Poetry at Glastonbury
A week on Wednesday, I will be pitching my tent in a field in Somerset, pen, paper and funky web-capable phone (on loan from Orange) in hand, preparing myself for a weekend of mayhem and poetry writing at the Glastonbury Festival as the Official Glastonbury Website's poet in residence.
It's a great gig - four days of trekking around the many-legged glory that is the Pilton Pop Festival and transmuting the most arresting things I see, feel and hear into celebratory verse. This is the third year of the residency - I am following in the muddy but enthusiastic footsteps of AF Harrold and Elvis McGonagall - and it's going to be splendid, whatever the weather.
I'll also be reading some of the poems at the Poetry & Words tent on the Sunday of the Festival - I'll post the exact time as soon as I know in case anyone reading this wants to come along. Some of the poems will be very short and posted as haiku on the Glastonbury Twitter feed. In the meantime, here are a few poems about Glastonbury, which I wrote for Cyril Laffort's excellent exhibition of Glastonbury photos at The Space Gallery in Stroud a couple of months ago...
A tumble of clouds leaping
over gate posts,
leaving bright pennants
barbed on flagpoles.
In tented margins
hats leap like salmon
along a river of flesh.
The air
is a shiver of music
unbinding dervishes
of dust.
In the Tiny Tea Tent, Alice is holding forth
to an ever madder series of hatters,
doped up dormice and March hares
still in the boxing mood come June.
PJ Harvey found me
in the healing fields
in 1992,
riding the updrafts
like a gull in pursuit of the plough.
Sheela Na Gig
gaped and grinned in my ears
brought me,
skidding and sliding in dust,
down to her bowl of music.
I have never left.
Gathering
for Katie-Jo
Your head massage guides me back
through an acid-spiked labyrinth
dancing to the tune of a fiddle
rough as scrumpy.
I am flying through the lanes in your hands
my brain expanding and contracting, like a lung.
I feel the long breath of trees on my back,
hear the stream’s music,
the undertow where dark, melodic fish swell
before swimming out to haunt guitars.
A waterfall of bodies.
A tumble of music and mating calls.
The high colours of morning
singing from painted stones.
We are all gathering ourselves in our own ways,
crow-wise or carefree,
the tribal river-drums of our blood beating
in a multitude of ears.
