the

Bard Window

on poetry

 

7 Michelle Diaz, Chaired Bard of Glastonbury

7 Michelle Diaz, Chaired Bard of Glastonbury

It was a real pleasure to have Michelle as a guest on the programme. Her history in poetry and her genuine love of words shine through. We talk of inspiration and difficult times, the process and pleasure of competing for and living the term

Michelle Diaz has been writing since the late 90s and began her life as a poetry performer in 1998 at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden. She studied English Language and Literature at Manchester University and always had a love of words and a passion for poetry.

In 2009 she had two poems accepted by Live Canon, which were performed onstage in Greenwich. Between 2015 and 2017 she hosted a monthly poetry group in Glastonbury. She also became a Wells Fountain Poet. In 2017, she won 3rd prize in the Mere Literary Festival Poetry Competition. She also began regularly submitting her poetry to a range of magazines with an encouraging amount of success. She has been widely published online and in print and has recently been accepted for several anthologies. She has been part of the open mic at Swindon Poetry Festival, Words and Ears in Bradford on Avon, Trowbridge, Wells Fountain poets. Poetry and a Pint in Bath and many other venues.In 2017 she was the inaugural winner of the Glastonbury Bardic Silver Pen award. She also won the 2018 Christabel Hopesmith NHS Competition judged by Wendy Cope and Lachlan Mackinnon. Her debut pamphlet The Dancing Boy is published by Against the Grain Press.

These are the poems read during the programme

‘How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth’ – Against the Grain Poetry Press

‘Absence’ – published by Lighthouse Journal – Julia Webb (Print Issue)

‘The Dancing Boy’ Against the Grain Poetry Press

https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/michelle-diaz/

The Fridge – Poetry Wales – https://poetrywales.co.uk/michelle-diaz-how-i-wrote-the-fridge/

Maddy – Cafe Writers

https://porridgemagazine.com/2019/03/31/two-poems-michelle-diaz/

Glastonbury Bardic Trials 2022 – Ynys Witrin – Michelle Diaz

 

 

05 Martin Porter

05 Martin Porter

Martin Porter was born and brought up in St Helier, Jersey. He started writing verse while in primary school and developed a love of poetry during his secondary school years. His interest in science took him across the English Channel to study at the Universities of London (Queen Mary College) and Leeds, where he pursued his interest in astronomy and astrophysics. He has lived in Jersey, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Wells UK.

Martin interests lie between and within the genres of poetry and micro-prose. He has been active leading and participating in workshops and writing groups in Jersey and New Zealand. His writing has been printed in books and journals internationally, and online. He has been a prize winner and judge in several poetry and flash fiction competitions. He served as a member of the New Zealand National Flash Fiction Competition committee from 2016 – 2019.

Typical recent work can be found in “Bonsai, Best Small Stories from Aotearoa New Zealand”, “Take Flight”: also online in “Love in the Time of Covid” https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/ and “Poetry Remake 4”

https://poetryremake4.wordpress.com/.

Martin read several works illustrating the range of his poetry and discussed how he saw poetry’s contribution to popular culture.

I wish you pleasure in listening to this latest programme.

1:25000

Only slightly lost, we find the paper

Folded in an inside pocket. We are there,

Somewhere, one to twenty-five thousand,

A mote of mobile imagining.

 

And a trickle of blue splits the landscape.

 

In the orange skein

We untangle a rolling surface pressed

Flat on the map, but filled with pebble,

Outcrop, blades of grass.

On close scrutiny of the stylised code

A shrubby plantation catches the eye

With its little lollipop trees

Springing from the rough green hummocks

Of a rough green pasture.

 

And a trickle of blue splits the paper.

 

On the ground

We find no deep black names.

No red carpets are laid on our tracks.

Hidden from the ink are the implicit sheep,

The thin, abstracted cry of a curlew’s mate,

The wide airy volume of the space

The loneliness

The unprintable emptiness of being there

 

Nude Descending a Staircase No.2

 

even nudes

have to get from one place

to another

 

sometimes

this involves stairs

 

treads and risers

arrayed

 

ascendant

while stepping down

 

this is nothing new

no shift

just movementcubed and fashioned

 

Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère

Édouard Manet, 1882

 

CHARLOTTE (Off Screen): I’m stuck. Does it get easier?

BOB: No, yes, it does…

(Sofia Coppola, “Lost in Translation”)

 

Caught between geometry and eternity

laced by fine fabric, cotton and holes,

choker and paste,

she does not say anything.

 

It is, of course, a presaged cubist ploy.

The reflection is one of disjunction,

almost as if the artist is conniving

with the chandeliered candlelight

 

in order to multifacet the facts.

