I had been delighted to return to Coco’s Lounge in Altrincham, following a pre-festival gig in March, for the second edition of Word Fest.

Word Fest, curated by Anne Early and Yoko Islamic, focuses on writing and especially encouraging local people to start writing or develop their existing talents. The festival included a wide range of events including workshops, discussions, performances, writer talks and lots of chances to learn from experienced writers.

As a non-resident of the area it was a privilege to be asked back to host the open mic poetry evening and as I expected, based on previous experience, the quality and variety of work was excellent.

Kevin Bamford read poems covering diverse topics ranging from the countryside awakening in the spring and Brexit to a concertina workshop.

Fred Varden was driven to love whilst Driving Miss Nosey, and gave us a recipe for life and a tale of falling in love with a senior citizen.

Taking a brief one-night break, from supervising students on a school camp, Chris Bateman had the audience laughing with his tale about and unhelpful shop assistant “Pat at checkout 25”.

Alex Swinton, still a teenager, is a poet with a great future; a young man with his anger, and angst, inventing, venting and performing to great effect and with excellent wordplay.

Martin Zarrop a popular performer at previous Altrincham events, and a widely published poet, had snowmen dreaming of English Summer, wondered how one might reason with a bereaved in Troutman and even mentioned the ERG (another Brexit reference).

First time performer Caroline Melliar-Smith performed a piece about the dancer Isadora Duncan “The silk scarf” a well crafted story-telling poem and we hope to hear from her again.

Liz Smith read a poem about a guide dog who “wanted the last glimmer to last forever” and a second everyday dramas.

Tom Jenks is known as an experimental poet read his poem “Going off-piste with Pedersen with great phrases like “Crowther’s desktop wormery” and “unsolicited marsh mallows” and the audience were certainly entertained.

Whilst compering I took the opportunity to follow the performers with a few of my own poems; “Outside” and “Only in my dreams” and a poem which was so new it did not yet have a title – fortunately the audience didn’t feel the need for a title.

Many thanks once again to Anne and Yoko got organising this lovely, friendly and innovative festival and letting me be part of it. I’m already looking forward to a hoped-for 2020 version.

I set up the OnePoetsVision blog so that all of my creative work whether it is visual or in words could share a home. In the last year I’ve also posted lots of my images, mainly photographic but also drawings and prints, on my OnePoetsVision Instagram page having set myself an image a day challenge #shaysimageaday .

Sadly 2018 has involved bereavements and health issues for myself and family and my work as a poet, writer and teacher of writing and photography has been impacted. My image a day challenge and this blog both stalled but are relaunching this weekend.

As a rule I don’t really do New Year Resolutions, but I am starting to feel recharged and have plans to make 2019 the year that I build on the work I began after giving up my full time work in Summer 2015.

What will 2019 look like?

Well there will be more of the following:

• performances
• events
• new writing workshops
• new poems
• new photographic images
• new drawings
• new linocut prints

There are also a couple of specific projects I am excited to be starting one being a collection of poems and the other involving illustration – there will be more detail in the coming months.

As a poet one might be expected to read quite a lot of poetry.

That isn’t a universal truth, but then nothing is; or if there is we haven’t really discovered and understood it yet.

Some poets do not read any other poet’s work for a wide range of reasons, examples I’ve come across include; not wishing to be influenced too much, concern that they might accidentally copy or plagiarise someone else’s words and quite commonly that “these are my thoughts, my words, they come from inside of me and they have no relationship to anything else that has been written, they can’t be changed” (or words to that effect). These are sometimes similar reasons why some poets chose not to edit. Maybe that will be the topic for a future post.

I am not one of those poets.

I do read other poets’ work.

Apart from British and Irish poetry my current bookshelf includes poetry from Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Russia, Poland, Spain and of course the USA (yes, that counts as overseas too).

Why?

Firstly reading poetry is fun, sometimes thought provoking, annoying or sad but always enlightening.

Poets from all cultures tend to write about pretty much universal themes; family, love, loss, death, society and nature; but different cultures tend to view some of these things differently and that in itself makes their work interesting to read. Added to that the actual structures of language are fundamental to how poetry works and in different languages poets will by definition express themselves differently.

Sadly I can only read fluently in English so I am relying on the translators to have kept as much of the original cultural, rhythmic and feel of the poets’ native language versions. Ideally for European languages I prefer to read the English translation with the native language version alongside because although I can’t really read the originals properly I can get a feel for the rhythm and flow and see how the language was structured.

This is where things get interesting; word sequences vary from one language to another and in poetry those word sequences are carefully chosen by the poet rather than always using the most obvious or common turns of phrase.

Additionally the subject matter varies between cultures. Almost all poets talk about a mixture of autobiography, life, death, hardship, love, society, politics and frequently nature. Views of such things are very different between cultures.

For example in countries where freedoms are very limited the poets will often write about freedom as much as they will about the lack of those freedoms whereas in countries that have much greater freedoms those freedoms can be somewhat taken for granted and the poets tend not to place so much emphasis on them.

Another example is the poetic treatment of death. In the UK death is something people don’t talk about if they can help it, something that although inevitable can be ignored and something that people and society find hard to address. Contrast the UK attitude to death with that in Ireland or Latin America where, although life is valued and celebrated, society doesn’t hide death and makes a much bigger fuss of it. A quick read of Seamus Heaney or perhaps Pablo Neruda will show the different attitudes.

As a poet I hope that I bring new perspectives to issues, that I talk about them in new and different ways and I know that by reading overseas poets I can broaden my own experience and further develop my own abilities as a writer.

In a series of future blogs I intend to focus each piece on a poet (or poets) from a different culture and show why I find that work interesting, broadening and worth reading. Perhaps that would be useful for any poet.