Morag's experience at the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival 2019

Borders and Walls: Commemorating the Fall of the Berlin Wall

On a greying Friday at the end of September, I finished my last lecture at six o’clock. It was the second week back. My car was packed and I set off from Falmouth through the evening traffic heading for the quiet isolation of STERTS Arts Centre, high on Bodmin Moor. I arrived a bit before eight, it was dark, I had missed the first speaker Kim Moore. I spoke with her afterward; she was alive, funny, clever. Her world felt very relatable to me. She was juggling poetry: reading and running a workshop and a very small baby which was strapped to her partner’s chest like a starfish. He jiggled around the event and she worried people would be annoyed by her child’s loud sucking and happy gurgles as he fed during a reading. Kim must have been good because people queued up to buy her book, Fear of Falling, when they came out of that session.

The poet Jamie McKendrick was halfway through his reading when I got there. I listened through a crack in the door till he paused, then slipped in and quietly grabbed a seat at the back. He was a great reader, giving lots of extra information about the poems. His preamble was very dry and self-deprecating but funny. He would crease you up leaving you open and vulnerable to the poem which he would then hit you with.

Then there was a break for a meal. Everyone sitting and eating together: poets, punters, organisers, student helpers. It’s a lovely atmosphere. David Woolley, the man jointly responsible for this wonderful event welcomed me warmly. His wife Ann Gray, also responsible and a well-respected poet herself, was absent. He explained that the care home that they run had been shortlisted for the national care awards and she had gone to represent them there. Leaving him to represent them here. I felt the uncomfortable tear of separation coming off him in waves. Theirs is a double act that is fully functioning and a joy to be around. It was a bit weird seeing him hosting the event by himself.

I was helping on the bookstall, run by a brilliant lady called Amanda She has a shop in Lostwithiel called ‘Lost in Books.’ There was also a whole table of publications from ‘Guillemot Press.’ Our own Luke Thompson is a big part of the festival and organises all the speakers and events on the Saturday. The books he publishes, if you are unfamiliar with them, are some of the most beautiful books of poetry you will ever come across. Everything: the binding, the paper, the layout, the illustrations, all are unique and integrate with their subject as only a real poet could manage to do.

Friday night was an informal affair, organised by Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta, poet and local lass. She comes home every year and puts together the Friday night cabaret. Now, having released her first book ‘Kingdomland’ to resounding critical acclaim, she is a star in her own right. We would have to wait till Sunday to hear her read as the penultimate act of the festival. This was painful to me as I had been yearning to hear her work again since hearing her here back in May.

First up was AK Blakemore. She read with relentless intensity her wonderful, sad, angry poetry. Her discarded poems formed a steadily growing, white mountain on the table in front of her. It was a piece of art in itself. After her came Will Harris. They were both very young. He started by reciting a poem by WS Graham that he had learned by heart and it was a great rendition. He managed to convey beautifully the way Graham’s poetry skips and skims from line to line. Harris talked about the confusion he had felt growing up as a mixed-race child who thought of himself as white and felt the same as the people around him. His poetry poignantly captures his feelings. This guy is funny, he has funny bones, he makes you laugh out loud. He would give a long hilarious introduction to a poem. We would all be laughing. Then one would realise that what he is actually saying is not really a joke. That it is sad. That it is about injustice, discrimination. The listener is brought to silence, confused, feeling wrong, caught out. Genius!

Taking part

On Saturday morning I took part in an outdoor workshop run by Camilla Nelson. It was called ‘Border-Line: Writing between Human/Tree.’ Using all our senses we engaged with the trees. It was raining very gently. The trees sheltered us as we touched them, smelt them, listened to them. I had never pressed my ear tight to a tree before. Suddenly I hear deep in the tree a noise like a great, slow harp. I look up. Against my cheek, the trunk is solid, smooth and cool I breathe in the thin smell of beech bark. High up in the high wind the smaller twigs and branches are fast-moving, leaves catching the sunlight. I make myself very still. I stand in the same earth river. Deep in me is a quiet harp, a drum, pipes. My hair blows against my face. In pairs, we go to another tree. This a hazel with many mature shoots. We tap her roots. One listens while the other taps. We become part of the song of the tree. Its fibres carry the sound to my coiled ear-bones. We vibrate. It is a great glockenspiel. We try to articulate it. Now I have a new skill. Now I can listen to trees.

