Creative Showcase – Deborah Tyler-Bennett

Deborah Tyler-Bennett is one of the East Midland’s most respected poets, and well known for her excellent workshops and the Rhymes and Wines night held each month in Loughborough. To mark the publication of her new collection Pavillion the Literature Network presents a small selection of Deborah’s poetry.

Pavillion is a celebration of the world of the English dandy, its gorgeous peacock feathers and fading glamour. Her cast of eccentric and complicated characters entertain their listeners at the bar, flashy and flamboyant as Brighton’s fantasy Pavilion, revealing the sad truths and disturbing secrets behind their cheap make-up.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s previous publications include Clark Gable in Mansfield (King’s England, 2003), and selected poems in Take Five (Shoestring, 2003). In 2001 her poem ‘Kirk Alloway’ won the Hugh MacDiarmid Trophy.

Flaneur

Kagool sheathed, they rush, avoiding rain,
crushing past awnings’ gushing waterfalls
and there he’s cloistered. Elegance calls
attention (world’s washed down a drain).
Dove-grey suit, with silver-headed cane,
exotic plant against Plain Jane pub walls
and, for an instant, sodden summer stalls,
pub front transformed to sudden picture-frame.

Could be imagining yellow rose,
tonal handkerchief, glossed ballroom shoes,
my nocturne formed of brushstrokes and regret,
torch song from a vanquished Pierrot Show.

He’s real enough. Discussing current news.
Blue smoke furling from his cigarette.

West Pier Serenade

There’s a dance going on in the dark above our heads,
men pressing women against laundered suits,
a girl’s surprised to find her older partner dances
better than boys, a woman leaves imprinted lips
staining the bar-tender’s milky cheek.

Above us, the burned-out Pier against evening’s
Guinness-black curtain, where feet shuffle in rhythm
(a few toes getting stepped on), and maybe this
close stepping’s what we’re made for,
hands tight against gabardine or georgette clad backs.
It may be the sea, or the dancers’ suggestive whispering:
‘At last, at last, at last …’

Above our heads, pier-bones lost to night,
where phantoms clutch each other.
Only the sea? Or a woman breathing to her partner,
before kissing him: ‘I wish tonight would last,
would last … would last …’

Artist

Around him waltz rouged women and louche
men, or Spivs and Good Time Girls push by his chair,
lobby filling with slit gowns and rented-suits.

He’s better dressed than them, Versace handkerchief,
gilt 1940s watch, strap fragile as sunglasses
kept on indoors.

Flamed tie (shapely as a red sheath-dress),
face set, hands manicured, walk sloped, as if emerging
from one of the pictures he copies for a living.

Dark glasses making eyes unreadable, he could be
film-noir villain, or victim, delicate fingers
made for circling wine-glass.

Stepping between scarlet and jet
he holds out photographs of favoured images
like Tarot Cards:

Competition dancer, number at his back, gazing
from a balcony … Girl in titanium chiffon
mauling roses … Well-heeled couples paddling.

‘Which do you like?’ He asks, I point to
the numbered man. Signs the photo’s back
hands it to me, fingers trembling.

His voice is full of cases being packed, of clasps snapped shut,
petals dropping, dance-number taken off,
and cast bin-wards,
full of wine-glasses in undetected corners,
of Flash Harrys and satin-clad honeys, leaning out
from repeating canvases of black, white, crimson.

Pavilion, published by Smokestack, price £7.95, ISBN 0780956034151. www.smokestack-books.co.uk

Creative Showcase – Aly Stoneman

Aly Stoneman is a writer living in Nottingham. She graduated from Nottingham Trent University with an MA in Creative Writing in 2008 and is now the Coordinator of Nottingham Writers’ Studio and the Writing Industries Conference. She performs poetry with a guitarist called Milk. In 2009 they played at a variety of events and venues including: SpeakEasy and Oxjam (Nottingham), Dazed and Confused at Summer Sundae Festival (Leicester), Canning Circus Extravaganza with LeftLion Magazine (Nottingham), Word of Mouth (Nottingham Writers’ Studio), Staple Magazine at Quad (Derby), Hello Hubmarine (Derby), Lyric Lounge (Leicester), Nottingham Artists Open Studio (The Refectory, Nottingham) and more….

Besides writing and performing poetry, Aly also reviews for LeftLion Magazine (Write Lion), works as a Learning Support Tutor and is a Freelance Arts Administrator (Literature). She is currently working on her first novel, A Beginners’ Guide to Running Away and two collections of poems. Her poetry is themed around environmental issues, myth and the relationship between water and humans – both physical and spiritual. Her novel-in-progress is an English road-trip story and tackles the logistics of hitch-hiking to a wedding (among other things). Her poetry is due to be published in Staple Magazine Issue 72 (The Music Issue 2009), other writing has been featured in Leap Anthology (Laundrette Books 2008), various magazines and an artists’ catalogue and website.

