasmere is a pretty and much visited village which has a ghost story from one of the local pubs. Gerald Findler records this from the middle 1960s. He says that some locals were in a pub in the village talking about ghosts. A stranger joined in the conversation. The locals said 'We've been talking about ghosts, but we don't believe in them.' At which point the stranger vanished."

Of course, I immediately threw my book aside and started to wonder which local pub this fleeting exchange might have taken place in... It seems like an appropriate excuse to investigate all the bars in the vicinity, and I've already embarked upon this labour of love, visiting Tweedies at the weekend with Andrew and Chris to sample the Grasmere Guzzler beer festival. A good time was had by all (we think) and Friday's beer didn't stop us completing the beautiful 11 mile Fairfield Horseshoe on Saturday.

We started at Rydal Hall and walked the reverse of the route suggested by Wainwright, who waxes lyrical about the beauty of the round, having a sly dig at fell runners along the way: "Fellrunners will complete the whole round in less than two hours without seeing anything other than the track before them. I admire those who can perform such feats. I envy their fitness but not their achievements; racers and record breakers seem to me to be out of place on the high fells. Mountains are there to be enjoyed, and enjoyed leisurely." That's told us runner types, then. The image at the top of this post, taken half way through the route, is a kind of ghost in itself: the pictured scene never actually happened - Andrew took photos of me and Chris separately and this image is a composite. Mind-bending stuff...

We were lucky with the weather on Saturday and enjoyed unusually clear visibility. I've not experienced that too often in the hills since July! Returning to 'The Ghostly Guide...', Tony Walker manages a stirling defence of the Lake District's miserable climate, observing tactfully "parts of the County do indeed see a little rain. There are also blankets of fog that shroud the moors, blizzards that block mountain roads and sea mists which hang over the coastal marshes. For spotting ghosts, this kind of climate is a distinct advantage." I repeated that to myself last night as I huddled at an Ambleside bus shelter in the driving rain, wondering if the whole street was going to float away in the deluge.

The Badger Bar and the Grey Lady

2010-08-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

Arriving back in misty Cumbria after a whirlwind fortnight in Edinburgh is a shock to the system, albeit one softened by climbing Arthur's Seat yesterday afternoon. Arthur's Seat gives a fantastic vantage point from which to map the city - sea to the East, industrial fringes to the West, blackened spires and the walls of the Castle marking a bullseye in the centre. If I were to chart my own map of Edinburgh city centre, the focal points would be The Banshee Labyrinth, a series of sofas where friends were kind enough to let me crash and many (too many) pubs. There'd also be a set of more abstract peaks and troughs sketched in to reflect how mixed our performances of 'A Pint..' were. Last week, British Theatre Review gave the one-woman version of the piece a pleasing 3 stars, though they would have preferred a little more theatricality. By far the best accolade as far as I'm concerned, however, is making it into a Top 5 Shows To Get You Tipsy. Couldn't ask for better than that...

Back in Grasmere, I'm already being assailed by ghostly tales. In the taxi on my way back from the station, we passed the Badger Bar, a mere five minutes from my house towards Rydal. The driver, who had previously been regailing me with stories about horse dressage, suddenly became animated. He began to tell me about a time some twenty years ago when he'd been working in the pub, putting emulsion on some panels in the dining room, when he glimpsed the ghost of an elusive 'grey lady'.

As he painted, he became aware of a sudden chill in the room that seemed to gather and pool around him, almost like a blanket. Looking behind him, he glimpsed a woman's head and shoulders through the glass doors to the room beyond. At first, he assumed it was one of the girls who worked in the pub - "simple lasses, good for pot washing but not much else. I went to tell her off for being where she shouldn't be..." - but as he made towards the door, the figure vanished as soon as it had appeared. Had it been one of the 'pot washers', they would have had to go through the external door, but the figure's disappearence was soundless. He switched all the heaters on in the room and consigned the vision to a 'daft moment'. In fact, he didn't think of it again until years later, when guests in the bar also reported seeing a stately female figure in the very same spot...

I didn't have much time to dwell on his story, because he was off again: "See that there hedge? I planted that in 1976...". I might have to pay a visit to the Badger Bar before too long. Purely in the name of research, of course. I'll report on any spirits who try to steal mine.

Being honest

2010-08-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

I've long been interested in the idea of what 'honesty' really means in the creative arts, and whether Rita Ann Higgins was right when she said that the poetic truth necessarily involves lying. Earlier this year, Horizon Review published an article of mine on the subject of Craig Raine's approach to truth, which you can read here. Given my preoccupation with white lies, I was immediately drawn to the title of D.C. Moore's play, 'Honest', which is being performed at The Fringe between now and 23rd August. Having settled in a side room of Milne's bar, Hanover Street, the audience is abruptly addressed by Dave (Trystan Gravelle), a disenfranchised city worker, clutching a bottle of Budweiser, with the memorable opening : 'I think I might be a bit of a cunt'. The monologue that follows is by turns witty and almost heartbreaking, an understated, frank account of what it means to see the world you're used to as if through the side of a glass tank. 'Honest' is made more powerful by its forthright delivery, and the audience are entirely drawn in. D.C. Moore's play has been well-received in the press and deservedly so - it was so excellent I went to see it twice in one afternoon. Interestingly, one reviewer likens the writing to Conor Macpherson, my favourite playwright and the inspiration behind some of 'A Pint for the Ghost'. Certainly, there was something of Macpherson's unflinching portrayal of lives without purpose in the writing, though I felt this was a subtly different brand of dark comedy. The premise that the whole play is in fact part of a bar room conversation is certainly something reminiscent of 'The Weir', and reflects Dave's character: part-outsider, part confidente. A must-see event for anyone in Edinburgh, without doubt.

Of course, when it comes to honesty, one man's truth is another man's bias. It was with mixed feelings that I read The Scotsman's lukewarm review of 'A Pint for the Ghost' last week. The review highlights some of the problems of our setup (a noisy bar, hardly suited to ephemeral metaphors) but largely focuses on the show's 'insubstantial' nature and lack of focus which is, in a sense, rather the point: 'A Pint for the Ghost' was conceived as a conversation, a set of exchanges in a lonely pub after hours, not a play with a clear narrative arc. The reviewer appears to have approached the piece as standard theatre (even curiously referring to 'male and female leads') rather than a poetry and storytelling event, intended to create an atmosphere in which the audience realises that our stories and lives seldom have a clear resolution, a neat narrative. Ghosts, after all, are a symbol of unfinished business. I'll leave judgement on whether or not the show has been effective in evoking that to our audiences. They don't have long - I'm fast approaching the last two night's of the show at the Edinburgh festival and what has been a fantastic learning curve. The Fringe is a merrygoround and I'm certainly feeling mildly sick and dizzy, though whether that's the Fringe's fault or the result of discovering Jaegerbombs, I wouldn't like to say... Watch this space for news of what we're planning for 'A Pint..' post-Scotland; there's talk of haunted venues in Leeds, Hull and beyond!

Auld Reekie

2010-08-11T03:04:00.000-07:00

Down a dark, dark street, in a dark, dark pub, there's an even darker basement where Scottish ghosts go to drink the night away. If you're brave enough to venture down there between the 12th and 17th of August, you'll find myself and Simon Perkins, clutching whisky glasses and telling far-fetched tales of steel city spirits, tap room poltergeists and murdered widows.

I arrived at the Edinburgh Fringe on Friday afternoon and was immediately chucked headlong into the festival maelstrom, with performers flyering every street corner and large swathes of the city centre turned into beer tents for the month (oh, what a drag). As a Fringe virgin, everything seems rather bewhildering at first, but I'm fast learning that it's an advantage not to have a clue what's going on around you: the scale of the festival is frankly mind-blowing otherwise.

'A Pint for the Ghost' is here as part of the PBH Free Fringe, founded by Peter Buckley Hill in 1996. The Free Fringe has a fantastically supportive atmosphere, with performers watching each others' shows, helping with set up and even partially staffing the door – I'm immensely grateful to the stars and behind-the-scenes staff of 'The Head Girl, the Gap Year and Sue Ellen' who have always been on hand to help me lug chairs and tables around and dish out flyers.

