Rina Vergano is a Bristol-based playwright and dramaturg with a background in European theatre-making, specialising in new work for younger and family audiences. For twenty years she lived and worked in Amsterdam and has translated over seventy plays into English from Dutch and Flemish.Her own creative output has brought her into contact with many theatres and groups including egg theatre, Grid Iron, Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Trestle Theatre Unmasked, Polka Theatre, Show of Strength, The Theatre Orchard, The Holland Festival, and Vitrage Women’s Theatre Company in Amsterdam. Rina believes in theatre for the people by the people, and in taking live theatre into non-theatre spaces. Rina is one of HotFest’s creative driving forces, bringing her many years of expertise to the planning, marketing and creative content of the festival. This is her blog, in which she addresses issues of stage fright, performance anxiety and the struggle to be truly present in the creative act. 

I am not a natural performer. It’s something I’ve rolled into over the years, and in order to be able to do it I’ve had to get over some stuff that was seriously holding me back. Terror, mainly, coupled with self-consciousness and no confidence, and the belief that performing on stage was something that other people – special people – did. Even speaking up in a meeting or sharing circle would bring on a silent panic attack as my turn drew closer. I still made myself go on stage though, cruelly it seems to me now, mainly in community pantos or doing comedy turns in cabarets at singing camps and social events. Wanting to be part of that fun narrowly outweighed the terror it involved.

Then one day I heard about this thing called EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), a tapping ritual that was supposed to get rid of phobias. Alongside my fear of performing I was also phobic about flying. So I went along to an EFT workshop and spent the weekend tapping my face and repeating phrases like “even though I’m terrified of performing/flying I still completely love and accept myself…”. I remember thinking, good job none of my friends can see me doing this because it’s clearly hippy bullshit and a waste of time. I went home and forgot all about it.

Hah.

Months later when I got on a plane – I’m a very occasional flyer – I was amazed to find that I felt absolutely nothing during take-off or landing, or the floaty bit in between. It was like sitting on a bus: a bit dull and not remotely scary. And a few months after that I was standing in the wings of a community panto waiting for my entrance as one of the ugly sisters (big wig and cozzie, lots of lines and a duet) when it dawned on me that I didn’t want to throw up, shit myself and faint all at the same time. The terror had completely disappeared, as if by magic.

What had also disappeared, I discovered, was my adrenalin. I could in principle have performed to an audience of 10,000 without a trace of nerves, but also with zero excitement. It’s still that way when I get up on stage – like having a cup of tea with an elderly relative on the adrenalin scale –  but it’s a million times better than the paralysing fear of yore. I have a little ritual to manufacture the adrenalin before I go on, but please don’t ask me what because it involves a fantasy about a swimming pool and the shark from Jaws…

Some other helpful things came my way, once I’d cracked the terror. I did a short course in Meissner, an acting technique for being completely present on stage or in front of a camera. I found it quite maddening at first, working in pairs and staying in the moment by objectively observing my partner opposite while holding eye contact: “I see you moving your head slightly to one side and blinking slowly”. These exercises seemed as banal as the EFT script to start with, and then slowly it all began to make sense when we started to perform dialogues on stage. Taking all the attention off myself and putting it on the other actors on stage, being completely present with what they were doing, was the key. “As soon as you put your attention and focus on yourself, you’re lost”, said the trainer.

That turned out to be right, so when emceeing I put all my attention on the audience, and on the performers. It’s a wonderful feeling, a bit like surfing. And because I stay in the moment I can respond spontaneously in the moment: emceeing is never scripted, it all happens organically which suits me because I have quite a butterfly mind and enjoy blurting things out, in the moment, without much of a filter. Because I always wear a big wig, anything I say is always the wig’s fault, not mine. 

Nowadays I also perform spoken word, poems and songs which I underscore with a shruti box or a small harmonium… a bit Ivor Cutler. But I particularly enjoy  emceeing cabarets in a marquee in a muddy field (mainly on the singing camps I go to) or in a seedy old room above a pub. Because of the hyperfocus on the performers and their acts – and maybe on my big fake hairdo – it seems easier for the audience to be transported and to imagine themselves at Sunday Night at the London Palladium rather than their actual real surroundings. Also, the audience is often captive – I mean, what else is there to do in the dark in a damp field but to head for the cabaret tent? Something else I’ve noticed is that the audiences’ suspension of disbelief often extends to some of the things I say. Because cabaret – well, the way I run it anyway – provides an anarchic space which is held but where anything can happen, some audience members are prone to believing ‘fake news’ or spoof announcements or random factoids about the performers. They will come up to me the following day and ask things like “you said that this morning’s singing programme is being replaced by naked mud wrestling and dry-land synchronised swimming, so what time does it start?” I love it when that happens.

