First Shindig of 2016

I've been very poor at updating things around here just lately, but for now it's worth highlighting this event, on Monday night - as always, it's worth making the effort to get along to. Open mic slots will be available, and Mark Goodwin always reads well. It all starts at 7.30pm, and entry is free.

Daniel Sluman, Cora Greenhill & Stephen Payne, 16.11.15

On Monday night, I was at the last Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig of the year, at The Western in Leicester.

As usual, the open mic readers were both varied and of high quality, and it's particularly good to hear pieces of short fiction punctuating the poetry.

The featured readers were all poets whose work I'm familiar with, and all, I thought, shared something in their delivery of their work. They're undemonstrative yet expressive, they pace both the individual poems and the whole set beautifully, and there was always a slight tension underlying their readings, a result, I think, of their ability to create a stillness in the room, a feeling that something is about to happen.

Cora Greenhill's The Point Of Waking is a collection that I've returned to a couple of times over the last year or so, and her reading here will no doubt send me back to it again.

Stephen Payne's Pattern Beyond Chance is recently out from HappenStance, and it's full of collisions between poetry and science, reflecting his day job. Above all, they're poems that constantly ask questions, both about their subject matter and the means of expressing it, and that curiosity is infectious - you start asking the same questions, too.

Finally, Daniel Sluman's the terrible is his second collection from Nine Arches. Judging from what we heard here, it builds on the many strengths of his debut by managing to be even more starkly honest. The result is both harrowing, at times, but also full of astonishing tenderness. The title poem, in particular, was stunning. It's a very difficult balancing act to pull off, but he does it beautifully, and I can't wait to read the book.

Nine Arches / Crystal Clear Creators Shindig

Daniel Sluman, Cora Greenhill and Stephen Payne are the featured readers at the latest Shindig, hosted by Nine Arches Press, Crystal Clear Creators and the Centre for New Writing, at The Western, Western Road, Leicester LE3 0GA, from 7.30pm on Monday, November 16th.

Dan will be reading from his new Nine Arches collection the terrible, while Stephen also has as new book out, Pattern Beyond Chance, from the ever-wonderful HappenStance.

As always, entry is free, and you can sign up for an open mic slot on the door.

Leicester Shindig, September 21st, 2015

The latest Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig takes place at The Western, Western Road, Leicester, LE3 0GA, from 7.30pm on September 21st – guest readers are Richard Byrt, Robert Peake, Sarah James and Rosie Miles.

As always, open mic slots will be available on the door, and entry is free. And also as always, it's a good idea to get there early to get a good seat.

Shindig: Jo Bell, Jonathan Davidson, and Crystal Voices launch

We've probably become a bit blasé, in Leicester, about having a great regular poetry reading/open mic night to go to. For years now, the Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators events have been presenting a mixture of well-known faces and newcomers, plus all shades in-between.

Monday night was a chance to reflect on that, and to thank the Crystal Clear Creators part of the team behind it - Jonathan and Maria Taylor - for all their hard work.

As usual, the open mic slots were varied and excellent, one of my particular favourites being the short story from (I think), Guy Gresham.

Jo Bell read from her just-launched Nine Arches collection Kith, and as usual was perfectly paced, giving the audience the chance to savour every nuance of her poems, which as usual deal with all aspects of life, love, sex, canals, and ducks. This book has been a long time in coming, but it's well worth the wait.

Jonathan Davidson's last collection, Early Train, was a favourite of mine, and his new book Humfrey Coningsby (Valley Press) looks like going the same way - I'm a sucker for poetry with a historical theme anyway, but this is really top-class stuff, playing with the whole idea of historical 'truth'.

The second half of the night included the launch of Crystal Voices, an anthology celebrating 10 years of Crystal Clear Creators. It features the following very fine poets, many of whom read - Alan Baker, Kathleen Bell, Rebecca Bird, Julie Boden, Alison Brackenbury, Will Buckingham, Jane Commane, Caroline Cook, Nichola Deane, Kate Delamere, Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, Angela France, Mark Goodwin, Sarah James, Charles Lauder, Jr., Emma Lee, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Carol Leeming, Siobhan Logan, John Lucas, David McCormack, Sue Mackrell, Martin Malone, Roy Marshall, Jessica Mayhew, Andrew "Mulletproof" Graves, Simon Perril, Alexandros Plasatis, D. A. Prince, Robert Richardson, Victoria Smith, Jayne Stanton, Hannah Stevens, Matthew Stewart, Aly Stoneman, Jonathan Taylor, Pam Thompson, Lydia Towsey, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Claire Walker, Lindsay Waller-Wilkinson, Rory Waterman. Oh, and me too - I read my featured poem, Hometowns of Unwitting Love Objects.

