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CALEB PARKIN

Poetry. Play. Possibilities.

NaPoWriMo 2.8: Position 7

Apr 8, 2014
2 min

NaPoWriMo 2.8: Position 7

“The vase is filled with another thousand of these moments.” Today, I’ve co-written (with my partner Paul Hurley) the second poem of the day, using a technique based on the work of Paul Matthews using questions (the elemental sentence related to Water and communication) and sentences (relating to noun, object and Earth). I’d been ‘gifted’ the name of an artist – photographer, Isabelle Wenzel – on Facebook, to post up a picture by… So we made an ekphrastic call-and-response po

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NaPoWriMo 2.7: Love Song of the Goblin

Apr 8, 2014
2 min

NaPoWriMo 2.7: Love Song of the Goblin

The dream home of Tomorrow, in which you might find the Goblin… It’s a two-poem day as my brain was too fried yesterday…The other (today’s) will appear later. So, catching up with yesterday’s prompt to write a love poem to a thing, here’s my offering. It ended up quite long, so if you can stick it out – thank you, there is a ‘pay off’ and I appreciate any constructive suggestions for cuts or other edits! 🙂 Love Song of the Goblin Such Integration: where before, we poor human

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NaPoWriMo 2.6: Enceladus Street

Apr 6, 2014
2 min

NaPoWriMo 2.6: Enceladus Street

Enceladus. Not enchiladas. Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to use what’s outside your window to make a list or toolbox of nouns, colours and verbs to play with in creating a poem. It wasn’t quite happening, so I had a look through the day’s news for further inspiration and came across this story about Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons (not the popular Mexican food, although it does sound similar). Scientists have confirmed that there is likely to be a large body of water which mig

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NaPoWriMo 2.5: Talking Dogs

Apr 6, 2014
1 min

NaPoWriMo 2.5: Talking Dogs

Borders need Boundaries…? Off-prompt today as I’m doing day 5 and 6 today (was out and about yesterday) and this had started forming in my head already. Something light, silly and sound-oriented, which occurred to me after a chat on the train yesterday – and the general number of talks you end up having when with a dog. I hope you enjoy it… Talking Dogs And on the train she says, That labradoodle she got the blues if she didn’t have shoes while she snoozed. And on the towpath

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NaPoWriMo 2.4: A Lune

Apr 4, 2014
1 min

NaPoWriMo 2.4: A Lune

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a lune – a kind of English language haiku which goes, line by line: three words / five words / three words. I enjoy the focus of a short verse form – the spaciousness of it. Just as when you cut a poem down, sometimes it gets bigger. So I fitted an overheard quote I heard a couple of days ago the form, with a cheeky denotative title (with more words than the poem)… 1530 BST: Two School Mothers Conclude Their Retrieval and Investigations in

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NaPoWriMo 2.3: A Charm Against Losing It

Apr 3, 2014
1 min

NaPoWriMo 2.3: A Charm Against Losing It

Ding! Ding! Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a charm against something. And today’s 52 prompt was to write about losing something. So – having recently been in a pharmacy – here is my curious prompt-fusion poem. It is, I realise now, perhaps a sister poem to one from NaPoWriMo last year – The Pies of Awareness – which could be the metaphysical bakery next door to the location this poem takes place in (or rather, doesn’t – or only does metaphysically). Apparently this yea

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NaPoWriMo 2.2: Ekkimu in the Reduced Section

Apr 2, 2014
1 min

NaPoWriMo 2.2: Ekkimu in the Reduced Section

Now 49p. Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write something based on mythology that isn’t Greek or Roman. On my web-travels, I discovered Ekkimu – who is not very nice: a kind of zombie-vampire (zombpire? vambie? actually, that sounds cute) who feeds on the pain of the living. It’s perhaps even worse than the kind that feeds on blood, or on flesh. So I wrote a poem as an Ekkimu, which is in development… #vampires #monsters #MesopotamianEmpire #mythology #creativewriting #NaPoWriM

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NaPoWriMo 2.1: Eat Chips

Apr 1, 2014
1 min

NaPoWriMo 2.1: Eat Chips

“Ten trillion flies can’t be wrong…” **WARNING** Parental Guidance – (Mildly) Explicit Lyrics So it begins. And I do enjoy the challenge of NaPoWriMo – it’s amazing what you can generate when you sit down for half an hour and actually focus… Today’s first prompt from NaPoWriMo is to write in response to a randomly-generated quote from the Bibliomancy Oracle – which is a fine and useful resource. Here’s what the Oracle returned for me to work with and what I did with it. So as

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Oct 6, 2013
1 min

Waterstone’s and Rats

On Tuesday, I’ll be reading alongside other LS13 Anthology writers at Waterstone’s in Leeds city centre, from 7pm. It would be lovely to see you there! And in publication news: one of my Vermin poems – Vermin the Fifth: An Exact Science – is part of an anthology of work on the theme of ‘Otherworldly Mammals’. You can read it at the following link: http://mgversion2datura.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/mgv274-otherworldly-mammals-1013.html More news soon… #writing #rats #CalebParkin #