Before the first person of the day started to read David came on stage. He announced that they had won the care awards the previous night and emotionally congratulated his wife for all her hard work over twenty years. He tearfully acknowledged and praised her dedication and hard work. Then it was straight back into the festival and Sandeep Parmar. Her prose poetry interrogates the stories we have been told about Los Angeles, about the riots, about the whole Hip Hop scene. About survivors and surviving, about whitewashing. So beautiful. So sad. She opens my eyes with her words. Then Phoebe Power. An extraordinary performance. Embodying her Austrian grandmother, telling us her difficult stories. Playing with the edge of belonging and not belonging. Reminding us all why we need refugees, immigrants, culture clashes, the flood of difference.

During the morning Alan Qualtrough set up his small letterpress. During the weekend he pressed people’s phrases and stuck them up creating a wall of truth. The foyer of the arts centre held an exhibition of his work. He talked us through it. He had served his apprenticeship as a letterpress setter, then become a newspaper editor. He went on later to study fine art. At art school, he discovered an old unused letterpress and started to use his typesetting skills to make art. It is analogue technology, physical, real and violent. He was interested in what was happening to language. The complex layering that constituted fake news. The defining of the human being by what they buy not what they do. He decided to do an MA. His proposition being whether people read a text differently that has been printed using the slowly assembled letterpress, as opposed to reading it in a digital form. He wondered if it gave them a deeper engagement with language. Walt Whitman said, ‘There can be no liberty for a community that cannot detect lies.’ Our modern media systematically uses language to lie to and coerce its readers. Could he use the materiality of letterpress to interrogate social media and see if it affected truth? His art has been a visual inquiry into this and many other political questions. ‘Kiss and Bite’ is the name of his company.

The next reader was Redell Olsen: poet, professor, maker of film, smocks and other works of cloth. She is a dynamic performance artist who uses her films as a backdrop to her poetry. She asks if landscape can become a form of language. Responding to art and the painter’s resistance to merely representing the scene. Her fragmented poems use found text to ward off witches, challenge patriarchy, illumine discrimination. She uses chance procedures to reassemble text into an amazing and unique environmental beseechment. Her bizarre word fragments create a linguistic landscape that is emotionally and politically active.

Up next were three young poets. First was Astra Papachristodoulou. She explores her Greek heritage, weaving myth into modern issues, the stars into her own life. Sequencing her words into unusual, highly pleasing arrangements. Next was Jenna Clake. Her poems were slightly surreal, revolving around an eating disorder, a friendship group and her dysfunctional relationship with her boyfriend. The dialogues are full of paranoia and self-indulgent melancholy. Last was Rowan Evans, poet and sound artist. He writes a walk where imagery is woven into literary references. Playing with the process of disrupting writing he uses his knowledge of Old English language to translate and mistranslate, listing and naming things as he walks creating an ecological politic. His beautiful burning images mix ancient language and modern metaphor into a concrete sequence to paint an ice-landscape. Writing into Old Norse Icelandic Sagas and women’s magic, to a soundtrack recorded in the Arctic, he translates literally, phonetically and speculatively. Witnessing into English the historical persecution of male and female shaman with his haunting verses and hybrid words.

