Worcester Music Festival – Performing Poetry

This weekend saw the annual Music Festival in Worcester, it runs for this 3 days/ nights with artists and musicians performing free events for the public. This year I was lucky enough to take part on Saturday and Sunday evening.

SATURDAY

Ian Passey (a.k.a Humdrum Express) a multi-talented musician and poet was organised the event on Saturday evening, at The Swan and Two Nicks. He had booked bands and musicians and thought it might be good to support the sets with poetry. He invited 8 of us to perform over the night.

A fabulous evening of music and wordiness compered by The Humdrum Express 
Featuring:

PTR Williams

Get Bag. Pack Bag. Go

Nip & Tuck (From Bo Pilar and the Mountain Valley Boys

Disco Tramps

Marina del Ray 

Featuring performances from very special guest poets:

Heather Wastie, Mike Alma, William Shatspeare, Mogs, Michelle Crosbie, Andrew Owens, Suz Winspear and Nina Lewis.

Worcester Music Festival is supporting YSS Worcestershire Young Carers and Young Adult Carers 

 

 

 I supported Get Bag.Pack Bag. Go. who were a great duo. I was really pleased that the crowd listened – when you play music venues, although (as a former musician and daughter of one) it warms my heart to hear good vibes and be inspired by the energy and showmanship of the acts, it usually gets quite noisy and often the crowd will be a force for the voice to reckon with.

I wrote a special set of ‘music related’ poetry, one In Memory of Radio and 3 more on Sound City – the famous recording studio in LA having watched an amazing documentary about it a few months ago. I finished my set with a request for Cake Man. The audience response to that made me wish I had created a set from original material, but I am also quite fond and proud of some of my new music poems.

Originally I think I was going to be last on the set of poet’s to support the final band of the night, as I thought I would miss the beginning of this gig,  but I swapped into an earlier slot instead, glad because I was able to enjoy the rest of the superb evening as you may see from these photos.

© 2014 Peter Williams & Ian Passey

 

 

THE WEEKEND

There were musical events all over town all weekend. It is always a great festival.

SUNDAY

WORD & SOUND

And as if all this excitement wasn’t enough – I was back in the city performing at Word & Sound on the Sunday night. Amanda Bonnick and Jenny Hope organised a grand event – hosted superbly by Amanda. The best thing was although a core of us perform at the same places often there were some new names and faces and some of them blew my socks off (5 Star performances)! It was an absorbing evening and I thoroughly enjoyed my set.

They host these events throughout the year usually, so I am looking forward to more.

Performers included (in no particular order); Mike Alma, Sarah James, Polly Robinson, Myfanwy Fox, Suz Winspear, Kathy Gee-Wordstring, Andrew Green, Neil Laurenson, Math Jones, Susan Davidson and others.

A great night, a great weekend!

Performances and Events in the Final Week of August: 42 & Naked Lungs

Last week I had the pleasure of performing at Drummonds 42, after taking a 4 day break after the book launch. This may not sound like much, I had 48 hours of that completely OFFLINE – it was wonderful, life used to be so simple… Sometimes nerves get the better of me when I have had a performance break, fortunately that didn’t happen this time.

It was good to see writers/poets I had not seen/heard for a while and we were even treated to a bit of Musical Theatre. Catherine Crosswell is currently rehearsing Sweeny Todd for a production in Ledbury and she performed one of the songs – with props and Andrew Owen (the host) as well as treating us to her poetry. It was fantastic.

Usually these nights are themed, but once a year they do an open theme, like on the 27th. I performed a poem called ‘Missing’ which I had only performed once before in Birmingham, back in the late Spring. I performed a couple of other poems too.

There was a good variety of story and poetry and some new performers, it good to see new people come back and others take to the stage for the first time. I cannot make 42 this month as I have tickets to go and see A Night With Elvis McGonagall perform his poetry at The Hive on the same night. Elvis McGonagall

On this same evening there were events which I would have also loved to have been able to make (still hate the clashes), notably ‘Spire & Dust’ – which is usually Fire and Dust (have been meaning to go all year), they re-named it as it was taking place in the Inspire Café where Antony Owens had his book launch.

 

Knowing that I had performances over the weekend, I wanted to take it a bit easy leading up to Worcester Music Festival. However, Joe and Chris delightfully booked me last month to perform this month. I wanted to go and see what the night was like, so went to watch performers at Naked Lungs (the people who run this are organising the artistic/performance collaboration for Birmingham Literature Festival in October).