And finally, the mask in the form of a wig. Well, it does have to come off at some point, leaving me with squashed hair and looking like a shadow of my cabaret self: diminished, dull, much shorter and older. It’s a horrible shock all round and people tend to stare at me with a concern in their eyes which says: oh dear, that’s what you really look like is it? So lately I keep it on for the rest of the evening, until I get back to the privacy of my campervan or my bedroom. Because basically I hate to upset anyone, or crush their dreams.

By Sarah Guthrie.

Addicts of words and music who joined us at HotFest ‘21, may recall a quirky little poetry and music mash-up in the Marquee called Love, Lies and the Green-Eyed Monster. It featured Kenneth Bell, Petra Jones and esteemed local director Ben Jenkins.

Ben is a pianist, musical and theatre director, who has worked at the Royal Ballet School, the Bristol Old Vic and Tobacco Factory Theatres. He is musical director of numerous choirs and performer groups, including the Bristol Reggae Orchestra, and as a theatre director, his work includes Travels with my Aunt (Tawdry Lace Theatre at the Alma Tavern 2015) and Peer Gynt: A Re-imagining (Circle Theatre 2019). 

Ben recently directed a production of Philip Ridley’s edgy and brilliant play Tender Napalm (2011), which was showing at the Alma Tavern Theatre in Clifton (7^th – 11^th March 2023). It starred Jack Bannell as ‘Man’ and Nina Bright as ‘Woman’. Produced by Misplaced Theatre, which, as their name suggests, consists of ‘misplaced’ Bristol creatives, it made for riveting viewing: 

‘Is it love or is it mania?’: A heady mix of passion, hate, desire, revulsion, and everything in between, Tender Napalm leaves you asking that very question. It certainly packs a punch.

“I could squeeze a grenade up there”, the man proclaims, confident and arrogant – one of many violent metaphors.  As the play continues, the woman savagely talks of retaliative castration, in what feels like poetic justice among the thick layers of misogyny that characterise the play’s pacey, psychotic dreamscape. The black, bare stage setting provides a blank, if sinister, canvas on which strong, carefully crafted words create a brutal auditory imagery. The effect is to cause one to question the fabric of reality, and the role words alone play in our visual perception of the world, and in thought generally. A universe of serpents, unicorns and deathly encounters unfolds. The high energy performances of both actors allow the audience to ride the tsunami of their relationship, become the ultimate third wheel and spiral in the microcosm of insanity that may or may not be love.

Sometimes tricky to follow, and skilfully exhausting throughout, this is a play that confronts (without apology) the dynamic intersection of passionate (maybe violently passionate) love for another, and that hinterland of toxicity – the tender napalm, I guess – of when relational and psychic boundaries are breached leading to that perverse and mad discourse of primitive relativity. The play’s power lies exactly in the fact that it is not comfortable viewing, that it makes you tolerate incongruous nuances and paradoxes. It’s a hard, tender play. But those who, like me, enjoy the strangely abstract and dangerously absurd will probably love it. I cannot wait to see what  Misplaced Theatre produces next.

Check out Events 2023 on the HotFest website to see what theatre, spoken word and music acts we’ve got lined up each month at HotFest on the Barge and HotFest on the Hill, and at the HotFest Big Weekend, 29^th September – 1^st October ’23!  

It is coming up to the one-year anniversary of Infringed Poetry at the Bristol Fringe in Clifton Village, a monthly poetry open mic that has grown into a beautiful, energetic and supportive community of wordsmiths in such a short space of time. Performers share a somewhat frightening array of emotion, experience and personality in their work, and we are fortunate to have a truly engaged and exuberant audience every month too (who are starting to queue outside the door…).

But I need to confess something now: I was working on the bar at the Fringe when the loose idea came to me to ask Sylvie, the manager, about potentially putting on a poetry night, and so I mentioned it to her in passing. A week later? By chance, a man came to the bar to ask if we had a poetry night.

