The North by North West Poetry Tour in Ormskirk (set list Joanne Ashcroft and me)

The North by North West Poetry Tour comprises over sixty poets collaborating in pairs to produce brand new collaborative works for performance, commissioned for each event, over six nights in January and February 2017. Tonight it went to Edge Hill University, Ormskirk~ here's Nathan Walker and Amy Cutler:

the pairs of poets for this ark and archive:

Tom Jenks and Tim Allen 

Jessica Tillings and Jazmine Linklater

Adam Hampton and Matt Fallaize

Luke Thurogood and Brendan Quinn

James Byrne and Cathy Butterworth

Mark Greenwood and Johnathan Hartley

Martin Palmer and Laura Tickle

Chris McCabe and Patricia Farrell

Robert Sheppard and Joanne Ashcroft (set list below)

Amy Cutler and Nathan Walker (picture above)

Everybody was on form, with a variety of tone, and focus, from politics to pataphysics and back again, some strong work from the touring core and from the local pairings including many poets from Edge Hill, who have appeared on this blog before. Well done everyone!

More on the tour here. Videos of all performances are viewable on that sight too, though I have embedded them all on this blog!

Joanne and I read (see video below) the poems of Matúš Dobeš of the European Union Of Imaginary Authors (see here and here for more on both)

And did more than 40 mushers from eight European countries

eat our rich food, pig-killing with rigidly clenched lips

and slightly restrained záviny? Did somebody in Slovakia

abuse my face to skip lunch, and was that someone you?  (Ashcroft and Sheppard: unpublished)

Tiger C. Roholt says, ‘We often understand things we deal with through our boldily actions.’ (Roholt 2014: 99; I'm writing through his book Groove to construct a treatise on metre. This is what I wrote today.) Reading collaborative EUOIA poems last night, under theatre lights, the floor disappeared and was an expanse of black with no edges, no horizon, though it reflected the lights in a blinding pool of glitter at my aching feet. I lost sense of my own balance, but wasn’t sure what sense it was.

            This is all on the other side of skill.

            I held on to the microphone stand, heard the sound of my grip over the speakers, while Joanne Ashcroft read her lines from our poems.

            Habit (like riding a bike, touch typing, motility) suggests poetry performance is continual performance, not this waiting, which cannot be ennobled as listening. Waiting with my two uncertain unrhythmic feet, for my voice to steady me:

                                     I glide off into Perspex fountains, sculptures

celebrating black holes, in slow-time now the work I was
to do is done, I weave ways out of these eternal prisons. (Ashcroft and Sheppard: unpublished)

I am pleased to announce that Shearsman Books will be publishing the EUOIA anthology.  It will be called Twitters for a Lark and will appear in June or July, in time for the EUOIA evening at The Other Room, Manchester.