MOST VISITORS to the Hoffman Building at Snape Maltings during the Aldeburgh poetry festival could not have failed to notice a number of roughly made ladders attached or suspended about the place, writes Greg Freeman. They were part of an exhibition, Travelling Ladders, by Ian Starsmore, which also resulted in a collection of poetry inspired in some way by his project, which he explained at a talk at the Peter Pears Gallery in Aldeburgh early on Sunday morning. Surrounded by photos, drawings, etchings and constructions, Starsmore said that the biggest ladder currently hanging in the Hoffman building had previously been suspended in Norwich cathedral. Other locations included a bird sanctuary on the North Norfolk coast and Cambridge University.  He had also buried a hoard of small silver ladders in the earth or hidden them in plain view, and left them there for a year. He said: “I have made and thought of these ladders as being somewhat like architecture, sculpture, poetry or nature.” Two poets, Paul Stephenson and Rebecca Watts, read their poems from the Travelling Ladders booklet at the gallery on Sunday morning. Starsmore added: "Somehow these strange things that I've made have touched people - and stories spill out."   

Also to be found at the festival, at the Dovecote at Snape Maltings and at the South Lookout Tower in Aldeburgh was Glas, a Poetry Trust commission by photographic artist Morven Greger and poet Gerry Loose, from the west coast of Scotland. In the Dovecote was a sail from their boat Finisterre, surrounded on the walls by photographs which appeared at first glance to be of cloud formations but were actually of crop irrigation. Glas is an old Gaelic word for green, or maybe blue.      

 

FRESH-FACED and full of enthusiasm for the language of his home (Shetlandic), Christie Williamson took us on a tour of European languages at the Jerwood Kiln Studio at Snape on Saturday morning, writes David Andrew. Shetland is so far north that its culture stands close to that of Norway, Iceland, and Finland. But his first example of his translations was of two Lorca poems. ‘Arco de Lunas’ (‘Arc o Möns’) and ‘Canción de Jinete’ (‘Da Sang O Da Rider’). His reading, in both languages, made clear how they shared similar, pure vowel sounds:

 

     El mar, hecho piedra, ríe

       su última risa de olas.

 

      Da se, turnt ta stane,

       gaffs a hidmaest gaff o her waves.

 

Scots (not Gaelic) shares much vocabulary with English; in turn, Shetlandic is a dialect of Scots.

It was a pleasure to attend a poetry talk where so much poetry was read in the original, and in translation. But Christie did not neglect the background, remarking how vocabulary was shared across the North Sea (with the Dutch), and down the east coast, from Shetland via Aberdonian to Geordie. The Romance languages returned at the end of the talk with his translation of Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Enivrez-vous’: in Shetlandic ‘Be du fu’, in Google “Get Drunk”. The original finishes thus:

 

     … enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, á votre guise.

 

     or

 

     … be du fu! O wine, O poyims, O virtue. Whitivvir takks de.

 

 

POETRY’S AUTHORITY on pop music, Jeremy Reed, gave us an insight into what music he might like to listen to on a desert island, during a late session with the Poetry Trust’s Dean Parkin at the Plough and Sail pub at Snape Maltings on Saturday night, writes Greg Freeman. There was particular praise for Lou Reed’s Kicks, which he described as “semi-spoken word, the way poetry should be performed, not like a bad lecture”. The song “reflected the style in which I read”. Reed also highlighted Marc Almond’s What Makes A Man A Man, and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black: “I’m a great lover of torch music. It fits her voice like a black glove.”

Reed warmed to his “bad poetry readings” theme the following day at Aldeburgh during a talk he gave at the Pond Gallery on the gay American poet John Wieners. He praised Wieners for his “ravaged, romantic sensibility … my kind of outlaw poet”, with an “innate style in his looks and his poetry”. Reed railed against “mainstream poetry” that was “tediously boring; it repeats itself and repeats itself”. He added: “I’ve always read in a very projectile style. The best poet I ever heard read was Thom Gunn. Why should you explain a poem, why should poetry apologise by introducing itself? That’s why I dislike 90% of poetry readings.” When an audience member challenged him on this percentage, he conceded: “Well, 99%.” His final advice was: “Never go to workshops, never read any critical books. Just write it.”