Camilla Nelson gave an inspired reading. She explores the materiality of language through writing, installation and performance. She voices nature and mixes description, landscape, folklore and etymology into riveting and vigorous poetry. As she walks you through the woods you feel the hairs on the back of your neck slowly rising. Her last book was created through a land-based installation. She took samples of things from different parts of a wood, mulched them together, made paper from the mulch, then took the paperback to its origins and allowed it to decompose back into the earth. The poem is her stream of consciousness as she took a long walk around the wood. You can hear the wood alive around her. Wet, sucking, creaking and moving.

Peter Larkin read straight after Camilla. He writes everything through trees. He has published several collections and all of it is trees. He uses language in great, wide correlations that somehow miraculously will come to paint a copse of trees recovering from the violence of their separation from the hedge where they once belonged. His ecological narrative eclipses the human and posits the potential to build a bridge back to nature. Asking if we might not need their arboreal gifts? He read a sequence of poems where he was writing the ‘not-tree.’ An abstraction that describes an actual unphysical representation of the tree’s not-tree aspect. The other side of nature where it is more than mere production, in the sharpness of its spiritual continuum. He asks whether the verticality of trees might maybe make the sky take off? He brings apparently unrelated words into a relationship to describe almost impossible concepts. Almost, but through his ability to say them, not quite impossible concepts.

The last two readers on Saturday evening began with Katrina Porteous. Katrina had traveled down from Northumbria. Her home lies beyond Hadrian’s wall on the English side of the Scottish borders. She writes in her local dialect, which lies close with its Anglo Saxon roots, of the politics of the northern people, the people of the land, farmers, fishermen. The land that her people have farmed for 4000 years. The Romans, she points out, were there for a mere 400 years. She tells of the old ways, the sustainable ways. Artisan fishing that has run from ancient times, right through the industrialisation, the over-fishing, and its subsequent collapse. It is the ecology of sustainability, detailing the lives of people whose way of life has become lost in the span of a single generation. Showing us the ruin of the Durham coast-line, a landscape despoiled by coal mining. Her poetry is hard, elegant and uncompromising.

The final reader of the night was John F Deane. The Irish poet has published many books, but the last and most lovely is produced by Guillemot Press and has only just come out. Life is a pilgrimage. The book is a pilgrimage. His poems are perfect glimpses into the portions of that pilgrimage that are life. He speaks of births, of deaths, of weather. Each concrete verse resonating those moments into tangible reality as we listen. His descriptions cause the body to sing like a gong, struck by their sheer glorious beauty. His subjects are often hard and cruel, yet he manages to soften them enough to let the spirit in, to make them shine. To allow us access.

Sunday morning the weather stormed around us. The views I knew were there, hidden in thick cloud, the windows obscured by rain. Kim’s workshop was full, we crowded around the table. She had called it ‘The personal and the Political.’ We tunneled straight into that concept. Realising that just about every personal statement is political if you look at it that way. Kim interrogated the idea that some things were not grand enough to deserve writing about. She made us see that these are the things that can become our own political language. We listed the names we can call ourselves. The lies we can tell to make a shield between us and the world. The times we had felt something very strongly, and where the supernatural was in that. These are the things we can bring a passion to. That will touch someone else. Inspired by a wonderful collection of poetry that Kim had brought to share with us, we spent the time writing, learning and unpacking the language of our personal political landscapes.

Before lunch we heard first, Kathryn Maris, an American-British poet and critic. She spins a bitter candyfloss. Without ever foregrounding her virtues she creates fast confessional poetry that breaks your heart even as you laugh. ‘I am a terrible liar,’ she says. Continuously misrepresenting herself in a stunning portrait of the stifling social constraints of being ‘mother’ or ‘sister’. One poem repurposes text from her WhatsApp ‘parents of the under 15’s football team’, group. In another, she uses characters from Greek mythology (she too has Greek ancestors three generations back) to dialogue modern dysfunctional relationships and interactions. In a hilarious, domestic, mental landscape she rapid fires poetry at her audience with great skill and a droll, poignant finesse.

