Schwitters again

In Bury on May 1 to visit Warth Mill, where Kurt Schwitters was incarcerated in 1940, as an "enemy alien"... performances of Ursonate took place as part of Bury Text Festival.. when I get a minute I'll add a full namecheck of artists. Very spooky atmosphere down there in the basement, where the prisoners really did have to live. A big contrast to the blazing sun and white plasterwork reflecting it outside.

BARROW again

The programme I've worked on now for over a year, simply entitled Barrow, is transmitted on Monday April 18 on Radio 4 at 11.00am....I'm slightly on the defensive because I realise people in Barrow will listen, my family in Barrow will listen, and Radio 4 documentary makers MIGHT listen (the latter recently expressing an interest in how to make a "radio audit" of British towns, post-recession, whatever an "audit" impies). And I can't keep them all happy. But once they've finished mending the railway viaducts, I'm sure I'll be back in Barrow...

Barrow again

dominating the skyline, BAE systems submarine dockyards. Seen from Walney.

lovingly restored industrial heritage merges into high security fencing.

Barrow's wide choice of charity shops are cosy and welcoming.

Walney warms up in early spring sunshine. Should I consider living here? (not on the beach, obviously)

poison pub

wet street cold front exile
footsore unsteady days unspent
helena her mask repositioned
breaks open the joke the punchline
every conversation is unwieldy
streaming from another country
the further apart the better.
but now is not the time to be belligerent
and asking amazes the crazed
the effort just sets off events;
upended, unpleasant, the poised
poison every party
marvellously hijacking strident mingling.
The stare she emits across the bar
to single men in suits
propped up behind lagers
is blankness and dark awayness
an all or nothing headstrong amendment
guaranteed to eradicate the memory
adjusting lust drop by glittering drop.
flattering the batting eyelids
they're lowering their sights again.
it's calm inside her as she
circumscribes the Sevenoaks
of the moment she cannot describe
of the song that she cannot reference
the location is spiked with effrontary
wordless insatiable walls of dull wounding
and home is the station, the running away.

Merz

Seen here at the launch of the exhibition Born After 1924 at Castlefield Gallery Manchester, singer, speech performer and practitioner in psychiatric medicene, Florian Kaplick, delivers in forthright fashion the third section of Kurt Schwitters' sound poem Ursonate (or Sonata in Primordial Sounds). Castlefield's show, organised by Ingo Gerken, features work by Madeleine Boschan, Matti Isan Blind, Rainer Ganahl, Atonia Low, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Reto Pulfer and Gregor Schneider. An updated version/adaptation of Schwitters' collaborative magazine, Nasci, is also on sale. Florian had started the poem earlier at Cube Gallery where the Manchester-wide Merzman project features a developing and evolving series of installations by Office For Subversive Architecture. There's further Schwitters action coming soon at Madlab.

morning

one more walk before movement
one more bridge to veer one way or
one more finding noted bystander
bypasser bicycle sloping triangle
no more one more before storm
or separation no extension
so delivers you were not yet for
moments ago no time for change
brickworks curing off into lost district
cut off history unapproachable
don't end possible and have reliance
on thought packages convenient
only there's this step
the next one and the one after
take as long as you want
to enter the city
with the detachment of the ill
the strength in season of lions apes birds
all the menagerie see it in the shields
coats arms makers could've been
shipwrights nothing steady
the work about a holding and the hooks released
the sound of clothes muffling a struggle

barrow

If you wanted to, you could travel to Barrow-in-Furness by ship.
But most people go by road or rail, along the southern edge of the long peninsular north of Morecambe Bay.

It feels out of the way, isolated. You're greeted by a horizon lacking high-rise or multistorey buildings.
What stands out are the Victorian Town Hall Tower and a great big pale grey shed - the Devonshire Dock, where BAE Systems, formerly Vickers, build submarines for the Navy.

The town centre's got boarded up shops - not surprising for any town in Britain nowadays, but weirdly they've plastered pictures over the front windows, of what that shop would ideally look like if it was actually trading as a shop. Mustang Sally's once was an "American Diner". Now it's a poster of an "American Diner".

Even more bizarrely, some of these postered shopfronts have also been infilatrated by celebrities. Even in dereliction, it seems we can't do without them. Standing inside the former Rapid Snaps photoshop, for instance, you suddenly come face to face with Gok Wan. But you realise he's not real, because he hasn't got any legs behind that piece of shop furniture. 

Barrow Island, reached by a roadbridge, contains the dockyards. And block after block of red sandstone tenements, made for shipyard workers in the nineteenth century. It resembles Glasgow, of old.