I Love West Leeds Arts Festival | Young Writers | Adam Lowe
Adam Lowe is an author, journalist and publisher from Armley in West Leeds. In 2009 he received four Lambda Award nominations and three British Fantasy Award nominations. In 2008 he was awarded a Spectrum Fantastic Arts Award. His debut novella, Troglodyte Rose, was released to critical acclaim worldwide. He also writes poetry and serves as a journalist for Bent magazine and The Pink Paper.
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By Adam Lowe.
Inspired by the image of the yellow bird in the fancier's hands. Part of Casey Orr's Comings and Goings Exhibition, The Millspace, Armley Mills, Canal Road, Armley, Leeds.
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Week 1: hectic but useful. Workshops attended: 2. Panel discussions appeared at: 2. Readings given: 1. Poems written: 2. Awards presented to young writers: 10. Festivals attended: 1.
Between the Voices of a New Generation Festival, a poetry BBQ with the crew from Letterbomb and Chatterbox, and wandering the streets of Armley for inspiration, it's been a busy week indeed. This is not to mention my placement at Peepal Tree Press.
In terms of my writing, I've been trying to reengage with these streets, with the place I've called home for 15 years. It's refreshing to look at the streets you take for granted with a new eye, noticing details you've overlooked and trying to glimpse the things said between words, the conversations had between gestures, and the thoughts going on behind the faces of those you walk past when doing your shopping.
At the moment I'm planning a short poetry tour, with me as the guide, which will probably take place along part of Armley Town Street. Exploring the histories of the area is proving to be an emotional experience, as I rather unexpectedly found myself full of emotion when reading about the Armley asbestos disaster (a matter I hadn't even thought about since I was a child). Even though I knew none of the people who died or were made seriously ill due to the contamination of the area, I felt for them, and felt that they were my people. Reading about MP John Battle's determination in fighting for his constituents' health and safety, and seeking reparations for the ill caused them, was an inspirational story. I've known John for a while, as he and my mother are colleagues and good friends, and I felt a real sense of pride in rediscovering his activities in this area.
Next in my plan is to spend some time in the shops, lurking in the frozen food aisles and gleaning tidbits from the conversation of shoppers. Shops, especially grocers' and supermarkets, are community spaces, where a wide range of individuals are brought together, and different, often contrasting worlds collide, graze and move apart. I'm trying to clear my mind of my own preconceptions before I get in there, and I may warn the supermarket staff to keep me clear of the hot food, in case I get tempted to stuff myself on roast chickens. It wouldn't be the first time I've torn into juicy chicken carcasses when trying to work. Food is always an occupational hazard.
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ARMLEY MILLS, 15:37, TUESDAY
Between the grinding hum of cars
coasting by on gravel and the rustle
of shrubbery with Parkinson's tremble,
I feel the shivery thrill of danger
and smell you approaching.
You are strange and distant,
physical, hard and oniony with sweat.
Sun peels back our skin
to reveal desire, and we make,
quick as foxes, for the undergrowth.
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Week 2: Things are beginning to coalesce. I'm working on a couple of parallel poems and one or two found poems. I've also been experimenting with microfiction and SMS poetry. I've been trying to get locations and objects to speak to me.
Today I noticed the site of the old maisonettes down near Armley Town Street. There's just an empty square of grass now, and it's rather small, but that site had a ridiculously large number of people living in it for the space it offered. There has to be something in that.
I've also got to plot the sites of interest on my poetry tour. I'm thinking it will start at Bob's Heel Bar and progress down Branch Road and towards Canal Road. Then we can wind it up at Armley Mills for the Word Cafe. I'll have to plan some exercises and stimuli for those who take part, as well as preparing some poems I can either read on the journey or share at the Word Cafe afterwards.
In the meantime, it looks like I'll be getting very little sleep!
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JABBERWOCK
[ode to a scribbling machine]
You tell tales with hand cards, drawing
Freudian pictures, pulling the wool over our eyes.
Your truths are indecipherable black leather
leaves, apocryphal manuscripts, emerging mothy
from between the iron teeth of your lying mouth;
we face erasure by the hooves of your illiterate steed,
your scribbling horse; and when tangled by your riddles,
you throw us to the jabbering whim of the bumbler,
where it splits us to our syllables, and censors us forever.