Dust
Inspired by travelling in Eastern Europe at the end of the conflict there in 1999, this poem relates to any area which has been through a war, and the people who have survived and returned.

By winter they had gone leaving only their shadows We stood where the dust settled watching rainbows and falling stars….listen to more

Mermaids
Many of the coastal villages we frequent in the summer are empty during winter, consisting mostly of holiday cottages. What creatures might we encounter that have been pushed to the verge of extinction by humans, and now return when people have gone….?

Tits wrinkled and slack, hair dripping lank / Pinched faces with eyes glittering black/ They hesitated , sighed, fell back……listen to more

A Beginners’ Guide to Running Away
Motorway Services are no place to be at three in the morning. A light mist was swirling around the car park and sodium lights created islands of fuzzy amber glow in the darkness. I opened the car door and Stick immediately scrambled over my lap to get out of the car. I climbed out after her and Cash pulled our bags off the back seat. Read more online.

Mark Charan Newton

Our creative showcase feature returns with a profile of Nottingham fantasy author Mark Charan Newton. Read more

Showcase: Wayne Burrows

Our featured writer for April is Wayne Burrows, well known as the editor of Staple magazine and a widely acclaimed poet.

Wayne Burrows’ first collection Marginalia appeared from Peterloo Poets in 2001, and his work has featured in the British Council anthologies New Writing 12 (Picador, 2004) and NW15 (Granta, 2007), as well as the Forward anthology for 2002 and many magazines and anthologies. The Protein Songs, a sequence about genetics commissioned for use in Retina Dance Company’s Eleven Stories For The Body, Distance To Our Soul toured the UK and Europe over 2005 – 6 and appeared in Poetry Review’s ‘Bread and Roses’ issue. He is currently completing a second collection of poems, a book of ‘documentary fiction’ called Shrapnel and a novel set in the musical underground of the 1960s and 70s, provisionally titled Albany 6. He writes regularly on visual and performing arts for Metro newspapers, reads for The Literary Consultancy, and took over the editorship of long-established literary magazine, Staple, in 2007.

http://wayneburrows.wordpress.com

Emblems VIII: A Curse (New Authorised Version)

“The world’s a popular disease…oft arising
From ill digestion…th’ unequal poising
Of ill-weighed elements, whose light directs
Malignant humours to malign effects…”

Francis Quarles: Emblems VIII

May your every chance be almost grasped
but each time seized by someone else.
May you remain always in sight of true content
as it recedes before you like a rainbow’s end.
Above all, may you be distracted by happiness
as it hovers close enough by for you to feel it lost.
I wish you these things for your past misdeeds,
your backstabbing, boasting and rich disdain;
and should your child prove a cockroach, your money straw,
your bed a gravestone and your father a liar,
may this be all you’ll ever deserve, or desire.

That Afternoon

(from The Protein Songs)

She sleeps, and into consciousness
swim fish and flatworms, a cloud of moths;
termites building ziggurats, beetles crossing tarmac roads.

She turns, and from the midday heat
comes a fever of lizards with iridescent crests,
a carpet of serpents, a sunlit rain of frogs.

She murmurs, and as her body twists
trilobites scuttle across the coastal shelves,
jellyfish ripple translucently with the flow of the mind.

She stretches, her leg muscles flexing
like the wings of a ray in the turbulence, prised from sand
to pulse and float like breathing gills

on the edge of the shore. When she wakes,
beside her on the floral sheets, is a body, of the species hominid,
picking crumbs from the folds of its clothes

like a chimp with a straw at a termite-nest.
In the window, the windows of another house,
red brick and rain, the aquatic light of TV in a darkened room.

Shrapnel (part lxx)

“You must realise that a coin, even one of unalloyed white gold, is of no more value than a dog’s excrement or a tea-pot lid without someone making it so”

Sir David Whitehorn: A Letter To My Son (1849)

Back at primary school in the early 1970s, I remember the mystique of the Wendy House, its yellow canvas walls and red roof, its clear plastic squares inlaid as windows. Inside was the girls’ territory, out of bounds. We would try to peer inside, putting our heads through the red flap of the door, seeing piles of dolls, tea-sets laid out, a grey plastic till with its drawer open, full of tokens, while empty cardboard boxes, printed with dried peas and washing- powder logos, stood around like goods on sale.