Our venue is the brilliantly spooky Banqueting Hall, downstairs in the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street, a stone's throw from The Royal Mile. Inside, the Labyrinth is a maze of eerie corridors and, as 'Scotland's most haunted pub', hosts ghost tours several times a day. For the next 4 weeks, comedians, storytellers, cabaret performers and spoken word artists are taking over the pub's many rooms to host free performances. The verdict? So far so good: we've had pretty much full houses most nights and, apart from the odd glitch with the CD player or an over-enthusiastic smoke machine (which gave particular resonance to the line in my opening poem that mentions 'pubs still cast in smoke so thick you barely see your hand before your face'), our first three shows in particular went swimmingly.

Edinburgh seems like the natural home for 'A Pint...' after all. The city's winding, cobbled streets and dark gothic buildings are crawling with ghosts. Even in the daytime, as crowds surge over North Bridge and shoppers crowd Princes Street, there are still corners where you can feel a distinct chill in the air. Nowhere more so than the Banqueting Hall in darkness. Last night, the performance was interrupted by repeated banging sounds and, as we cleared up, we were accosted by a less-than-sober contortionist, who told us that the ceiling had partly collapsed on him as he performed in the space last year...and he was definitely blaming ghouls instead of faulty architecture.

As befits the festival, I've managed to sustain a few monumental hangovers, ably assisted by the mind-altering properties of Tennent's lager. I've also taken in a range of other spoken-word shows, loosely connected by the theme of death: Literary Death Match, Tim Clare's Death Drive, Molly Naylor's 'Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You' and the fantastic Dead Poets. All highly recommended to anyone who is in town for the Fringe. There's also been plenty of whisky window shopping, running up hills and more pints of Brewdog's aptly named 'Trashy Blonde' than I care to recall. Amongst all that, I also found time to walk into a lampost in true, slapstick style, whilst reading a map. Living proof that, whatever audacious claims my show might make, I'm definitely not a ghost: ghosts don't bounce.

The Somnambulist

2010-08-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

I've often thought that the hills are a good hideout for ghosts - by night, the peaks behind Dove Cottage seem to guard their own secrets. One of the paintings in the Wordsworth Trust's current exhibition, 'Savage Grandeur and Noblest Thoughts' depicts a passage through Langdale; glowering mountains on either side, a woman riding alone through the desolate landscape... walking alone in the hills towards nightfall isn't for the faint hearted, particularly if you're partial to a supernatural tale.

It's no surprise that the Lake District, with its sombre peaks and deceptive, tranquil waters, is home to some legends similar to the ghost stories from my native Peak District: there are tales of phantom armies marching over Hellvellyn, a drowned village at Thirlmere much like the one at Derwent reservoirs in Derbyshire, and countless tales of miners run amok. In Whitehaven, the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould was moved to report in the 1800s:

"I know a man who is haunted by two spectres. He has shaking fits, during which his eyes wander around the room; then he sees the ghosts. He was a miner, and is said to have half cut through the rope when some men against whom he bore a grudge were going down the pit; the rope broke and they were dashed to pieces. Their ghosts haunt him night and day, and he can never remain long in one house, or endure to be alone night or day."

Neither is it surprising that some of these legends stirred Wordsworth's poetic imagination. Wordsworth is credited with inventing the fateful tale of Emma and Sir Eglamour at Aira Force, near Ullswater, detailed in his piece 'The Somnambulist'. Emma was the promised bride of a knight, Sir Eglamour, who sailed abroad and was gone for months without any word. Half mad with worry, Emma would sleepwalk every night, down to a bower beside the waterfall of Aira Force (part of Aira Beck) where she had last seen her lover. She never met a soul in her sleep and would return to bed.

One night, however, Sir Eglamour returned and, passing through the ravine, saw his bride's white-robed figure in the moonlight there. He rushed towards her on the precarious ridge where she stood. His touch woke her immediately and in her terror she tumbled into the torrent and was swept onto the rocks below. The finale to this tale of lost love is predictably bleak, with Emma's body retrieved, and a whispered 'assurance of love and fidelity' to Sir Eglamour before she died in his arms and he in turn died in mourning.

Though the story is reputed to be one of Wordsworth's own rather than a tale inspired by legend, there have been various reports in the years that followed of visitors becoming lost of trapped in the rocks and chasms around Aira Force, only to be led back towards the light by a white-robed figure. It seems ghosts who die for love are usually not malevolent...

Banshees, of course, are not reputed for their good tempers, and next week sees 'A Pint For The Ghost' heading to the terrifyingly-named Banshee Labyrinth in Edinburgh to perform at the Free Fringe. The show will run between Saturday 7th and Tuesday 17th August, with a night off on the 11th. Do come and have a pint if you're in town for the festival....

Now you see them, now you don't

2010-07-23T01:14:00.000-07:00

Three Invisibles

The sea is invisible
under a sun-scatter of light.

What are you invisible under?
From what hard foreland of being

do I fail to see you?

I could put a boat
into that baffling glitter

that would tameit, that would slide
on the veriest water...

Inland, the mountains

withdraw

behind a beautiful blue haze.

I could walk through that haze

and reach those mountains,
I could measure them

with legs and lungs.

Is it your beauty

that comes between me and you?

Is what strips me

to my unwilling self

your closest shelter?

What wrong place am I in
who, of three invisible things,

love most the one

no voyage may take me to,

no journey will ever take me to?

Norman MacCaig, June 1964

I've been getting used to the idea of 'invisibles' over the past few weeks in Cumbria: all too often the mountains are hidden behind cloud that's not so much a veil as an overcoat. But, as MacCaig says, they can be measured 'with legs and lungs', and running in this landscape is always a comfort as well as a test.

Last weekend, I was performing at Latitude Festival in Henham Park, Suffolk and was thinking about that other sense of invisibility that MacCaig invokes in 'Three Invisibles'. The audiences in the poetry tent - which had a stunning line up this year, from the legendary John Cooper Clarke to Blake Morrison and Jacob Polley - were variable and almost tidal, sometimes a huge crowd at the back, sometimes a scattering of sleepy, hungover teenagers slumping on cushions at the front. One the one hand, that made it quite difficult to plan a set. On the other hand, I realised, we're always rehearsing for a kind of invisible audience anyway. There are always people in your mind when you practice and perform your poems who aren't really in the audience, who perhaps never have been or will be, but who shape your reading all the same.

Those 'significant others' are often there when we write too, and they can be a healthy influence as long as they aren't too much of a censoring, editorial presence. They're often the people who, ironically, probably wouldn't give a toss about our poems if they were here - old lovers, greater poets, disapproving relatives... - but they have a hand in them, like it or not.

However many 'invisibles' were in the tent at Latitude (insert jokes about invisible poetry audiences here), the festival was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, with highlights including Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborne's mesmerising midnight storytelling by the lake. You can see a photosynth of me doing some poems from 'a pint for the ghost' in the poetry tent by clicking here. Note the er, stylish black dress and army shop wellies combination...

I'm now preparing to take 'A Pint...' to Edinburgh in August, where I'll be performing at the PBH Free Fringe from 4th-16th August in the Banshee Labrynth, including a special 'Utter Ghouls' event with the excellent Tim Turnbull on August 13th.

Lonely as a crowd

2010-07-12T14:46:00.000-07:00

Tom Jones is making a cameo appearence at Latitude festival this year. An octopus predicts the football scores with barely-compelling accuracy. Evidently, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Perhaps such strange but riveting happenings explain why 'A Pint For The Ghost' has been so eerily silent in recent months (so long, in fact, that I'm not sure the use of 'recent' is justified).

An alternative explanation for more rational followers: I've had a busy six months, having recently been appointed Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria and moved halfway across the country to take up this exciting new post. The hills of the Lake District are an inspiring setting for any writer, but I've been particularly intrigued to learn that Wordsworth's former house, Dove Cottage, was once a pub. In fact, ale houses figure prominently in local history - apparently Samuel Taylor Coleridge's son, Hartley (who lived just up the road from my current house) met his end in a ditch after a long night at The Nag's Head. Hartley, himself a fine poet, was frequently found sleeping by the roadside after one too many at his local. A ghost after my own heart, though I'm relieved to find the road back from nearby Tweedies bar is an easy one...