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I Am Sat Behind His Hand…

Aug 28, 2013
2 min

I Am Sat Behind His Hand…

Making my merry way back to Leeds after a lovely time in Bristol (which I do miss). Obviously I am on the glamorous Megabus – and am sat just behind the hand (see picture) of its jolly/sinister/jolly sinister blue and yellow mascot, branded on its side…Is it a smile or a smirk, Mr Megabus? Sometimes you have to keep yourself occupied on a five hour journey and I thought I would use the image of being sort of ‘in’ a hand for some writing stimulus. Also, a repeated refrain can

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First Bee Ceilidh and Bee-Flower Dialogues

Aug 21, 2013
2 min

First Bee Ceilidh and Bee-Flower Dialogues

Returned from Green Man on Monday – which was an utterly lovely festival experience: the event is brilliantly well run, with a perfect mix of types of music and other arts to rove around experiencing. And such lovely people, everywhere! On Friday and Saturday, I was up to run the first sessions in the Einstein’s Garden Workshop Dome (wherein were various arts-science happenings took place throughout the fest), with the inaugural Bee Ceilidh on Sunday afternoon. As expected, t

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Processing the Bogle – as Ivor Cutler

Aug 7, 2013
3 min

Processing the Bogle – as Ivor Cutler

Ivor Cutler, January 15, 1923 – March 3, 2006. For a while now I’ve wanted to write and perform something as – channelling, or in tribute to – Ivor Cutler. I was introduced to him some years ago and love the slowness, darkness and ambient-intensity of a lot of his poetry – and songs. And how inexplicably hilarious (while worrying) they are. He and poet Phyllis King jointly appeared in the BBC programme ‘King Cutler’ – where silence (not awkward, more wilful and full of poten

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Descent

Jul 29, 2013
2 min

Descent

Having been struggling to get the pen moving this last couple of days, I just tried out a little exercise to generate this poem… Descent Two elderflowers flank it, waving white-flag leaves: the Cottage for the Keeper of Lock Seventy-Eight is drowning in brown fields, the drizzle it breathes. For he knows, as he toasts and quarters his bread, each ambling hulk he ushers up or down could be his last: could cost his head. There it is, every time the lock recedes, growling in the

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Jul 17, 2013
1 min

Love The Words on ELFM

I went along to ELFM Towers yesterday for a chat with the ever-gracious Peter Spafford on his monthly extravaganza of all things wordy, Love The Words. You can hear our conversation and my poems (on topics ranging from red kites to exam invigilating and pirate-spiders) by clicking on this link. I hope you enjoy it, or some of it, or even just click on it to find out… You can also hear an interview on the same programme with excellent Leeds writer Rommi Smith about her residen

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The Rules of Twister or, Meaning of Whirl

Jun 11, 2013
2 min

The Rules of Twister or, Meaning of Whirl

One of the recent, unusual, French funnels. Recently, there have been tornadoes in both the USA and in France (!), where they are much less common an occurrence and, mercifully for the French, much less powerful. So in a bid to capture something of their violence and swirling destruction, I put to use the Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk in conjunction with Google Translate, the internet, and my brain. Essentially, I put the rules of Twister and definitions of tornadoes t

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Poetry by HEART flyer

Jun 7, 2013
1 min

Poetry by HEART flyer

26th June at the Heart Centre, Headingley – come along! #writing #poets #creativewriting #poetry #HEadingley #Leeds

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May 31, 2013
1 min

LS13 Anthology and Upcoming Gigs

A quick update also that – GOOD NEWS – I’m going to be one of the poets featured in the LS13 Leeds Writers anthology, about which more information here. It’ll be launched next Friday June 7th as part of the Leeds Big Book End weekend. Also, I’ll be performing at a couple of upcoming nights: Firstly at Spoken Weird in Halifax on Thursday June 13th at the Sportsman Pub – full details here. The May event was a real pleasure – a room full of attentive poetry-lovers, sharing their

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The Bee-Spell of Shakespeare Primary School

May 21, 2013
1 min

The Bee-Spell of Shakespeare Primary School

Here is a collected list poem or “spell” from students’ work today – coming up with new collective nouns for (Latin-name) species of British bee (which we spoke about as spells, like in Harry Potter…). It has been an exhausting, but seemingly quite successful, day of workshops and waggle dances! Hopefully the Buzz Words over the summer will get better and better. And here is a ‘tweaked’ version of the poem, with a little stanza at the end to seal the spell… The Bee-Spell of S

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NaPoWriMo 30: Here, Roots Are Not Joined

Apr 30, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 30: Here, Roots Are Not Joined

You fear, you fear her return. IT IS THE END OF NAPOWRIMO. And it really has been marvellous. I’ve just one poem (apart from that below) I would like to finish today and will have produced over 30 poems throughout April. It’s been a very positive experience: keeping poetry with me all the time; being exposed to new forms and stimuli; and discovering many talented creative-cousins out there. So, the final piece was to create a poem of ‘inversion’: to find a poem you like and t

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Apr 30, 2013
1 min

Buzz Words and the Bee Ceilidh at Green Man Festival

Buzz Words and the Bee Ceilidh at Green Man Festival Here’s my listing site for Einstein’s Garden at Green Man – take a look! I’m very excited to be going to the festival again and helping create a bit of science-inspired creativity and lunacy 🙂 #writing #festivals #GreenManFestival #creativewriting #poetry #dancing #folkdance #bees #poems #ceilidhdancing

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