We’d be seen, and there’d be squealing, and our heads would recoil from the hands that pushed them out then held the flap tightly shut afterwards, while whispers would be heard inside, and giggling, and other, indeterminate, sounds. We’d slope off, push yellow Tonka trucks and Dinky cars at each-other, make pile-ups, squash Action Men between bumpers, dare each-other to swallow small objects, or just look and point at pictures, mostly dinosaurs and military hardware, in gloss-coated hardback books.

I remember this today, walking quickly towards the Arsenal tube-station, a silver plastic token clutched in my hand. Printed on it are the words Ten Pence, the number 10, and it’s an imitation only plausible from the several paces distance at which it fooled me into picking it up, like the squashed milk-bottle tops we sometimes tried to use in vending machines, that because they were round and metallic must, as a consequence, fool the machines into giving up bars of Dairy Milk and Galaxy for nothing.

Close up, the silver of the plastic is pale and clouded, its weight wrong, its thickness three times that of the real thing, double even that of the old heavy coins with the lions on that you now never see, and even if you did, passed out of legal tender years before, like the big five-pence pieces and one-pound notes.

The serrations around the coin’s edge are too chunky to convince, and you can see the thin lines of its mould pressed into the sides. It is nothing more than training money, worthless in itself, but designed to mimic a real coin so that it can be used legitimately in a game, where empty cardboard boxes stand in for goods, which this coin can buy.

You learn the system, graduate from parental treats to pocket-money, from there to weekend jobs and paper rounds, from there to full-time work, each stage deepening the dependence on holding coins to exchange for property or rental, food or clothes, and only now, thirty years down the line, is it possible to see through this plastic token, only worth anything within the rules of some mysterious game inside the Wendy House.

Then see further still, going right through, in a moment of clarity, to the worthless jangling of base metal and the rustle of clean notes just dispensed from an ATM in my pockets as I walk. They will buy me anything to the limit of a worth decided by a different mould, a printing press, a credit-file held in some great machine 300 miles from here, for as long as the rules hold, and not a moment more.

Sometimes the rules change, and once-coveted coins revert to junk, worth nothing from midnight on a particular date. Whole currencies go, dying like the fairy in Peter Pan when belief is withheld. It is almost five o’clock. I close my fist around the plastic coin and quicken my step to catch the shops.

Showcase: Drew Gummerson

This month Literaturenetwork.org showcases the writing of Drew Gummerson with an extract from his recently published novel. Drew’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. His latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’, about pop duo Down By Law, was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008.

Drew is also a prize winning short story writer. He lives in Leicester.

Drew will be reading at Short Fuse on 17th March

Visit him at www.drewgummerson.co.uk

***

Hunchback Christmas

from

Me and Mickie James by Drew Gummerson

Me and Mickie James were moving down to London together. We were 24. We were going to be pop stars, Mickie James on keyboards and me on lead vocals. Mickie James had a hunchback but that didn’t matter. Even I knew it. He was the talented one.

We talked about how famous we were going to be on the train on the way down. “The world is fed up with manufactured pop,” I said. I put on my Ronan Keating voice. “I’m a talentless Irish twat,” I said. Mickie James laughed at this. He likes it when I’m funny. It takes his mind off his own problems.

During the journey people going to the toilet kept tripping over our Korg keyboard. “It’s not my fault it’s long, is it?” I said to this skinny bloke. Then this big bloke tripped over it. I apologised to him. You can’t be too careful these days, there are a lot of nutters about.

When we got off the train at Euston Mickie James asked me to take his photo. He wanted a reminder of the time we arrived. I took the picture on an angle, slicing off his hunchback. It was the sort of thing I’d done before. I’d been at Leeds art college for two years. I hoped I’d got it right. To be honest these disposable Kodak cameras are crap.

This guy we knew from a pub in Birmingham had told us to contact his mate who worked at St Pancras station. He said that he would sort us out for somewhere to stay.

We eventually traced the guy to the station manager’s office. He was wearing trousers that were too small and you could see the outline of his knob. Or it might have been a key chain.

“What do you want?” he said.

“We heard you had a room going,” I said.

He shook his head. “This is a bloody station not a hotel.” The other guys in the office laughed at this.

“You want to get some glasses mate,” said another one of the guys. He added, “What’s in Quasimodo’s case, is it a banjo?”

“Come on,” I said to Mickie James. “Let’s go.”

Dowload and read the full extract

Buy Me and Mickie James at Amazon

Showcase: Pam Thompson

This month we are showcasing the work of Pam Thompson, in advance of her first full poetry collection ‘The Japan Quiz’, published by Redbeck Press.