Her reverie drifts

around locked doors between hotel rooms,

each with no connection to each,

 

each with its own concealed presence,

ill defined fellows, fixating,

conversing with a figment of her image

possessed by another.

 

She is empty among the full bottles.

Her absent gaze has no sparkle

wired into that concentration

that is the beginning of grief

 

and ends in the ellipsis

of dialog and understanding,

inside space and lost exteriors.

It does not get any easier.

 

Islander

Les Êcréhou, Jersey

… and paddling from dinghy to shore

remembering sailors

who wrote about shores and oceans green

rolling plains

touching those sentences

looking at strata

running my fingers along lines and discontinuities

these places are marginalia rising from their own myth

creative

with monsters and seabirds and islanders

I once pulled up my anchor

and found, embedded in wave and strand and kelp,

an old lobster pot, broken, no longer a trap.

Today, I returned with poetry between my toes…

 

04 Linda Saunders

04 Linda Saunders

Linda Saunders is a highly praised, prizewinning poet. She has been widely published in magazines and
anthologies.  Her first full-length collection was short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize. Two further collections followed, most recently A Touch on the Remote (from Worple Press).   https://www.worplepress.com
She worked for a number of years as a fine-arts journalist and editor, shortlisted for Arts Journalist of the year and she is a member of the International Association of Arts Critics.
Philip Gross wrote of her poetry that she ‘applies words to subtle experiences
as a painter might use paint, for their texture, balance and tone, with attention
to each brush stroke ….’
She herself has written: ‘I am fascinated by the exquisite particularity of every
living moment. For me a vital spur to writing is to explore the unique feeling of
each slippery experience, memory or observation.’
Her themes are prompted by family and by human encounters, and by a love of
the natural world, landscape and birds in particular. At the same time she has a
of sense of existential mystery in the larger context of space-time.

When Linda won the Teignmouth Poetry Prize Judge John Greening said:    “This poet knows what E.M. Forster meant by ‘only connect’, juxtaposing different elements with immense care and clarity: the shoes, the shell, the glasses, the egg-cups, the elephants, they all process and are processed into a dignified courtly music before our eyes – but the poet allows time for a big philosophical question too. I hope you will agree that ‘Outside Chance’ – which should perhaps be retitled ‘The Favourite’ – well deserves the top prize.”nfathomable universe.

We talk of her own evolution as a poet and her inspirations. Her considerable body of work can be sourced from most major outlets and today we have the pleasure of Linda reading several of her works–which will be published on BardWindow.

Poems read today include

Entrusted

A sliver of light
flitting
above the lawn, weaving,
wavering, never quite deciding

to settle, feinting as if to baffle
a predator, or searching the air
for some sweet pheromone –

a Holly Blue!
If I look away
it must vanish, but now flirts
around me, a flake of sky,

dancing a net to hold me captive,
then alights on my hand,
nails me with its pale blue sail:

silvered azure with a sheen
of turquoise, colour alive,
never to be believed till now

as I dare bring it even
closer
to examine banded antennae,
a pepper of black dots on folded wings.

Smaller that my fingertip,
sipping salt from my skin,
it investigates my strangeness

with no apparent notion
beyond its own need and moment
of the gift it entrusts to the human.

Intimate and rare,
remote
as a signal from a star,
I feel the tickle of its footsteps.

2

Lifer
We used to think it a mad sparrow before
we learned it was the last migrant to return
and its name explained what it was up to,

flipping off a post or a low-slung branch
with flight controls seemingly gone haywire.
Today, here’s the first, hunched at the ready

on the tallest tombstone in the graveyard.
Overhead, against a washed sky brushed
by feathery remnants of raincloud,

swifts are scything the wind, returned only
last week for their circus of high-flown love.
For our souls’ health, we need to go on gazing,

stopped in our tracks and sorrows, to mark
the arrivals of birds that cross the world above
our news and wars, our migrations of loss.

Long-haul passerines with their songs of summer.
The swifts twenty-four/seven on the wing.
Birders call their first-ever sighting of a species

new to them, a lifer. For me, each returning
migrant is a lifer again, somehow newer still
in renewing each first of every summer

down the years: harbingers of memory,
human and avian, surely ancestral.
Yet only this moment recalled as exquisitely –

wing-tilt and flecked feather, the lilt of its whistle.
My heart always somersaults as crazily as
the spotted fly-catcher plying his skill under

the churchyard yews like a spirit liberated
from the earth below, skittish with surprise
and quite loopy with life, this fling of resurrection.

