WHAT’S IN MY HEAD RIGHT NOW
2.1.2024: BLOG 1. Autumn 2023 was the busiest time I’ve had for a while. And it was a certain kind of busy: an organisational kind. Unsung Sports 2023 (photo, top right, by Lizzie Coombes) was a big project with scores of participants in different sports communities, a team of artists, four different art forms - and I enjoyed it, I really did.
But organisational jobs never let you go. You wake at 3.24am sweating because you haven’t confirmed the venue of a workshop, or sent the slight re-punctuating you’ve done of someone’s poem for them to approve, or met an urgent deadline for publicity. Downstairs in the pitch black, make a list…
Then, as soon as Unsung Sports was done, I was deep into Writing On Air, the festival I coordinate and produce with my Chapel FM colleagues. Why do these ‘producing’ jobs stress me so much? Because I have an habitual fear about letting people down, allowing enthusiasms to go flat, tensions to slacken, connections to go cold.
On the personal front, there were family challenges, I hardly saw friends, read no novels, barely glanced at a film, wrote no poems. And yet the big projects happened and happened - I hope - well for both participants and audiences. At the Unsung Sports gigs, singing with the Chapel FM Jazz Collective was a blast, after initial concerns about my ageing and out of practice voice. Dave Evans’ arrangements of the Unsung songs were witty and moving, and Agnes Leonovics did a fantastic job on vocals; listen to her here. Meanwhile, thanks to our amazing programme makers, Writing On Air aired more quality shows than ever before. Listen to all of them here. I look forward to a full 2024 at Chapel FM working with colleagues and community members on fresh projects.
But I’m also going to take some time this year to work on some personal ideas: finish a batch of poems for my 3rd collection, finally get back to working with Richard Ormrod on a clutch of new songs which are all settings of poems by the underrated American poet Edna St.Vincent Millais, and on a book I’ve been writing for two years.
It’s an anecdotal account of my work with communities over the years. Provisional title: ‘And You Get Paid For This?’ Social art, participatory art, or community art, needs to tell its story. These days a significant criterion for securing Arts Council funding is whether you can show your project involves people who may not, for a variety of reasons, access the arts. That’s a massive shift in emphasis!
And how did it come about? In great part because social or applied artists have been fighting their lonely corner for the last fifty years. I think we need to shout about that, celebrate it and make ourselves more visible, not just to the arts mainstream but to the general public, many of whom may not be aware that what artists like Matthew Bellwood or Lizzie Coombes have been doing all their working lives is actually ‘a job’. I just believe we do good work, I want young artists to be able to earn a living doing it, and if telling my story helps in any way, I’m going to tell it.
And now I’ve said all this, I need to do it!
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2.2.2024: BLOG 2. It’s been a month of mixtures. I’ve so enjoyed having some space and time to breathe: make new plans with Chapel FM, catch up with friends, play a few batty Burns Night gigs with The Remnants. I’ve edited a few poems, written a new one, even recorded a song or two. I Murder Hate is a lyric by Robert Burns, a proto-Make Love Not War poem which I set to some music last year. It’s here. But the good things have been bittered by more solemn concerns; friends and much-loved relations in and out of hospital.
I’ve also dug back into the book (see entry for 2.1.2024). When I opened the file for the first time in months, I spent the first hour staring at the first page, biting my nails. 98 pages of stuff. How to order and structure it? Where to start? I spent the second hour wondering why on earth I was doing this anyway and who would want to read it. Vanitas vanitatem..
Now I’ve calmed down a bit and begun to file and nurdle away at it. I talked to my old friend Nigel Pollitt today. ‘Just make a start’, he said. ‘It will teach itself to you’. I love that idea. But what I must do is plant a big electric fence around the time, guard those writing days - and carry on. I’m looking forward to it.
In other news, we’re recording the Unsung Sports 2023 songs with the redoubtable Barclay McKay in late March and hoping to record a radio version of Sand House, the play I wrote for Cast in Doncaster in 2019. And here’s the recent poem…
Now What
Knock on my door at this hour, tell me
Look, look here, shove a
red Pukka Pad at my chest, say
now, now -
I’m slow-brained and tired from the apocalypse.
