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When I started writing the poems that became Smithereens, I didn't set out to write about male friendship but this seems to have been the end result. In fact, I didn't set out to write a collection at all. I wrote one, very short and jokey poem in my friend's lifetime and never showed it to him or sent it out to journals. When he died, I wrote another poem attempting to capture the shock of what had happened. Then I wrote a poem about the inadequacy and denial of my first poem, and then I started to write poems that documented moments from our 40-year friendship, and then I started to want to fill in the gaps in the story... What I felt was a personal, individual loss, but what people seem to have found different about it is that it reflects on the nature of a long-term friendship between men. It was a bit of a surprise to find that I had addressed this subject. Though I have close male friends, ever since I left an all-boys school for what had, until a couple of years earlier, been an all-women Cambridge college, I have tended to feel more comfortable in female company. However, perhaps it was this that allowed me to look more closely at what was, for me, an atypical and enduring friendship. Further reflection, though, made it clear that I write about such friendship more often than I originally realised. I experienced a much gentler loss when a friend moved away a couple of years ago and the poem I wrote about it at the time recently featured on the website of The Poetry Village. Generally, I'm a bit reluctant to push my own poems, but I have been so gratified by the response to this pamphlet so far. The blurbs for the pamphlet all came from poets I respect and admire enormously:  Additionally, I was extremely pleased by the reader response, from which I give some samples:
"It is a tour de force. It is remarkably deep yet flows effortlessly." "I have just finished a first reading of your poems and just wanted to say how much they impressed me. I found them almost unbearably moving and beautiful, not only because I recognized so much of the emotion... but also because they're formally highly accomplished, works of insight and precision." "It’s a gorgeous book in and of itself, and the poems are wonderful. The charting of the disintegration of a friendship, and the disintegration of a friend." "Lovely work!" I would love to see people at the launch, for which tickets are still available, and should you feel inclined to buy a copy, they can be obtained here.
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My pamphlet Smithereens, which will be published by 4Word at the beginning of April now has a cover and is available to pre-order on the books page of this site.  I will be launching the pamphlet along with Ruth Aylett's Pretty in Pink via Zoom on Friday 19 March at 7PM. If you'd like to attend the launch, you can book a ticket here and you can request an open mic reading slot by Emailing Ruth. If you're interested but can't make that, there will be a further launch event in April, date to be announced.
Smithereens is the story a friendship between me and 'A' that lasted for more than forty years. It began at school, before we were teenagers and ended with the untimely death of ‘A’ in 2017. Here's one of the poems from the pamphlet, using the 'duplex' form introduced by American poet Jericho Brown: Duplex for A After Jericho Brown Thirst isn’t thirst if it can be quenched. You put five-thousand miles between us. When you put five-thousand miles between us my stories of you grew truer than fact. The world you chose wove truth out of facts. You loved ideas more than the body. To flesh her idea, she used your body. It took on a life beyond her, beyond you. You never thought that life was beyond you, to reach for it now, you needed help. You had to reach for whatever helped. Oblivion, knowledge – sides of a coin. Sides of a coin – knowledge, oblivion. Your thirst was real. It couldn’t be quenched. Here is what people have said about Smithereens: “Written with the wisdom of hindsight and shot through with real tenderness and love, these poems tell the story of a friendship between two men which stretches across a lifetime and around the world. The pamphlet’s narrative arc is as compelling as a novel, and each individual poem is that rare thing – a true moment of musicality and lyricism.” Kim Moore “Smithereens explores the loss of a long male friendship, its elegies fretting restlessly backwards and forwards through time and the stages of grief. These are poems bursting with the talk that “we hadn’t needed to say / for forty-odd years” – intimate, urgent and affecting, private gifts to the dead which speak powerfully to the living. This is a moving, unusual and beautiful collection of poems.” Antony Dunn “Farren’s poems are snap shots, an album of words which capture the moments of a lifelong friendship and the slow decline, the long-loss of a friend, the distance of an ocean away. Farren has a deft touch; the poems are sensitive, but not sentimental, with a solid skeleton of anger but more importantly, love.” Wendy Pratt Prior to the publication of my pamphlet Smithereens, which drops (as I believe the poetry kids say nowadays) at the beginning of April from 4Word Press, I thought it was about time my 'Books' page was overhauled. I'll be adding Smithereens shortly for pre-orders. In the meantime, this is what Antony Dunn has to say about the pamphlet: “Smithereens explores the loss of a long male friendship, its elegies fretting restlessly backwards and forwards through time and the stages of grief. These are poems bursting with the talk that “we hadn’t needed to say / for forty-odd years” – intimate, urgent and affecting, private gifts to the dead which speak powerfully to the living. This is a moving, unusual and beautiful collection of poems.” Until the pamphlet is available, I wanted to talk about some of the books that I have published as Ings Poetry. Although I am part of the team at Yaffle Press, I have been publishing as Ings for several years, mainly producing anthologies for groups with which I am involved. The most recent of these is the anthology On the Other Side, published on behalf of the Ilkley-based group, Wharfedale Poets, of which I am a member.  Frustrated by our inability to meet because of COVID-19, we nevertheless did not want to compile yet another pandemic anthology. Instead, we began to wonder what we might find on the other side.
