We made our now annual expedition to The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival this weekend just gone. It's held mainly in the village of Snape at The Snape Maltings...very apt for the potter and wife!
Our association with this part of Suffolk goes back to the years of the teenage children. But the festival..only the last three years. The potter has some ceramics in the Gallery there and also in The Buckenham Gallery in Southwold ...so there's a double reason to take the six hour trip from here in the north west to East Anglia. And a further reason as the oldest grandgirl is now at UEA  in her second year and getting more political by the moment!!
But the festival was just great this year. I love the different approaches. The "academic"...the "comedic"...the "ex-punk"...the "rock-star"...the "rap poet"....and the madness of the open-mike late night session!!
Each year I've made the effort to get to as many sessions as I have energy....and these poets are a sample of those I heard speak this time.
Attila The Stockbroker, Gerry Loose, Kei Miller, Helen Mort, Jeremy Reed, Valerie Rouzeau, Pedro Serrano, Susan Wicks, Jane Duran, Peter Sansom and Jeni Smith.
From the workshops to the Q&A sessions the talks and the readings, it's a feast of words and emotions.
  Now I will have to have a go at putting it all into practice....
I plucked up enough courage to have a go at the open mike session in The Plough and Sail at Snape on the Saturday evening.....this was my contribution!

...hands shaking by the time I had finished!!...

A Poem for Thursday...in time for St. Patrick's Day

We attended The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival again last November. I went to one of the workshops at The Red House...where Benjamin Brittan had lived.
Do you ever feel out of your depth in these situations?
We were given a sheaf of poetry chosen from other languages.
I chose one in gaelic by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill..."Ceist na Teangan"
Now I hadn't ever learnt Irish...went to the wrong school!! but dad was an Armagh man and over my life I realised that some of those "odd" words that he and Aunt Cis used were most probably Gaelic.
Whether Irish or Scottish I cannot say....but definitely not Anglo Saxon English.
So when asked by the leader of the day to write a poem based on the sound of the words and the rhythm of the lines...I thought of dad and all the story-telling that he had done when he was alive.
...and I wrote this piece, making up a story of chieftains and betrayal in Ireland...
of which I now know from reading Irish history...there was a lot between clans!! 

 

I looked up the translation of the original poem and there was the story of Moses in the basket being found and reared by the Pharoah's daughter....

Maybe it was the rhythm...or maybe something much deeper made me think of this story of betrayal.