Since my last posts, 'A Pint For the Ghost' has been on the road, with performances including the sold out London Word Festival and a trip to Hull and back for the North Lincs Art Festival last week. Simon Perkins (pictured above) and I performed in the intriguing surroundings of Cleethorpes Light Railway, which boasts the smallest pub in the UK and, we're told, will soon also be the home of the smallest sweet shop.

We're taking the show to the Edinburgh Fringe this year between 4th-17th August, where you can retreat from the clamour of the festival and hide away in the chilling Banshee Labrynth for ghost stories and poems from myself and Simon. Do pay us a visit if you're in town; the show will be free to watch.

More imminently, I'm off to Latitude festival this weekend to perform ghost poems and other material on the poetry stage and, of course, to hear the likes of Tom Jones and Sheffield's finest export, Richard Hawley.

Now that I'm installed in rainy Grasmere, expect some more frequent updates about poetic and ghostly goings on from The Lakes and beyond, including some new poems!

A backwards glance

2010-03-22T08:20:00.000-07:00

The latest Poetry Society bulletin fell through my letterbox last week and it contains a nice review of 'A Pint...' which looks at memory and 'the veil that separates the living from the dead'. The review concludes by considering the fine line between poignancy and sentimentality in a very interesting way:

'Each poem is a glass raised, tipped in the direction of who or whatever the poem is dedicated to, be it an ageing father or a long-dead industry. Yes, there's darkness here. But ultimately, the collection celebrates persistance, the reluctance to give up or give in, the reluctance to accept any ending.'

I've always thought that considering the past is never a chiefly sentimental act. The past so quickly becomes a different life that we can't feel close enough to it to get too doe-eyed. It's as if we're viewing someone else's life. Ghost stories are not simply an act of nostlagia, they're a way of re-inventing; both chilling and wistful.

Ken Head has recently reviewed the pamphlet online here for the flourishing blog Ink, Sweat and Tears. In his review, he also muses on some of the dangers inherent in re-imagining the past. Luckily, he's convinced by 'A Pint...':

'Though often darkly moving, her ghosts aren't sentimental. She knows well enough that, however precious, the past's a foreign country where Time's already been called and the poet herself has become a ghostly watcher...'

Of course, if ever there were a warning against looking backwards too much, it's Michael Donaghy's fine poem, 'Upon a Claude Glass':

Upon a Claude Glass

A lady might pretend to fix her face
but scan the room inside her compact mirror -

so gentlemen would scrutinize this glass
to gaze on Windermere and Rydal Water

and pick their way along the clifftop tracks
intent upon the romance in the box,

keeping untamed nature at their backs
and some would come to grief upon the rocks.

Don't look so smug. Don't think you're any safer
as you blunder through your years

straining to recall some aching pleasure
or blinded by some private scrim of tears.

I know. My world's encircled by this prop,
though all my life I've tried to force it shut.

Cheers m'deer

2010-02-08T08:07:00.001-08:00

I'm chuffed to be able to say that my poem 'Deer' has won the Norwich Cafe Writers' prize 2009, judged by George Szirtes and landing me a grand to spend in my fine local The Live and Let Live. * It's not a ghost poem as such, but it's certainly to do with hauntings of a kind. I'll be reading the poem on February 15th at the Norwich Cafe Writers' event, which gives us all a great excuse to visit The Fat Cat, Norwich's finest pub (in my humble opinion).

It's been a busy few weeks of readings in Greenwich, Covent Garden and elsewhere and with more to come: I'll be at Black's, Soho, on the 20th Feb with some other excellent tall-lighthouse poets. Lastweek saw me heading home for a local gig at Vox Sheffield. Reading some poems from 'A Pint...' in the bar, I was joined on stage by a sinister Rottweiler, dragging a chain behind it like Marley's ghost. It came up to the stage as I reached the last stanza of my poem, walked in front of me and settled down on the stage. Good job I wasn't reading this poem, or I might have thought it an omen:

Short Measure for the Gabriel Hound

Each time I read a cloud’s dark countenance
or watch two crows stitch out a warning
in the clear blue air, I can’t forget

the Bradwell miners, bound for home
without a lamp to guide them, night as heavy
as the earth they’d toiled beneath all day.

They heard the long grass stir. They stood
dead still. A beam, sharp as a skinning knife
shone from the moon down to the hill

and carved the huge shape of a hound; a dog so quick
they’d barely taken flight before they heard it bay
and felt its harsh breath at their heels. They ran

full speed with burning lungs until the dawn,
until the daylight overtook them and they went,
grim-faced, down to the mine

to meet their certain fate. Remember them
as you lie in bed, when the empty house
has fallen still, and you stare through open curtains

at a starless sky, imagine it’s a dog’s
black flank that passes you, bound
for somewhere else tonight.

* DISCLAIMER: I may actually use the money for useful things, like repairing my laptop, much as I could happily spend a fortune drinking real ale in The Live.

Poetry Book Society Choice

2010-01-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

I was over the moon to find out recently that 'A Pint For The Ghost' is the PBS pamphlet choice for Spring 2010. The choice is awarded to what the selectors think is the best pamphlet published each quarter and my work will be featured in the next PBS Bulletin. The pamphlet judges this time round were Helen Ivory and Jacob Sam-La Rose, so I'm glad that they found something to intrigue them in my weird tales of haunted houses, roughed-up pubs and late night whisky drinking.

The show and pamphlet have also been nominated for the Ted Hughes Award, a new prize launched in 2009 to recognise a public contribution to poetry. Nominations continue until January 22nd, so if you want to put in a good word for 'A Pint..', you can do so via the Poetry Society's website here.

This calls for a celebratory pint. Luckily, the Cambridge Winter Beer festival starts this weekend, as if to oblige me!

I'm not dead yet...

2010-01-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

...though you might be forgiven for thinking so. It's been far too long since I updated the blog and the explanation is sadly mundane: I've been without a laptop over the festive season thanks to chucking it on the kitchen floor at home (laptops, it seems, don't bounce).

Luckily, the new year brings exciting developments for 'A Pint...'. The show will be performed along with Robert Lloyd Parry's spine-chilling rendition of 'Oh Whistle...' in a suitably creepy warehouse location this March. The event is part of London Word Festival and you can find out more here. 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You' is without doubt my favourite M.R. James story, so I'm looking forward to being suitably terrified.

Before that, I'll be performing other new work at...

* Newnham College MCR (Cambridge) on January 22nd

* The Hold @ Oliver's Music Bar, Greenwich on January 28th (http://www.facebook.com/pages/clinic/131199806508#/event.php?eid=236876255788&ref=mf)

* VOX Sheffield on January 31st

...as well as working on getting the full recording of 'A Pint For The Ghost' finished, so I'll add some extracts to the blog as soon as they're ready.

Ghost Town

2009-12-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

Visual artist Issam Kourbaj and I are currently enjoying 30 seconds' fame after being featured in a Cambridge University Newsletter article on ghosts. The piece, which is also being printed in the Cambridge Evening News, is illustrated by Issam's haunting photos of the city, taking using camera obscura.

The article marks the publication of two ghostly volumes by Oleander Press, the first a set of supernatural tales from Jesus College and the second a collection of ghostly fiction by a former Chaplain of King's. It's a spine chilling read... though, I must confess, I'm not convinced by the article's claim that Christ's Pieces is a disconcerting place to be:

"On a misty November evening, with the perimeter trees masking the city’s landmarks, it’s hard to navigate the criss-cross of paths..."

The only times I've got lost on Christ's Pieces have been after a lock in at The Champion of the Thames, when I could have happily wandered round in circles all night...