But you, a twitch flickers in the corner of your eye. You’ve
waited a thousand years in your kitchen, your cap beneath
the drip of a poem
and caught it, finally
you have it. There will not be another till the next
sack of Rome. I want, you say, I want you -
Your tongue is out of practice from
the long thirst of silence, your mouth crammed
with mothballs. I want you to tell me -
spit it out - If -
The tassles of my dressing gown trail,
my ears sing their tinnitis. If
a poem is a pearl or a pebble, coal
or a nugget of fool’s gold, if it’s worth the sacrifice
of love and easy time, quotidian contentments,
now, specifically now as things stand,
this, it, the world, and especially after
Thursday -
I blink at your spoon eyes, the black planets.
You sway dizzily back towards the sheered edge
of the staircase – worth it, worth it?
Stand there, gaping.
Stand there, blinking and gaping.
No, I say. Yes. Give me a moment.
And shut the door in your face.
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2.3.24: BLOG 3. Walked in Meanwood Park this morning with Mary: pulled my first leaf of wild garlic; always a hopeful moment and my start to the spring.
It’s been a tough few weeks on the family side of life, with difficult but also beautiful moments, and a steady month on the writing side. I’m pressing ahead with the work memoir, oscillating between enthusiasm for the project and a 'what’s the point/this is just a work-out for my ego’ trough. When I keep to Subject (the work) I’m happy; when there’s too much of ‘me’, I lose the will. But I can see the light of a completed first draft through the trees.
I’m writing more poems (one at the bottom of this entry), gradually assembling a rattle bag of decent drafts towards a third collection. And it’s fab to be back making music with Richard Ormrod for a brand new Schwa project: song settings of poems by Edna St.Vincent Millay. We’ve started working with vocalist Agnes Leonovic who just brings a whole new potential to the project. I’d love to perform the songs later this year, with some interspersed pieces of text, rather like Dave Bowie Jnr and I did on The Weight of Smoke. I also had a lovely moment listening back to some of the lush arrangements Richard did for Schwa’s Threshold album. In other music news, I’m recording some of the Unsung Sports songs in the wonderful Valley Wood Studio later this month with Dave Evans. Really looking forward to that.
Recently I also finally managed to do something I’ve meant to do at Chapel FM for years: start a group of writers who work in social/community contexts, to meet regularly to celebrate the work we do and support each other to do more. We’re called Blurb and we had our first get-together last weekend. I felt heartened by it, which is at least partly the point. There’s a lot of gloom about. I can’t envision the idea of Trump getting back in without dire forebodings, usually at 3 in the morning. But I take heart from seeing friends and watching young people do lovely things.
Which is a set-up for my final shot of this entry, because I can’t sign off without succumbing to the proud dad compulsion to mention Owen Spafford and Louis Campbell’s new EP release on Peter Gabriel’s Real World X label. It’s rather lustrous, and I’d recommend it. Of course.
To the actor playing Peter Spafford
Fool us, thinking,
after all this rehearsal
you might have bedded in.
Years to grow into the role!
Is it such a pig?
No excess of lines or endless
anecdotes. No sudden
costume changes, soliloquies, just
a bonhomie, an approximate
friendliness.
O Persona, did we ask you
to sweat like a gym when addressing the group,
or blush at disclosure, the mildest?
Check your script!
We send you out to be teflon-stoic, whilst
we sit at home with the poem, not
clean out of puff before the party’s done.
And that snide aside?
This character is nice!
You signed up to be a thicker skin.
It’s not written in, these strained facials,
fleeing from meetings to the solitude of trees.
You’ve gone native.
You who have trained to walk into rooms
as if they expect you, straightening
that introvert’s kink in the spine.
Is why you were hired!
Coarse actor, mask that slips,
you’re just a turn.
We’re through with you.
From now on in, let it be known:
Peter Spafford will play himself.