Naked Lungs happens at Cherry Reds, a lovely, small, funky venue in a pedestrianized part of the city. Unfortunately my SatNav is currently on the blink and it is so I had my route scribbled on A4 paper. Birmingham is a nightmare to drive around at the best of times, they are working on the tunnels at the moment and a lot of central traffic is either diverted or at standstill. I think it took me longer to navigate the island (roundabout) that it did travelling into the city itself. I parked up and made the stupid mistake of asking a local – who helpfully google mapped on his phone and it looked like I was miles away. Keeping the route in my head I over shot a turning and basically by the time I got off the RING ROAD – I was on the other side of the city – fortunately an area I know well as it is where Writing West Midlands are based. A 30-40 minute journey turned into a frantic hour! BUT… I got there.

The lovely Andrea Smith (a.k.a Performance poet Swingerella) was there and we got to have a half decent natter in the numerous intervals. The crowd is fairly young – so that helps me decide on material for the set. Of course there were some people my age and possibly a bit older too. I was excited to find that both Ben Norris AND Ian Bowkett were performing sets.

The whole night was fantastic with great performances from; Ian Bowkett, Ben Norris, David Timothy, Heidi Murphy  – during the evening a box was passed around for us to write ideas of topics of conversation for Benjamin Jones the resident philosopher who then pontificated on a range of subjects, a funny, quirky and cool addition to the evening and a master of improv!

A new experience was FATLiP, (Toby De Angeli, Dana Segal and Jak Stephens) although we only had 2 of them, they were mesmerising a spoken word (with heart, narrative, mixed styles and pace) prose poetry, along with music and a loud speaker. I truly could have listened to them all night. They are playing Bestival this September!

FATLiP will be performing their combination of spoken words, sounds and performance to tell unheard stories from unsuspecting places.

Sometimes it is just nice to watch and not have to sit with butterflies, nervously waiting for your turn! Although it is such a relaxing, enjoyable atmosphere I doubt I will be too worried. Mainly it was FUN, laid back, well organised and FUN!

I managed to learn another new poem for Worcester Music Festival (only wrote it last week) so I am planning on being able to connect properly with the audience on at least some of the poems. It is much easier to work on the performance if you are not trying to balance a book…. another reason why my next poetry collection will be in an A5 notebook! I am looking forward to getting my set ready and returning to Cherry Reds on the 25th September

 

Review of August

Can’t believe it is the end of August already! What a CRazY month it has been – especially when I consider last year (in my first year of writing before I had found my poetry feet) I practically took the whole month off! Although I think that had more to do with resigning from my job and enjoying the last summer off on full pay for a while!

August saw; a plethora of birthday celebrations, wedding outfit shopping, allotmenting, garden centre visits, new plants, harvesting vegetables, catching up with friends and family, as well as Arts/Music festivals, one off events, performances and Book Launches!

August is always busy because it is summer and I don’t work (or get paid) < before you get too jealous. This month I may not have gone on holiday but I did extend my birthday celebrations over several weeks and it wasn’t even a significant one! Who needs a holiday when the 6 weeks poeting took me all over the Midlands.

© 2014 Rangzeb Hussain

Blogs and Projects

52 continues – as it will all year – I am now planning a catch up though before I start back to work as I have missed some weeks.

Last month I wrote about Naked Lungs and a project/performance for Birmingham Literature Festival. I presumed they had picked other participants to collaborate as I hadn’t had an email. There was an email. It just didn’t get to me! Momentarily dancing around the lounge… My next exciting venture to work on, the performance is October 11th, a week after my brother’s wedding.

INKSPILL a free online writing retreat I run from this Blog at the end of October 25th/26th is in full swing (organisation), more on this soon – September will be full of tasters and teasers.

ONE YEAR A POET – I am also busy organising a celebration of my first year back in the world of poetry and it was also the point at which the 1st 9 months of a writing life bore fruition – in terms of work and being a writer. There are lots of poets/artists lined up and it should be a cracker!

BLOG The blog now has 781 follower just 3 people joined this month. The most popular post continues to be my articles about Short Story Writing

Title		Views
Writing Short Stories – Tips on Planning and Structure		438
Writing Short Stories – Tips on Narrative Structure & The Writing Process		279

This may have to do with being linked on educational sites, or just they were dang good posts!

Submission

I worked on lots of writing this month, I regret not spending more time on my pamphlet submission, I lost confidence with it and shelved it, only to dust it off again on the deadline day – when by the time the writing was finished I was half an hour late leaving for an event, speed reading is not to  proofreading, needless to say I came home and found 3 mistakes!

I sent poetry to Bombay Gin, Paragram, Barrelhouse and a portion of a pamphlet to VPress.

Publishing

I worked with proof copies of GBWO and Restless Bones Poetry Anthology.

HCE Here Comes Everyone Published my poem ‘Falling into Line’, written especially for the Boy/Girl Issue of the magazine, it is available online and as a print copy.

 

Performing Poetry

Performing Poetry – the links will take you to blogposts about the events.

All over the Midlands this month, I have (as always) missed some events – because I am human mainly, once I find my superhero self I shall fly out to all gigs… Mr G also booked a fortnight off work.