Seasonal Terrors

2009-11-25T02:31:00.000-08:00

As the pubs begin their annual tirade, and the Saturday night streets of Cambridge fill with women in tinsel-trimmed boob tubes and Santa hats, it's time to face the long countdown to Christmas again. Scarred from too many winters working in pubs where 'Santa Baby' played on loop all day long and the stalwart drinkers started December with a seasonal arm-wrestling match (repeated with gusto throughout the month), I've usually had about enough merriment and mince pies long before Christmas eve.

Luckily, this year December also means the opening of Robert Lloyd Parry's show 'A Warning To The Curious' at the Corpus Playroom in Cambridge. He'll be re-telling one of M.R. James' finest tales from Dec 14th to Dec 19th, and it's not to be missed: http://www.nunkie.co.uk/

And, of course, no Christmas would be complete without a cynical marketing ploy, so I suppose this would be my cue to remind you that a copy of my pamphlet 'A Pint For The Ghost' might make a good stocking filler. To be frank, it'd make a rubbish stocking filler, being the slender volume that it is. But if you're as bad at wrapping presents as I am, you'll find it reassuringly square and unchallenging.

Or, if you prefer, you may be able to own 'A Pint...' on cd by the time Christmas comes to town. Neil and I spent this weekend recording the stories and poems from the show, with a huge amount of help from Ian Cartland, who is currently editing the material into a proper recording. If we're pleased enough with the results, you may soon be able to buy a CD featuring new music by Sam Genders, as well as my ramblings and Neil's sinister tones.

Finally, in the spirit of festive cheer (or seasonal boredom) I'll be doing my own ghostly 'Twelve Days of Christmas' here on the blog, posting a different, new ghost story or poem on the site every day between Christmas day and January 5th. So if you can't afford an advent calendar, look no further...

Go forth and be merry.

A tale told by an idiot

2009-11-18T03:24:00.000-08:00

Of all the quotes that abound about life being a stage, Shakespeare still gets the biggest thumbs up from me for saying:

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

On Sunday night, above a pub in Camden, I ended up strutting and fretting in equal measure. Having never even attempted to act before 'A Pint For The Ghost', I somehow found myself on a stage in front of a packed house, pretending to be a grumpy Yorkshireman.

How did all this sound and fury come about? Last year, I wrote a short play 'Careless Torque' about two climbers, trapped in a mountain hut. Here's a trailer for you. Imagine a gravelly voiced American bloke who makes a trip to the offy sound like the end of the world:

United by boredom in the northern town where they grew up, Niall and Jackson became partners in crime as teenagers - bunking school to climb on the rock outcrops of the Peak District. Ambition took Jackson to university, but kept Niall at home, labouring for cash and taking risks with extreme climbs. Now, with Jackson about to start a job in London and give up climbing for good, the pair have decided to reunite for one last adventure: a dangerous route on the north face of Mont Blanc. But when a blizzard traps them in a small mountain hut in Chamonix, they find themselves with nothing but each other, and their separate versions of a past that both have struggled to forget...

This would all have been well and good, except that, following an unfortunate turn of events, I found myself without any actors just three days before the performance.

My first thought was to go to Wetherspoons, find a pair of blokes propping up the bar and drag them to a London stage. But even the drunks in Cambridge sound posh, and my characters were meant to be northern. After a manic afternoon of bribery, blackmail, treachery and corruption, I was rescued by Simon Perkins, a fine actor with a good line in Barnsley dialect. Five minutes on the phone to him convinced me that I was talking to Ian McMillan. I was sold.But the cast was still only half complete. With the clock ticking, there was no other option: I'd have to play the part of twenty-something lazy and feckless Jackson myself.

Some of the exchanges between Niall and Jackson certainly took on a new dimension:

JACKSON: I’m freezing my bollocks off.

NIALL: What bollocks?

Indeed.

It's also worth pointing out that Niall (referred to throughout the play as 'a whippet) was being played by the tallest man I've ever met in my life.

Did we get away with it? Who knows. But we certainly had a laugh along the way, and I've learned a lot about performance which should feed back into 'A Pint For The Ghost'. You can read more about Sunday's shenanigans here.

To Brum and back

2009-10-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween to you. It's been a busy week in the life of 'a pint for the ghost'. On Tuesday, Neil, Patrick and I dug out the pint glasses and fake whisky again and headed up the motorway to Birmingham to perform at a book festival in the central library. Birmingham is full of spectres. According to the local paranormal investigations team, there's a ghost in the Three Tuns pub that likes to stroke people's hair. So it was with trepidation that we set up our stuff in a darkened theatre and got ready to take to the stage again.

There was definitely some sly spirit at work: the stairs seemed intent to leg Patrick up, and I kept breaking glasses. Despite my clumsiness, we survived and made an executive decision to use real beer on stage instead of the evil concoction Super Malt (which has been giving me nightmares since June). It was very interesting to perform in a less intimate venue than the setting of the Hotbed festival, and we discovered theatres are possibly not the natural habitat for the landlord and his ghosts. Nonetheless, it was a great experience. And none of us got our hair stroked.

On Friday, the pamphlet was launched in style with readings from some fine poets (including a pub crawl with Michael McKimm and Tim Wells' encounter with a goth on the bus) and music courtsey of Gareth's ipod. Ta, Gareth! And if that weren't enough excitement for one week, you can now listen to the landlord's stories from 'A Pint...' online at Short Story Radio. The tales are read by Keith Drinkel, who played Liz McDonald's boyfriend in Coronation Street years ago, as well as appearing in the comedy series 'I Didn't Know You Cared'. Find a dark room, light some candles, pour yourself a dram, and click this link.

Freaky Friday

2009-10-27T01:34:00.000-07:00

There's no rest for the wicked. Today, Neil, Patrick and I are off to Birmingham Book Festival to perform a scaled-down version of 'A Pint for the Ghost' in the West Midlands. Then, tomorrow, I'm making the long journey to Barnstaple to perform a few poems from the show, amongst other work, for Apples & Snakes. Luckily, I've got some good reading matter, having purchased a book with the intriguing title 'Michael Jackson's Beer Companion' in London on Sunday. I can't find any evidence that it's by the late pop star, but it makes for an interesting read...

The week finishes with the launch of my tall-lighthouse pamphlet 'a pint for the ghost' on Friday 30th (the night before Halloween) upstairs in the spooky Betsey Trotwood pub, Farringdon. Joining me on stage will be John McCullough whose fantastic tall-lighthouse pamphlet is appropriately named 'the lives of ghosts', Michael McKimm whose first collection 'Still This Need' is full of haunting poems, and Tim Wells, whose cracking poems need no introduction and often feature that fine institution, the pub. We'll be taking to the mic from about 8pm, so please come and join us at The Betsey.

If you can't make it for Friday's merriment, but you'd like a copy of the pamphlet, you can get one online here. But you can't get a pint online, or try one of the Betsey's famous whiskies, which make the perfect companion to ghost stories!

Whisky: a friend in need

2009-10-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

I was performing in Soho last night, and I asked the crowd whether there were any whisky lovers in the audience. It hit me immediately that it’s hard to be a true ‘lover’ of whisky, because I’ve come to regard it as a long-standing, shit friend - the kind who legs you up in the street, steers you into embarrassing conversations and nicks twenty quid off you on a Saturday night. The sort of friend you stay mates with all the same, because no matter how much they abuse you, they’re always there when you want a good weep.

Over the course of our acquaintance, my fair-weather friend has encouraged me to spend an hour trying to get into my neighbour’s house instead of my own (“but I DO live here officer!”), pushed me headfirst over a garden wall and convinced me that The OffSpring’s ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’ is an excellent choice of karaoke song. But whisky was also there the night I sat by a pitch black canal with no company except a moon as bright as a lamp, and the time I stood on Birchover rocks in the snow, so I keep reminding myself that we’ve had a good innings.

And, in defence, whisky isn’t the kind of mate who rings you up the morning after the night before to give you an earful about what a twat you made of yourself (wine can’t resist popping round to shriek: “but you MUST remember dancing on the pool table…”). It preserves a blissful nonchalance, almost as if nothing happened at all.