Taking inspiration from this urge to be 'on the other side', we look at the question of sides from many different angles. How do we relate to those on the other side of a political divide? How can we know the person on the other side of the window? How have we been changed when we reach the other side of a journey? What - if anything - awaits us on the other side of death? One of my contributions is given below: Centaur After Eilean Ni Chuilleanain’s ‘Swineherd’ When all this is over, said the centaur, they’ll expect me to be one thing or another. They’ll corral me into their taxonomies, as malformed human or – to them – an enhanced horse. They’ll make me choose between the headlong gallop down the slopes of Taygetus for the hell of the wind in my face and the scent of crushed thyme beneath my hooves – or lyre, lust for nymphs and drinking dish, and in either case, they’ll judge me by standards that have nothing to do with the foster-child of Apollo, with the teacher of Achilles: they’ll foist their human morality on my mythic appetites or track me with GPS on Google Earth, up Olympus, as I search, forlornly, for the gods. Please take a look at On the Other Side and the other books available. I would be delighted if you were interested in a copy. Please use the links on the Books page to let me know, or get in contact with me. It's once again some time since I last reported but plenty happened in writing terms (let alone in terms of what else was going on in the world) in the second half of 2020. Some of the highlights included the fact that, for the first time ever, I won a poetry competition outright. This was the Saltaire Festival Poetry Competition - my own local festival! It was one of those occasions where, on reading the 'Green Aire' theme, I seemed to know exactly what I wanted to write - about discovering local walks under lockdown, while more traditional destinations were unavailable. For anyone interested, an anthology of the winning poems and the short stories in its sister competition, is available for £7.50 + P&P.
As noted in a previous post, these things tend to come along like corporation buses, but I was no less delighted when I found out that I had won the Ilkley Literature Festival's Walter Swan Poetry Competition. Again, this festival is special to me as it is where I first decided I could actually do something with poetry, under Kim Moore's guidance at the 2014 festival. This feels like my most significant achievement yet. There's a video of me reading the winnng poem (I'm about 13 minutes 50 in, while comments by the judge, Professor John Whale, are at around 11 minutes). It's only fair to mention some of the other journals and anthologies that have been kind enough to include my work. I have had poems in Dreich journal, The Angry Manifesto and Wet Grain, but I was most surprised to find myself in very illustrious company in 14 magazine, along with David Harsent, Zaffar Kunial and others. In terms of anthologies, I was very gratified to find a poem in the voice of Baudelaire's mistress, Jeanne Duval accepted for Civic Leicester's Black Lives Matter collection, as well as to see my poem 'Second Avenue, Heaton, 1992', which had previously appeared on the Poem of the North website, reprinted in Fragmented Voices' The Language of Salt. There was also poem in Yaffle Press's anthology, Whirlagust II. After a busy end to 2020, it was a great start to 2021 to find that my pamphlet, Smithereens, had been selected for publication by 4Word Press. There will be a launch announced shortly! It's a thankless task at times, this poetry lark. Submitting to magazines, anthologies and competitions, waiting months to hear, only for rejections to trickle back - usually just after the submission deadline for a publication for which you thought (almost certainly wrongly) that your tied-up poem would be a dead cert. Still, nobody makes us do it. When moved to complain, I often think of the line from the old Gang of Four song (with appropriate gender switch), "She said she was ambitious / so she accepts the process."
