A fair field full of folk
Hello dreamer,
I have three quick invitations for you, and a reflection.
Invitation one.
Beginning on June 28th in a field in Devon, England, will be a year-long project called Our Longland Is Dreaming. It’s a series of four medieval poetry dance and stone circle Happenings. It’s about corruption, venality, revolution, rewilding, oxen, raving and the 14th century poem Piers Plowman. After this one in summer, there will be another in autumn, another in winter, another in spring.
Where does revolution come from? How do we change it all? Is the flower of Salvation growing amongst the buds of putrescence that surround us?
If you like medieval poetry dance and stone circle Happenings, then you’ll like this.
Here’s the link for free tickets.
Ask your feudal overlord if you can use your pilgrimage allowance and join us in a beautiful place in the country.
Invitation two.
My most recent poetry book, Black ribbon, is now in its second printing. This time in a Starfish cloth cover. I gifted the first print run of seventy-five copies (which were in Kingfisher, Amethyst and Forest cloth covers) to people all over the world.
It’s a Symbolist collection. Here are some latest comments from readers.
“The words walk over me leaving me with a sense, a feeling that something just happened to me. Something deep down in the shadows which will only emerge into the light when it’s good and ready.”
“Read the first half a dozen or so poems in Black Ribbon with my son in a Bedouin tent in the Jordanian desert. Provoked some great conversation. Thank you. I think poetry works best as a shared experience.”
“I read them at one sitting in a quiet corner of a Sussex pub on a Saturday afternoon after a blustery walk under the Downs. I got lost in the pages, rereading as I went, completely absorbed. They have sat with me since, images and lines rolling in and out of my consciousness at random moments.”
“I love how you conjure a dream world that messes with reality but somehow seems grounded and 'normal' even though it’s snapping all sorts of psychological and emotional synapses.”
You can pre-order a copy of the Starfish cover second printing here. It’s £10 and will be posted at the end of the month.
As ever though, I’m more than happy to gift the book plus free postage if you’re not in the business of paying for things right now. Everything has its season.
Invitation three.
I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to my first art gallery show. I’m aware that it’s highly unusual for a poet to be given space in a gallery to showcase their work and thinking, so I’m hugely grateful for the wonderful Field System for doing what countless bookshops have been reluctant to do.
The corridor is a retrospective of my publications, prints, philosophy, Happenings and writing from my first six years. If you’re in the south west of England then please do visit. I read and told tall tales at an excellent launch event and now the show is on for the whole of April.
However, if you can’t visit, you may want to check Field System’s shop out. I’ve created some exclusive pieces for this show, and there are also works for sale by my regular conspirators Eleanor Robins, Will of Margaret and Studio Sutherl&.
A reflection.
I decided last year that I’d take a risk this April and not accept any commercial writing projects for the whole month. Focusing *purely* on artistic projects. As I’ve mentioned before, I split my time 50/50, commercial and artistic commissions. Half my time is spent on writing poetic things for brands – who pay me – and half my time is spent losing all that money by doing artistic things. I am self-published and my own patron so the Happenings and books and prints all cost lots. I am not rich
I regenerated into this life on April 1st 2019, so this month’s break was partly a little sixth birthday celebration to myself, but also a test of nerve.
I have one terrified eye on my draining bank account and relatively little work lined up for after April, so this poetry-only month is a kind of deliberate decay. A scary way of offering myself up to Thoth – god of language and magic.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rotting … and the resurrection that so often comes from it. Greater minds than mine write fabulous Substacks about current political apocalypses and what new magical growths may emerge from the dying-grounds of empires. My musing is more personal I guess.
But also Our Longland Is Dreaming is about this. I feel that societal revolution never arises from the fertile moments of doing what we’ve always done. Instead they sprout from those times that feel like death.
Anyway, come and join our fair field full of folk in Devon. Here’s some work-in-progress from the Happening about a rotting ox.
Regard the apocalypse of the ox in carcass. Meadowed. Dead-indented. Heavily as a packed sack on the way to lightness, good grain lost to a catch in canvas. A little fermentation for the sun, maggots in sparkle, gases – like angels – are viciously curious, they make a freshsong of new places. This honourable worker’s life was track-locked straining, heavenly-sweated skin. It has become a billion fetid resurrections of gleeful teeming not-ox but still-ox four-faced forms. You are awake now, uncertain of when the dream began, but with new knowledge that somewhere, amongst buds of putrescence and addle of germination, grows a flower called – in the common tongue – Salvation.
Thank you for reading. Please share, it makes all the difference. My artistic work is here. My commercial work here. Instagram here. LinkedIn here. I welcome all email responses, everything good I’ve done in the past six years has come from future conspirators contacting me out of the blue.