An article about Ride the Lights, which me & @drpaulhurley did for @HepworthGallery last month…
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Tag / arts
NaPoWriMo 24: Dust Across the Beam
Hyde Park Picture House: 100 in 2014!
As you may have noticed, things have been a bit cinematic on my blog during NaPoWriMo.
I’m reading a few poems (including my poem about the Invisible Cinema walking tour, from earlier in the month) on Sunday morning at an event to mark the centenary of Hyde Park Picture House. And here is a piece I wrote based on an earlier prompt from Canal Laureate Jo Bell, which was to write a poem of Welcome.
So, to celebrate the Picture House’s centenary, I wrote a welcome for its next 100 years – and here it is:
Twenty-One Thirteen
or, Dust Across the Beam
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may your bright skies usher in
the twenty-first century’s pigeons –
their future-coos upon the roof’s tiles
(not nesting in seats, feathering aisles).
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
the elaborate plaster flowers which grow
from the walls are the germinating magic bean
of all the cinemas to which we can no longer go.
A furrow of many bulbs (and most no longer glow).
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may the red curtains of each romance
open and close, close and open
on the clumsy ill-fated dance
of faltering fake yawns
and thousands of missed chances.
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may never the popcorn of cinema dreams
be trodden under giant flat-screen feet
confining chorus gasp, behind-you screams
to closed-curtain houses on sparse streets.
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen
and all the seconds in between:
may the 26-flicker of each second’s cell
combine with the terabytes of files, to tell
stories as many as dust across the beam.
For stories are light and light is the spell.
So welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may all your future screens,
even in desperate certificate eighteens
times contain only some scenes
of the mildest peril.
NaPoWriMo 13: Windowless Walls
Bagel Nash, which was once the News Theatre, by Leeds Station
I continue to run at a poetical-deficit, but will catch up soon (12 and 14 to follow today)…
Here’s my poem based on going for a walk: on Sunday, I went on a walking tour of some of the forgotten/disused cinemas around Leeds city centre – which is part of the celebration of 100 years of Hyde Park Picture House – and was organised by these fine folk (Conway and Young). I put up some more pictures of this walk yesterday…
So I wrote this piece from jottings and thoughts while looking around these forgotten cinemas:
Windowless Walls
or, Cut (A Tour of Cinemas Past in Leeds)
At the News Theatre (where the only
fresh news is today’s bagels), we cut
open bags of popcorn and sniff
it like posies – warding something off –
and say how its aroma
is better than its taste.
Lyric, Lyceum, Olympia: we cut
a queue of ancient voices
through gusts of decades. Cinema
at the centre of the block-
buster’s vortex. The jump-
cuts in the waveforms of lives.
The Merrion Centre’s lights
and mirrors hold prisoner
a 1970s Odeon: the orange-brown
Autumnal kernel of
future past.
On a windowless wall, words over words
(of what was The Tower) meekly whisper how
there is Always a Good Programme. A frame
half-covering it booms Demand Everything! Now!
listing superstar DJ-names and Gatecrasher-choons.
3-D digi-HD smell-o-feel-o-vision gimmickry,
in this most flammable and malleable of media:
memory. Bricks begin to flicker.
Dust in the lens, my eyes
water: a strong wind, cut
full of particulate matter.
We, the City’s Editors –
its planners and punters –
razor-blades poised to cut
between CGI-progress
and/or
celluloid-preservation.
Look Up: Primark was once a cinema, too.
NaPoWriMo 5: Unprompted Art Poetry
Paul Jenkins’ ‘Phenomena Secret Cargo’ – but not as we saw it in the gallery…Which is right?
Day 6 of NaPoWriMo – I’m still brewing a cinquain from yesterday (which are HARD!) but here is a non-prompt piece inspired by a visit to the gallery in Cardiff (Wales, where I am today). I’m writing overlooking the Wales Millennium Centre (with its Gwyneth Lewis quote writ large on the front: IN THESE STONES HORIZONS SING) from a lovely cafe called Kemi’s in Cardiff Bay.
So my NaPoWriMo efforts might come a bit out of sequence (I am one behind!) – and that fits rather well with today’s atemporal slightly-experimental back-to-front work. (I’m not sure it does ‘work’ yet – but in the spirit of keeping on keeping on for NaPoWriMo, here it is anyway…)
A brief explanation: a friend and I (hello Rachel if you are reading!) went to this exhibition at the Wales National Museum Gallery and both really enjoyed the picture (above, kind of). But when we Googled it, it was upside down. Or the one in the gallery was. And really, really different because of it – not the same painting at all.
So I wrote an upside-down art poem about the incident. Here it is:
After seeing Phenomena Secret Cargo by Paul Jenkins
or, Up Way Which?
We part ways
and on my screen,
a satellite-line paints itself,
writes itself, unseen
blue, through the city
to this bay.
So we go to the desk
to ask a lady beneath an i
if she knew why
the Internet said
it should go up
the other way?
Drinking tea, we talk about writing
and find the picture, Googling on
gravity-sensing devices. But the
thumbnails show it upside-down:
Cargo Secret Phenomena.
In the top gallery, we talk about
Yves Klein Blue and layers
of paint in original Rothko. Then
Phenomena Secret Cargo
by Paul Jenkins. It looks like wings,
we say, like butterflies, like feathers.
How the brush sweeps up:
like it could fly.
One artist had refracted the stairs
in kaleidoscopic photographs –
(‘to make us question public space’)
curving up the walls.
Back through time,
we take pictures of
Mammoths, in panoramic mode
(which I just showed you how to use)
then make our way to the gallery,
strolling through Geology.
Card-board Word-hoard: Sunday 17th March
Sunday, 2pm at Melbourne Street Studios, Leeds.
YOU SHOULD COME. IT WILL BE FUN AND MESSY.
Bring: glue sticks, scissors, old newspapers and packaging (clean not skanky!).
On Sunday 17th March at 2pm, I’ll be running a workshop at 2pm at Melbourne Street Studios (Melbourne St, Leeds – address here) as part of The Fabulous Recycling and Discourse on the Environment Exhibition (about which, more information here) working with old newspapers and packaging to create found (and concrete) poems.
The exhibition is by artists Donna Bramall and Rachel Hinds – the exhibition aims to show their “individual responses to the realities of how the waste created by society effects the environment we live in”.
Whether you’re an experienced writer or have never written a poem before, it’s a great way of working with form and enjoying words for their sound, as objects and in their arbitrary (but often intriguing and beautiful) collisions with other words. That’s the fun of found poetry of this kind: you choose the words ‘off-the-shelf’, someone has already written them down – you’re collecting, curating and creating with them. And whatever the self reveals, even through ‘randomness’, still reveals the self – the theory goes.
You can lay them out in interesting and peculiar ways, in shapes and with images – along the lines of Concrete Poetry.
Finally, as an example – here is a found-poem I made working with some students (when teaching):
A found poem, mainly from Metro headlines!
And here’s the poem typed out:
Summon The Urban Future…
…naturally adaptive,
the sirens tumble
unsupported patterns.
Now meet the Ultimate
30-month low you’ll treasure,
transforming a perfect A-Lister.
Buy the £440,000 art cakes
inside the new blue red carpet,
as accidental tech-scents
hit
the flawless box triumphs.
(My favourite is the ‘accidental tech-scents’ – I would never had come up with that without Metro’s assistance! It’s not often you can say that about poetry…)
Hope to see you Sunday for some cut-and-stick fun…