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HATTERSLEY LOOM
Iron dragon
rags girls around
by their dyed cotton hair,
leaves them
torn.
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COTTON
Cotton analysed.
Results in:
67% hair.
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SPINDLE
It becomes clear
why Sleeping Beauty
needed sleep.
She was too enamoured
of pricks.
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SPINNING JENNY
Sorry life isn't round -
like me.
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CARRION FLIGHT OF THE HARPSICHORDS
Son of Norman McCraig, anatomist
Ewan builds harpsichords with vulture
quills to make his own kind of poetry
when the bony keys are tapped like ribs.
Flemish-style virginals; open casket
muselars, ottavinos and spinets;
katabatic instruments assembled with passion,
hunger and flair. Compassed and pitched,
when played they flew him on scavenger wings,
to soar rapterish above Gott's park.
[With thanks to Ian Duhig]
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I LOVE WEST LEEDS
I am the nipple of a people's catholicism.
I am the excommunication of coinage by pocket.
I am the gasping vista of working class happiness.
I am the shadow of transport and infrastructure.
I am the slave's chain weaved of packing ribbon.
I am West Leeds and I speak for myself.
Sights: St Bartholomew's, the betting shop, the sky on a grim day, the tarmac of Armley Town Street, the Post Office dole queue, myself.
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PICNIC
From Tupperware containers, in the shade
of Kirkstall Abbey, we assemble
elderflower jam and scotch eggs into a tale
of origins, of stolen red bicycles
on holiday in Wales.
The wasps' intrigue reminds us
to keep our hands clean.
You end up sitting on a daisy
without realising, and when you stand
it's pressed flat against your 501s,
tacky with chlorophyll.
Time passes, throwing
the Abbey's shadow around
like the silhouette of a drunken sundial.
When the sky begins to bruise,
we pack ourselves up,
discard the wrappers and take
empty Tupperware back to empty houses.
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Week 3 Blog
The Word Cafe is coming up soon and we will all have to present our work. I'm currently in the process of planning the presentation and refining the script for my poetry tour. That means picking which poems to read and how I will overcome the Town Street traffic to guide my literary tourists.
In the meantime, I've been very impressed with the amount of writing I've done in the past few weeks. Not only have I written loads for the festival, I've been more productive in all my writing projects. I've managed to add to my portfolio of work considerably. I've also taken the plunge and begun submitting my work again. In the past I did so about once a year, but long response times and rules on simultaneous submisszions usually meant I didn't bother sending out my work very often. But now I've got quite a big body of work, I've been able to submit more widely because there's been more to send out. It means I've finally got round to trying out those magazines I'd always wanted to submit to but had never had time to send anything to.
Hopefully I will get some acceptances soon.
Adam
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Final Blog
So my time with the I Love West Leeds Arts Festival has now come to an end. What an experience it's been! From drinking elderflower cordial to mulling over the monstrous mechanics of mill machines, it's been an interesting and challenging experience.
The questions I've raised on this short journey are already leading me in new directions-most pertinent among them the role of the machine in contemporary culture and how it structures our identities. It was Donna Haraway that argued we've all become animal-machine hybrids of a kind in A Cyborg Manifesto, and the way industrialisation, and then later robotisation and digitisation, has changed our lives is important. For me, it speaks directly to the West Leeds experience. It seems no coincidence that with the decline of industry and craft in the area came the rise of social disaffection and exclusion.
Industry was far from wholly beneficial, however, as my explorations of the Armley asbestos tragedy and the Victorian horrors of the mill revealed. It's a difficult subject.
Perhaps the revival of arts in West Leeds is a reaction to the friction between a lost, but once destructive industry and a much-needed sense of community and purpose. The people of West Leeds, like me, are trying to find what our new place is. This can be seen in the changing face of Armley Town Street and the slow gentrification of those areas nearest Burley and Headingley. It can be seen in the arrival of Florence Café and the presence of Chatterbox at Armley Library.
Something exciting is happening in West Leeds, and it's only just beginning.