Pam has been writing and performing poetry in the East Midlands for a number of years. Pam was a first stage prize winner in The Poetry Business pamphlet competition (2005) and her pamphlet, ‘Show Date and Time’ was published in May, 2006. She performs with the group of poets called Inky Fish as well as being one of the organisers of WORD, and delivers writing workshops and has written to commission. She was a former winner of a writing bursary from East Midlands Arts and has several reading tours with other poets. Pam chaired the poetry panel at the Writing Industries Conference at Loughborough University in February 2008 and performed for Word! as part of the Phrased and Confused spoken-word events at Summer-Sundae Weekender, 2008.

Just a few of Pam’s numerous publications include pamphlets Spin (1999) Waldean Press and Parting the Ghosts of Salt (2000) Redbeck Press. Her poems have appeared in the antholgies ‘The Orange Dove of Fiji’ (1990) Hutchinson’s ,’As Girls Dare Boast’ (1994) Oscar’s Press; ‘The Virago Book of Wicked Verse’ (1994) The Ring of Words (1998) Daily Telegraph/Arvon Prizewinners Anthology; Independent on Sunday/Arvon Prizewinners Anthology(2001); Mslexia, The North, The Rialto, Smiths Knoll, The Observer, Staple, Other Poetry, Raindog, Iota, Magma, Dream Catcher, Frogmore Papers,; Radio 4: MATV (local TV Channel) . She has been shortlisted and has won prizes in the Cardiff, Arvon, Mslexia, Huddersfield Literature Festival Poetry Competitions among others. She was a runner-up in the BBC Wildlife Magazine Poetry competition (2003) and winner of the Nottingham Poetry Society Poetry competition (2006).She won the Leicestershire Libraries Crime Poem competition in 2007 and won second prize in the Three Cities Poetry Competition in the same year.

More of Pam’s work can be found at:

http://pamthompsonpoetry.wordpress.com

http://inkyfishpoets.co.uk

Pam’s first full collection is ‘The Japan Quiz’, published by Redbeck Press.
Look out for details of the launch on March 3rd, 2pm, as part of De Montfort University, Leicester’s series of Cultural eXchanges events.

Copies of’ The Japan Quiz’ can be bought from Pam at £7.95 plus £1.50 postage by contacting her at the e-mail address: pamthompson240@yahoo.co.uk

TESTING HIS SHADOW

Some days he wore it inside-out
like a tail or map of sorts:
waterproofed, transparent,
its routes bubbling silver
when held up to the light.

On others, his shadow loped ahead;
he’d experiment, hold up a tent-pole,
broomstick, bin-lid, stool, so it gained height;
appendages; a second head and horns;
or, at sunset, was nearly headless.

He noticed that near candles
it scattered into velvet dust; by moonlight,
became furred, so much he’d stroke,
caress the wall, or reaching
for an embrace, clasp arms and air.

In bed he felt it crawling underneath his skin;
felt fingers slipping into his;
the drawskin bend of knees inside each thigh;
the flicker of its penis.

He’d try to stare it out then taunt it.
He’d fight; not stab nor club, but punch,
wanting to be the man who pulls
a trigger faster than his shadow;
who conquers but never kills.

A man, after all, was only as good
as the shadow he wore;
to draw around your shadow
was unlikely to fix it;
to lie down with it, nothing at all like defeat.

PAPER HOUSES, BURNING WATER

Some of them were not properly powdered; here and there their skin showed through unpleasantly like the dark patches of earth where the snow has begun to melt.

Sei Shonagan (965 – on escorts in the palace)

Littlest one in my bed, your
Feet scarcely reached my knees.
Which story tonight?

Mama, the one about fire and the bees.

Once upon a time, in Tokyo,
there was a great earthquake and a fire.
Paper houses collapsed, sparks flew
like burning bees. The ground flapped like a dog
ridding his coat of the rain.
The ladies wearing gold kimonos held
melting mirrors and jumped into the waters
swirling beneath their windows. Many drowned.

We dip our golds
in the black canal

the water growls
and boils
so painted oiled

too late now
for chrysanthemums

their floss on our skin
rubbed in

Our pasts melt like wax

THE TALKING CURE

Budapest. An island park. Young couples pulling down lilacs
to offer grandparents as compensation for being old.
And you are telling her this. From your mouth. Lilacs.

From your lips. Old. Fifty pounds an hour
in an inner-city room as five o’ clock traffic
poisons the air. You know the temperature

on the side of the newspaper building will be ten degrees
warmer than in reality. She has lit an incense cone
without your permission. She is burning vanilla,

green tea, blackberry, or maybe lilac.
She reminds you of Paul Weller, particularly around the eyes
and hairline. You want to confess some dark sin

that she’d absolve but your mind wanders,
for at least twenty three pounds, back to the Danube
and speculates on why it was ever regarded as blue.