I am a Man of Many Parts…

Peter Lay Performer, Poet, Publisher

In my youth I wrote and performed songs. Later I became an artist but most of the time I’ve been a facilitator of other people’s talent. I was a Youth Worker and encouraged young people to follow their dreams. I began working with bands through the youth service and then went on to become a manager for several rock bands, both here and internationally. Arranging gigs, recording opportunities and promoting the bands was a real pleasure to me at that time…

It was exhilarating.

This is what prompted me to see how I could promote Josephine’s writing, as well as my own, and other people whose work might not fit into the accepted genres of todays publishing world. Gone are the days of having to follow the conventional agent/publisher route and so after some research I set up Black Eyes Publishing UK.

In the last few years I have begun to write more poetry and have written a dual language, cross cultural, metaphysical tale with a Chinese lady, ‘Yellow Over the Mountain’.

This was Black Eye’s first publication followed closely by Josephine Lay’s, ‘Inside Reality’, her first poetry book.

Black Eye’s has just published ZD Dicks (Ziggy)’s book, ‘Malcontent’ and there are several books in the pipe line from Josephine, myself and others. It is no longer necessary to print dozens of copies of a book and to pay large sums of money up front, Print-on-demand has altered all that when books can be ordered one day and delivered the next.

My passion for the art and philosophies of the East led me to communicating with people around the globe via artistic and cultural sites. This is how I met Zaiming Wang and how ‘Yellow Over the Mountain’ began. I have also begun to write poetry about my experiences when travelling, especially Japan. I have visited this country three times and during my last trip in November I experienced an emotional roller coaster when in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Several poems about this time are featured in my forthcoming poetry book, ‘Still Tilting at Windmills’.

I joined the Gloucestershire Poetry Society about a year ago when Josephine became interested in performance poetry. I perform some of my poetry on open mics but I am more interested in the production of books and facilitating other writers and poets to publish their work.

Writing With The Land By Nimue Brown

Nimue Brown writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction and is co-creator of the Hopeless Maine graphic novel series. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

I’ve written poetry every since I could hold a pen and in my early childhood scratching, the natural world featured heavily. It was what I cared about. It’s still a very large percentage of what I care about and write about.

I write nature poetry because I want to bring the wild world to people who may be disconnected from it. In practice my current poetry isn’t about ‘nature’ in a broad sense, but about specific details. Encounters with otters, incidents on walks, how I feel about certain hills… I want to name things and be precise and evoke them for other people. I want to write things that will encourage others to look more closely at the world they live in.

Nature isn’t away in some pristine distant place. Nature is with us in our towns and cities. I write about urban foxes sometimes. I have a lot of encounters with them, and also with local deer, who wander through the industrial estates sometimes, moving between the woodland around the cycle track and the wilder bits of land alongside the canal.

As I walk for transport, I encounter wild things most days. I don’t go out looking for material for poems, but if something strikes me while I’m walking, I’ll think about it. If a few words line up, I’ll find some time to sit down with a pen and see what I can make of it. When I was younger I tended to write in the heat of emotions. These days I like to take my time and ferment and simmer ideas over a period of days before I try to get them down. I usually do a few re-drafts.

I like poetry as a way of connecting people with everything else –it’s easy to emote and in this form, narrative isn’t necessary. I can use words to give a sense of other living beings as distinct individuals living their own lives for their own reasons. Humans objectify the rest of life on Earth, treating other sentient beings as objects for our use and consumption. I don’t want to write nature poetry that contributes to this – if we dwell on the picturesque surfaces, on how we benefit from nature, on nature as exotic and separate, we can write about it while pedalling all the wrong things.

I hope what I write encourages people not to view everything non-human as a consumable. Be it the weather, or a landscape, or an encounter with a bird, I want to place humans in the contact of everything else, as participants, but not owners or users. Sometimes I’m subtle about this, other times less so. This is a recent example of my work that pulls together much of what I’ve been talking about here – the specific-ness of the encounter, the sense of human participation in the natural world, and avoiding the feeling of being a user or consumer of ‘nature’ or of ‘nature’ being a utility for human benefit.

We look at each other

I look at the otter, and, wondrously, the otter looks at me.
I do not wish to objectify the otter so will speak of her, as she.
I neither wish to misgender, a fellow mammal either;
Size, and sightings suggest range, suggesting a female.

She is hunting opposite an industrial estate in winter dawn.
On a week day, she is eating something yards from me.
And she looks back, dark eyes intense and interested.
Exploring me, contemplating my role and presence.

I look at nature a lot. I pay attention, observe and spot.
Watch for wildlife, tree tending, fish finding, moth marvelling.
It is one thing to stand outside and look at nature,
Another to stand inside nature, to be seen as well as seeing.

When nature looks back and you are not alone, but witnessed,
When nature looking back ceases to be generic, becomes specific.
This deer resting beneath this hedge, this heron gazing critically
This swan in search of seed offerings, and today
This otter who takes interest, watches the watcher.

When eyes meet mine and I am another spirit of place,
Another denizen of the land, encountering, then ‘nature’ is me
And I am as much nature as the tree above me or
The robin in the tree inches from my face.

I am in this place, and this place is in me
Robin, and tree, and otter and me
And we look at each other.

I blog regularly at https://druidlife.wordpress.com/ – which sometimes includes poetry.

You can buy my collection Mapping the Contours here – https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/641871660/mapping-the-contours-poetry and here’s a video of me reading the title poem – https://youtu.be/fuBpTe_L3ZM

For anyone really keen on my stuff, Patreon supporters get a poem in the first week of each month. https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

Fill Your Mind With Poetry

Nothing is ever created in a vacuum, everything you see or hear or read or sense, helps build the poems within you. So fill you mind with poetry.

Go to the library and get out some poetry collections, it may take you awhile to find the poets you get on with and be prepared that whom you like reading maybe completely different from the sort of poems you like to write.

I personally find going to poetry readings much more enjoyable than reading the poems out of a book, the authors voices bring the poems to life for me. There are also lots of youtube videos of poetry performances both old and new, which are well worth the explore!

If you are anything like me, you will find that once you fill yourself up, poetry, new vivid, excited poetry, started to leak out of you.

Chap Book and Anthology

At the request of several participants we are constructing a chapbook of poems written during WoPoWriMo for those who took part. The e-book will be only be sent to the mailing list so will not count as ‘published’ for those seeking publication in journals and the like. It would just be fun to share what we have all done with each other.

There is also work afoot to make an anthology of poems written during WoPoWriMo. This will be available as both an e-book and a physical book, and will very much count as published! Any profit from sales will be split between WoPoWriMo (to do site maintenance and the like for next year) and the Wikipaedia Foundation (they have an awful lot of infrastructure that costs money and they give us a valuable resource! Plus they are involved in many smaller projects that should help relieve poverty in the long run).

We hope you will wish to take part in one or both of these projects! Send up to five of your poems in the body of the email to books@wopowrimo.org with the subject line Chap and Anthology or if you wish to only take part in the Chap book just Chap. A short bio or informative bit about yourself complete with any personal blog links etc. would be good too. The maximum word count is 500 for the biography.

We are very excited about these projects and hope you will be too!

From Team WoPo