The month started amazingly with A Night with Maya Angelou – organised by Jordan Garvey and Shakti Women. I watched a video of my performance for the 1st time, it was a little uncomfortable.

Maya Angelou

Mouth and Music – War & Peace A great evening hosted by Sarah Tamar, I was expecting the subject matter to weigh heavy – but the evening was as vibrant and uplifting as always.

War and Peace

PFL Poetry For Lunch – The Funny One with Andrea Smith

Birthday Stanza – a normal Stanza meeting where I took CAKE! Great to be back with the Stanza crowd, first meeting in 2 months, due to clashing dates and performances.

Stanza

Bridge the Gap – an intergenerational tea party on a canal boat – the brainchild of Aysha Begum(Beetfreaks). My first time on a moving canal boat and therefore also the first time I have performed on one!

Poetry on a Boat

Restless Bones Poetry Anthology – Book Launch – Restless Bones raises money for Born Free Foundation, protecting animals against the fur trade. The book launch was at Akamba an African Heritage Centre in Solihull, a fitting environment. It was a great night and it is a great book. Details on how to buy your copy, coming soon.

Book Launch

42 Drummonds – An open mic/ off theme night at 42. A small and select crowd, a great night of story, poetry and theatre.

Worcester Music Festival Humdrum Express – Ian Passey organised a menu of bands and supporting poets for a great night at The Swan and Two Nicks.

Worcester Music Festival Word & Sound – Amanda Bonnick and Jenny Hope organise Word & Sound nights and this one was hosted by Amanda as part of the music festival. It was a cracking night with some stellar performances. Crème de la crème!

(Links to follow)

 

Performances and Events

I don’t always perform, sometimes I just enjoy the Arts and support friends and fellow poets.

Benches – Jan Watts Book Launch / Off the Page Event – starting on the canal and finishing in the Library of Birmingham.

Launch

I have since read and reviewed the book. This link is the blogpost and details on how to buy your own copy can be found here.

Review

SpeakEasy – a night of poetry hosted by Maggie Doyle.

SpeakEasy

Naked Lungs -They have booked me to perform next month so I thought I would go along and check it out. Glad I did, great night. Performers included Ian Bowkett and Ben Norris.

 

My writing life/ The Poet Within

August has been a funny month – action packed but also dippy in emotional stakes, belief in my writing, confidence drooping in my ability to perform, inner gremlins getting a look in. I suppose the more seriously I take myself the more this may happen or it could have been some of the subject matter covered by this month’s writing. Or the pressure I placed on myself to complete this month’s submissions and performances. It doesn’t look more than usual but considering I took about 10 days off completely, it is a LOT! August has produced many new poems and some still have slightly rough edges. My writing spirit is high!

 

 

RELATED LINKS:

August

Full Diary – Be Careful what you Wish For!

I am joking – I love wishes coming true…. but it does make for a busy life!

I cannot believe the summer break is over and I am back to work next week – as well as watching a show on Monday, performing a set in Ludlow on Tuesday (which will possibly be after a day at work), resting Wednesday and Thursday and then heading on a road trip – back to where I used to live to stay with poetry friends I met at the 52 picnic this summer and then performing at a festival in Stafford on Saturday then heading back to Birmingham to watch Ben Norris in his one man show at the MAC! Followed by 2 day rest and then Mouth & Music, a Dance Workshop, SpeakEasy, Stanza, Writing West Midlands Writer jobs and finally my One Year A Poet Party*.

The end of August brings a very busy weekend. I am performing at the Worcester Music Festival later and tomorrow having an evening event Words and Sounds – which happens every 12 – 18 months – I wasnt on the circuit last time.

This week I performed at 42 on Wednesday night and Thursday night I went along to Naked Lungs – who have booked me to perform next month – both were great nights.

As far as reviewing my events I plan to wrap these 4 events up in one post (early Sept) and probably will have to post my review of August then too… as I havent been keeping an up to date draft this month.

This afternoon – before going off to the festival I am DESPERATELY trying to write poetry for submission – all deadlined for tomorrow – tomorrow morning Mr G and I have to sort out the allotment (we have had it for 5 years but it is time to let it go) we are homegrowing in the garden at home and even then we sometimes dont pick the stuff fast enough! Then there is a joint family meal – my younger brother is getting married (excited) and it is the Groom/Bride Sunday Lunch as his fiancee’s family live in a different County and she thought it would be good to meet everyone before the wedding.

Then I have a small window to send submissions I need to write today before performing and somewhere in between I need to practise my sets!

An enjoyable but hectic time ….

* One Year A Poet – In addition I am organising (and have been since end of July) a poetry night to celebrate one year back in my poetry skin. So far it is very much concept and I have just a fortnight to make it a reality – more on that soon.

So for now go and enjoy some archive posts!

Happy writing x