The High Window Press has now published three books of my poetry. I am very grateful to David Cooke and to Peter Jay who designed them so beautifully.
From Inside – 2017 – Chilcot, Arkan, Dick Cheney, the Middle East: subjects that find expression in these poems which explore the genre of “Immoralism” – a notion developed from the writings of André Gide and the personae of Robert Browning. We are taken beneath the external face of society. They employ a trope perhaps more sinister than irony. Their author taught in prisons until he was taken off the books for helping the inmates write material the authorities deemed inappropriate. Meaning here has a swingeing accuracy, which is remarkable, coming from a poet who pioneered abstraction in the seventies. Further information ISBN incorrect – £9.95
Songs of Realisation – 2019 – In this book, urban imagery gives way to the muddled ground just beyond London: woods and marshes, villages on the up and estates fallen into dilapidation. Central to the collection are three Songs of Realisation. In Indian literature, a “Song of Realisation” is a poem that realises divinity. The nature of matter on, below and above the earth provides inspiration for a description of Epping forest, the Chauvet cave and the Hubble telescope. These “songs” draw on mythology, archaeology and particle physics. A leitmotif is the notion of Shiva as creator and destroyer, conceived as a dancer, on axis. Meaning is both created and destroyed in each section, while the intention is to cause thought to express itself as a dance. Family history and childhood get explored in the poems that conclude the book. Further information ISBN 978-1-903006-16-0 – £9.95
Invention of Reality – 2022 – “An editor once told me that when it came to my work she was apprehensive about turning the page. I mix reassurance with uncertainty. I doubt she’d be able to cope.” A sequence of dizains celebrates Hawthornden Castle. After that, we take a tour of Europe – as did the castle’s owner William Drummond. Returning to an England mired in confusion prompts a shift towards a darker tone bearing witness to the state of affairs. A final sequence imagines a poem from the afterlife by Iraqi Fawzi Karim who died in 2019. Further Information ISBN 978-1-913201-28-9 – £14.95
Anthony Howell’s first collection, Inside the Castle, came out in 1969. In 1973 he was invited to the International Writers Program in Iowa. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn award. His versions of the poems of Fawzi Karim were a PBS Recommendation for 2011. He was the founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and is editor of Grey Suit Editions.
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There is an exhibition in homage to Luke Howard ‘Namer of Clouds’ on his 250th anniversary at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road N17 9AS – 15 November 2022-14 December 2022.
Martine OrmerodAlbert Marquet – Waiting for a Ferry on the DanubeJames McBey – View of DunkirkJohann Geyer – Balloonists – Courtesy of Agnews Fine ArtJohn Lindoll? – The BroadsPaul Mictchell – Train and LightPaul Mitchell – 1960s Birmingham RoadAlgernon Newton – ChimneysArnesby Brown – Pines and CloudsAnonymous – Clouds and CowsAnthony Howell – Clouds and pylonsAnthony Howell – Clouds, Steam and SheepKerry DugganKerry DugganLuke Howard’s plaque at Bruce Grove
Also included – Sandie Macrae’s film “The Most Beautiful Shadow of a Doubt”.
Open Mike Poetry Reading at 6.30 pm on Tuesday 22 November, and then viewing by appointment after the opening. This is part of a whole series of events in Tottenham – at the Hub Recreation Centre and at Bruce Castle museum.
For the performance, bring a single flat sheet, pale in colour.
Cloud rehearsal with the cubs
CLOUD EXERCISES
Equipment. One single flat sheet per performer. Costume: white, grey or pink.
HOLD ON TIGHTLY TO THE ENDS OF YOUR SHEET – The Short ends!
1 CLOUD SAILS/CLOUD TRAILS
Fill a shared sheet with the wind. Walk or run with it. Or each performer may take a single sheet and run as fast as they can with it, so that the sheet flaps in the wind in their wake. Run around an in between other performers, who may be performing another exercise. That is fine. You are the wisps of cloud under and beneath and around the edges of other clouds.
2 CLOUD ROTATIONS AND RIPPLES
Share the shake of the sheet, one of you at each short end. Rotate your sheet on the spot with a sheet shared like this with a partner – which could be interesting done increasingly fast or slow. Then really slow the action down to doing it so slowly no one can see you moving.
Can you turn inside out? That is, start facing each other and then work out how to turn under your arms and end up facing outwards? Can you reverse and get back to facing each other without twisting the sheet?
Or try folding the sheet so that it is half as wide. The folded width of a single sheet can be held by its folded corner right up next to that performer’s shoulder and the other corner held in the same way by a partner so that the folded sheet dangles down to their ankles.
Now you can revolve in towards your partner, and your partner can do the same. You can both do this standing up or rolling on the ground (depending on the weather). Explore all possibilities. Try working in sixes (three pairs) – what patterns can be made?
