Poems & Photographs: a Warwick Exhibition

A much-discussed project will be going ahead this summer, namely a poetry and photography collaboration between myself and the Leamington Spa Artist in Residence, Anand Chhobra.

Anand will be taking photographs around the town and castle of Warwick over the next few weeks, and I will then write some poems to accompany them. We expect there to be between 15 and 20 poems in total at this stage, but that figure may change as the project moves ahead.

The resulting collaboration will be exhibited at Art & Wine, a new and vibrant Warwick art gallery, during the weekend of the Warwick Words Festival in early October. The exhibition is being run in connection with my year-long Warwick Poet Laureateship which ends that month.

It's a challenging but exciting concept, having to combine my words with someone else's images. I've written poems about individual photographs before, of course, but never experienced quite the same collaborative spirit from the inception of a project. So anything could happen ...

Please watch this blog for further details of when you can view the resulting exhibition.

Warwick Castle poems

Some of you may remember that one of my major ambitions as Warwick Poet Laureate this year has been to produce a number of poems based around the theme of 'Warwick Castle through the ages'.

In connection with that project, I've been meaning to visit Warwick Castle for several months, and finally found the time to go last week. And it was certainly a splendid visit, highly inspiring, and I took reams of notes in my little black book ... facts, feelings, odd phrases that leapt into my head as I wandered around, and even a few lines ready formed.

But there was so much to see, I couldn't possibly take it all in during one afternoon visit. Especially as I had a small child in tow!



So I intend to visit the castle again on my own before Easter, and probably again in early summer, by which time I'm hoping some of the poems about Warwick Castle should have been written and will only require revisions.

Meanwhile, I have to put my third poetry collection - entitled Camper Van Blues - to bed this month, i.e. prepare it for publication at Salt Publishing.

It's a fiddly and stressful process for a poet to go through, making up to sixty or seventy poems 'public' in book form. Every comma needs to be questioned, every line debated. So I could do without having so many sick children in the house, not to mention being unwell myself this week!

And meanwhile, the Warwick Castle project has to remain on the back burner, simmering away in my subconscious.



Still, some of the photos I took should act as a visual reminder of my visit and may help to keep my mind focussed once my third collection is safely at the publishers and I'm able to sit down and work on these new poems.