‘Yes,’ Sylvie replied to him, ‘and he is going to be organising it.’ She was pointing at me. ‘It starts next month.’

I was now the organiser and host of a poetry night, apparently.

That is sort of how Sylvie works: if it sounds like a good idea – even in passing – she wants to do it. And I am so glad we did, as at the end of each night of Infringed Poetry I am left dazed, even speechless, by the work that is shared, the deep range of human expression that is
offered, and by the festival-like atmosphere that is created by all that attend. In all honesty, I still haven’t quite caught up with what goes on during those Tuesday nights, and it makes me emotional – even slightly confused – to write now about what has been created. I just
thought it was a decent backroom to put a poetry event in!

The talent that comes through our doors and lands on our stage isn’t confusing though, especially when it forces itself to stay with us long after we are fortunate enough to watch it give birth to itself on the mic, too. And one particular soon-to-be new-born at the May event? It was a young man I’d seen before, only, ‘I’ve got a new alias,’ he said to me as he signed up.

‘I don’t want to know,’ I replied. ‘Just be it and don’t tell anyone you’re an “alias” again.’ 

I said this to him as I wanted him to entirely become the character for us and himself. I wanted him to embody and feel every inch of who he was about to perform as on stage an hour later, the magnitude of what he was doing – delivering a new self, creatively and otherwise – perhaps being unknown to him.

And didn’t he give us something special, an explosive unveiling of B.T. Wine for the fortunate 40-or so of us in that “decent backroom” that night, a performance we will all remember for some time. 

(And I think I also saw glimpses of the man beneath the alias saving himself through his reinvention on stage, too.)

Below we have the words of B.T. Wine on the debuting of B.T. Wine at the Bristol Fringe, 13^th May 2023. It may sound cliché to say, but remember the name, again: B.T. Wine. He’s even got me worrying I’m Captain Sensible…

Debut – B.T. Wine
Another cuppa, I venture to my sink and swill the Gromit mug, third one today. Maybe I’ll have another before I leave? No milk – it went off days ago. In lieu of this I shakily pour the silver spoon into the brown, murky sludge. Usually sugared char is a cardinal sin, but needs must. 
Clock strikes 5:30. I don’t have a clock. What I mean is, I looked at my phone and it told me it was 5:30. And clocks don’t strike on half hours anyway. I decide to leave for Clifton: sign up is a bunfight, get there early. Drugs are boring now and too expensive since I’m buying my own food. I actually steal most of it too. I walk past a Tesco express. Monster energy drink. Pocket. Outside. Neck. Shaking properly now. 
I walk in through rain. Dingy and damp pub that always seems humid – always seems to be raining. Name down; ‘B.T. WINE’ scribbled for the first time. Compliments received on my audacious sunglasses and purple beret combo. I know who Captain Sensible is. Captain Sensible doesn’t have a clue about B.T Wine. Lawsuit incoming, probably. 
I walk to the gorge for one last practice. I clamber down to an arse-twitcher ledge and shout soul into the void. I don’t trust my knackered boots paired with the shakes. One slip, all over. They’ll think it’s a suicide. Captain Sensible will never know who I am. Highly important I stay alive. I am more than a twenty-year-old nineteen-year-old with an ego problem. At least die after the set so you can be jotted down in the history books. Ian Curtis was 23 when he died. What the fuck have you done? 
Back to the pub and I take my usual seat, back corner, adequate brooding space. I am B.T. Wine: poet extraordinaire, masterful lover, the Clifton Village Antichrist. Truly the Ludwig Van of the male-pattern balding world. Deaf and all. 
My name is called, I can’t see a thing in these sunglasses, I trip over a sea of poet ankles and hand stitched tote-bags and make it seem part of the act. 
B.T. Wine greets his public and spaffs anger into the eyes of the unashamed unamused.
B.T. Wine returns to his seat. 

Infringed Poetry is every second Tuesday of the month at The Bristol Fringe – see www.instagram.com/infringedpoetry

B.T. Wine can also be found on Instagram at www.instagram.com/beeteewine 

I’m in Spain for inspiration. That’s my excuse.

How do we find inspiration? I’m not sure. I think often it finds us. Unexpectedly, that bolt we’ve all
felt but you need pen and paper ready. Or in my case, phone. It does happen.

