Monday 3rd February 2014
Long gruelling trawl through
notes to get recent lesson plans keyed in. Heard from Jenni this afternoon.
She’s still unwell but a bit better thanks to chocolate. Worked on more lesson
plan stuff this evening. Really pleased the writing marathon is fully booked up – with
three reserves! Will be arranging one for the March very soon. Really want to
make these a monthly thing. Very tired now, didn’t get tea till after seven. Eyes
starting to hurt. Hope I don’t get a migraine. Oh well, almost bedtime. 10.30
pm.
Tuesday 4th February 2014
Made it through this evening
without migraine kicking in. Powered down about 700 calories of ginger cake,
bacon sizzler crisps. And a chicken mayo sandwich about half an hour later from
Asda in Stanley.
Tried on another black coat but the inside pocket was a little flimsy. So,
nearly two weeks since my birthday money and I’m still without a new winter
coat. Lucky the weather has been a bit milder of late. Session at Waddy went
okay. Doing a Villanelle illustrated perfectly how much graft goes into making
a successful poem: we got about two stanzas of the first draft down. Will take
multiple visits to complete. Tonight at Clayport I felt I could have done a bit
more. Next week we’ll delve into fiction. Home by eleven. Nothing on the answer
machine. No snailmail. 11.08 pm.
Wednesday 5th February 2014
Totally chuffed today. Wrote
two poems on the bus to Durham
as a precursor to our Intermediate session at Waddy. The group wrote similar
about themselves – positives and negatives after Tomaz Salamun. Was pleased to
get a good response to the exercise. Had an amazingly scrumptious bowl of meat
stew courtesy of Nicky and her cookery class this lunchtime. Then home to
lovely chat with Jenni on the phone. Pleased to hear the giggles. She likes the
darker of my two poems and says it’s a set-opener. Bigly thanks for that
feedback. Poem is typed, printed and pasted into my spiral-bound notebook;
going to road-test it at Poetry Jam. Jenni had a dig at me for listening to
now-defunct teen-targeted emo band My Chemical Romance. I have no shame. The
Black Parade is a cracking little dark platter if you ask me. Chuffed to get my
Alnwick ten-minute set sequenced this evening. Had a look at some art journal
pages. Ate fried egg on waffles and scribbled this. Oh yes! 10.23 pm.
Thursday 6th February 2014
Morning Pages:
So much for the central heating coming on at half six this morning. I swear I’m
becoming senile in my old age. Maybe you have to set the timer for both cycles
to get it to work. Oh well, I’m warm enough in my black joggers, t shirt and
little beanie hat. Who would have thought; never worn pyjamas for decades. Oh
well…
Last night I pulled the 2-13-61 trilogy off
the bookcase. Those early Rollins writings work much better in the original
volumes – with titles, dates and locations of composition, and a fresh page for
each piece. Lots more space around the words; the poems and vignettes really
shine that way. So chuffed I decided to collect all the original formats.
Really hungry. Reckon it’ll have to be an
all-day breakfast. I have a paid workshop at Derwentside Mind this morning and
an informal catch-up at Waddy this afternoon. Mind is supposed to be an editing
and sequencing session for a new collection from the group. I’m thinking of
taking in the little batch of handmade notebooks and running What’s in the Box
as a warm-up exercise to get them thinking speculatively, then give them A
Martian Sends A Postcard Home. Then Tomaz Salamun. And if there’s any time left
we can look at Show Don’t Tell. I think that is way plenty for this morning.
And afternoon will be re-runs of stuff from Tuesday and Wednesday with the
option of doing some group work. An A2Z of advice poem; or a group terza rima – sure there’ll be at
least one in the Staying Alive anthology.
Be good to get a little time out this
afternoon to pick up the Tom Paulin and Connie Bensley books from Clayport
Library. Looking forward to Poetry Jam this evening, Going to road-test
Charlatan. So, once in Durham,
once in Alnwick and then JibbaJabba. Not doing it at Hot Words or Material
Launch. I’m hoping to have it off book by Jibba on the 27th. Hot Words is a great
night for road-testing new prose. And I think I’ll be doing extracts from Home
Town Slog most months this year. I’d like to do a polished off-page poem at
Jibba each month if possible. Probably just “Sunshine” – but that’s okay.
