Excellent news, I’ve been confirmed as performing in Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man Festival in August!
There is some information about it here:
I’ll be performing all seven Vermin poems, which I’m developing into a single performance – verminous costume and all – at the moment.
Last Wednesday, I performed some work at Folk Tales – which was excellent as ever, including gorgeous music and some top-rate storytellers. As I’d been working on it with a view to performing the whole sequence at festivals, I finished the final vermin piece – Fox/Sloth ‘Why Even Try?’ and read it there. It might be a slightly down-beat note to finish on, being as the fox’s sloth seems to take the form of nihilism (perhaps sloth’s ultimate conclusion) and I wanted it to be a ‘coda’ to the sequence – on the endeavour of writing and the possible futility of it.
As the most famous of ‘literary foxes’, I invoked Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought-Fox’ – or rather, un-invoke it, with my sloth-fox’s diminishing refrain of ‘no thought-fox am I/so why even try?’ Hughes’ poem is very much about the act of writing – the poet watching the fox’s footprints printed in the snow’s white expanse, while the poet attempts to fill the page’s white expanse with something meaningful. All the Vermin pieces are written in the first-person, so it seemed like a good moment to have the fox ‘replying’ to the poet, looking back to him/me/her/whoever is writing, through the window, and questioning the whole venture. Perhaps, too, there is s’ome slothful cunning in there, as the fox attempts to discourage poetry while contrarily ‘becoming’ a poem. As fox’s have been at the heart of a lot of controversy through hunting, I bring this in at the beginning – as the ‘red pen’ of the hunting jackets attempt to ‘correct’ the fox. They may be inspiration for one of our greatest poets, but they’re also still considered ‘vermin’ by many in the countryside.
So as a point of reference, here’s Hughes’ poem:
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.
And a very elegant one it is. (And certainly much more formally constructed than my own!).
As I’ve no publishing deal lined up just yet, here is the working version (which may change – red pen and all) of the fox piece:
Vermin The Seventh:Â Fox / Sloth
Why Even Try?
There they go again, correcting between the
furrows with the red-pen of their jackets;
the slick of their Hackett wax. Blowing
their own trumpets until
the air is thick with pomp
and gory details of the game:
they are set
on the catch.
And everyone says
we are meant to run
but where’s the fun
in that? Put me down,
if you like. Put me down,
I might bite – if the mood to do
anything takes me. I would fight
if the mood
not to move
eludes me.
Why even try?
No thought-fox am I
to be caught by the tail
and caged in your spry
and wily verbiage.
Sometimes, padding between
the eyelids of night, we catch you
tangled in light at the window.
Thinning paper to tissue,
forcing nothing to write,
your blankness is wrung
out on the page. Look at that fur
on your tongue: it’s not just our coats
that get mange.
Why even try?
No thought-fox am I
to be caught by the tail
and caged.
I’m hardly cunning, fantastic,
or no more than you might be
if committed to verse – or the
scabrous, sticky-back plastic
stories pursuing me.
What could be worse: outfoxed
by your own scent trails; by packs of
lies, baying for ever more tails.
So why even try?
No thought-fox am I.
Amidst your rubbish
I found evidence, clues,
of what mouldy-chicken talent
you have to lose. In the sluggish
trails of whose ideas were whose,
these stagnant scraps
caught my eye.
So why even try?
Fingers crossed there’ll be some more festivals I’ll be able to take Vermin to over the summer – I’ll update as and when…