I first saw Trevor Barton’s art at this year’s Oxford Internationl Women’s Festival and was taken by it mixture of reflective stillness and dynamism. Talking to Trevor, it soon became clear that a fascinating approach to both art and life lay behind his work (he introduced me to intentism, of which I have to say I wholeheartedly approve), and it’s a joy to get him to talk about that here. Do check out the links to his work and go and see the series of shows he has coming up.

1. Your art combines still points on the canvas with feelings of rhythm and motion around them. To what extent does this reflect your wider philosophy?

Hi Dan. Like in Stepping Out of the Mental Movie, you mean? Ideas for my current exhibition come from themes arising through Zen practice. Zen’s not a philosophy, though. It’s a sort of ‘way’. Way to be. (Philosophy doesn’t encompass the whole human experience, only ideas. Zen is not an idea.)

Mental Movie is about learning to step out of mental drama – that incessant running commentary in our heads. What happens when the film rattles out of its cage. Does life stop, or get better?

2. I also get a sense of distance from your work. Or rather, of smallness. As though we fit into the world of the picture as only a very small piece…

That’s interesting! It hadn’t occurred to me before. But you’re right. Like in Artfinger or Come In or To Truly Enter the Mountains. Yeah.

Though say ‘smallness’ and it sounds restrictive. I’d prefer to say we fit at just the size we are – no bigger, no smaller. A realistic human scale.

Anthropocentrism has a lot to answer for. Think how Earth would be without humans. Maybe better off right now… Maybe having an ice age that’s now overdue.

We put ourselves in the middle just because we’re at the top of the chain. It’s erroneous. Literally – it’s not what’s real. Our place in the chain is not what we think it is. Not as important. And not as unique. Dolphins are sentient, ants have tracking abilities we should envy. We’re even learning that birds are developing language.

At the same time (in Mountains), there is paradox of scale. We are just the size we are – but that’s liberating. The meditating figure, if you turn him (it looks mostly male) around, slots in to the mountain behind and to the right: like that’s what he formed from, or what he is part of. If that scale were literal it would be a massive mountain-sized human body. But it’s a comment; it’s not painted literally. You might miss it all together, even.

So – just the size we are. But that’s where the hidden magic is.

3. Which brings me to the other sense I get, that you mention on your website, that of the interconnectedness of the cosmos…

On the personal page. Yes. The …feeling… that every thing in the cosmos is connected to everything else in the cosmos.

That’s the hidden magic.

The entire cosmos is intertwined with our veins and nervous systems. And you can either take that from Lao Tsu, or Brian Cox explaining the Pauli Exclusion Principle of advanced quantum theory. People hate it when quantum theory gets used to talk spiritual stuff – but on this particular point, both ancient wisdom and modern science describe the same tenet of reality here.

The Californian New Age dolphin brigade say that we are One. I tend to prefer the ancient wisdom traditions to the new ones. I haven’t really heard anything new from the new ones; only people dressing up old as new to try and make cash by taking advantage of the vulnerable. Mostly in the US, but over here too.

Personal, and bad, experiences of this – when I was in a vulnerable place myself – led me to make a protest piece about how important it is to be weary of religious claims, even when shared amongst the post-religious. F*ck the Enlightenment Industry, TM is part of my current show, but is not on display in most venues of the tour for obvious reasons.

I made it using Microsoft Word and a canvas printing service.

It’s for sale! Ha.

But yes. Yes. That’s there in my work. I hope it’s there. Even in the commercial stuff I paint. It’s not just ‘we are one’. It’s everything is one. ‘We’ tends to anthropocentralise again. Big mistake.

Experientially, I’ve had more beautiful moments in life since after my first serious mental health issue than I ever did before. I lived like an automaton before. This is a bit simplistic but it went something like I was working in the city, flying regularly to New York on business. Fast forward a bit later to one day, a feather broke an already-laden camel’s back and I woke up. To emotion. To myself. To the universe. Break through not break down.

Lucky me but that’s not the point.

In those peak experiences I’ve felt every planet and every star nurse me to sleep, caught the odd word out of bird song, and conversed with trees. Hey, if I’m mad then so was St Francis – the Dr Doolittle of the beatified. But he can’t be mad because he got vindicated by the Vatican. So there you go. The Vatican beatifies mad people, so we must be OK.

Not that we need vindication from any religious institution ever again.  Oh dear. Yes, I’m still angry about a few things. Hardline Baptist upbringing.

The best way to step past something that angers you is not to give it the right, wouldn’t you say?

Perhaps I’m the one that should be ignored! That’s what Zen’s about. Getting over yourself, you find the magic. That interconnectedness is very real to me, so it will come out I guess.

4. In what kind of space do you think your paintings work best?

In your house. On your wall. When you’ve paid me some money to do a commission.

Seriously! I haven’t taken to eating locusts quite yet. Or kamala extract with candy. There’s still time. Especially in 2012!

I’ll tell you where they don’t work, and never will, and that’s most galleries and dealerships. Saatchi online, yada yada. Get me a bucket.

I’ve got something I want to tell the world – anyone who will listen – because I believe it might empower artists. Do you mind if I indulge? It will sort of answer your question too. Though there isn’t room to say it all here, so I’d like to invite anyone interested to read my new manifesto proto blog, The Artistic Shift, and get the message out with me. I don’t want it to be my blog, my message. I’m looking for people to work with to carry out a task of re-education for the benefit of other artists. I’m thinking seminars, workshops. Whatever.