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16.4.24: BLOG 4
‘The problem of self-doubt.
The problem of shame...’
The inward struggle of the writer, according to Sigrid Nunez in her novel, The Friend. Which is, by the way, a fantastic book.
I’ve delayed writing this 4th blog entry because I lost confidence in the project. The word confidence etymologically breaks down to ‘con-fidence’. With faith. I lost faith.
It may have been something someone said. After reading the 3rd entry, a friend wrote to me: I think I admire your confidence that people will want to read your blog. I don't mean it isn't interesting...it is...but when there's so much to read...?
I played this back to myself as: why would you assume you’re interesting enough to think people will want to read what you say? Which is, of course, not quite what my friend meant.
Same tension with this extended piece of writing I’m doing. Call it a work-memoir. Call it And What Do You Make Of It? I’m doing it. I’m chipping away at a massive slab of stuff and making something of it. Call it a book. Call it an extended piece of writing.
But all the time I’m writing it, I question it. Just as I question the blog-writing. I question my right to write it. Why would you assume you’re interesting enough... And this self-doubt seems to get more marked with age. Can that be right?
Last night I had a curry with another friend. He asked where the 4th entry was. Had he missed it? I told him about all this. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame.
‘And yet’, he said, ‘The work you do every day, the work you’re writing about it in the book, is all about giving other people the confidence to write; often people who, because of their circumstances, may find it much harder than you to find that confidence.’
Over dosas and aubergine curry, he suggested that because (apparently) I know about the self-doubt, the shame, I might be a good person, perhaps even the right person, not only to be doing the work I’m doing, but also to be writing the book (extended piece of writing) which is really all about the right to write, to utter, to speak.
In other words, perhaps this 4th blog entry should be about my doubts about writing it. And about the decision to carry on. And it is.
Here’s a draft excerpt from the EPOW about my experience of being a writer in residence in a prison c.1996. It refers to a question I was asked by a prison officer on my first day. So what exactly is it you’re supposed to be doing here?
We’re in a 'meeting room' off one of the wings. The room is empty apart from a broken chair lying on its side and a pile of litter. L. is perched on the window sill, his regulation trackies low over his hips, head shaved. He seems impatient to be gone, despite having asked to see me.
He wants to write a poem. He doesn’t know how to start. What’s more, he doesn’t know anything about love and flowers. ‘Flowers?’ I say. He hoiks a prison library copy of Palgrave out of his pocket. ‘Poems are always about fuckin flowers. Or love.’
‘They’re not, you know,’, I hear myself saying. ‘You can write about anything in a poem’. ‘Anything?’ He glances at the door. He could make it in three strides.
‘OK’, I stall, lighting on the only feature of any interest in the room. ‘What's that?’ I point at the broken chair lying by itself on the floor, probably thrown by another young man at some careers adviser. ‘It’s a chair’, he says but is really saying ‘Dickhead’.
‘Tell me more about it, the chair.’ ‘It's bust’. 'But what does it look like to you?’ ‘It looks like a chair’. I’m sweating, doing the blush thing. ‘Come over here.’ ‘Why?’ he asks, suspicious. Because he thinks I’m trying to trick him, make him look a fool. Or that I fancy him. ‘For a different view.’
He looks at me a long moment,and slowly, very slowly, gets up. Together we look at the chair, smashed up by itself on its side five feet away in the corner of the empty room.
‘Starship Enterprise’, he says.
I thank the god of desperate writers. ‘Yeah and? Where is it?’ He’s still nervous, thinks I’m laughing at him. ‘Space. Bust up in an attack by the Empire’. I pledge my life to all those gods, the entire pantheon.
‘So,’ I hazard tentatively, ‘It's a broken chair but it’s also the Starship Enterprise, bust up in an attack. That’s how you see it, from where you’re standing?’ ‘Suppose so’, he shrugs. ‘There’s your poem’.
I can't remember whether he ever wrote the poem, or even if I saw him again, but in that moment I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing at HMP/YOI Moorland.