It was my friend Alastair who introduced us, at a party. He’d known whisky for years, didn’t have a bad word to say. It was only later that I found out people had been slagging her off: I heard some bloke called Logan Pearsall Smith (erm, obviously, I know a lot of people with names like that) muttering that “whisky has killed more men than bullets.” Which is a bit harsh to be honest. And according to Ralph Emerson “as a cure for worrying, work is better than whisky.” Well, that depends very much where you work, doesn’t it Ralph? I used to sit at the reception desk of the Chesterfield nightclub Livingstones, and I was definitely calmer when I was up in the bar after closing time with a Famous Grouse than when I was downstairs in the cloakroom having to confiscate lollipop lady signs, large inflatable dolls and traffic cones.

And without whisky’s steady inspiration, I wouldn’t have written this poem from ‘a pint for the ghost’:

A dram for all the men I’ve never drunk with

Sigmund Freud refuses every neat Ardbeg
or soft Caol Ila swirled beneath his nose,

but Byron knocks them back in one, then winks
and taps his glass against the lacquered tabletop.

Beside me, Marx is dishing out full measures
of the sherry-finished, twelve-year old Ledaig

but Larkin’s nothing but a bitter man, he says,
he’ll have no truck with spirits.

I’ve brought them to my local, in the snug
armpit of Sheffield, where the landlord

doesn’t bat an eyelid if my wise companions
sometimes slip their guard;

pass fingers through their glasses, take a shortcut
through a wall to reach the loos. It’s Sat’dy neet

he says, there’s stranger folk in here than these.
And, after all, he’s seen the likes of me before as well,

he gently lifts them out of corner seats
past closing time; the women who arrive alone,

who murmur toasts into the air, who raise a glass
to men who’ve never answered them.

* * *

And, just for a laff, here’s my whisky top 5. Arguments, additions, free samples from distilleries all welcome…

5. Bushmills summat-or-other – I had it once and it was nice but I don’t know much more than that.
4. Bruichladdich – unpronounceable and brilliant.
3. Macallan – what a winter walk in the park would taste like.
2. Caol Ila 1996– stinks of cigarettes. As many of my best mates do.
1. 10 year old Ardbeg – the real deal.

Definitely not making the list is a bottle of whisky I once drank in Chesterfield, which was to Bells what Blue Shark is to Red Bull, and was possibly called something like Rings…

Deepest darkest London Bridge

2009-10-12T02:35:00.000-07:00

Before I went to London Bridge to start the Shunt residency last week, a page from 'ghostweb' had already had me in stitches. 'Spirit energy', or the powers of photoshop? You decide...

Nonetheless, walking through Shunt lounge (pictured above!), the first sounds you hear are screams of terror from the London Dungeons. By night, the place is a gloomy maze of dark archways, eerie corners and green lights. Worse still, if you'd stumbled into the Vaults last week, you might have been ambushed by a terrifying group of apparitions: haggard, sun-starved, muttering. Yes, that's right, the most unearthly of species - poets in a bar.

The theme of our residency at Shunt was 'when no-one's listening', which strikes me as a ghostly topic in itself. The other performers all put me to shame with their inventiveness: poems featured an onslaught of paper aeroplanes, the voice of a drinker's liver, the subconscious mind of Dave and even the voice of God. My piece was about the things objects in the bar might say to each other when there's no-one around, and it's posted below, just for a laff...

While you weren’t listening...

I heard the glass
say to the tabletop:
I like the way you hold me.

I heard the table
answer back:
I like the way you feel.

The barstools
thanked the floor
for all the nights it propped them up

And though
I didn’t catch the floor’s reply
it sounded delicate

and I wondered
what the wind says to the trees outside
to make them swoon like that

and what it tells
the grass
to set it shivering,

or what it is
that’s spoken when you
press that bottle to your lips,

what passes there
between you
in that silent and repeated kiss

that seems to say
I’m here,
I’m listening.

What the devil am I up to?

2009-10-08T04:02:00.000-07:00

October's a busy month as well as a haunted one. If the launch of 'a pint for the ghost' on October 30th wasn't enough to be getting on with, I'm currently in the middle of a residency at the strange and spooky Shunt lounge, below London Bridge.

The residency is connected with Apples & Snakes and explores the idea of listening, involving three performances in the busy main bar at Shunt. I'm working with a ridiculously talented group of writers and performers including Byron Vincent, Molly Naylor, Joe Hakim and Joshua Idehen. You can read more about the residency here and, even better, you can come and see us perform tonight and tomorrow from 8pm.

Throughout October, you can hear me reading extracts from 'a pint for the ghost' amongst other work, at loads of different places. Including:

Sheffield's fantastic 'Off The Shelf' festival on October 17th
Soho Theatre on October 21st
...and in deepest Devon on October 28th

Watch this space for more reading dates.

'Course, today is National Poetry Day, so in the spirit of that, here's a favourite recent poem of mind, taken from Don Paterson's book 'Rain' which won the Forward Prize last night:

Rain

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

A long overdue update

2009-10-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the recent, deathly silence that has fallen on the blog. I wish I had an appropriate excuse (out battling the fenland ghouls, or out sampling the fenland pubs) but it's work rather than spirits that are to blame.

I may have been quiet of late, but there's no rest for the pub ghosts of England. The lovely Catherine Smith sent me an article last week about a troubled pub in Southsea:

A pub landlady is hoping to enlist the help of an exorcist in order to banish a ghost that insists on topping up customers' glasses.

Janice McCormack, of the Apsley House in Southsea has become increasing vexed at the ghost's machinations.

"It happens when customers pop to the loo or put their pint down for a second," she explained. "When they look back there's an extra inch of beer. It must come from my pumps."

This peculiar spirit with a penchant for spirits first made his presence felt nine months ago. Regulars have nicknamed him Reedy, in honour of the famously thirsty actor Oliver Reed.

"My regulars love it but it is costing me," Mrs McCormack added.

"People are drinking less as their pints are being filled up all the time. My stocktaking figures are all out. We get more customers through the door but it seems to be people expecting a cheap, never-ending pint."

Ms McCormack believes she will need to adopt to a suitably supernatural strategy to rid her premises of the generous ghoul. If a séance doesn't work, she intends to enlist the services of an exorcist.

I can't promise that there'll be such mysterious refills at The Betsey Trotwood, Farringdon on October 30th, but I can promise you that if you come to London that night, you'll find a host of poets reading at the pamphlet launch of 'a pint for the ghost'. I'm launching my tall-lighthouse pamphlet from 8pm in the Betsey, with guest readings from John Mccullough, Tim Wells and Michael McKimm. Since it's the night before Halloween, ghostly costumes are encouraged... If you're in London on the 30th, please do come to the launch, it should be a great night.

A Pint For The Ghost: The Next Stage

2009-07-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

Now that I've had time to catch my breath after the Hotbed festival, it seems like a good time to reflect belatedly on the scratch performance of 'A Pint...' on Saturday 27th June. After a frantic day of rehearsals (and a brief escape to the Cambridge Blue to gulp down A Pint For The Writer), actor Neil Jones and I were nervously reading through our scripts in the dressing room when we heard an usher utter these fateful words:

"We're going to need some more chairs in here...the tickets have sold out."

Full house! So we invited an audience of 60 odd people (by which I mean approximately 60, not to imply that all the audience members were odd) to join us in a strange and ghostly pub for the evening. Highlights from the show included a fantastic score by Sam Genders, a brilliant performance by the landlord, Neil, and free shots of whisky for lucky members of the audience. Choose your seat wisely when the show goes on tour!

So where next for the show?

Hot of the press, a pamphlet containing the poems for the show and a few extra ghostsly pieces has just been published by tall-lighthouse press. It will be launched soon, but you can buy your copy already from the tall-lighthouse website HERE. According to Ian McMillan, it's 'an exciting collection from a writer who knows the value of the past and how to set it against the present to illuminate them both'.

I'm going to be doing another performance in Cambridge before the end of the summer for everyone who couldn't make it or couldn't get tickets to the scratch performance.

I'll be applying for a touring grant from the Arts Council and, if I'm successful, hope to take the show on the road towards the autumn, starting with a launch in London.