Art’s true calling, IMHO, is the positive transformation of social space. Full stop.

From there, it transforms the brain patterns of those experiencing it. And from there, it transforms the world.

It does that because it’s a recording. (If you think about it, every art form is recorded somehow.)

It’s a recording of something. That something is intention.

But that’s only if the intention is positive, of course. I listen to Massive Attack and want to slit my wrists – not kidding – so it works the other way too.

The intentists are on to this (www.intentism.com). But I don’t know if they’re going far enough on that train of thought yet. They’re protesting outside the big commercial galleries but it’s like they hardly quite know what they’re kicking against. They’re just doing it intuitively. Something in their gut tells them they should.

I say they hardly quite know why because it shows in the work of some intentists. There’s a focus they have on leaving a trace of their intention in the work. To my mind that’s getting caught at the first philosophical hurdle, having philosophical doubts, being afraid of failing in the task of getting intention across, and rolling backwards.

They should step past that hurdle and keep going, I think.

Here’s what to fight.

The middle man is not your friend – whatever your field of art. (Well, duh.) Thankfully with an internet economy we artists potentially have the tools to cut him out (in my case gallerists, dealers) – we just need the guts.

You’re doing it, Dan. With your publishing model.

You could say musicians have tried to go it alone and look what’s happened to the music industry. Arctic Monkeys did OK but it all went downhill from there. They used to say that the days of penniless musicians was a long phase and then musicians got rich and that old phase was over. Now it looks like rich musicians was a phase, and the norm is people not making much money from popular music. So they spoilt the industry for everyone.

And book publishing. Look at the book stores closing and the rise of online monopolies. Or scientific publishing and the fight scientists are having to establish open-sourced, free journals.

It’s happening in so many fields. Everywhere you look, old authority systems are being challenged. At the same time the belief prevails that the middle man makes it pay so surely we need him? Surely we need those institutions?

I’d still disagree. You’ve just got to get smart at marketing.

Like you and your blogs and events, if you don’t mind my saying, Dan. That’s a form of marketing – the best kind for the emerging economy, if you ask me.

And you’ve got to do it with a generous heart, or not at all. That’s the way the new economy works too. The new economy is flat, local, global (not national), networked, interdependently co-originating, and everyone wins. There is no top dog in the emerging economy. If you try to stay on top you will fail. Perhaps not to start with, but in a while. And that’s because to be on top, people have to believe you should be there. And we’ve stopped believing in top dogs. Nobody believes in old hierarchical management structures any more. So they’re falling apart at the seams. The church, politics. Everywhere. So we’re trying out new management structures: SCRUM, for example.

The middle men are only there because they’ve disempowered the artists long enough for them to believe that they are essential for survival. It’s a lie and we’ve swallowed it. In the case of art, it’s because of three things:

• artists stopped believing they had anything useful to contribute to the world after Derrida’s deconstruction and Barthes’s death of the author
• which unfortunately coincided with the popularisation of mass mechanical reproduction
• Chuck in the old fallacy that artists have always been struggling and weak and you have a recipe for disempowerment and, frankly, abuse.

Who baked with that recipe? That’s the real question. Financiers, middle men firstly. After that, the educational establishments did too, by rote.

So… ditch the middle men. Use alternative spaces if you have to. Understand your market. And yes, market yourself.

If you’re turning your nose up at marketing as an artist, you’re just regurgitating the ideas that are keeping you disempowered so that someone else can pull your strings.

And it means you’re not necessarily ready for the new economy either, which we have to make together.

But it’s not so much forget the rule book as….the old rules are dying out. Fast. So we’ve got to learn new ones.

I hope that means the days of self proclaimed experts controlling who goes up and who goes down in the art world are coming to the end – being replaced instead with artists going direct to their respective markets, and the markets fairly trading for their goods because markets are changing too.

5. Complete the following “I wish the next time art and artists come up in conversation people would…”

Recognise them as some of the strongest and emotionally matured humans that exist.

All artists need permission to be artists (from themselves, from others). To become an artist is a journey of struggle for many. It is a sign of tremendous strength and persistence to have reached a point of self-realisation where being an artist is wholesome. Is OK. And that process can’t be taught so some people qualify academically as …painters…. before they’re ready to accept the artist within. Some.  

The idea that artists are weak is a fallacy. But I think it’s prevailed for so long because of the previous issues cited (philosophy, mechanical reproduction, built dependency relationships). OK, Van Gough cut off his ear, allegedly, Joe Orton topped himself, etc.

But then if you think about art in Eastern countries, this ‘suffering artist’ myth suddenly looks very Western. Not universally human. So if it’s not human then it is a myth – you have to ask yourself what it is in Western culture that gave rise to it. I suggest the reasons cited.

Humanly speaking, people only do extreme things when extreme things have been done to them, right? So if our artists are sick it must be because we are all sick on some level. The few profit at the cost of the many; depriving everyone from what art can be.

Artists are the perfect and always broken who have the tools to heal us.

But it relies on self-belief. If you’ve got that, if you can see art’s true calling, as well as your own, then you’re an artist.

6. Very very many thanks and best wishes with your upcoming shows – would you care to end by telling us a little about them?

Thank you. It’s called UnStuff: Art, Mindfulness, and Mental Health, and it’s a touring cameo show. Size isn’t everything.

I have about four works from the tour at the café of Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, Oxford, throughout July. We love Blackwell’s! Woo!

The show is online-interactive on my website. Anne James calls it innovative so it must be good! Ha.