Outside Chance
Baby wants new shoes, he’d say, to give a lift
to a small flutter each way on a horse
he’d wised up on in the racing columns.

But once he put all of five pounds to win –
and did – on an outsider, Burlington Arcade,
having dreamed himself among a wild crowd

yelling its name at the finishing line.
It was the sole evidence he could ever claim
for divine or psychic intervention

on behalf of any need of baby’s,
or his own. Just chance, he thought it, when a shell
slammed down beside him on the battlefield

and did not explode, while the world paused
as he said goodbye to it, aged seventeen –
he’d lied about his age to volunteer –

then found his glasses by another miracle,
and put them on to look into the future.
What is the difference between luck and grace?

His golfer’s swing was an action of honed
grace, preceded by a moment of stillness
something like prayer, club raised on high,

as if to align himself with every
quick nuance of this world’s here and there,
the sky’s depth, each inflected shadow, tilt

of wind and wish towards a promised land.
Among his silver trophies on the sideboard,
sharing the pride with ebony elephants

paraded trunk to tail, were the egg cups
awarded in those days for a hole-in-one.
A stroke of grace, I’d say, in league with luck

that the shell didn’t kill him, as was the perfect
loft and flight he gave a ball that landed
sweetly on the green and trickled home.

4
Sideways
poem starting with a line by Jack Gilbert
We use them sideways.
Words, he meant, that will do for now,
slipping them through or between
to prise a way towards
what we don’t know yet how to say.
*
My mother cut sideways through water –
she’d swim in any weather, any sea,
her right cheek pillowed on the waves.
Once she hooked back a man from drowning,
brought him to shore on her strong sidestroke,
legs scissoring the undertow.
*
Tacking
is a strategy of cunning,
making headway in adversity,
catching the gale sideways
and using it.
*
After the stroke, she was often lost
for a word – she the linguist who loved a cryptic
crossword. I took the slant of her meaning
and how she strove by indirection
to arrive at it, like a small craft
in a contrary wind.

5
Some things, faintest stars, we see more brightly
if we just look
glancingly,
so a mist, a smudge, resolves
into points of light, sidereal
in the corner of the eye.
It’s the way our eyes are made,
near the edge more densely receptive,
so we always have this sense of what escapes
our scrutiny,
a truth askance and facetted,
a love so far unsaid.
*
“Almost…” she said once, exhausted,
gripping both my hands and waiting
like the poet for the word that will tend
his passion, then hooking the prize at last
with an intake of wonder, “…inexhaustible.”
Which was about the size of it.

6
Awesome
His smile on my screen saver keeps beaming in
above the Milky Way on that tee shirt
I found at the Monterey Aquarium
and brought back across 6000 miles

of earth and ocean. He’s worn it and worn it –
our home galaxy floating luminous
on ultramarine, with the arrow pointing
You Are Here, north-west of his heart.

From the back garden, he finds Mars for me;
October small hours, conditions perfect,
near invisible scrim of cloud to cut the star-glare.
You’ll have to be quick, he says –

to glimpse the faint smudge of Sirtis Major
like an upside-down Y, and the south pole
tilting its bright spot of ice towards us.
I stoop over the eyepiece and catch

just a tiny cell sliding already out of
the scope’s slim beam of vision: the planet
no bigger than the pupil of an eye, but closer
than it’s been for years – and I’ve lost it.

Awesome! breathes my son the astronomer
as he tracks it again across 35 million miles.
His anorak gapes open
on those glowing words: You Are Here.

7
Internal Window
We pass things between us, memories that rise
like a genie from an old lamp rubbed clean,
from these jugs and teapots and bowls reached down

from a wide ledge dusted less than seldom.
We have washed and dried every one
to reawaken the gleam of the glaze

and the colours it protects undimmed.
He passes them back to me, where I stand
on a chair to replace them on the shelf

at the internal window that lets light through
from the hall to the kitchen. One by one,
he makes almost a rite of it, says Careful!

as if I would not be with these bygones
which we lit on once with glee and brought home
wrapped in newspaper. He can’t help foreseeing

disaster – how china would smash if dropped
from this height. Though just an infant in the War,
he still hears the scream of sirens in his dreams,

the whine of doodlebugs over London, feels
through the years the aftershock of the bomb
that reduced their terrace home to rubble.

But now I too can’t bear to watch the news.
Already millions of refugees jam
the routes out of Ukraine, trundling cases –

what to take? what to leave? – lugging plastic bags
stuffed with iron rations, nappies, a warm rug,
infants on their hips, wide-eyed, taking things in.