Leicester Shindig, May 18th

Next Monday night sees the latest Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig poetry night at The Western, 70 Western Road, Leicester, LE3 0GA.

Featured writers are Jonathan Davidson and Jo Bell, who will be launching her new collection Kith, as well as contributors from the new Crystal Voices anthology, edited by Maria Taylor, celebrating 10 years of Crystal Clear Creators.

As always, admission is free, and you can sign up for open mic slots on the door - the fun starts at 7.30pm.

The best yet?

I'm not entirely sure how long the Leicester Shindigs have been going. I could check, probably, by trawling back through this blog, but suffice it to say that it's been a good few years, from the early days at The Looking Glass to its current incarnation at The Western.

Whatever the case, last night's might just have been the best yet. Certainly top three, anyway. Four excellent readers, packed open mic slots, and an extremely appreciative audience. Kudos to Nine Arches Press and Crystal Clear Creators for all their work in building the event over the years, and to Jane Commane and Jonathan Taylor for their unflagging enthusiasm as hosts.

Let's start with the open mic. So many were signed up that the readers were restricted to a single poem (or in one case, piece of fiction) each, and that kept things flowing nicely. Regulars such as Roy Marshall, Jayne Stanton, Martin Malone and Charles Lauder Jr were reliably high quality, but there was a heartening number of first-timers, too.

The first guest, Michael W Thomas, was making his return after reading here a couple of years back. As then (when he read a superb poem about the secret language of tramps), he was quietly assured and utterly riveting. I'm always pleased to come across one of Michael's poems in a magazine (and fortunately, he's in plenty), and I rather hope that he's one of those small press poets who's actually widely read as a consequence of his prolific nature, his willingness to offer his work in a wide variety of outlets, and of course his skill as a writer.

Ben Wilkinson's pamphlet For Real, winner of the Poetry Business competition, was a real advance on the anyway highly accomplished The Sparks, and his reading from it confirmed all those good first impressions. It's poetry that thinks very hard about what poetry can do, but it's never less than accessible and engaged with the real world.

After the break, DA Prince read from her recently-released second collection, Common Ground. She's another poet who manages to be understated and precise without diminishing the emotional punch, and she read the same way, giving every word the chance to pull its weight.

Andrew Taylor brought the evening to a close with poems from his debut, Radio Mast Horizon, as well as two forthcoming chapbooks - his poems also work quietly, and perhaps with more of a cumulative effect than the other readers, but again without sacrificing anything in the way of readability (or listenability, perhaps that should be). I look forward to reading more.

So, the only problem now is that Shindig had set itself a very high standard to maintain in 2015 - get along in January to see what's next.

Leicester Shindig, July 21st, 2014

It's Shindig time again on Monday, with guest readers Carol Leeming, Tony Williams, Richie McCaffery and Kerry Featherstone. As always, it's free, everything starts at 7.30pm, downstairs at The Western, on Western Road, and open mic slots will be available on the night.

Leicester Shindig, 20.01.14

Last night's Shindig at The Western was a slightly unusual one, from my point of view, in that the featured poets were, largely, new to me, although I've always enjoyed what I've read from Cathy Grindrod, and Lindsay Waller-Wilkinson's open mic spots at previous Shindigs have always been worth hearing.

I'll certainly seek out more from both after last night's readings. Both were quietly assured and nicely paced, no mean feat when, during Lindsay's set, there were a certain amount of slightly comic interruptions.

After the break, Charlie Jordan was perhaps more obviously polished in her presentation, but none the worse for that, while Joe Coghlan built momentum almost hypnotically from a slightly nervous start. He recited two long poems, and it would be interesting to hear and read a greater variety of his work, but this was a fine introduction to a writer and performer I suspect we'll hear a lot more from.

The open mic spots were of their usual high quality. Rebecca Bird's poem was a highlight for me, as was Caroline Cook's, and Martin Malone read what might be the best football poem I've ever heard, partly because, of course, it was far more than a football poem.