Maybe, like I said a couple of days ago, with a little anecdote – build up a
lot of off-the-cuff stage time. That’s why I used to like the little five
minute sets at Lamplight coz it gave the opportunity to try adlib links and
intros – and a lot of times they’d become set speeches. It’s the whole package
of how you put it across: set up, link from one thing to the next. I’ll be
doing a session on this at Waddy again this year. And I’d really like to get
the group doing library jams again. But
it’s difficult without the core performance group.
So, what to put in my bag today? I don’t
want the whole week’s papers or I’ll not be able to carry my handmade books.
And I’d like to take at least a few copies of So Much for the Sunshine. Will be
on sale at Jibba all year. But I think a piece off book each month would be a
great aim. Charlatan to begin with, if possible; then stuff from Sunshine until
the 2012 journal book is available. Need to keep on top of the typesetting for
that. I reckon it’s going to run to about three hundred pages if I include at
least a paragraph from each day of the year – and that’s the intention. It will
be a rare sell, but on loulou.com I can manage it. Okay, time to get the
breakfast cooking. Yay! 7.10pm.
Facebook update:
MEGA-THANKS to everybody who filled Waddington Street
Centre in Durham tonight; I thought we were full last autumn, but what an
astonishingly high turn-out for the first Poetry Jam of 2014. And what a
brilliant line-up. Thank-you Terry Krazzywolf Dobson, Degna Stone and Scott
Tyrrell for superb sets - and all the jammers - some outstanding open-floor
this evening. Awesome. Awesome! Thanks greatly to Fergus for working the cafe, sorting the room
logistics and giving me a lift back to Moorside. Poetry Jam is back on 6th
March with another great line-up. Pix from tonight in due course. And if you
missed out on a copy of Scott's new book this evening, you can catch him at the
Lit and Phil for the official Red Squirrel Press launch next Monday at 7.00pm.
Keep it going!
Friday 7th February 2014
Lots of good feedback on
Poetry Jam. Photos came out better than usual coz I sat right next to the
performance area. Was still up this morning in the small hours sorting through
student poems to send in to Waddington
Street. This evening lots of fun putting together
an art journal page. I took the “I remember…” prompt as a starting point from
my all-dayer solo marathon in Consett last month. Then collaged some graphics
onto a double-spread. I copied up the prose in black ink over the graphics then
added a green wash. This distressed the fuck out of the text but it’s still
readable. I then took a slightly darker green and daubed the words HOME TOWN
SLOG over the top at right angles to the inked prose. Traces of Spiderman, ET
on a BMX bike, Venom and Twisted Sister logos visible if you look hard enough.
Result! 11.42 pm.
Twelve albums, no particular
order, that have resonance for me, taken from a Facebook game I didn’t share
online at the time:
News of the World - Queen
Dirk Wears White Sox – Adam
and the Ants
Back to Mystery
City – Hanoi Rocks
Welcome to Hell – Venom
Back in Black – AC/DC
Stay Hungry – Twisted Sister
The Head on the Door – The
Cure
God's Own Medicine – The Mission
Dreamtime – The Cult
Misplaced Childhood – Marillion
Opheliac – Emilie Autumn
New York – Lou Reed
Saturday 8th February 2014
Shopping for art paper and
card stock to make new journals and notebooks to sell at workshops. Jula Crafts
Ltd was curious so we exchanged business cards… Really tired today Couldn’t
focus at the computer, so I made a hand-sewn notebook. The bulky
single-signature fold and stitch is a killer on the hands. Hardbacks are less
damage but more tricky to assemble. Nice to see a pic of Jane Burn’s customized
journal that I sold her on Thursday. Journals are awesome. 11.02 pm.
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