With my good friend Nick Dormand, artist and photographer, we have been collaborating in words/images for a few years, these wonderfully spontaneous links in that my writing is always prompted by the – mainly – photographs he takes and posts [Facebook/Instagram] but also other images, including sketches/paintings.

It is a ‘found’ collaboration, never structured/organised. We both seem to have an urge to capture, and finding whatever that is then becomes an ongoing and homogenous process.

This facemask image struck me immediately, for obvious reasons. Probably more than ever, the compulsion to write with this was powerful. For Nick, the image is hugely personal in that it is of his daughter who works in the NHS. My response was one no doubt shared by so many in this Covid-19 world where we all have deep-rooted, emotional attachments to and thankfulness for the caring and compassionate commitment of nurses and other frontline workers: the facemask now an image firmly fixed to that selflessness but also the personal risks involved and, speaking for myself, unacceptable abuses from lack of supply and those responsible for this, including making excuses for it.

Where my accompaniments, especially found prose poems, normally come from quite wide searches, these words just seemed to be there.

I will obviously never know, and it would be paradoxical, but I guess her wish, maybe just a beginnings of one aged 15, was to in fact leave, eventually. This cannot detract one bit from the honest and poetic description of the town of her birth – classic, small-town America, population in 2010 still modest at 662 – but my mother did move away to an eventful life, filled with personal trials as well as ultimately moving afar completely to Europe and taking charge of her family – myself and three sisters – for those journeys and the number of moves and that forever distance from home, until returning to the West Coast where she was at least near to her daughters, my sisters: me deciding to return to and stay in England.

Although I was always aware of my mother’s love of writing in her many letters to me when we were apart, as well as her journals about travels and living abroad, it is only more recently I have become to appreciate her urge to write, and to write well. I’d like to think in the nature/nurture dichotomy, this latter does apply to however I have been able to follow in her footsteps.

A review comment from Jackie Moore on Self-Isolation, a collaborative words and images response to the current situation by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell. With our thanks,

‘I have just been able for the first time to open the wonderful Self-Isolation. What a knockout combination. This is profound material and I’ve only looked through it twice. The range is remarkable – from the beautiful, to the philosophical through to the deadly dart at our corrupt politicians, where they ‘insulate the message from the meaning’. It moves all over the place: interior, exterior, abstract; personal, national – into the ether. The paintings are glorious, exactly in harmony with the words. Clever use of the colour bar: is it a thermometer taking the nation’s pulse, or the anxious individuals? Seems to capture the general anxiety of us all.’

Read/download Self-Isolation.

A couple of days ago on twitter a link was posted to get a free download of Sound Poems & Theatre Pieces 1965-1976 by bpNichol [get here] – new to me – and the poem Song above is a favourite from that engaging collection.

Prompted by that poem I tried one of my own, a variation on its theme, and quickly realised Nichol’s patterning was quite complex so I have to admit I went for a more obvious model, but I enjoyed the stimulus, so thanks for/to that:

This is a generous, thoughtful review of my book. I am most appreciative of the observations and insights given, not least the connection made with the intentions I had for this work.

Thank you Alan and Litter Press.

Read the review here. The Lonesomest Sound is available here.

On this day of Edwin Morgan’s centenary celebration I was delighted to hear that I have had an acceptance of one of two poems submitted for the above, to be published by Speculative Books.

Because of C19, the book launch has been cancelled [though I probably couldn’t have attended] but I have today supplied a requested reading for a podcast to be made as a replacement – and had some fun recording for that.

I first came across Edwin Morgan’s work through his poems appearing in anthologies I used in my English teaching. I subsequently explored his work more fully, continuing to use with students. For my postings about him and this, you can find and read here.

The following is one of my favourite Morgan collections, a ‘reverse’ twofer, and I built a GCSE Speaking and Listening activity around this with students reading and then re-presenting his poems as TV news reportage with interviews: a great amalgam of engagement with and response to his Takes poems:

Our third-party fire and theft
and pandemic insurance,

guided by the preparedness
of excess death planning.

We have been caught
planning for unprecedented

recruitment and deployment
of death, and

implementing lessons learned
by trying to be ready.

We have been trying,
guided at all times by rapidly

learned lessons of death.
This is an unprecedented

theft of life.
The right steps at the time

of being guided at all times by
the insurance lessons.

We have preparedness.
We have tailored preparedness

at all times guided by
the right steps at that time.

This includes being ready.
We have been caught planning.