Please come. And bring your smartphone with you, with a QR code reader installed. That’s how you interact with the artworks.

Then… I hope to be back at Art Café (Bonn Square) around October time, and possibly sending a few to Art in Woodstock (27^th October to 4^th November). Follow me on Twitter (@zeneverything) for dates. There’s still more to confirm.

But the main thing I’m pushing is my commissions for interiors. I feel no shame at all working with interior designers and their projects, or with direct clients for their homes. It’s not selling out. It’s my main focus, and has been for 6 years so it’s become my area of expertise.

Interior designers are themselves artists who know the transformational power of aesthetics – it’s what they do. They’re on the ball and ahead of the curve in that respect. They’re already following art’s true calling. It’s quite common for interior designers to become artists later in their careers. Or earlier. Some might not see themselves as artists. But they are to me. Real proper ones, too.

Shiny.

So another way to see my upcoming show of work is get me to do one for you where you are.

Dan – can I just say this…..

2012. So we have to embrace change, look for potential, think big, go with our intuition. It’s a day of reckoning for our species, not just our economic system. Economy. Environment. Energy. Survival depends on adaptation. Greater potential depends on letting go of fixed ideas.

A great transformation is happening. We have to move with it and help each other along. Make the new rules before they’re made for us, because you can be damn sure that new ruling elites will establish when the dust settles and then it gets harder again. They’re already working on it – so why don’t we.

‘Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ – Margaret Meade.

Bless you, Dan. I’d say you’re on the case already. You know where it’s at. Let’s go for a beer and plan art’s next evolutionary leap!

I’ve known Lisa Scullard for several years now. She’s the author of some fabulous books, most notably the darkly comic urban novel Death and the City.

Lisa is not just a great writer, she’s a great person, both inspirational (as we’ll see), generous, and with impeccable taste in Linving Dead Souls hoodies. She’s also the very model of the multitasking mastery required of today’s self-publisher. Do catch up with her on twitter, and read her fabulous blog. But first buy her book and read what she’s got to say about the whole shebang.

1. You are in many ways the perfect self-publisher because you seem to be highly skilled in so many relevant areas – was that part of the motivation?

I’ve been at home around computers since the ZX Spectrum Plus and Commodore 64 came out, and was already writing and illustrating my own stories back then as a youngster, so it was just a matter of time until they came together as a platform for self-publishing. Not in the form of those old computer platforms though. Jet Set Willy and friends didn’t open a publishing house fast enough for my liking.

I’d never pictured myself as an indie, however, because I got industry interest very early in life – initially from Gollancz in 1990, suggesting I do a rewrite of Living Hell, and almost immediately after that from Simon Spanton, who was at the time with Pan-MacMillan, and asked to see a sequel to Living Hell, based on a pitch about a motorcycle hitman. I wrote the sequel and submitted it, but hadn’t enjoyed writing it quite so much, as I felt I lacked life experience to reference at the time – I was only just out of my teens by then.

So when Simon left PanMac after three or four years of pondering, I wasn’t too bothered about it and went my own way for the next couple of years, using the motorcycle hitman premise in the screenplay Heavy Duty in 1999, which won me Raindance Film School’s “Live!Ammunition!!” pitchfest in July that year. I spent a couple of years testing the waters in the film industry, and got some interest in the feature script, including from the US.

By that time I was back at university and working full-time as a bouncer, and shortly the sequel to Living Hell was completely rewritten as Death & The City, in 2008, with the screenplay, Heavy Duty, used as the back story. It did the rounds of agents and publishers for a year – Shiel Land probably still have it at the back of some cupboard of theirs – while Living Hell went into the Pratchett/Transworld contest 2010 – and it was the contest deadline passing which became my planned publishing date. I did a test publication with The Terrible Zombie of Oz, a parody mash-up I’d done for fun, to see how hard it was to format for print and ebook – and it was a piece of cake, so I published Living Hell and Death & The City immediately – the latter being so long, I split it down the middle into two for ISBN versions to keep the print price manageable, but also released special combined editions in ebook form. It was so much easier (and cheaper) to self-publish than the 19 years of submitting and waiting around previously – although I realise now it was just about waiting for technology to catch up, and for the process to become dirt cheap.

The most frustrating part was editing from the proofs, where the errors jump out at you. I’ll still spellcheck and re-load if I spot a corker.

2. You seem to be at home in so many genres – where do you feel happiest?

With being myself I’ve tried to write dead straight-faced stuff, but it bores me. I’m like a kid in a cinema inserting my own comedy dialogue at the back of my mind, so I just allow it right through like a bulldozer when the mood takes me, so I love a good parody mash-up. With Death & The City, I was basically keeping a diary of nightclub incidents and funny anecdotes at home previously, woke at 6a.m. on the first Sunday in April 2008, and it was snowing, ruining my plans for the day. So I decided to write something else instead of my diary, and started writing exactly as if it was my diary (except I had to change the starting day in the book to a Saturday to fit the plot). It’s basically about some of the same characters as appear in Living Hell, grown-up, only written in the first person POV of one of them. That part was a great fun challenge to do – writing from the limitations of a single POV. But in nightclub security, you have to mind-read and pre-empt a lot, so it was a perfect observational point to write from, second-gueesing the other characters and their motivations, exactly as in real life at work.