But I believe you can make it happen, or at least, help it. Hence Spain.

And here it is, a piece.

It’s called bubbling up or letting it happen. Letting go. You throw your proverbial bread on the water
and wait. You don’t know what will happen, you never do. It could be a tiddler or a
phantasmagorical great shark. But something will bite, sometime. And when it bites, you’re caught
in its teeth.

Pushing and shoving doesn’t work. It may in a sort of, half baked, pedestrian or bread and butter
way. You can produce something decent to a formula, a half alive piece that ticks the particular
publication’s boxes. Journalists do it all the time.

But to be truly creative? To capture that gravelly, rasping essence of the local accent, gutturally spat
in your face? To face the morning sunrise with marshmallows and strawberry sundaes in mind? That
takes at least three glasses of wine. And yes, creativity IS enabled by mind altering substances.

But not always. All you need is a mind altering holiday. Or a Sunday afternoon. Just make space. See
the shapes in the sky. Watch the fairies dance in the daisies. Let the crazy verses come. The
nonsensical lines. The madness happen. It won’t all be rubbish. You will find a pearl from the grit.

And don’t push it. No-one likes to be pushed, least of all Ms Creativity.

People sometimes comment on the unconventional mode through which locals address Hotwells,
the home of our festival of words and music. We don’t use holiday brochure terminology, we use
words like ‘scruffy’, ‘tatty’, ‘congested’, ‘encumbered’.

And these are not criticisms, but the fruits of our homely love language. It’s a neighbourhood of
confluences: road, river, harbour, writer; it is the start and the end of the city, the start and the end
of its possibilities.

Beautiful in its ugliness, grim in its splendor.

Here is a short lyric by Hotwells poet and HotFest 23 guru Tim Jowett. In this ironic aria to Hotwells’s
uniquely quirky spirit of place – ‘staggered’ and ‘amputated’ by its topography – he draws on the
power of the scruffy, the tatty, the congested, the encumbered, and the creative power of those
within.

Enjoy…

A Tourist Guide to Hotwells

Riding in the back seat to its future.

If you’re looking for a village, you won’t find one. You won’t find a post office or a decent shop.

You will find yet another bunch of inner-city amputees left standing on one leg wondering how to
wipe their metaphorical backsides.

You’ll find this stubborn bunch of castaways surrounded by three lanes of goods and commuter
traffic…

Which we don’t mind at all. You see we all know the dear old traffic keeps the faithless away.

What could we possibly be protecting?  Here are some clues:

A staggering amount of mud, which we call the river. The docks basin, which holds a staggering
amount of water, taken from the river.

The Atlantic Ocean, which rushes up the gorge twice a day with staggering speed covering up the
mud, making it look like a river.

Two pubs worth speaking of, an Army Navy store and a curry house.

In this street map of possibilities, we have the queerest set of circumstances that bring about the
most inexplicable effect on the greater part of the population.

We feel a bit Cornish, but with Halloumi wraps instead of pasties.

So when our saviors, the politicians, start cutting their teeth on our last remaining good leg, with
their latest noble,

concrete it all over and build a bunch of overpriced penthouses, nine-tenths of the people they say
they represent won’t be able to afford,

Whilst pocketing another offshore directorship you might naturally expect the local community to go
hopping mad.

No! Do you know what this bunch of underdogs are doing?

Writing poems about these erstwhile saviours. They’ve written so many poems they don’t know what
to do with them. Songs as well and

to top it all, the girl in number twenty-seven has gone and written a play. It’s called The Beginning of
the End.

ALL COPYWRITE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE!

Haiku gives structure
You see it’s five, seven, five
Syllables per line

Sophie

I must admit that the first time I came across haiku poetry was not that long ago. A traditional form of Japanese poetry, typically a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Something that is surprisingly hard to achieve in my mother tongue, German, where words tend to have quite a lot more syllables than other languages. This might be why many Germans will pull a puzzled face when confronted with the term haiku, possibly wondering whether it’s some new form of martial art. Not so the English-speaking population on this planet.