Shindig does it again

I've written on here before about how, at the best poetry open mic nights (and Shindig is certainly one of those), a mysterious process seems to take place by which many of the poems coalesce around a unstated theme.

It happened again last night, with a string of poems about drugs, booze, addiction, and the fall-out from such things. I didn't catch all the names, but there was an astonishingly assured first-ever performance by a young man called (I think) DP Horton, and another fine poem from David Devaney (I think I've got that right). The regulars rose to the challenge, too - Rebecca Bird's Parisienne poem, and Roy Marshall's rather menacing, butcher-themed piece, were among the highlights, but there was a lot else to enjoy, too.

Of the featured readers, both Lydia Towsey and Deborah Tyler-Bennett, who formed the first half of the bill, are familiar faces, but no less impressive for that. Lydia actually did just two, long poems, both performed from memory (something that always impresses me) - the second of them, with its Spanish setting, was particularly fine. Deborah's new book, Turned Out Nice Again, is a collection of stories about music hall and variety in the East Midlands, and as with her poetry, it demonstrates a great ear for natural speech, especially where accent and dialect are concerned (nowhere but the East Midlands is 'home' pronounced 'omm').

After the break Martin Malone read superbly, both from his Templar collection The Waiting Hillside, and from newer work, touching on memory, family, masculinity and landscape. It's the first time I've met Martin or heard him read (although I've long since enjoyed the book), and he's a born performer, projecting his poems through that mixture of stillness and energy that I've talked about before.

Sarah James was a totally new poet to me, but I'll look forward to reading more of her work. She's had collections out from Circaidy Gregory and Knives Forks & Spoons, and her poetry rather defies easy categorisation, flitting between the mainstream and the more experimental without ever being intimidating.

Finally, it's just worth mentioning that there's an additional Nine Arches event in Leicester next month, on Friday October 25th at the Quaker Meeting House on Queen's Road, Clarendon Park. For just £5 you get four poets (Mario Petrucci, Claire Trevien, Alistair Noon and myself, plus tea and cakes). Follow the link to book.

September Shindig!

The latest Nine Arches Press and Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig takes place at The Western, Western Road, Leicester LE3 0GA, on Monday from 7.30pm.

As usual entry is free and there'll be plenty of open mic slots - just sign up on the door if you'd like to read.

Guest readers are Sarah James, Lydia Towsey, Deborah Tyler-Bennett and Martin Malone. Deborah and Lydia will be familiar faces to East Midlands audiences – Deborah's publications include Pavilion (Smokestack, 2010), Revudeville (King's England, 2011) and her most recent, Turned Out Nice Again: Stories Inspired by the Music Hall Tradition (King’s England, 2013), while Lydia is a poet and performer who has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and is currently working to organise a tour of her one woman show, The Venus Papers. She's also Chair and Compere of WORD!, the longest running spoken word night in the Midlands, held monthly in Leicester.

Sarah James is a poet, short fiction writer and former journalist. Her first collection Into the Yell (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2010) won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011. Sarah's second collection Be[yond], published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, is officially launched this week.

Martin Malone was born in West Hartlepool, and now lives in Warwickshire. A winner of the 2011 Straid Poetry Award and the 2012 Mirehouse Prize, his first full collection - The Waiting Hillside - is published by Templar Poetry. Currently studying for a PhD in poetry at Sheffield University, he edits The Interpreter’s House poetry journal. He also has a taste for 1980s Australian indie bands so frighteningly similar to my own that you'd think we'd been raised together in a Perth commune.

Interviewed by Roy Marshall

There's an interview with me over at the blog of Roy Marshall - you can read it here. It was very enjoyable to do, although I fear I may have wittered on incoherently at times, and repeated myself at others. But anyway, many thanks to Roy for taking so much time and trouble over this.

There are also a few poems from The Elephant Tests there - if you like what you see, it's available through the Nine Arches website.

While you're at the blog, take the time to have a more general browse. Roy, who's from Leicester, is a very fine poet whose Crystal Clear Creators pamphlet Gopagilla was a taste of what he's capable of, and his forthcoming collection from Shoestring Press promises to build on that auspicious start.

Launching The Elephant Tests

Maybe it was the fact of reading with the doors wide open behind us, thanks to the balmy weather, but there definitely seemed to be an outdoor vibe to last night's Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig. As ever, the poetry in the open mic slots and the featured readings ranged far and wide.