3. You are a remarkable and inspiring person as well as a brilliant writer – do you mind sharing some of that story?

Ooh, haha, where do you want to start? I’m the eldest of eight, with six of them brothers. And I’m the one that took up all the martial arts, and trained as a motorcycle mechanic… As a child people thought I’d become an artist, but my mum guessed I’d be a writer from the age of about seven, she encouraged me to write stories, while I found school and socialising difficult. I had autoimmune Graves’ Disease from age 15, which led eventually to surgery, the aftermath of which led to a lot of personal research on my part into personality disorders – I took it as far as working with the mentally and physically handicapped as a CSV live-in volunteer for a year in north London, which put a lot of issues about mental health into perspective. I also had my eyes corrected from the Graves’ Disease eventually, when the surgery became available aged 34, which meant I had to learn from scratch how to distinguish between different facial expressions and eye contact, having only had people respond to me with staring for twenty years. But I took it all in stride – I hadn’t ever had a ‘normal’ life, so the extraordinary happening was everyday stuff to me. I have one child from a holiday romance, I like my cars sporty, and I like my own company. I’m quite happy on my own in the evenings with a camera, photographing clouds and sunsets, or with a hula hoop in the garden, listening to Thin Lizzy and The Beastie Boys.

4. Why is it so much more interesting to write about life’s darkness than its light?

I think because for me there’s more personal referencing in it that’s relevant to me and my life, and more scope for humour. I wasn’t raised religious, but was raised to be open-minded, so I was interested in everything from Buddhism to Satanism, as a teenager. Until I met a couple of real Satanists, who said you still had to read a ‘Bible’. No fun in that. Just more rules and stuff to remember. I value my free will. But I have an overriding moral ethic, which is why enforcing the licensing laws was my ideal job, in security work. I’ve got no time for alcoholism, or human rights abuse, domestic or otherwise. You see a lot of the dark side of people in that kind of job. And how stupid and narrow-minded they can be at the same time. I like to create objective characters who use others’ dark sides and weaknesses against them, like blackmailers and hit-men.

5. You write screenplays as well as fiction, and your style and your subject matter feel very cinematic – I can picture you as a Neil Gaiman type figure spanning the divide between the two worlds. Is that a goal of yours?

Neil Gaiman? I’m honored I’ve already sensed out the film world experimentally, as I said earlier. I think the Hollywood machine has enough invested in Tim Burton to stop me worrying that my kind of fun isn’t reaching the big screens for a while yet I do like to reference things in a postmodernist way in my writing more as an adult now, I think because as consumers we’re all hyper-aware of anything self-referential within the media, as well as being a part of it ourselves. If you remember the old stereotyped soap opera demographic – the family who never watches TV, never goes to the cinema, never listens to music, never laughs, never goes on the computer, and never has birthdays – if you wrote about that family now, it’d be classed as dystopian fiction. Nowadays you’ve got 12-yr-olds blogging and reviewing, sharing recommendations with each other faster than the companies can stick an ad onto the TV. I’m open to offers of interest to collaborate on film projects. I own my own companies already since 1999, and already work regularly with a film producer on the IT and publishing side of her work. I’m in no hurry though. For me personally, it’ll happen when something on the technology side inspires me – like putting bonus material into ebooks, or reader-preference enabled interactive reading, both of which I’ve already done. I know the industry in publishing, film and gaming platforms are desperate for anything with Transmedia potential, but individuals are already creating their own – to quote Jason Kingsley at last year’s London Book Fair 2011, they (Rebellion) got into Facebook apps because ‘As a business, how do you compete with free?’ I am still a big fan of graphic novels though – some I just know it’s a movie storyboard, itching to be made. And they don’t require electricity, or a satellite or Wi-Fi signal. I think that’s the reason reading will be around for a while yet – just printed text on a page, and the reader’s imagination running the show.

6. What would success look like?

I’m already full-time freelance/self-employed, and being interviewed by Eight Cuts, so I guess this is it. Yay me

7. What next?

There is a teenage reviewer in my house demanding sequels, which will appear eventually. And pizza. My car might be due for a tune-up… no, seriously, at some point I’ll finish my sciences degree, and then maybe do another one for fun. I never get bored of learning new stuff. Although I do tend to go home and write fiction about what I’ve learned that day, instead of doing my homework assignments. I’ll never make it to PhD, unless they give me one just for turning up and showing enthusiasm xxx

One of the gigs we love most is London Literature Lounge at Covent Garden Poetry Cafe. It’s almost two years to the day since MC and jazz poet Anjan Saha first welcomed us into the wonderful basement venue, and it’s a true privilege to have been asked to put some of eight cuts’ finest together for a fourth appearance there on May 23rd, 8-10pm. We will be joining a wonderful line-up handpicked by Anjan, built around the theme “Our Colloquial Past” and whatever that throws up to us or, indeed, doesn’t. Expect, though, the highlight of the evening to be Paul Askew’s rendition of the piece that is slowly becoing known as one of the cultural highpoits fo the year, The Extremely Abridged History, Present and Future of Paul Askew in Five Dream Scenes.

We have for you:

Paul Askew, slam winner, editor of Ferment Zine

Tina Sederholm, co-host of Hammer and Tongue Oxford and 2010 Oxford Hammer and Tongue slam champion

Anna Hobson, MC of Oxford Pride, runner up in the 2012 National Flash Fiction Day Oxford Flash Slam!