She might have been a hard act to follow, especially if you were a poet writing very serious poetry. However, David Morley nailed it. From Romany background to Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University. This guy is the biz. His beautiful spare poetry steals into your heart like a knife. He is the only poet that brought me to tears all weekend. ‘Romany wounds me’ he says. ‘It is not an official language’. He brings it into his poems like a slip of the tongue. In the voice of a young Romany lad, he takes England to task for closing its borders. ‘They say that language shows you.’ Morley showed us, we really saw him, sitting where he does in his lovely, difficult world.

After lunch came first Hugh Dunkerley. Writing about his experience of becoming a father and extending that to look at our relationship with the non-human world. In short literal poems, he shares the anxiety, the exhaustion and the love. The ecology of parenting. Catching an image and cleverly transferring it to the reader complete. His assemblage precise and unusual. ‘The green sea of now translucent with seeing.’

He was followed by Maurice Riordan, returning to the festival after a number of years to read again. Juxtaposing objects with feelings, his poems are a tipping thing that balances only when a butterfly alights. Half rhymes that hide in the lilt of his gentle Irish accent. His are the ideas of half-sleep, surreal and just believable. Songs of ordinary things sung with a sweetness that belies the subject as it honours and celebrates it. ‘Slipping the nest back under the nesting bird.’

The festival and the community

Every year the festival reaches out into the community and on Sunday afternoon we get to sit in the amazing, round-house/tent theatre, and see what they have been doing. First was an all-age dance piece exploring the weekend's theme of Walls and Borders. The group had only met this morning. They had looked at protests around the world. The way the desire to talk about something can overwhelm you. The efforts people went to to get messages across the Berlin Wall. The dancers crawled, rolled and climbed across the stage. They had notes held in hands or mouths and they transferred these from one to another until finally someone would open and read it and then the others would crowd around to read it too. The act of communication, caught in a sinuous, emotional rhythm. Linking arms, they became a chain. a line of communication, each dancer enacting a different emotional response.

Back to the arts centre and a puppet show from a small boy and the puppeteers who had brought a bunch of truly wonderful puppets to work with. A person trapped in a coconut is freed leading them to start to search all the coconuts encase more people are trapped inside them. After this Sarah Cave and four children from the local primary school assembled a giant Jenga tower. During the week Sarah and Astra had run a workshop with the kids and generated lines of poetry which they had written on the bricks. The children pulled out a brick and read the poetry that was on it. thereby creating a poem. As more bricks came out and were replaced on the top it became increasingly unstable and the higher it got the worse it became. Eventually, it came crashing down, symbolic of the Berlin wall coming down thirty years ago.

Next, we watched Access Theatre. A weekly theatre group for young people with disabilities. They had each made an autobiographical portrait on film which the whole group had joined in making. Anne Grey has been working with the group for a number of months. It was funny, sad and inspirational. After this, we saw a film made in the Gaza strip called ‘The Wall.’ Shot by Jane Darke and Andrew Tebbs on a trip there ten years ago. Jane read a moving poem about the persecution of the Palestinian people over the footage.

After tea, there was a long performance by Poet Roger Garfitt and guitarist Gareth Rees. In the first half, they explored the borderlands between Wales and Shropshire. Between Gareth’s haunting melodies Roger tells of Stone Age dwellings and the history of the Ridgeway. His anger flows out across the audience taking us into chapterhouse and temple. The second half was about walking away from a broken relationship. Inspired by an Argentinian song that describes a journey across a snowy landscape. This time the music was classical Argentinian guitar. Roger describes his desperate helplessness in Colombia as he watches his beloved suffer the effects of austerity when he fails to earn anything with his writing after moving there. Eventually, he emerges from his grief and becomes reconciled with himself again.

