To make God laugh tell him your plans for tomorrow.
Manchester Literarature festival October 6th 8pm: in a room resembling a small gothic church, within the gigantic cathedral of Manchester Town Hall, Carol Ann Duffy’s playful, generous imagination lets us and two hundred others in on the thoughts of Mrs Tiresias, Mrs Faust and Mrs Midas. Then, having shown complete control of her material and her audience, the laureate turns to us sitting, slightly apprehensively, in the dark by the stage,
Well it’s my great privilege to be the warm-up act for LiTTLe MACHiNe. You’re in for such a treat. It's a long time since I heard something so exciting in poetry; I think the last thing that excited me as much was the "Poems on the Underground", which seemed a wonderful way of delivering poetry, and this band are THAT. They are available for bookings in schools and gigs throughout the country so please see them afterwards - LiTTLe MACHiNe!
Follow that! We managed it, much helped by a sympathetic sound engineer, and an attentive audience – great review of the show at
http://manchesterliterature.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/nectar-for-ears.html
Carol Ann reads as if without taking a breath, because her poems follow the natural rhythms of English speech, and you don’t notice the breaths someone takes when they are talking to you. Breath is another pulse, a beat. The first thing we do when we separate from our breathing mother is take a deep breath, then yell .. our breaths join to hers, hers to her mother’s, all the way back to the first breath. The iambic pentameter is said to be the natural line in English verse because it takes one gentle exhalation to utter .. and sung lines are also controlled by the requirement to take a breath, and then a breather.
Just like a dead man laying about
don’t wanna fall short or turn inside out
(‘I Don’t Wanna Lose, Lose You’, ZZ Top)
Iambs, dactyls, trochees – it depends how you say or sing these lines by Don William Gibbons – but, however you deliver them, each line is a breath: songs and poems follow the same rules. It is no accident that Saint Cecilia is the patron Saint of poetry and music.
Returning to the Underground: Orpheus gets past all the barriers into the underworld with his lyre music - his lyrics. He charms Hades and Persephone into releasing his lover Eurydice with another sung poem and only his (understandable!) doubts about the trustworthiness of the Deities of the Dead prevent him from resurrecting her. Eurydice is the beautiful buried poem that LiTTLe MACHiNe tries to bring into the light, using Stratocaster, Martin, electric bass and keyboards, instead of a tortoise-shell and sheep-sinew lyre. (But see ‘Eurydice’ in ‘The World’s Wife’, in which Eurydice is very reluctant to rejoin her self-obsessed poet, with his images, metaphors, similis, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles ..)
After the performance a young Greek woman surprised Wal with,
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
5οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
the opening dactylic hexameters of the Iliad in the original Greek, which all Greeks learn at school. Wal in turn surprised her with,
Sing Goddess of the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’s son Agammenon, the lord of men and brilliant Achilles
which he knows as they are the opening lines of our show EPIC, a mad dash through three thousand years of poetry, from Homer and Sappho to Larkin and Duffy. We put this on at the Herne Hill Festival recently, to a packed house of all ages – to say it was received with enthusiasm (suitably Greek – the entry of the God) is an understatement.
Somewhere, during a busy October, delectable and decadent MADAM LIFE made her appearance, with Apollo Kitharoidos, God of Music and the lyre, on the cover. Meet her at our performances and on Amazon. Here is what theartsdesk thinks - http://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music/cd-little-machine-
From the Manchester Literature Festival with the English laureate back up the M1/ M6 to play at the party at the end of the Birmingham Book Festival, with the Scottish ‘Makar’, Liz Lochhhead, and Liz Berry. Before that we ran our first FREE THE POEM WORKSHOP: (Sometimes it seems poems are imprisoned inside books. We try and release them so they reach people in a different way. Bring a poem and we will work together to find music that gives the words a new life). We did not know what to expect but Julie, Roz, Annette, Roy and Liz Lochhead herself all turned up with more than enough poems and ideas. From the moment Roy got off his chair, knelt down and started reciting his extraordinary, mysterious verse, followed by ballads, sonnets, and Liz improvising a refrain to her poem Listen, we were on a roll. We improvised different sorts of music for all the poems, and filmed them being performed – once all is ready these will be sent to the poets, put on YouTube and, hopefully, completed. In the evening, after engrossing, beguiling, moving readings by the two poets – one in strong Scots, the other in rich Dudley - we got up and played a long set in a big, high-ceilinged, echoing room where apparently once custard was made. The sound was far from yellow and soggy but sharp and silvery. We began with Liz Lochhead on stage reading ‘My Way’, then we played our version, and Liz showed us how to move to the steady shuffle groove we laid down. Writer Joseph Sale wrote a wonderful review of the Birmingham show on his blog.
How many sandals did Alighieri wear-out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about the goat-paths of Italy? The step, linked to breathing and saturated with thought. (Osip Mandelstam on Dante, quoted in ‘On Poetry’ by Glyn Maxwell). Dante’s – and Shelley’s – Terza Rima twists and coils down the page in a recurring pattern – like breath. We don’t wander (shuffle?) about the goat paths of the midlands but race back and forth in Sappho, our big Ford, propelled by diesel and the collective pointed boots of Billy, Dusty and Frank. Keele and Sheffield next, more M1/ M6, then the Roxy in Borough, EPIC at Emmanuel College , Cambridge (with Carol Ann Duffy), the British Library + full wallets, and a couple of evenings with the great John Hegley to finish the year with a riff, a poem and a joke ..
As I sd to my friend,
because I am
always talking, - John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look out
where yr going.
(I KNOW A MAN, by Robert Creeley)
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