Emily Harrison, winner of the 2010 Tower Poetry Prize

Kate Walton all the way from Birmingham with her gorgeous modern blues poetry

Davy Mac, slam-winning author of The Homeless Oratorio

Marc Nash, flash fiction maestro

Dan Holloway, 2010 winner of Literary Death Match, reading from his forthcoming pamphlet/CD Last Man Out of Eden

I first met Paul, having seen his videos on YouTube, at Blackwell’s, after This is Oxford, last autumn. He terrified me in that “oh no, you’re a really good poet how am  I meant to talk to you?” kind of way. Since then I’ve not only gotten to know him as just about the nicest, most generous man you could meet, but have had the privilege of drawing him into the New Libertines orbit. And at Chipping Norton Literary Festival his performance of The Extremely Abridged History, Present and Future of Paul Askew in Five Dream Scenes went down as the best thing I have ever seen (here’s the poem). What I sense in his poetry and performance is not only a depth and breadth of emotion, not only dealing with the things I try to tackle, but a restlessness, a refusal to settle on an answer when there is always another question, and a sense of the fleeting moments of joy, endless hours of anxiety, and the increasing paranoid anxiety that the knowledge that the-search-is-endless-but-I-CANNOT-get-off-not-now-not-for-one-moment brings. Paul Askew, the person and the poet, is a truly special thing. Cherish him. And have a listen to the really cool things he has to say about poetry.

1. Looking through your poems for common motifs, I arrived at animals and food…

And Death. Don’t forget Death.

I’m not sure why, but these are the things that help me to write the style of poetry I mostly write in.

When I was growing up, I would get up really early, and on Sundays my Mum and her boyfriend would usually stay in bed til fairly late into the afternoon, because that was the one day that neither of them would have to work. Our TV in the front room was kept on a chest of drawers that were full of VHS tapes of stuff recorded off the tele. I would spend my Sunday mornings watching things like Monty Python, The Young Ones, Not The Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out, Fawlty Towers, Cheers, etc etc. I grew up watching comedy and my favourites were usually the slightly more surreal ones.

I specifically remember this one Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch. It was about a man who had taught a gorilla to speak. They’re appearing on a chat show and soon just descend into some old bickering married couple.

That one sketch is a pretty huge influence on a lot of my poems. I just love the fact that in that sketch, they take something totally surreal and make it a normal part of the everyday world. A lot of other comedies do this too of course, not just comedies either (look at David Lynch’s films for a start), but that’s the time which I first noticed it and realised that that was what was happening.

2. Your poems, and your performance of them, are incredibly intense. It seems, sometimes, as though you’re literally draining yourself on the stage – do you ever worry that you give too much of yourself?

I don’t really know how else you’re supposed to do it, to be honest. Surely the whole point of watching a performance is to see someone perform. If I watch something, I want evidence that the person or people involved are giving it their all. I don’t watch a gig to do someone a favour, I watch a gig because I want to experience something. I expect that to be why other people turn up to gigs, open mics, etc, too, and so when I’m performing, I kind of see it as my duty to give it all I can. That probably comes from when I wanted to be an actor, was in a youth theatre group and also studying Performing Arts. You kind of get that mentality when doing that sort of thing.

I did an open mic the other day, and I was doing the door for it so didn’t have time to get nervous about it or really even think about what I was going to be doing, and I’d done that thing where I hadn’t really done any practice beforehand. As a result I just ended up reading from my notebook in a rather flat “I’m reading this poem from my notebook” way. I found it pretty unsatisfying, so fuck knows how the audience felt about it.

I mean, I almost always read from a hard copy of my stuff, but not in that way, you know? I don’t read from the page because I’m a “Page poet,” I read from the page because my memory is pretty rubbish these days and if I don’t have the poem to at least glance at, I will forget it. Not only that, but I’ll also forget how I want something to be performed, what words trigger what switch, how I want a pause to work, etc. All the things that hopefully make it more interesting to see in a live context.

3. Why poetry instead of prose?

When I was doing my creative writing BA, in my second year there was a compulsory writing poetry module. I was having a massive problem with it as I thought I didn’t “Get” poetry. I mean, obviously I went through that teenage writing poetry phase that so many of us do, but I don’t count that as mine was all a pile of wank (it’s true, I recently found some of it and it’s all just awful), and in the previous year to the module I had written a couple of poems while trying to impress a woman who wrote poetry, but it was all just a bit straightforward “I’m writing a poem, this is what poetry is,” boring, lazy stuff. Because I didn’t actually read poetry then.

The poetry we had read in the first couple of weeks of our module hadn’t sat well with me at all and I couldn’t get my head round this poetry thing. My tutor, after spending an infuriating hour long tutorial trying to explain a certain poem to me and having no luck whatsoever, decided a different approach was needed for me and lent me four Ivor Cutler albums.

Ivor Cutler was a fucking revelation. It was like the poetry version of the comedy that I’d grown up with. “Ohhhh, you can do poetry like this?”

Hearing ‘Fremsley’ from the ‘Dandruff’ album was like watching that gorilla sketch from Not The Nine O’Clock News. Everything Ivor Cutler did just clicked with me. I “Got” it. That was my “Way in” to poetry, if you like. From there i found out about people like Edwin Morgan, Luke Kennard, Ian McMillan, John Hegley, my friend George Chopping, and from all these writers I got more of an appreciation for poetry as a whole.

George is actually responsible for me performing my poetry. He used to work with my Mum and they’re still friends. When she told him about me writing poetry he got me to go to the open mic he runs and sort of made me perform some stuff. It went down really well, so I carried on doing it. The rest, as they say…

These days, I just seem to find poetry more satisfying than prose. I am starting to try and write prose again too though, so we’ll see how that goes.