Sometimes, the effect is amplified by corporation bus syndrome - month after barren month, with several good things coming at once. Thus, last week I found out that, for the second year running, I had been longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize. Granted, there were 295 on the longlist but out of 1,952 it's not bad - and it puts my poem on a par with one by Kim Addonizio and means that it must briefly have caught the attention of Billy Collins. Even better, though, was having a poem highly commemded in the York Poetry Prize - one of two that were shortlisted. 'The abattoir is Eden' derives from a visit to Malaga, late last year. We went to wonderful pop-up Pompidou Centre in the city, where there was an exhibition entitled Utopías Modernas - 'Modern Utopias'. Given the 'Hell in a handcart' state of the world then (and now), we felt that utopia was something we needed, and the exhibition was, indeed, fantastic. In one part of the gallery, two films were running consecutively on a loop: one was a piece by Chris Marker, while I failed to notice the author of the other - as I now greatly regret. The latter showed footage of an abattoir run in reverse, so that the slaughtered cattle were reassembled and restored to life, before being trucked back to an idyllic life in the fields. It's an idea that has been used a number of times before but I found it strangely moving and, after being unable to shake off the image, I realised I had to write about it. It's great that it connected with the judge, Sean O'Brien. You can take a look at the poem and at me reading it on the York Prize page, along with other winners including my poetry friends Wendy Pratt, Emma Storr and Jo Haslam. Alternatively, here it is: It has been a tough few months for most people I know. We had the nightmare of how things might go in the lead-up to the election. And then the nightmare came true. We know we have to live with it for at least five more years.
For the past few years, Christmas hasn't felt much like Christmas and, in the context of everything else that has been going on, it would be understandable if it felt even less like it this year. However, we have involved ourselves in a few community activities and reminded ourselves of just how lucky we are to live in a great place, surrounded by great people. Today, on Christmas Day, when we went out for a walk in beautiful surroundings and clear blue skies, with almost everyone ready to wish us a happy Christmas, it really did feel like a day when renewal was possible, which has always been at the heart of the idea of Christmas - or of the celebrations around the solstice, if you prefer. Perhaps I'm just being seduced all over again by the notion that underpins New Year resolutions and the like but I felt positive for the first time in a long time. Along with the Christmassy feeling, the words of Brecht (I keep feeling the need to quote him at the moment) occurred to me: "Wherever life has not died out, it struggles to its feet again". 2020 won't be easy. It will be a struggle. But on Christmas Day, at last, I feel up to engaging with it. In the meantime, for what it's worth, here's a poem about a day like today. A day in the middle of winter When a year can’t wait to get to its close we’re left with a day in the middle of winter, cold, short, hard and bright in the dark, something that can be everything by being nothing but itself. And if that day took on flesh, it might as well be a new-born baby, not needing precious gifts, not needing the worship of millions, just the love of a mother, the support of a father, whoever he might be. And if the baby dies on a cross or lives to old age, rises or stays in the tomb, it will always have been that naked, helpless child; and if the days lengthen, if life stirs, dies back and returns, there will always have been that cold, short, hard, bright day in the dark, with the whole world turning on it. I'm totally made up about the fact that my poem, Second Avenue, Heaton, 1992 has been selected as one of 50 poems for the Poem of the North project. I'm even more delighted about the fact that it was one of five, from those 50, to be chosen as the winner of one of the five Cantos. That's reward enough in itself but a year's membership of the Poetry Book Society is definitely a cherry on top!
 I have three rather colourfully illustrated poems in the latest copy of Scrittura magazine. Book town is a relatively new poem. I'll leave it to the reader's imagination whether it concerns a real town and if so, what that town's location is. Peasant poet is an old idea, recently re-written. Three avatars of the unicorn, on the other hand, is one of my oldest poems. I just couldn't let go of it, and I'm delighted that it's found a home at last! 
I was very pleased to have two poems published a few months ago on the Runcible Spoon website, run by Kathleen and David Strafford. Kathleen is an American-born, Yorkshire-based poet, whose debut collection, Her Own Language, was published earlier this year.
The two poems were Huntress moon and Lunaria annua. The first of these arose from the names of the full moons, which seem to have been widely popularised over the last few years. I observed a hunter's moon (October), but on starting to write about it, my notions of that particular full moon seemed to be more about the huntress goddess, Diana, particularly in her encounter with Acteon. After writing this poem, I decided that I would write a number of other poems related to the moon, but would give them my own names, rather than rely on the traditional names. More have been published, and I will share some of them shortly. They also form the basis of a collaboration with composer Keely Hodgson, which we hope will result in a performance-based piece later this year and early next year. The second poem concerns honesty - a plant whose seed pods have many different names in different cultures, but whose Latin name brings in a further 'moon' connection. |
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