Every year on April 17th, the Haiku Foundation celebrates an International Day of Haiku Poetry. As an organising member of a festival focusing on words in all their forms, I volunteered to explore haiku in more detail, keen to discover if there is more to this ancient art form than the syllable count. Weirdly, this somehow led to my very first, but surprisingly intense, interaction with a chatbot, a AI software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. It was recently in the news for its potential to allow university students to cheat in their essays, but it is also known for its tendency to invent things. Here is what happened:

The neighing horses
are causing echoing neighs
in neighboring barns

Richard Wright

It’s the morning of Easter Day. The weather can’t quite decide what to do, so – with the same reluctance as the weather – I sit down to carry out some initial research on haiku poetry. Driven by my secondary teacher instincts, I take a look at the English Literature syllabus to see what English 16-year-olds need to know about haiku poetry. I am pleased to discover that haiku poems are indeed mentioned in the context of analysing ‘Unseen Poetry’. I am intrigued to know more about this, but even an in-depth Google search for an example question remains inconclusive. Somewhat frustrated, I find myself typing into my phone: 

“Hi Chatbot, can you please find me some examples for exam questions on haiku poems?”

“Certainly”, says Chatbot, “There are many practice questions on haiku poems that you can find online or in English literature textbooks. Here is an example of an exam question on haiku poetry: ‘Analyze the use of literary devices such as personification and onomatopoeia in Matsuo Basho’s (17th century Japanese poet recognised as greatest master of haiku) The Old Pond:

An old silent pond
A frog jumps into the pond –
Splash! Silence again.

Matsuo Basho

How do these devices contribute to the poem’s meaning?’ “

Whilst remaining skeptical about whether Chatbot has just made this up, I decide to go with it:

“Wow, really? Would you be able to analyse this haiku for me please, Mr Chatbot?”, I reply.

“Sure, I’d be happy to provide some guidance on how to approach this question:”, Chatbot gallantly offers.

“Analysing Basho’s haiku ‘An old silent pond / A frog jumps into the pond— / Splash! Silence again.’ reveals the use of literary devices such as personification and onomatopoeia. The personification of the pond as ‘old’ and ‘silent’ creates a sense of stillness and calm, which is then disrupted by the sudden movement of the frog. The onomatopoeic word ‘Splash!’ captures the sound of the frog jumping into the pond, which contrasts with the silence that preceded it. These devices contribute to the poem’s meaning by emphasizing the ephemeral nature of life and the transience of moments. The frog’s jump creates a brief disturbance in the calm pond, but soon the silence returns, highlighting the fleeting nature of the moment. Overall, the use of personification and onomatopoeia in Basho’s haiku contributes to the poem’s message about the impermanence of life and the fleeting nature of moments”. 

Not bad, I am thinking to myself. In the conversation that follows, Chatbot willingly tells me that haiku poems traditionally have some seasonal reference, such as a flower blooming in spring or leaves falling in autumn, that they use sensory language to create vivid images to capture the essence of a moment, and that they deploy contrast and juxtaposition to create a sense of tension or surprise. Chatbot also tells me that haiku poems focus on a single moment or experience, rather than telling a story or conveying a complex message.

To my general disappointment though, Chatbot has so far kept me in the dark about the cutting word (kireji), so I confront it directly: “Chatbot, what about kireji?”

The apparition of these faces
in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

“In English haiku”, Chatbot admits, “the use of a cutting word is not as common or necessary, since the structure and syntax of the English language often provide similar effects. Instead, English haiku poets often use other techniques to create a sense of pause or transition, such as punctuation, line breaks, or shifts in tone or imagery. These techniques can help to create a sense of contrast or comparison between different parts of the poem, much like the cutting word in Japanese haiku. For example, in the English haiku poem above by Ezra Pound, the use of a semicolon creates a pause or break between the second and third lines, emphasizing the contrast between the two images”.

Fair enough. I am getting bored of being lectured. What I am really getting interested in now is whether Chatbot can be more intuitive, more human-like, than that. Maybe even show some feelings?

“Would you be up for writing a poem about spring for me?”, I cheekily ask. It takes Chatbot about a second to come up with a reply:

Beneath cherry blooms,
Nature’s symphony awakes,
Spring’s sweet song begins.

I am impressed. Just to be sure, I double check with Chatbot whether it really created this haiku by itself. Chatbot seems taken aback: “My apologies for the confusion. The haiku poem that I wrote is not attributed to any specific author, as I created it for the purpose of providing an example of an English haiku poem. I hope this clarifies things!”.