I've started doing some themed workshops for schools in Cambridge and will be developing these further in the coming months.

Thank you to everyone who has been such a tremendous support so far. Please do keep following the blog to keep track of 'A Pint For The Ghost' and its errant Derbyshire spirits. There'll be more to come soon!

The final fling

2009-06-22T11:21:00.001-07:00

Time's running out until the scratch performance of my one hour show this Saturday at the fantastic Hotbed festival, though there's still a chance to get tickets from The Junction's website here.

Hotbed is set to be a brilliant weekend of performances, including the famous one page play competition, and the intriguing 'Stand By Your Van'.

A pamphlet for the ghost

2009-06-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

After a hectic month of work and thanks to the heroic efforts of my editor, Les Robinson, my tall-lighthouse pamphlet 'a pint for the ghost' is almost finished, containing poems from the show and some extra ghosts besides. Though it won't officially be launched until later in the year, there will be advance copies available at the Hotbed festival on June 27th. If you believe Ian McMillan (and I always do), the pamphlet is "full of ghosts of language, ghosts of long forgotten stories, invisible ghosts that haunt landscapes we think we know well...an exciting collection from a writer who knows the value of the past, and how to set it against the present to illuminate them both".

When I was gathering quotations for the book, I ended up revisiting great ghost poems by other writers, and realising what a potent theme spirits have been for some of my favourite poets. I started with Robert Frost's 'Ghost House', which evokes a ramshackle, haunted cellar. Then, I moved to Edward Thomas' 'The Other', with its account of a strange pursuit: Thomas' narrator is tracking a man who might almost be his double from inn to inn, though when he finally catches up with him, he meets with a poor welcome... Finally, I turned to John Burnside's work, which is full of allusions to the other, the liminal, the strange. 'The Good Neighbour' is a poem that has haunted me for years.

When I first embarked upon 'A Pint For The Ghost', I wanted to create something that could have a life both on and off the page. The poems in the book create a very different mood to the one they conjure in the show. I hope the ghosts of South Yorkshire enjoy seeing themselves in print...

tall-lighthouse is an independent poetry publisher based in south east London, with a fast growing reputation for publishing a diverse range of writers (including Kate Potts, shortlisted for the Michael Marks award). The press is currently celebrating its tenth year; more details about upcoming events on the tall-lighthouse website.

Martin Figura's photos

2009-06-01T03:47:00.001-07:00

Here are a few images of 'A Pint For The Ghost', taken by poet & photographer Martin Figura at the Escalator showcase last month... Terrifying stuff, as I'm sure you'll agree (and that's just my hair).

I'm still busy in rehearsals for June 27th at the moment, so much so that, to my shame, I missed the Cambridge beer festival recently. I've had to console myself by compiling a list of my top ten UK pubs...

10. The Bear, Alderwasley, Derbyshire
Medieval tapestries on the walls, and a dark interior that disguises the sinister bears lurking round every corner.

9. The Fat Cat, Sheffield
Beer straight from Kelham Island brewery, located in the middle of the former industrial quarter. A trip to The Fat Cat will take you on a scenic tour of Sheffield’s red light district. Well worth it for the best beer in town.

8. The Fat Cat, Norwich
A pub by the same name in Norwich with the biggest guest ale board I’ve ever seen, including the famous Fat Cat Marmalade.

7. The Marble Arch, Manchester
I’ve never been to The Marble Arch to see its incredible interior, but my dad’s so in love with it it seems to have become part of family legend and I almost imagine I’ve drunk there...

6. The Blue Ball, Grantchester
Brilliant cider and all the folk music you could ever wish to hear. Walking back across the fields to Cambridge in the dark is brilliant after a few pints.

5. The Queens Head, Newton

Mulled wine and poetry in the winter, and a bard for a landlord.

4. The Bricklayers Arms, London

The first place I ever got drunk in the capital as a teenager, after a happy day eating chips and drinking Sam Smiths beer.

3. Fannys Ale House, Saltaire

Brilliant ale and always packed to the rafters.

2. The Devonshire Cat, Sheffield

It seems all my favourite Sheffield pubs have a feline connection. This pub has a beer menu longer than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

1. The Arkwright Arms, Duckmanton

My local at home; brilliant beer and an assortment of family drunks. The Arkwright has been the ruin of many a Christmas dinner at home, with my dad and grandad falling asleep on the turkey.

Derelict London

2009-05-27T02:34:00.000-07:00

Roddy Lumsden just sent me this link to a brilliant site about derelict pubs in London: http://www.derelictlondon.com/id45.htm I'd never come across it before, and some of the pictures are incredibly haunting.

Staggering to read that six rural pubs close every week in England and Wales. The picture above is a photo of my old local, Duckmanton Lodge (or Ducky Lodge if you come from Calow...), the Civil Service Club where I used to spend hours exploring as a kid, or was seen-and-not-heard at the bar with a packet of crisps and some lemonade while my dad and step grandad had a few pints. It was strange to go home the other week and see the place boarded up: the grounds are just too big to make a business viable, it seems.Walking round Chesterfield recently, I also lamented the death of the beer garden playground. When I was a kid (get the violins out), almost every pub had a climbing frame and a couple of tyre swings out the back. Fathers everywhere must be despairing these days: I remember my dad's familiar refrain, "I'm just taking Helen to the swings...'.

Mind you, not that I minded the beer. Family legend has it that, at the age of five, my dad had taken me to the beer garden of The Arkwright in Duckmanton. Having drained his glass and set it on the table, he was astonished when I piped up: "Let's have another one!". He was less impressed when he returned from the bar with a full pint and I proceeded to climb on the table and kick it over...

The Ghosts of Chesterfield

2009-05-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

The countdown has begun! The first full performance of ‘A Pint For The Ghost’ will take place at the Hotbed drama festival in Cambridge on Saturday, June 27th at the ghostly hour of 9pm. There will be music from Sam Genders, visuals from Issam Kourbaj and a special guest playing the part of the pub landlord.

As part of the visuals for the show, I’ve been gathering some images to use in a projection. This involved a trip around haunted York, a visit to some of my home town’s boarded up, derelict buildings and, of course, an all important visit to The Arkwright Arms in Duckmanton to collect some photos of beer. Thanks to my able assistants Danny, Milner and, of course, my dad for being so willing to help me in my quest to photograph empty pint glasses.

Though The Arkwright has the best beer for miles in Chesterfield, it would have been more appropriate for us to have visited Somerset House; a pub just up the road from where my parents live in Calow, and where I used to spend many a Friday night drinking Guinness as an impressionable teenager. For Somerset House has its own haunted history. Legend has it that the pub is plagued by the ghost of a young girl who was tragically killed in the 1930s:

‘(The pub) was the residence of a wealthy gentlemen farmer. In 1934, he had been shooting with a number of friends and had brought them back to his home for a drink. The men put down their guns and stood outside talking. Also present was the farm labourer who lived next door and his three children. One of these children, a ten year old boy, picked up a gun and pretended to shoot his sister. The prank went tragically wrong when the gun went off and the girl was injured. She ran into Somerset House, but died a few minutes later. She was only seven years of age’. – Derbyshire Ghosts and Legends

The young girl makes her presence felt in the pub by locking doors, turning off lights, whispering the names of bar staff and even scratching them in their sleep:

‘In 1988, the landlord, Bill was in the taproom when the barmaid, Carol, asked him what he wanted. She had heard a voice call her name and since no customers were in, had assumed it was Bill. Bill knew it was not him and both were extremely puzzled. .. The next day, Carol’s arms were covered in scratches which had appeared overnight. She denied that she could have scratched herself in her sleep as she was in the habit of biting her nails and they were extremely short. Bill then pulled up his shirt and revealed his back. It looked as if it had been clawed by an animal...’

In The Arkwright Arms, the only spirits I could discern were in bottles behind the bar, but you never know....