Thinking about it, a lot of my poetry is fairly prosey anyway. I’m not really a “structured, set rhythm and rhyme” type of writer. I’m more concerned with a sort of natural flow of language. I like internal rhyme and sound clusters. I can have more fun with those. Sometimes it’s good to give yourself limits, but I’d much prefer that something read and sounded natural rather than being “Acceptable,” if you see what I mean. I think that having a form can be great and all, challenging even, but if it becomes something you’re reliant upon you can end up writing something that seems a bit awkward. I don’t see the point in stifling something just to make it fit a recognised framework. Form should be secondary to content as far as I’m concerned.

4. Tell me about the importance of storytelling

Oh God, I’m gonna talk myself into a right corner here if I’m not careful.

I think storytelling is vital.

See, on the one hand if you’re not telling a story on some level then what exactly are you doing?, and how can you expect anyone to connect with what you’re doing? What’s the point of it?

I think too much poetry ends up eating itself. Poets and people who love poetry complain that it’s not taken seriously enough or doesn’t get widespread attention, but continue to write these incredibly distancing, navel gazing poems. It’s like the obnoxious kids at school in gangs who spend their time being wankers and then wonder why the teachers are so hard on them. You can’t have it both ways. Don’t be bull-headedly introspective and then wonder why not many people give a shit.

Conversely, I find there’s a tendency with some modern poets, especially ones from London it seems, to be very repetitive. They seem to be more concerned with finding as many ways to say the same thing as they possibly can than actually writing something that has progression, because they don’t actually understand how to effectively tell a story.

On the other hand though, you have experimental poetry, flarf, alt. lit, etc, some of which can on the face of it seem to be the exact opposite of storytelling, but some people working in these genres produce some pretty fascinating stuff.

When I was doing NaPoWriMo last month, I scrapped a poem that I’d spent the day working on because just before I was about to post it, I read something that an alt. lit writer called Crispin Best had posted on Twitter, that had in one sentence said what I was trying to say far more effectively than I had taken about five or six stanzas to.

To do that kind of thing so effectively though, you need to understand storytelling. It’s like free jazz. You can’t just start blowing randomly into a saxophone because that will just sound shit. You have to know the rules and know what you’re playing against for it to work. It’s the same with experimental literature. You can’t just write something like “Beef toboggan in Kathmandu. / An existensis trivium, / lording over four for Steven. / Blades on a Thursday,” because that’s totally empty. There’s no point or purpose to it. You might as well just be some mad bloke shouting at passers by on the High Street. No-one likes that guy.

5. Most of your poetry seems to be about loneliness…

At the risk of sounding emo or like I’m seeking sympathy, it’s kind of inevitable that that would be the case, because I am a pretty lonely person. I find it very difficult to make connections with people, and I find that when I actually feel that I have, I tend to either get over-enthusiastic and put them off wanting to know me that well, or I get scared and push them away or keep them at a distance. As a result of this, I spend quite a lot of time on my own.

I think I’ll leave it at that, I’m not about to start going all “In The Psychiatrist’s Chair” on you. I’ll just say that it is pretty much guaranteed that you will end up writing about what you know, and loneliness is something I know well.

6. 50 year old Paul Askew will look back happily on his poetic life if…

HA! I have no idea. I can’t seem to work out definitively what I want from all this right now, so I have no idea what will make me happy to look back on in a couple of decades time.

If I can look back and be happy with whatever it is that I have done though, that’ll be pretty awesome.

It was a delight to talk to poet, novelist and songwriter Jessica Bell recently about her incredible poetry collection Twisted Velvet Chains. It’s a very special pleasure to give the lowdown on her new book Fabric

Jessica says:

My poetry will not baffle you with phrasing that scholars award for academic genius and that can only be understood by those who wrote it. My poetry is for the everyday reader. In fact, it is even for those who don’t like to read poetry at all. Because it is real, stark and simple.

The poems in Fabric are no different. They explore specific moments in different people’s lives that are significant to whom they have become, the choices they’ve made. It’s about how they perceive the world around them, and how each and every one of their thoughts and actions contributes to the fabric of society. Perhaps you will even learn something new about yourself.

So, even if you do not usually read poetry, I urge you to give this one a go. Not because I want sales (though, they are fun!), but because I want more people to understand that not all poetry is scary and complex. Not all poetry is going to take you back to high school English, and not all poetry is going make you feel “stupid”.

You can still say to people that you don’t read poetry … I really don’t mind. Because if you read Fabric, you’re not reading poetry, you’re reading about people. And that’s what reading is about, yes? Living the lives of others?

Are you still here? I hope so!

Please support the life of poetry today by spreading the news about Fabric. Hey, perhaps you might even like to purchase a copy for yourself? The e-book is only $1.99 and the paperback $5.50.

Here are the links:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Goodreads

Let’s keep poetry alive! Because not all poetry is “dead” boring …

About Jessica Bell:

If Jessica Bell could choose only one creative mentor, she’d give the role to Euterpe, the Greek muse of music and lyrics. And not because she currently lives in Greece, either. The Australian-native author, poet and singer/songwriter/guitarist has her roots firmly planted in music, and admits inspiration often stems from lyrics she’s written.

She is the Co-Publishing Editor of Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and co-hosts the Homeric Writers’ Retreat & Workshop on the Greek Isle of Ithaca, with Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest.