Alright, alright. However, I still want to know more about Chatbot’s real feelings. Conscious of having knocked Chatbot’s pride before, I carefully pose my next question: “Some haiku poems are about emotions and feelings rather than seasons. Like love. What do you think about all this?”

And, to my amazement, Chatbot has a lot to say:

“Haiku traditionally focused on nature and the changing of seasons, but contemporary haiku poets have expanded the scope of the form to include a wide range of topics, including emotions and feelings like love. While love is not a traditional subject for haiku, the form’s brevity and focus on sensory language can be used to capture powerful emotions and experiences in just a few words. In fact, many contemporary haiku poets see the form as a way to capture the essence of human experience, including the complexities of emotion and relationships. By using sensory language, juxtaposition, and other techniques, poets can create haiku that evoke powerful emotions and resonate with readers on a deep level. Here’s an example of a haiku that focuses on love:

Your hand in mine:
The warmth of your touch
Melts the winter snow.

In this haiku, the sensory language of the warmth of the speaker’s partner’s touch creates a powerful image of love and intimacy. While this haiku does not focus on nature or the changing of seasons, it still captures the essence of the haiku form by using sensory language to create a vivid and powerful image in just a few words.”

Right, that’s it, I am genuinely touched by Chatbot’s heartfelt response. Still in awe, I ask “How on Earth do you know all this, Chatbot?”

Gobsmacked and somewhat insulted, I realise that Chatbot has just ended our conversation. It takes me a minute or two to overcome my initial feeling of rejection, but then I remember that really my mission has only just begun. I put my phone away, take my coat and leave the house in search of real people who can tell me more. More about the fascinating art form of haiku poetry.

Poppies love word play,
They tense-tease, they opiate,
They dress nouns as verbs.

Ben

By Ben.

The disappointment started at something called a Literary Fair near Stroud. Women in scarves and
bangles (some with husbands) came up the valley like the rapture and besieged this little village of
bethels and turnpike houses. They’d come to interrogate a group of self-published, local poets, and
their questions came on like rain:

How did it start? Where does your inspiration come from? When did you learn you had ‘the gift’?

The captives were not displeased with this ticketed intrusion, far from it. They discoursed floridly on
the value of their own output, treating their poems as competition jams laid out for sampling. One
credited his recent diagnosis of bipolar disorder (for which he’d paid handsomely) as the true author
of his work. The crowd was intrigued by this, but we never did hear anything he’d written. A woman
reading a poem about her chrysalis-like spiritual rebirth, gyrated, during her recitation, so erratically
with hand, arm and pashmina that we all missed the poem entirely. It shunned flight. When I did get
hold of a poem or two, I found them to be ditty-like, self-referential and – like their raucously
applauding audience – violently mobilised against anything beyond themselves. Frantic hands
clapped the airborne, moth-like meanings to dust, lest they penetrate the psyche.

Everyone colluded in the massacre, even me. I left feeling guilty, and hungry.

My disappointment, I suppose, with this mob was that they treated poems as biographies with
assonance, odes to an insulated and static worldview. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think this
makes for an interesting, relevant or effective engagement with how we perceive and deal with
reality. It was order and ornament over chaos and flux. It was poetry before the Fall; sort of innocent
and insubstantial and untravelled.

I’ve always liked Kafka’s metaphor about skilled writing being like an axe, which smashes the frozen
sea within us. It has a brutal urgency to it, akin to the non-consensual bolt a flicker of good verse can
discharge straight to the core of the listener. That’s when it starts to feel real. Objects shed their
skins and make themselves more fully known to us, with more colours and dimensions than we’d
noticed before: Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.

A million emotional miles from that Literary Fair thrives the burgeoning thoughtscape of Bristol’s
poetry scene. These pioneers are trying to reach through and beyond themselves to that which
frightens and disturbs, excites and saddens and thrills: climate crisis, gender, sexuality, falling in love
in non-binary space, micro-aggression, cynicism, intolerance, uncertainty and change. They seek a
new dialect for inherited concepts and outmoded, perhaps toxic, idioms. We hear the poems loud
and clear, their boldness, their nakedness, their incompleteness; nothing can conclude because life
hasn’t yet ended and we’re still living it. That’s where it differs from the Literary Fair poets, whom, I
suspect, felt their work, like their worlds, to be compete and perfected.