3 A CLOUD QUARTET
Two sheets shared by four performers ducking under and over their sheets. Perhaps this could be done in an avenue of performers – in the manner of English country dancing.
4 LONELY CLOUD/ONLY CLOUD
If alone, what can you do with your sheet?…….. Can you put it over your head? Can you twirl round, hidden by the sheet. What else can you do?
5 LARGE CUMULUS GROUP CLOUD
Three performers face outwards each holding one corner of the short end of a sheet, thus they are holding three sheets in an outward facing circle, and one performer takes up the sheet at the other short end, but holding the two short-end corners as do another two performers with the other two sheets. Now we have a sort of cloud three-leafed clover. One performer gets into the middle of the circle and improvises with their own sheet, as the other performers step sideways, slowly revolving the whole combination. This requires seven performers. Four sheets.
It can also be performed by six performers forming an outward-facing circle, connected by six sheets, with six performers using both hands to hold the other ends of the sheets. Now there can be two performers sharing one sheet in the centre of this larger circle. This takes fourteen performers. Seven sheets.
To parents, dancers, performance artists, group leaders: this performance will depend on your own creativity and the creativity of your teams. I suggest working with unelasticated single flat sheets – but some of you may get ideas for double sheets. Clouds can be white, grey, pink. Remember, simple actions can look great en masse. Actions can be shuffled or staggered or done at the same time or done in opposing directions. Actions may seem tentative at first, but with practise a very simple action becomes crisp and disciplined. A drone will film the performance from above as well as from the ground, and the best view will be the one from above. Imagine the grass as the sky and we are painting clouds in it.
Clouds move slowly as well as fast. Instil this idea in your performers. Use acceleration and deacceleration. Sometimes try moving so – which is often true of clouds. So the performance of any of the ideas suggested below might begin fast and end up so slow no one can see any movement – or vice versa.
Repetition will be of the essence in what you do, and the more you repeat, the smoother and the more controlled the actions will become.
Encourage everyone to come up with new ideas, and use any that seem promising.
If some of your team are particularly interested in video, create a film team which works towards making an excellent video of the final performance. They will need practise as well, and they may pick up excellent out-takes (short footage of details) which can be useful later.
I present a few suggestions, but it is up to each team to create its own cloud performance. We might finally do these performances one performance at a time, and then, use the entire field to perform all of them simultaneously. Then we will have a cloudscape! Mixing the exercises, performing exercises simultaneously, or all performing one (such as Exercise 7) at the same time are what will create our cloud performance.
And on the day, come with macs, and headgear and gumboots – just in case it rains.
When sharing another performer’s sheet, tie your own sheet around your waist. Work out a fancy way to do this that doesn’t take too long to do.
A week ago, as I was watchingThe Professionals with growing admiration for its writer Richard Brookes, it struck me that the ultimate crystallisation of portraiture where America and Americans is concerned is the Western. The genre provides, more than the thriller, which has its roots in the policier of French cinema, a cheap-enough stage (desert being the most of what it needs) for a minimalised, ruggedly pastoral version of America’s tragedies, farces and subterfuges to find expression. Brookes has been compared to Chekhov.
There’s a gang of vets from some war or another. There’s a deal. Authority is a long way away, and in this case Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvinhave long since parted with authority. Woody Strode and Robert Ryan back them up. They are all into the deal for the money. Strode is black. A tracker. Ryan is a bronco buster. The logistics of keeping their horses alive is essential to the trek the deal entails. So they are a mixed bunch.
There’s a client. For the money their allegiance is to him. For the gang, violence is expeditionary – they have fought for Mexican revolutionaries – more for the adventure than for the cause of independence. And this holds true for most US military initiatives. They are not fighting for the survival of their families. Essentially they are mercenaries. And the desert backdrop could be replaced by a swamp. A swamp of deals, clients and gangs.
So in terms of genres – America might be epitomised by the Western, France by the policier, Britain by historical costume drama and Russia by the war movie.
Of these Come and Seeis perhaps one of the most powerful – it shows how, for the Russians, war is conceived as existential rather than expeditionary – the Russian is fighting for the actual survival of his or her family, fighting against occupation and ethnic cleansing. Patriotism is born out of necessity.
Netflix has just brought out a German view of war – All Quiet on the Western Front– after the best-selling novel by Erich Maria Remarque – and here war is seen as entrapment by patriotism.
It also shows us the sheer horror, the humiliating brutality of defeat. This too is a powerful film – and I find it interesting how a book recently published by Grey Suit Editions UK – The Cross of Carl by Walter Owen, a halucinatory evocation – arrives at an expression of the same sense of war as terrifying and grotesque.
Britain’s war films abound in tales of “derring do”, suspense and tension and spies – in the spirit of the SAS or MI6 – and of course, if nostalgically now, the navy.
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