Poetry and Performance

I have always written poetry, but returned to it more seriously in 2015.

I have had my poetry published in magazines and anthologies including:  The North , Wildfire Words, The Mass, Surrey Poetry Competition, Puck Press, and the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival anthology. I have performed  poetry across the North of England and Scotland including Spoken Weird, Halifax, A Firm of Poets, Leeds, Mammaljam, Hull, at the Climate Psychology Alliance conference, London, as guest performer in Leeds with Lola Perrin on her UK tours, No Boundaries Festival Sheffield , Loud sets Slam and Brave New Words, Dumfries.

DON’T – a poem listing all the ways our language has to warn you not to put yourself out there, was the first poem I performed at an open mic session as my ‘return’ to live poetry. It’s basically about being scared of messing up.

#HASHTAG is a poem people seemed to like.

The Front Page is a long narrative poem I wrote quite a while ago now

Breath[e]:LESS is a show I made with fellow poets Ralph Dartford and Tom Hunt, music producer/ DJ Kwah and video and lighting designer Al Orange. It is a performance/ gig about our response to climate change and threats to the planet, and the most recent version includes material I wrote in response to the floods in Hebden Bridge in December 2015.

Here is an excerpt :

Sharry’s brain has little space

for things already known.

She’s making room, a place to move,

to rearrange the stories and the plans, the loss,

the mourning choirs for what might be,

distance from the world, the local, a way to see.

She knows that God is dead, and was

a trope to ape control,

certainty and paranoid governance.

But also God is possibility and air

A dragoman of things that could be there

and of that which could be done

a sacred meme of intuition

a moon beyond our covenant

with earth, tides, wind and sun.

On her sixteenth birthday

Sharry knew her world would end.

Her Mum and Dad explained it all,

they’d be just sort of friends, apart

and Sharry knew the plot, her heart

divide to a shard of loss.

She wore her platforms higher, skirts shorter,

make- up darker, hair wild

it was a sign, a marker which said

she’s all grown up now, not a child

or a proper daughter.

Just an orphan in a world soon dead.