It is, I think, the incomplete, imperfect and transient quality of consciousness that makes poetry
important, even vital, as a mode of perceptual awareness. Good poetry gets us closer to the always-
evolving-thing-in-itself, never finished, let alone polished. Not ornament, but ordinary life, rescued
by the poet from the beige of inattentive half-looking, becomes charged and alive. It crackles in the
brain, fizzes on the tongue, and gushes out of you like melting ice.

Planning a festival, even a small one, is a logistical nightmare. Unless, like me, you ignore the logistics, in which case planning a festival is a tidal affair. Hope and worry, trepidation and exaltation; the poetics of logic, things coming together, coming apart, falling together, falling… well, you get the idea. I’ve been dreaming about it. 

A logistical nightmare. That’s what people say isn’t it? And what a nightmare that would be: a million different strands, each dependent on all the rest, refusing to coalesce, and tangling into ever-less extricable knots.  I can’t be alert to everything at once. It’s like trying to pin down a fleet of hydrogen balloons. Everything wants to levitate. That’s the thing about dreaming, it ends in waking. 

If it’s gonna happen, these dreams need to be realised, that means ‘made real’. But, of course, the whole thing gets dampened in the thinking. Dreams need to be thought, made thinkable, snatched out of the clouds and gently (perhaps gently!) massaged into a clear, strategic, deliberate planning process. 

No point getting stressed about it. Let’s try mindfulness. That seems to be the answer to everything at the moment. Find your centre, feel the floor, ground yourself. It’s 2021. It’s October.  

The October mists are settling, and the stickmen of Sauternes pick beads with gilded tongs.

‘Stop it!’, you tell me (or do I tell myself?). That’s just the type of whimsical distraction that we could well do without! Festivals require logical, sober planning, not airy-fairy fantasies about grape-pickers and autumn mists. Who’s going to put up the marquee, where will the sea-chanties take place, have we obtained permission from the harbour master, what about insurance, fire regulations, stewards, bank accounts, first aid, licenses, Moscow Drug Club, tickets.

Tickets?! 

Yes, tickets! 

I say, you plan it! You say, it seems,

it’ll take more than hauteur to realise these dreams!

Rude!

But it did rhyme. Sort of. 

I suppose there are some things we can predict. During the festival weekend the Severn tide will lift the Avon six times, give or take. It will come in six times. And it will go out six times. The Earth will rotate on its axis about two and a half times, depending on when we start counting. Several thousand cars will cross the flyover. 

How many exactly?

I don’t know. I don’t care.

How many gallons of cider will be sold? How many daylight hours? 

About twenty-five I would think. 

Gallons?

Hours. 

Oh no, it’s not possible to be alert to everything at once. A logistical nightmare. Best to take comfort in what we know will be in place. Thank God for practical, logical, balanced, steady, stable, reality-orientated people. Thank God for people like you.  

Is that a compliment?

No. 

Oh. 

Stand there, stand still! Breathe in the harbour-city, breathe the mud and the salt. It’s 2021. It’s October. All around you, a festival of words is taking place. You are here. It is now. Float your mind’s eye on the ebb-tide, let it take it. Let it open out to where logistics is a matter of ever broadening circles. 

Further out, sprats are schooling in their millions, and further still, the sonar diminuendo of whale song. Beyond the song is wilderness, by which I mean territories untamed by thought and planning. Let me tempt you out of this. Take my hand and we’ll step over the brink of this, this, this…?

You say, an edifice, built strong, built tall,

I say, weightless is a cool way to fall… 

Deepening by degrees, in total darkness, we swim out of our bodies, out of our minds, 

out beyond the whale song to where thought ends. 

And further 

out, out, outer still. 

Out into the silent roar, to where enormous entities cohere over unthinkable distances. 

I’m a dreamer.  

You’re a nightmare. 

Jenny Bradley, writer and director of ‘Lockdown Unleashed’, is a writer with a successful career in business. She is a published poet and short story writer; her radio plays have been broadcast on the BBC. Her work has been published in anthologies, websites and in the Bristol Post where she was columnist for a year. She won an award for flash fiction.  Her literary agent obtained an offer from a publisher for her first novel. She reads at events and ran a successful poetry open-mic for Clevedon Literary Festival and was a Judge for Poetry on The Lake. She finds living on the North Somerset Coast inspirational and is currently writing a book themed on the coast. Her recent book ‘Sibling Poets’, a book of poetry and short pieces of fiction written with her brother Jonathan Bradley, was published this year. It is available at bookshops and on Amazon.

