This weekend will see me at Gloucester Cathedral taking part in the Poet Laureate finals – apparently it is a sell out event gulp.
Also Monday saw me at Cheltenham Community Radio recording poems for Poetry Corner which will be on tonight! (listen here)
Here are the photos of me at the station 🙂
And as a result of the meeting I am now going to be hosting a show about science as well called Science Cats.
Saturday saw me once again in Waterstones Cheltenham at a poetry event – unfortunately I couldn’t stay much longer than my reading 🙁 Which was such a shame considering the line up!
Here are the photos
And here is a video of it
The first one Shy has been recorded with a hammond organ.
As if the last few week neigh months! had not been fantastic enough – I get an email asking if my poetry can be used for the Edinburgh e-book Festival!
I have given them my poem Shy to use – do check it out 🙂 It looks fun!
Mainly as it has a funky recording:
Once I thought it was easy
Once I thought it all defined
Then came along another truth
I had to stop and find
My brain stretched
My mind popped
And in a chair I did flop
At thoughts of a void
Filled with billion of glowing plasma balls
I investigated using mathematical tools
Showing systems of rocks
And gaseous spheres
Ballet dancing with icy shards
Circling these pin point stars
And the stars bunched in fried egg shapes
With globules and dumbbells at any rate
Pulsing with annihilation
Galactic clutter that clusters
I felt I needed a vacation
So I moved onto super clusters
And voids billions of light years wide
Killing of my planetary pride
With invisible planets and stars burning cold
All many of phenominian yet to unfold
And just as this was all sinking in
The synapses began to sizzel and sing
With giant balloons inflating
Membranes and hand claps of gods for the rating
Thoughts spiralling around the concepts
Big Bang
Big Crunch
I scrabbled for some chocs to munch
And then with suns ringing like bells
With solar quakes
I stood back and with a shake
Saw it was all minute
Something small, insiginificant and really rather cute
Like the realisation of the child that was me
There was a whole world out there to see
The world kept expanding
And then the Universe rushed in to fill the gaps
Expanding my mind to the max
Now there is a multiverse
Which makes me smile and… curse
I ponder what on this adventure to take
And hope, just hope I have enough Kendal mint cake
Silver sentinel
Amongst heat
Wrapped up tight
You did your job
Fire – forest gloaming
Keep safe
Until flames subside
Until we need you again
The next few days are going to be amazing – starting with tonight. I shall be in Bristol at the Grain Barge performing geek poetry, throwing knitting and giving a little talk on well sciency stuff 🙂
Here is the knitting 🙂
This is part of a regular event called Science Show Off which mainly happens in London (there are also other show offs like Museum Show Off).
I have really enjoyed preparing for this – combining my poetry, craft and science.
Then this weekend there is my stint as a poetry installation at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire. They have one of the most amazing sculpture gardens in Europe and I get to go there and read poetry to the unsuspecting 🙂 (I hope the weather is ok as I want to actually be out in the garden!).
I have my post cards and poetry cards and the like ready to see what people think of them too 🙂
I now have poetry cards for my Celestial Montage. I’m selling them for £2 each – I think they have come out great 🙂
I will have them with me on Thursday (12th of July 2012) for Science Show Off at the Grain Barge in Bristol and again at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire on Saturday.
This speech by the writer Neil Gaimon I found extremely powerful especially for someone like me who has to do creative things to survive.
But also the fact that I have not done things the normal way and that I keep hitting barriers such as I don’t have an art degree so therefore do not count as an artist for some people. I am in a space inbetween. When I hear or read that others have not done it the normal way either it gives me hope.
Also I feel encouraged that I am not the only person who finds that trying to do projects for money fail and end up leaving you worse off than you started but the ones you do because it’s a fun idea race ahead and are successful.
He mentions the changing landscape of publishing too which for me is an emotive subject – I really think I am going to continue on my own path with my blogs and getting my own CDs printed and what have you. I have tried traditional publishing twice now and both time the company has gone bust or something similar – one still having the rights to the work I’d done so I didn’t even end up with it and worse they have not done anything with it :/
My first attempt at crowd funding has been a huge success 🙂 So I am very happy with that.
He mentions throwing bottles into the sea and then they all start coming back and you have to learn to say no. And you know – this is actually happening – though I would say I have been shouting into the void and now the echos are not only coming back but are bouncing and reflecting and propagating and I am having to turn things down! (But please still ask as I may not be doing stuff that weekend etc… or like with the Stroud Water Festival – what I was supposed to be doing may have been canceled).