An aperitif for the ghost

2009-05-14T02:43:00.001-07:00

Well then. Last Friday, I took myself off to Norwich in a Skoda, armed with a bottle of whisky, a battered chair, a trilby hat and a couple of pint glasses, ready to perform a twenty minute extract from 'A Pint For The Ghost' at the Norfolk and Norwich Arts Festival.

Ten hours later, powered by nerves and Nescafe (erm, other brands are available...) I was standing on the stage in front of hundreds of people, wearing a giant bandage and listening to a recording of one of my poems being played over sinister music written by Janie Armour. It had been a tiring day of rehearsals, but Patrick (my director) and James (the director working with all the Escalator winners) were always on hand to make sure things ran smoothly. Thanks to them and to Ed, Ben, Danny and everyone else who calmed my nerves and helped me survive the day!

My favourite episode was when I was walking down the corridor of Norwich Arts Centre with a bottle of whisky which I had filled with apple juice for the performance. Realising I'd been a bit over-zealous with said apple juice, I took a long swig from the bottle to stop it spilling out. A woman, hurrying to the cafe, stopped to look at me with horror and disapproval.

And what was the verdict on the show? Apart from a technical hitch with the microphone, it went pretty well, though you'll have to come to the Hotbed festival on Saturday June 27th to see for yourself! My dad's a man of few words, and I imagine if he had been there he would have nodded, said "it were allrate" and then gone to fetch me a beer from the bar.

That puts me in mind of the time I was running a fell race at Chatsworth, Derbyshire. Jogging round the course, I passed an old farmer leaning on a fence. Knowing that he lived nearby, I stopped to ask him what the course was like. He turned to look me slowly in the eye:

"There's some cow shit, some dog shit and a rate big hill."

All of which brings me to this poem from the show:

A pint for the true shepherds

Now the chance has gone, I wish
I’d bought that man a pint:
the farmer who sat silent next to me
through Midnight Mass, and raised
his eyebrows as the well-fed vicar
revelled in the story of the gentle shepherds
(friends, how like The Lord’s own servants
are the men round here who still
keep animals today). And as the organist
received the nod to play, the man
who hadn’t spoken took his cue at last,
rose to his feet, said: Reverend,
tha knows nowt about sheep.

Hold the date!

2009-05-06T01:16:00.000-07:00

The first full performance of 'A Pint For The Ghost' is going to be on Saturday June 27th at 9pm at The Junction in Cambridge. Put it in your diaries (if you dare).

I'll be performing as part of the Hotbed drama festival, organised by the brilliant Menagerie theatre company. More details to follow soon; the Hotbed festival website should feature more info about the festival performances soon...

A sneak preview

2009-05-05T06:46:00.001-07:00

It's less than a week until the Norfolk & Norwich festival and the first performance of material from 'A Pint For the Ghost': the showcase is happening this Friday, May 8th. So if you want to find out what this peculiar photo on the left is all about, you'll have to come to Norwich and see for yourself!

There's now a facebook event set up for the performance, which you can access here and find out more about the other artists involved with Escalator.

A poem for Justin

2009-05-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

A very, very sad occasion on Thursday: I went to read a poem for a friend who was killed in an accident on April 9th. One of the most wonderful poets and people I have met in Cambridge, Justin Wand is greatly missed and the event was a fitting tribute to a wonderful man.

Here's the poem I wrote for Justin. The ghosts of absent friends are always with us, it seems.

Justin

I’m sure we must have said goodbye outside a pub one night
or by the traffic lights on Norfolk Street, though now I try
to think of it, I can’t recall a single time. And if I’m asked

to name the evening when I saw you last, I’d say
that you were laughing at my three unshaven mates,
dressed in drag, acting up in a bar too good for us.

Or I’d say you were wearing a slim top hat - the kind
magicians save for disappearing acts - and knocking back a beer,
checking your watch, the time much later than you’d thought.

Or else you were sitting in a worn red seat in the back row
of the 1960s theatre, long after the play had finished,
thinking of Chaucer, the words still forming in your mouth.

Or I’d remember none of this at all, just you: the cautious writer
who I didn’t know enough, black-jacketed
and climbing on your motorbike,

pulling the visor of your helmet down,
lifting a hand to us as you revved the engine, accelerated hard
towards wherever it was you knew you were going.

A College Mystery

2009-04-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

'Peter - this is a rather sad mystery, but it is about Christ's...'

So reads the scrawled note in the front of the leather-bound copy of 'A College Mystery' that arrived in the post for me at work last week. The 'mystery', by A.P. Barker, was sent to me by an alumnus of the College I work for in Cambridge, Christ's, because he thought some of the fellows might be interested. Preoccupied by ghosts as I am, I've intercepted it before they could get a look in!

The tale concerns an apparition in the Fellows' Garden, where I've often sat to read at lunchtime, or stood beneath the famous Milton Mulberry tree (fancifully claimed to be the spot where he wrote 'Paradise Lost'). Apparently, a number of former students of Christ's with rooms overlooking the gardens have 'observed the figure of a man emerge on the lawn under the great chestnuts, on the left, and walk slowly and deliberately, with bent head, as far as the great yew and the weeping ash. There he invariably stopped suddenly and turned towards the may tree, and then faced the garden again, on the right, and either disappeared by the green beech, or came out on the lawn past the great copper beech, skirted the border of that bed, and then faded from view by an old elm near where the sun dial now stands. They described the figure of that of a tall, heavy, elderly man, dressed in black, with a swallow-tailed coat and high collar and stock. He sometimes raised his face; but the sudden halt at the great yew was invariable.'

Imagine my mounting sense of foreboding when the ghost in question turned out to come from Derbyshire! One of the sections in 'A Pint For The Ghost' deals with unfinished business, and the business that preoccupies this particular spirit is a terrible crime that he committed for love, a sense of guilt he needs to assuage... It was a great read, though I spoke to a historian at the College who takes a dim view of the saga.

The tale ends with a rather profound reflection on the nature of guilt and absolution:

'Is it that, in the regions of spirit, intention, or even desire, brings the same responsibility as accomplished fact?'

Who you gonna call...?

2009-04-22T05:56:00.001-07:00

Now then. My excitement about the May 8th showcase is mounting. Why? Because I'm anticipating the bright lights? The giddy heights of the stage? The terrified audience? Nah, that's all well and good, but what I'm excited about surpasses it. Yesterday, a friend revealed that he will be coming to the showcase in a Ghostbusters t-shirt... It doesn't get much better than that. Apologies for embarrassing said friend, who will now be obvious to all and sundry. If you see him, give him the thumbs up. Or buy him a pint for his ghost.

Preparations for what I'm calling 'An Aperitif for the Ghost' are going pretty well, and I'm spending this week concentrating on set design. Conscientious as I am, I've been particularly distracted by the tricky dilemma of drinking on stage. Having spent a fruitless afternoon pondering what liquid I might pour into tankards to imitate beer, it took a swift half at my local to supply the necessary, obvious solution.

Don Paterson quotes this snippet from a book on theatre sound effects at the start of his collection, 'Nil Nil':

"A real door slammed offstage gives the best effect."

'Nuff said. I won't, however, be using real whisky, much as a dram might help to steady my nerves. Apple juice seems to be the best. I remember seeing a brilliant production of Pinter's 'No Man's Land' in London before Christmas - in the first scene, the characters had quaffed so many drams the actors would have been comatose if it were real... But, of course, I'll need to do some serious whisky drinking in the week running up to the showcase, just to get myself into character, of course. I'm also in search of beer mats, tankards, beer towels and other pub regalia, so I might be propping up the bar, pestering local landlords for a few charitable donations before May 8th. It's a hard life, but someone has to do it.

Joseph Braddock's Haunted Pubs

2009-04-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

Skulking round a bookshop in rainy Fort William the other week, muttering about not being able to climb any hills because of the weather, I found a brilliant guide to Britain's haunted houses in a tiny, secondhand bookshop, which redeemed the day for me. The author is Joseph Braddock who, by coincidence, 'regards himself primarily as a poet', if the dust jacket is to be believed. You have to love an author who dedicates his ghostly musings to: 'my wife, who has walked with me round the edge of the unknown'.