In ‘Lockdown Unleashed’ Jenny has brought together three monologues written in 2020 in the first six months of the covid19 lockdown and the gradual easing of restrictions. They feature Mrs Eldon, an ordinary woman living alone, and are interspersed with poems written during that period. Sparked by some of her own experiences in lockdown, Jenny turned them into comedy.  

The first monologue was written as a radio play and then adapted as a performance for a retirement party over zoom. Jenny worked with actor Vicki Vowles to bring the first monologue to life. In a collaborative process of iterative recordings also rehearsed and performed over zoom, they cobbled a production together which required a great deal of ingenuity and creativity. Luckily, it involved much laughter. They discovered that sounds distort and what they thought was a knock on the door sounded like someone trying to make a sound like a knock on the door rather than an actual knock on the door. They learned to pile pillows and duvets and talk into an open wardrobe to get better sound recordings. Finally they got something that worked. The play received fabulous feedback and was broadcast on radio Bristol. 

After the success of the first monologue, Jenny decided to write a second featuring the same strong character, Mrs Eldon, to continue her journey through lockdown.  This too was broadcast on Radio Bristol. The third monologue came later, finished only recently, but based on several earlier drafts amalgamated into one. We watch Mrs Eldon become bolder and think about dating again. Each monologue stands alone as a story but together the three also make a story, the nearest equivalent being a flash fiction book. 

The whole creative process saved Jenny’s sanity at a very difficult time. It was an extremely productive time with Jenny also creating Sibling Poets. Some poems inevitably featured lockdown experiences, from real sadness and a stifling feeling of being caged to moments of hope in witnessing a beautiful sunset. The poetry reflects and documents other aspects of lockdown too, in particular the profound effect nature had on so many of us both in a nurturing way and a vivid awareness of its power and beauty. That we need to look after it not only for its own sake but because we too are nature and depend on it for our survival. 

Lockdown Unleashed takes us back into the lockdown time and space with humour and pathos. With no budget or production team, the monologues have been adapted for stage, so the audience witnesses the rap on wood for a knock on the door and a mini handbell masquerading as the doorbell. The show becomes something of a behind the scenes peep and tell production. Jenny says ‘Vicki is the perfect person to colloborate with, she is a great performer and it is wonderful to see the monologues come alive. I’m reading some of my poetry between the monologues which adds a different dimension, capturing moments which many will relate to, both soulful and humorous.’

Twitter: @JBradleyWriter

Blog:       JennyBradleyWriter  

Email: jenny@jennybradley.co.uk

How would you describe your music?

The Shrinks are inspired by all music but especially Americana (it used to be called New Country), we think our sound as ‘where the mighty Mississippi meets the muddy Avon’, or Avonicana, if you like – it’s mostly home made and about English things (rather that ’trucks stopping on Highway 61 for gas’), so, not so much Country and Western – more Cotham and Westbury.

What’s The Shrinks‘s story? What’s the band name about?

The Shrinks began about 21 years ago at a kid’s school music function – one of us played a John Prine number with our offspring and another parent recognised a kindred spirit (not many people know about the legendary John Prine) and suggested we might get together – we’ve been playing on the Never Ending North Bristol Tour ever since.

We’ve been going so long now, I can’t remember why we’re called The Shrinks, but it’s probably more to do with Roald Dahl’s ‘the incredible shrinks’ from his book The Twits, rather than something deep and meaningful from Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytical Theory. Sorry.

Your craziest performance?

Year’s ago, before it was modernised, we had a regular gig in The Eldon House in Lower Clifton Hill. Because of the size and layout of the pub, we had to play in one room, whilst the audience stayed in the other two, so we regularly played to a pool table, a dartboard and some sad, forgotten, faded Christmas decorations. I can’t remember ever seeing anybody, but I have it on good authority that we sounded best in the gent’s toilet (a phenomena that is actually more common than people realise). Showbiz, it’s all glamour…

To find out more about this band, check out their website!