I receive each find, found again, in both hands
like a gift, as we tell each other where
and just when this lidless ginger jar, or this

teapot with its violets in fresh spring bloom,
first took our fancy, asking to be loved.
Familiars, survivors, viewed from each side

of the internal window they look somehow
astonished by the light of this moment,
rescued again from their own lost stories,

and part of ours, re-enchanted, at home.

As always, thanks to http://www.albadigitalmedia.com for technical support to the podcast.

03 Tick Rowley, Bard of Bath

03 Tick Rowley, Bard of Bath

Tick Rowley is a poet, storyteller, script writer, voice over artist and the 22nd Bard of Bath. She has a first class degree in Creative Writing; has been publish in several Poetry 365 Anthologies, Dark Poets Club magazine, as well as the Coffee Table Coven. She has been contracted by OhCleo to write the Divine Feminine series. She has also been runner up un the Bristol Old Vic Open Sessions for her Play Ricochet, which covers the subject of abortion in Ireland. Tick is also lead of the poetry page Ladies of Letters on Instagram, which is a platform for sharing poetry from women around the world. Tick also hosts a podcast: Dreaming Awake where she uses poetry and stories to discuss a wide array of subjects. When Tick isn’t writing or performing, she can be found painting or foraging mushrooms. Her work , some of which is here in site , reflects a fresh and very readable style. I enjoyed her talk about her own route as well as the poems themselves.

002 Graeme Ryan

002 Graeme Ryan

A warm welcome back to BardWindow. Our guest today is Graeme Ryan

Born in St Annes on Sea, Lancs, a ‘sand-grown-un’ near the big tides and beaches of the Ribble Estuary. Over the past forty years a poet, playwright, drama teacher, ecologist. Now living on the edge of Exmoor and a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton.
A prize-winner in several national poetry competitions and fortunate to have had a series of full-length plays performed by young people at the Tacchi-Morris Arts Centre in Taunton. Author of Nature Notes Calendar (Jynx Books 2020) and a monthly nature columnist for Somerset Life magazine.

He studied English Literature at Leeds University and trained to teach English and Drama at St Martin’s College, Lancaster.
He taught in Cornwall and then became Head of Drama at Heathfield School, Taunton.

Author of eight full-length plays for young people, including Heartland, The Name of the Beast, Hope Street, Brave New World and Tracks of the Free. He has been fortunate enough to be able to direct and stage them all at The Tacchi-Morris Arts Centre, Taunton.

We talk ofthe impact of poetry in today’s world and how it can be amongst the most powerful means of communication. I strongly recommend listening and getting to know Fire River Poets  https://www.fireriverpoets.org.uk/

Graeme explains his love of poetry    “Since giving up school teaching I recently returned to poetry, which was a passion in my teens and early twenties and went underground. Now it feels a spring has bubbled up and I am really enjoying the challenge and unique excitement of making poems, rather than plays, come alive as they open their doors in the imagination – voices and worlds always present under this one, more real.” 

Graeme reads these poems which, for subscribers ( Free! ) are on BardWindow to enjoy over again.

1) The homeless man thinks of ancient Egypt 

2) To become a Nightingale

3) Ignition

4) A flying visit and

5) Listen

 

My thanks , as always, to http://www.albadigitalmedia.com  for their technical support

001 Ama Bolton

001 Ama Bolton

Welcome all to the BardWindow Podcast

Ama Bolton is a poet and bookbinder living in Somerset. All her life she made up songs and verses. For years she read and listened to poetry and wrote almost in isolation. She knew Adrian Henri but never dared show him her writing. When she moved to Wells from Liverpool in the early 1980s she joined a group of poets who critiqued one another’s work, and from that time she began to call herself a poet. Around 20 years ago Jane Williams and Ama started the Wells Fountain Poets, who met monthly until the lockdown and will, I hope, eventually be able to meet again.

An established poet once told her, “You don’t write prizewinning poems!” This was surprisingly helpful. I’ll show her, she thought, and the next year Ama came 3rd in the Bridport Prize.

Rejections, of course, far outnumber acceptances.However Ama has had about 100 poems published in magazines and anthologies and online and had some success in competitions. In 2014 she worked with schoolchildren on a community art project in Exeter. This sample poem that she wrote for the children was later published in Mslexia.

We talk of when poetry became important to her as well as her thoughts on how it is perceived today.

Ama’s work is on BardWindow now for subscribers to enjoy and, I’m sure, will be added to over time. I’m just really pleased  that she is the first guest poet on the podcast.

She reads 5 poems — Meantime, After the Comet, Chambered Cairn Quoyness,Dreams in upper Silesia and Hartlake.

Thanks , as always,  to http://www.albadigitalmedia.com for technical support on this podcast.