For more information about Jessica Bell, please visit:

Website:

String Bridge (a novel) Homeric Writers’ Retreat & Workshop Blog 

Vine Leaves

Facebook

Twitter

(Paul Askew’s breathtaking performance at The New Libertines at Chipping Norton Literary Festival)

Danni Antagonist, bard of Stony Stratford

Paul Askew, editor of Ferment, Hammer and Tongue slam winner

Hay Brunsdon, finalist for Gloucestershire Poet Laureate (coming up on August 18th)

Hannah Elwick

Penny Goring, author of The Zoom Zoom

(Penny Goring at Covent Garden Poetry Cafe)

(Jessie Grace [left] at one of our first ever shows in London in 2010)

Jessie Grace, brilliant blues singer-songwriter

Emily Harrison, winner of the 2010 Tower Poetry Prize

(Dan Holloway at Pow-Wow Literary Festival, Birmingham)

Dan Holloway, Literary Death Match winner

Marc Nash, acclaimed flash fiction writer

(Clarissa Pabi)

Clarissa Pabi, 2010-11 president of Oxford University Poetry Society, Orange Prize judge, MC of FULLPHAT

(Anna Percy at The New Libertines’ barnstorming gig at Three Minute Theatre in Manchester’s legendary Afflecks)

Anna Percy, curator of the Stirred Poetry Collective

(James Purcell Webster)

James Purcell Webster, the man who will send you poetry direct to your phone

A while ago, we publicised a poetry competition for Oxford ME Group for Action (OMEGA). It’s a pleasure to be able to announce a month of poetry events revolving around the winners.

(James Webster, whose devastating poem about self-harm blew the audience away)

I cant remember the last time I was as nervous for an event as I was yesterday for our New Libertines show, the official fringe at Chipping Norton Literary Festival. It was great to be asked to be the festival’s fringe, but that also meant our publicity had been minimal, and I had serious worries that we might have spent the evening in the wonderful setting of the Chequers’ barn venue essentialy workshopping.

(Claire Trevien’s heart-stopping turns of phrase left the room breathless)

But half of me wondered if that might not be preferable to the alternative – an audience that wandered in expecting – well, who knows – and ending up offended, disturbed, and worst of all disappointed.

(Anna McCrory’s razor sharp delivery and vulnerability perfectly complement content that’s observant, poignant and true)

In the event, not only did we have an audience but it was the most wonderful, warm, receptive evening, lifted by some of the most extraordinary performances I can remember from our stars Claire Trevien, Fay Roberts, Paul Askew, Anna McCrory, Laila Sumpton, James Webster and Tina Sederholm (I won’t be so presumptuous as to comment on my own reading, though I was really touched by the response to my new piece Hungerford Bridge).

(Laila Sumpton delivers The Only Photo, a devastating poem about the aftermath of the conflict in Sarajevo)

But more than that, we had some great open mic from the resplendent Caroline Wills-Wright, the poetic landlord of The Chequers Jim Hopcraft who had done a fabulous job of hosting the festival’s open mic earlier in the day, and a stunning set from Pat Winslow. And we had the added bonus of reading the winning poems from the festival’s children’s poetry competition which had blown me a way earlier in the day – a lyrical piece from Daisy Stapleton, a fabulous scattershot piece read magnificently by Paul Askew from Daisy Thomas, and a genuinely brutal and brilliant piece from the winner Alba Skidmore-Lapueta.

(Paul Askew’s The Extremely Abridged History, Present & Future of Paul Askew in Five Dream Scenes is quite simply the best performance piece I’ve ever seen. But calling it just that would be a gross injustice to the fact that this may be the most emotionally devastating, real poem you will ever come across. I cried through the whole of the next set)

It’s been an incredible poetry year so far, and there’s so much to look forward to. What continues to inspire me every time I hear our wonderful poets is that there are still people dealing dazzlingly with every aspect of life, that the stereotypes I had of performance poetry being all slick and superficial and dealing with everything at its most general, whilst they apply to some poetry hide an incredibly vibrant, exciting world of poets whose stunning performance is more than matched in contents.

(Tina Sederholm’s wonderful words come alive with her energy and stage control, and we were treated to a preview of her forthcoming Edinburgh show)

There are still people calling out from the wilderness, from the heart, with passion and anger and joy and humour and despair, and a burning desire to change lives.

(Fay Roberts brings an almost transcendental stillness to words that creep inside you)

A resplendent Caroline Wills-Wright

our fabulous poetic landlord, Jim Hopcraft

Pat Winslow gave us a stunning end to the evening

This time last year I wrote about Pretty Flamingo, a fabulous shop in Aberystwyth.

Well, I’ve just come back from our annual spring break in Aberystwyth and I have more photos so you can see just how fabulous the place is.

And how super-talented its owner, Michelle White is. Not just with getting amazing stock and laying the shop out like heaven, but (that’s her with one of her creations above) as a designer.

AND the place is the centre of a bustling nightlife that involves cabaret, music, fashion shows and more. Which got our ears all perked up and leads to the rather amazingly fabulous news that you should watch this space for an announcement of a rather exciting poetry slot at one of their gigs in the autumn.

I can’t urge you enough if you’re ever within 100 miles of Aber to go and visit – and take your credit cards.

Thank you so much to one of our favourite authors, Vivienne Tuffnell, for this incredibly thoughtful piece on a subject that affects all of us.

Vivienne Tuffnell is the author of Strangers and Pilgrims and Away With the Fairies.