The festival closed with two poets whose first books had taken the poetry world by storm. Rachael Allen’s ‘Kingdomland’ creates another universe ruled by surreal logic. All is superstitious and strange. She was responding to a series of paintings in which unusual landscapes are populated by women in various states of distress. She had wanted to find a way to write about violence towards women and also towards animals without in any way diminishing either. Her words are cut from the bone with a sharp knife, they burn us. Yet the images are so new and fresh and unexpected that they force the listener to engage, trying to make sense of this torturous new world. Allen is unafraid of spilling women’s blood in public. She makes no excuses for throwing desire and pain around. She abandons her listeners in frightening places where people become tangled in net curtains and are murdered. She leaves us in a ‘concertina of worry.’ This is poetry that changes you. Read it.

The last reader was Andrew McMillan. He read from his second book, ‘Playtime’ which is about childhood and adolescence and how we grow into our sexual selves and the self we will become. He uses a stretched-out language that carries us into his emotional past. A masterful arrangement of words that eat us alive as he shows us the difficult relationship he had with his body. The abuse the adolescent mind inflicts upon itself. Upon others. The pain of admitting to others that you are a poet. He had us laughing about his sexuality in a conspiracy he had brought us into. It is a traumatic place to end up, part of the laughter, part of the conspiracy. He crafts us into his landscape, tending his words as they grow from his dirt into poems that stand up, precarious and strange. Dark, damp and difficult he exposes himself to us and we feel like we have exploited him. But he enjoys our discomfort and takes pleasure in our fear.

The festival ended with supper. It was my third time at this event. I cannot say how inspiring it is to hear this quantity of incredibly good poetry in such a short space of time. I was filled up with it, like a balloon. I felt ungrounded, destabilised, like I might take off and float away. I wanted someone to hold me by the ankle just encase. Instead, I drove home, my bag heavy with books.

Bodmin Moor Festival reading list

Kim Moore: The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015), If We Could Speak Like Wolves (Smith-Doorstop, 2012).

Jamie McKendrick has published seven poetry collections and has a collection of essays on art, poetry and translation: Foreign Connection, forthcoming (Legenda).

AK Blakemore: Humbert Summer (Eyewear, 2015), Fondue (Offord Road Books, 2018)

Will Harris: Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press, 2018),RENDANG forthcoming (Granta, 2020).

Sandeep Parmar: Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013),Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011), The Apple Orchard, Eidolon

Phoebe Power: Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018).

Redell Olsen: Film Poems (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2014),Punk Fauna: a bar rock pastel (Book, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004).

Astra Papachristodoulou: Stargazing, (Guillemot Press, 2019).

Jenna Clake: Fortune Cookie (Eyewear, 2018), CLAKE/Interview For (Verve Press).

Rowan Evans: The Last Verses of Beccan (Guillemot Press, 2019), cante jondo mixtape (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2017).

Camilla Nelson: Apples and Other Languages (Knife, Fork and Spoons, 2017), A Yarn Er Narrative (Contraband |Books, 2019).

Peter Larkin: Give Forest its next Portent (Shearsman, 2010), City Trappings (Housing, Heath or Wood) (Shearsman, 2016),Trees Before Abstinent Ground (Shearsman, 2019).

Katrina Porteous: The Lost Music (Bloodaxe, 1996), Two Countries (Bloodaxe, 2014), Edge (Bloodaxe, 2019).

John F Deane: Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), Semibreve (Carcanet, 2015), Give Dust a Tongue (Columba Press, 2015), Dear Pilgrims (Currach Press, 2018), Achill: The Island (Currach Press, 2018), Like the Dewfall (Guillemot Press, 2019).

David Morley: The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2105).

Kathryn Maris: The House with Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin, 2018).

Hugh Dunkerley: Hare (Book, 2010), Kin (Cinnamon, 2019).

Maurice Riordan: The Water Stealer (Faber, 2013), The Finest Music (Faber, 2014).

Roger Garfitt: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2000).

Rachael Allen: Kingdomland (Faber& Faber, 2018).

Andrew McMillan: physical (Jonathan Cape, 2015), playtime (Jonathan Cape, 2018).

by Morag Smith