St Milburga and the Much Wenlock Poetry Festival

On April 15th singer Polly Bolton, her choir Larks and I will be presenting a joint performance of poetry and song on the theme of water, home, and St Milburga, the 2nd Abbess of Much Wenlock Priory. The Priory is an impressive building, what remains of it(and quite a bit does). It is huge and must in its day have been the equivalent of a sky-scraper in modern times.

Our performance is part of this year's Much Wenlock Poetry Festival, the 3rd year of the festival which was founded by Anna Dreda of Wenlock Books. St Milburga has many legends associated with her: she is recorded as having burst into flame when praying for the life of a child; she has a well dedicated to her in the town of Much Wenlock and also at Stoke St Milborough. At the latter, legend says that she drove off a flock of geese that were ruining a crop in a field nearby, and she not only saved the crop but made it come to yield, ready for harvesting, overnight.

The goose is her signature and the picture above was taken at the Stoke St Milborough well; it's the ornamental finial on the hand-rail leading down to the well.

You will find details of the festival programme on the website:

www.wenlockpoetry festival.org

Among the many performers will be Paul Henry, Mario Petrucci, Ian Duhig, ourselves as above of course! Jackie Kay, Martin Figura. And for all the other glorious performers ( so many!) please check their website.

Cheering!

Still looking a bit tatty, the garden, but how daffodils raise the tone!

Sharing Challenges in Poetry

On the website of Tears in the Fence, under Notes, you'll find Sheila Hamilton's account of sharing poetry challenges with me. We have been doing this for some time now and it has given rise to a great number of poems for each of us. Some of the poems have been good; some have been excellent enough to win the odd prize; many have been published; and some were complete failures. Both of us often found that when it was our own turn to set the challenge we ourselves got stuck. Much easier to respond to the other's task. But the best thing about it has been, as Sheila says in her essay, that it shakes us out of our comfort zones.

Our recent task was to write about paths or roads, creating a poem of over 50 lines or more. Curious that shortly after we set this, roads and journeys have cropped up in poetry everywhere... the Odyssey has been examined, used, and spoken of by poets, and Basho's Narrow Road to the North has been featured on radio. Is there really such a thing as a collective consciousness? And how does it work? The Green Man was popping up everywhere not so long back. Poems about cancer have been pretty extensively exhausted in the last few years (not so surprising since the disease is so common). Now it's roads/journeys. What next?

Meanwhile the best poem I know about roads is a poem called Those who Make Paths, by Catherine Fisher, from her collection The Unexplored Ocean (seren)