I’ve long been haunted by this song by Tori Amos. It seems to encapsulate so completely the agony of not being able to speak what is inside us. There’s a saying that everyone has a book inside them. I disagree. Everyone has a story, or many stories but that’s not the same as a book at all. Plenty of people write books but who don’t ever tell the stories within them.

I don’t mean your life story or a memoir.

I mean stories that inhabit every corner of your being, the ones that unconsciously drive your every decision. On a larger scale there are stories that drive cultures, and even when the true origin of the story is lost, the power of that myth still drives that culture, often like a hidden rip-tide that can pull people under. When an individual takes on a wider story as their own, the results can be powerful and unpredictable.

Within British culture there are a number of all-pervading stories that everyone knows about and which seem to speak to virtually everyone. The first of these is Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It’s very hard to get at the real core of the story, so many accretions and additions have been made over the centuries by poets and writers, songwriters and film-makers. But the core seems to be this: as the Roman legions withdrew from Britain in the fourth century, a man rose to the top of the many warlords and chieftains and for a time held back the start of the Dark Ages. All the subsidiary stories about the sword in the stone, the Holy Grail, the Green Knight, Lancelot and Guinevere are secondary to this. One man, standing against the darkness, succeeding for a while before he too is swept away, lost to the darkness. Yet the story tellers chose to leave a tiny glimmer of hope in the form of the legend that Arthur was borne off to Avalon to be healed there and to sleep until the Nation truly needs him again. For me, that seed of hope when all seems hopeless is the key to the story, because it means the story has never quite ended.

The second story every Briton knows is Robin Hood. The truth of the story’s origins will never be found because the legend is so pervasive, but the likelihood (sorry) is that there were several men who used the title Robin and so over many decades the stories were joined together and became attributed to just one man. The core of the story is one man rallying many to fight a corrupt government and to restore justice to a land crippled by debt and wars.

There are others. Yet, while we may know our culture’s stories, do we know our own, those shadowy ill-defined legends that somehow define and underline our core being?

Children are bombarded today by more input in terms of story than ever before. Disney has re-imagined traditional fairy-tales and subtly(and not so subtly) twisted their core. We are seeing a crisis in both male and female identity, in my opinion, as a direct result of this twisting by popular film and television. Girls are reverting to a pre-feminist standpoint, choosing to focus on ambitions like motherhood and being housewives. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, yet, often they choose them out of a sense of finding something simpler and more readily achievable. Girls are fed a diet of Disney-esque princesses from babyhood but over the last twenty years those princesses have morphed from being damsels in distress to be rescued while remaining beautiful, to superwomen who can fight like men, are clever and resourceful and STILL look beautiful. This may seem a progression but I feel it is as undermining of girls as the original dumb damsel needing to be saved. It’s all too much to ask. It’s setting an impossible standard and it’s about time we fought back. I cannot speak for men, but the expectations for women have become an impossible ideal. Much of it is unconsciously expressed, but I feel this retreat from the achievements opened up by thirty years of hard graft by feminists is a direct result of these unreachable goals.

I failed dismally to have any sort of career, largely because a serious and long-term episode of clinical depression hit me at the time when I ought to have been finding my feet in the world of work. I had at the time a small child, complicating things further, but plenty of women go back to work when they have children, yet I failed to do so. My own psyche seemed to betray me, making it impossible to have held down a job even had I got one.

And yet…..

I found a way to speak my story.

My story, that tale distilled by countless idiots speaking sound and fury and yet signifying nothing because no one was listening, became hidden in other words. Fiction that holds more truth than I knew when I wrote it. Somewhere deep inside my mind, amid lost memories and hidden pain, something alchemical goes on and transmutes those shreds of ancient story that make up my story into tales than others can read and find a way of freeing their stories.

In some ways the song holds a key to explaining quite why it is so important to find and speak your story. “Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand… years go by, will I choke on my tears till finally there is nothing left,” tell of the awful isolation of not being understood and valued, of being alone with our experiences, our thoughts. If another human soul understands us, our story, then perhaps we are not freaks, not outcasts and perhaps our story has value.

Some are decrying the ease with which a person may publish a book, either as an e-book or as a hard-copy or both, citing the wave of dross emerging and drowning the more worthwhile works in a sea of millions of words. I don’t agree. Yes, there are some pretty dire books out there. Mine may be considered among them, by some. Yet the chance to have your story seen and understood by another human soul is unprecedented in human history. Ordinary folks, without publishing connections and opportunities can have their story read by people who might otherwise never hear of them. Yes, it makes it harder for good books to be found, yet, for a long while I’d found the offerings by the traditional gatekeepers of publishing bland and oddly homogenised, at a greater remove from the author’s original vision of what their story was to have been. Yes, self-published books often seem to need an editor, or at least a better copy editor. They’re not perfect, and nor really should they be expected to be, just as us ladies are not modern Disney princesses capable of everything and anything and with PERFECT nails. Just as Disney has sold us a lie and we have swallowed it whole, so too has the publishing world. There is a template we’ve started to believe makes a book perfect and when we recoil from a book because it doesn’t fit that template, it’s time to start asking questions why.

The chance to free your story, and have it heard or read is one of the most healing things imaginable. I’m not talking about cosy Agatha Christie-esque murder mysteries or thrillers or whatever written with more than half an eye on the commercial potential. I’m meaning those quirky, awkward to place, genre defying oddities that have been springing up here and there, those brainchildren of inventive, questioning, often tormented minds.

Those are the stories I want to read and write.