I do feel a bit weird though it is just like suddenly I am this person that people know of – I’m getting pounced by people who I do not know who start chatting to me about my art (ok well this has always happened quiet alot but frequency has increased!).
It is bizar but I do feel like a fake – really? Me? That thing I made in the middle of the night? That story I wrote whilst breast feeding the baby at 5 am? The knitting I did at a festival whilst listening to my favourite local bands? That really? You like it?
It is not all positive feedback mind – one of my best friends hates my songs, I was accused at the Poetry Festival of being arrogant as my business cards say Artistic Scientist and Scientific Artist. Alaric cringes at my Wiggly Pet stories and visual puns. Performance poets see me as a page poet, page poets see me as performance or worse experimental and the artists are scared or the science part and the scientists are like ‘you have no PhD!’ and I have people ranting at me over spelling mistakes on my blogs…
But….
That is small compared to what is coming back to me at the moment. I keep thinking I’m so lucky how has this come about? But it is such a knife edge world really – I’m getting bookings now but 6 months down the line? And also it still isn’t actually making money 🙁 And what it does make tends to be for charity.
But you know people are excited about Ballads of the Scientifica and there have been requests for a Wiggly Pet book and for t-shirts with things like my Normali Tea picture on.
If you watch/listen to Neils speech he says make good art, I would change that to Get Creative.
When I tore the ligaments in my ankle and had to be flown home from a field trip in the desert I GOT CREATIVE – I made Wiggly Pets
When I had to take a year out for medical treatment to my back – I GOT CREATIVE – I began writing and designed a series of childrens’ science stories.
When I found myself having nearly died, and crippled from childbirth, boiling with anger and fear – I GOT CREATIVE – I started writing a novel and so was found in a cafe by the now Cheltenham Poetry Festival Director.
When our house was flooded I GOT CREATIVE and designed childrens activities to entrain my toddler.
When I got shingles and had to rest and give up the Master degree for the second time I found the Paleo Art community and began drawing trilobites and things.
When I was devastated about miscarriage I constructed The Punk In Pink personality.
When I was petrified of going to the hospital to have little Mary I wrote poems about that fear and about having a separated pelvis.
When we were being chucked out of our home I made a poem about how the home is not the building but the people with in.
And so on. There is an even larger list of good times and being creative but that would make this post silly long! 🙂
Basically as I have struggled to build my own serendipity funnel and have just reached my perceived tipping point and this talk resonated so strongly that it made me cry (yes I know that will be the hormones).
If you haven’t already listen to it 🙂 But most of all Get Creative!
I am mainly working on Ballads of the Scientifica at the moment. I need to get it finished to send copies to people who have generously sponsored me. But more than that I have found a science open mic night called Science Show Off which seems like exactly the sort of thing I should be reading and singing these poems and songs at. The main thing holding me back is that due to the house move I currently can not find two of the poems I really want in the collection. There is a second song for recording. I need to finish the page set ups and the images which are going with it. Also some of the recordings need a little more editing or re-doing to be honest. You can listen to what is up already:
I sang my song Flowing at Wychwood Festival at an open mic night set up by a local group so I am hoping to go along to their events. I did better this time though my voice is still trying to run away when I get up to sing in public :/
July I am going to be a Poetry Installation at Asthall Manor, I’m in the programme and everything 🙂
Then of course there are the Poet Laureate of Gloucestershire finals in August for which my name has already been given to radio stations – I’m avaliable for interviews and readings 🙂
I keep meaning to enter competitions and submit to mags and things but am finding that I am just so busy I keep missing them.
My husband looks a lot like the singer Gotye so over a half term at the beginning of the year me and my family decided to make our own video. It takes elements from Gotye’s own video for his song Somebody That I Used to know and from Walk Off The Earths cover plus I maintain that it sounds like Baa Baa Black Sheep though everyone looks at me oddly when I say this :/
This is my first attempt at making a film rather than just doing stuff to record poems and songs to share and get feedback. It is daft fun and is just done using the camera in the laptop so was very limited.
Thanks to a workshop I did with the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra there are shoes being used as procussion 🙂
I also have permission from Goyte head quarters for the use of the sound track though shamefully I asked for it after the project was done.
My husband Alaric – is non plussed by the ‘look like Gotye’ thing – but my uncle currently isn’t speaking to us as he thinks we have afforded our new house because Alaric has been secretly in a band and has just made it big 🙂 It is strangely like a parallel universe. The first picture I ever drew of Alaric was him being a drummer which Gotye is and also I have often wondered where Al would be if he hadn’t been discourgaged with his synthersiser playing. As it is with the new house move we’ve ended up with a hammond organ which has also been used in some of my poetry recordings.