It was also the launch of my new Nine Arches collection, The Elephant Tests, and it was great to be able to give the poems their first airing (well, sort of - many of them have been read at the Shindig open mic over the last three years) in the company of so many fine poets, not least the other featured readers, David Morley (pictured below), Zeandrick Oliver and Kate Fox.

I've talked before about David's forthcoming Carcanet collection, The Gypsy and the Poet, and the poems from it are outstanding (especially The Invisible Gift). But the final poem he read, just finished earlier in the day, was as good as anything else we heard in a superb reading.

Zeandrick's chapbook Secretions, from New Fire Tree Press, is a thing of beauty, a work of art before you even get started on the writing, and he read from it confidently and well. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend - he managed to pull off the difficult trick of a Frank O'Hara homage that sounded both natural and original.

Kate Fox is a familiar voice from radio, and had just spent time as poet in residence at the Glastonbury Festival, but after assuring us that she's had a shower since, she delivered a great set that had the audience demanding she return for encores. There's a great deal of humour in her work, but there's a great deal more too - her poem about her father was touchingly honest, while her piece on call centres added anger to the mix. I think that's because it, and many of her other poems, use northern vernacular and speech patterns not simply to sound somehow 'authentic', but to question how they're heard and seen by the rest of society. I bought her book, the splendidly titled Fox Populi, to read more.

It always feels unfair picking out particular open mic readers. Jayne Stanton never fails to leave an impression, and Roy Marshall and Rebecca Fox were two more personal favourites in what was a uniformly strong showing. Steve Carroll's closing poem was great, especially if you remember some of Leicester's now-vanished watering holes, while Gary Carr's poem was a little masterpiece of allusion and the use of sound, being constructed wholly of initials. Shindig goes from strength to strength - it was a privilege to be part of it.

Shindig in Leicester

This Monday (July 8th), I'm reading at the latest Nine Arches Press and Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig, at the usual venue of The Western, 70 Western Road, Leicester.

Special guests are Kate Fox, David Morley, Zeandrick Oliver and me. David needs absolutely no introduction, to readers of this blog or poetry fans more generally, but the poems I've heard from his forthcoming Carcanet collection are absolutely outstanding, and he's always a riveting reader of his own work. Zeandrick is a student at De Montfort University in Leicester, and I have to admit I don't know his work at all - I look forward to hearing it.

Finally, I'm pretty sure Kate Fox was there at one of my first-ever readings (well, mini-readings), an anthology launch at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle. She was, and still is, a top-notch performer of her own  work (she's a comedian, too), and has most recently been Poet In Residence at Glastonbury. 

It's free and it all starts at 7.30pm, and as usual there are open mic slots available - just sign up on the door if you're interested.

March 2013 Shindig!

The latest Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig takes place at The Western, Western Road, Leicester, next Monday at 7.30pm.

Featured readers are Nicola Deane, Jonathan Taylor, Jess Green and Mark Goodwin, and there are the usual open mic slots available - sign up early to make sure of one. Entrance is free.

Leicester Shindig, 14.1.13

It was unfortunate that the first real snow of this winter fell on the day of the first Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig of the year, but there was plenty to warm the cockles at The Western, as usual.

The open mic was as good as ever - I particularly enjoyed pieces by Maxine Linnell, Maria Taylor and Roy Marshall (his blackbird poem), but the quality was uniformly high. Good to see Anthony Owen there to read, too.

First featured reader was Dave Reeves, something of a legend in the Midlands, especially on the western side of the A5. His set used Black Country dialect, a squeeze-box (a highlight for me - far too few poets use squeeze-boxes), and some props for poems such as the one about how many Wild West heroes would have had British regional accents. Think about it - they would.

Julie Boden is another well-known face on the Midlands poetry scene, and her set of love poems was what I've come to expect from here - accessible, and very musical (she actually sang one poem), without sacrificing any subtlety. She uses repetition well - something that's far harder than you'd think it is to pull off.

After the interval, David Clarke (who'd braved the journey up from Cheltenham) read from his Flarestack pamphlet Gaud, as well as newer work, and read very well too. I'm looking forward to reading the pamphlet after what I heard, and he made a good point (very gently) about the assumptions we make about authorial voice in poems.