The book contains a fantastic chapter on haunted pubs, intriguingly titled: 'Haunted Pubs and the Runcorn Poltergeist'. My favourite pub ghost is Charlie, resident of a small whitewashed country inn near Taunton. Apparently, one of Charlie's tricks was to magic beer from thin air:

"On entering the bar one morning Mr. Phillips the landlord found that a seven pint enamel jug was full to the brim with beer, although he was positive it had been empty when the household went to bed the previous night."

I've often found the opposite problem with my pint... I could have sworn that glass was full five minutes ago.

When I worked in the Red Lion (on the way to Matlock from Chesterfield), we were supposed to have a cellar ghost who rattled the bottles in the fridges late at night, or moved the barrels around. I never saw her - it was a lady, dressed in grey, according to my boss - but I did always find the cellar unnaturally cold, as if a breeze was blowing through it, and I never lingered too long when I was bottling up.

An aperitif for the ghost

2009-04-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

The time is drawing near... on May 8th, I'll be performing a short extract from 'A Pint For The Ghost' (a shot? An aperitif?) at the wonderful Norfolk and Norwich Arts festival, alongside the other Escalator winners. For a measly fiver (that won't even buy you two pints round Cambridge way) you can have a taster of the ghosts show and watch four other great performers. I've finally managed to isolate 20 minutes of the show and I'm starting to learn my lines, so come along to watch and be afraid! The theatre at Norwich Arts Centre is really dark and sinister, so it's the ideal venue for the purpose. Who knows what kind of ghouls might join the audience...

Then, on May 9th, I'll be trying out some of the ghost poems in front of a different crowd at Poetry-next-the-Sea, a brilliant festival by the seaside in Wells, Norfolk. I'm expecting cider, fish and chips, tacky rock and maybe the odd poem. I'm looking forward to meeting the ghosts of Norfolk along the way.

Bandages, scissors and light shows

2009-03-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Now that the script for the show is finished, I've been spending a bit more time working with Issam on the design for the (very minimalist) set. As ever, he's had some brilliant ideas, but I can't give too much away at present. So, if you want to know why I spent some of yesterday struggling with an enormous bandage and a pair of scissors, you'll have to come and see the finished show in July, or the 20 minute taster on May 8th in Norwich! It's not what it sounds like, honest...!

Issam does a lot of work with camera obscura (see above), and there's something very ghostly to me about images of ordinary places, taken upside down. You can see some of his camera obscura images of Cambridge here.

Curious Warnings in Cambridge

2009-03-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered that we have our very own M.R. James expert and lookalike here in Cambridge. What could be better than that!? Robert Lloyd Parry is a performer who re-tells some of James' classics, performing them in strange locations around the city and beyond.

It was Tim Wells who first introduced me to the delights of M.R. James, over a mug of the finest coffee in England (well, definitely the finest in East London, and I'm pretty confident about England too), and 'Oh Whistle...' makes an appearence in one of the poems in the show. I was reminded of the fate of Professor Parkins in the tale on a recent trip to Bruisyard Hall in Suffolk for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh seminar. My room had two single beds in it, and bore an uncanny resemblance to the one in the film version of the story. Worse still, on the first morning, I was convinced it looked as if someone had been sleeping in the spare bed the night before... I didn't sleep with the light on. Much!

Robert is currently working on another of my favourites, 'A Warning To The Curious' which will be touring from October 2009 to March 2010, looking forward to that one already. Oh, and uncanny resemblance or what??

A Light Death?

2009-03-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Strange though it might seem, I hadn’t considered the relevance of my, um,‘grave’ surname to the ghost project until Roger Robinson pointed it out to me at a workshop in Norwich this afternoon. According to that source of great wit and wisdom ‘ancestry.com’, the name Mort is associated with the following:

“English (Lancashire): of uncertain origin. The most plausible suggestion is that it is a Norman nickname from Old French mort ‘dead’ (Latin mortuus), presumably referring to a person of deathly pallor or unnaturally still countenance, or possibly to someone who played the part of death in a pageant.”

Coupled with my first name, Helen, which has Greek origins and means ‘light’, that gives you ‘A Light Death’. How charming.

I’ll ignore the other possible definition of Mort: “it could also be the result of survival into the Middle English period of an Old English personal name, Morta, or an Old English vocabulary word mort ‘young salmon or trout’”.

I’d rather be dead than a young trout, on balance.

Here’s a poem about my deadly name, which first appeared in 'Acumen'.

The French for Death

I trampled ants for kicks on the quay at Dieppe, dawdling
by the desk where they wouldn’t take yes for an answer;
yes, it was our name and spelled just so –
we shook our heads at Moor and Maud and Morden,
dad repeated it in Oldham’s finest guttural.

Rope swung from the captain’s fist
and flayed the water. I saw him shudder, troubled
by a shift of air or a vision of our crossing: glower of thunder,
the lurch and buckle of the ferry, a thick Alsatian
with a face like Cerberus ushering us in to port

and I looked him in the eye, popped my bubblegum,
a child from the underworld in red sandals
and a t-shirt made by Disney, not yet ashamed
by that curt syllable, locked, cold to the tongue,
its hush of the morgue, not yet the girl

who takes the worst route home
pauses at the splayed mouths of alleyways
and looks straight past you as we kiss, as if to pick out
small behind your left shoulder, the spindle of a shipwreck,
prow to a far country.

Graveyard photos

2009-03-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Last weekend in Norwich, photographer Katie Utting had me wandering round a graveyard for some publicity shots for the show....and here are a few of them. No ghosts developed on the film, as far as I can tell!

Tell me a tale

2009-03-11T03:48:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm interested in as part of 'A Pint For The Ghost' project is hearing and collecting other people's ghost stories which might become part of a bigger project. I'm hoping to set up a kind of ghost booth at the performances where people can come to have a pint and tell me a scary story after the show, but I'm also interested in collecting them in writing, so if you have a story to tell, post it on the blog or send it to me by e-mail and I'll look forward to being terrified...

What's this ghost malarkey all about then?

2009-03-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

'The ghosts I never saw
and don't believe in
won't go away.

Should I be rural
and put out food for them?
- I'm not Homeric enough
to leave on the table
a bowl of blood.

And there's no need for that -
they drink mine.'

- Norman MacCaig, December 1975

Whenever I think about poetry, or the act of writing itself, I've always found myself coming back to the idea of ghosts: people and places we once knew, characters we've never met, stories we overhear and wish were ours. I'm fascinated by those ghosts and how a poem reinvents them, encounters them in unlikely places; the way you can slip into a bar in strange town and think you see an ex in the corner, nursing a whisky.

Growing up in Derbyshire, I was always aware of what a singularly ghostly place it is, how many stories are attached to the landscape. In particular, I was interested in the ghosts of the former industrial areas; miners and steelworkers who haven't given up. Ghosts have business to finish, and there's no place better for them than the pits and the old foundries of South Yorkshire. Sheffield is rife with ghosts, from the ancient sailors in 'The Ship' inn, to the Hillsborough spirit who pinches the black pool ball from all the pool tables in the pubs...

'A Pint For the Ghost' developed from a desire to re-tell some of these local legends, and introduce a few ghosts of my own. It's a series of haunted poems and stories I've been working on over the past six months for a one-hour poetry show, set in a shabby pub, after closing time, where spirits abound and anything might happen... As well as the show, which I want to put on in unusual locations around and about the country, the poems will be published as a pamphlet by the wonderful tall-lighthouse press later in 2009.

This all came about because of the Escalator regional talent scheme who are supporting me through the development of the show, and an Arts Council grant, as well as a lot of help from friends who have provided me with endless inspiration and pub wisdom throughout the research!

Who else has been roped in?

The show isn't just about the poems. I'm working with excellent director Patrick Morris, distinguished artist and theatre designer Issam Kourbaj and brilliant musician Sam Genders, of 'Tunng' fame. The finished act will be a mixture of spooky effects, haunting music, stories and poems. Oh, and there might even be the odd magic trick. I'm hoping to eventually put it on in former warehouses, old pubs and other unexpected locations, as well as in theatres.