Jayne Stanton is a familiar face at Leicester poetry events, perhaps THE most familiar face, but I've heard her read a whole set too rarely before now. She has a quiet voice, both literally and poetically, and her work is all the better for it, I think - I enjoyed her poems based on a trip to Cork in particular, but she's someone with a wealth of strong material.

And that was it - back out into the ice and snow after another excellent night. Oh, and I read one newish poem at the open mic - The Dark Ages - inspired by finding an old university textbook of mine (John Morris's The Age Of Arthur) in a charity shop.

November's Leicester Shindig!

The latest Nine Arches Press and Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig! takes place at The Western, 70 Western Road, Leicester LE3 0GA a week on Monday, 19th November, at 7.30pm.

The night's guests are Jo Bell, Dragan Todorovic, Ian Parks and David Cooke, and as always there'll be open mic slots available on the night.

David Cooke won a Gregory Award in 1977 and published Brueghel’s Dancers in 1984. He then stopped writing for 20 years. A retrospective collection, In the Distance, was published in 2011 by Night Publishing. A new collection, Work Horses, has just been published by Ward Wood Publishing.

Jo Bell is a former Glastonbury Poet in Residence, director of National Poetry Day — and now the UK's Canal Laureate. A boatdweller and former archaeologist, her poems are about everything from Roman forts to sex on the towpath (between ducks). Current projects include a collaboration on a sequence with Martin Malone, charting the progress of a passionate relationship.

Dragan Todorovic is a multimedia artist and author of eight books of nonfiction, poetry and fiction. He’s worked extensively in print and electronic media, in Serbia (where he was born) and in Canada (where he lived between 1995 - 2005). Little Red Transistor Radio from Trieste is his first collection of short stories.

Ian Parks is the only poet to have poems published in The TLS and The Morning Star on the same day. His latest collection is The Exile’s House (Waterloo Press) and he is currently Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Entry is free.

The Marshall plan

Lovely to see that Leicester poet Roy Marshall will have a debut collection coming out with Shoestring Press next year - his Crystal Clear Creators chapbook Gopagilla is excellent (I'll be blogging about it and some of the other CCC pamphlets soon). Roy has some interesting things to say about the book and the pamphlet here.

Shoestring, run by John Lucas, is a fine little press, too, with excellent production values and, over the years, a varied line-up of poets. I've just enjoyed Gregory Woods' pamphlet Very Soon I Shall Know, from them, for example.

September Shindig

Next Monday (September 17th) it's the latest Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig! at The Western, Western Road, Leicester.

Featured poets are Angela France, Daniel Sluman, Sarah Jackson and Rory Waterman, and as always, you can sign up on the door for the open mic slots. Entry is free.

Best yet?

Monday night's Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig was as good as any reading/open mic I've been to - I'd wondered whether the ongoing deluge and the Leicester holiday fortnight might make keep people away this time, but in fact the Western was packed out.

A great bill helped, obviously. I'm not going to attempt to review the night properly, but Alan Baker, Maria Taylor and Robin Vaughan-Williams are all poets whose work I've known and enjoyed for some time now, and all three gave fine readings, as ever. You can read much more about them here and here.

Kim Moore was a new name to me, though, and closed the night with a really fine set (she was down from Barrow-in-Furness, but has family in Leicester, I think). I bought her Smith/Doorstop pamphlet - If We Could Speak Like Wolves - on the strength of it, and it more than does her justice. I loved her opening poem, The Wolf, in particular, not least because of her declaration that she reads it because she doesn't know what it means. That enquiring sense is there throughout the book.

The open mic slots seem to get better with each reading, and it was nice to see more and more West Midlands poets coming to give it a try. Gary Carr's second poem, a letter to his daughter, was a real highlight for me, Gary Longden, Deborah Tyler-Bennett and Jayne Stanton were as good as always, and Graham Norman and Maria Rooner performed the same poem in English, then German, to good effect. Considering I managed to fail O Level German three times (don't ask), I surprised myself by how much I actually followed when Maria was reading.

Talking to Alan and Robin afterwards, we were trying to work out what makes the Shindigs work so well (aside from the poets, obviously). The size and shape of the room certainly helps, as does the fact that there's always been a nice, relaxed feel at the Western - people wander in from the street or the other bar and dip in and out of the poetry, which you don't get at many places. And last but certainly not least, the laid-back, resolutely uncompetitive atmosphere cultivated by Jane and Matt of Nine Arches and Jonathan Taylor of CCC, makes all the difference.