Word On The Street

Contact: winstonplowes@googlemail.com

Part of The 2nd Hebden Bridge Folk Roots Festival

Join us for a poetry stroll through street themed poetry and prose and even the odd tune as we lift off the roofs of houses and peek inside. Listen to local and regional voices explore the happenings on real life streets, which are invariably stranger than fiction could invent.

Our main guest, Terry Simpson has lived in Woodhouse, Leeds on and off for most of his adult life, and will be colouring our night with words of all shades from his memories there.

Support Guest Winston Plowes will present his findings in Vector Humans, a series of poems composed by stitching together fragments of overheard speech from individual voices borrowed from the streets and shops, trains and busses and banks and pubs of Halifax.

We will be treated to a Hebden Bridge debut broadcast of part of What’s Happening On Starling Street, a play for radio featuring the words and voices of Calderdale writers and members of the On The Write Wavelength project facilitated by Gaia Holmes and hosted by Phoenix FM, Dean Clough. Halifax.

Don’t worry about getting lost as our host for the evening, Sean Kavanagh will be on hand as we call in on our special guests, Natalie Rees and David Nixon who will further add to a rich night in the lovely café and bar in the Town Hall.

Terry Simpson has written two plays about the mental health industry that were filmed for use as course materials by the Open University, including a dark musical comedy ‘An Untimely Death on Paaschendaele Ward’. His collection of songs and poems “Off Beat” was described by Poetry Express as a “good selection from a very talented writer and performer, who has drawn on a wide range of literary and musical influences”. He was runner up Poet Laureate at the 2006 Camberwell Bonkersfest, a ‘festival of mad culture’, for which he was awarded a plastic banana holder by John Hegley. He lives, and sometimes writes about, Woodhouse, a suburb of Leeds that at least one scholar thinks was the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.

Winston spends his summers as a hare chasing bicycles and winning by miles, in winter he categorises found jigsaw pieces and tunes the family silver. Each night he waits with his cat, ‘Fatty’ under starlight on the roof of his boat for his found poems to return to roost from the pages of journals published worldwide to his floating home in Calderdale UK. He has been the compere and organiser of Hebden Bridge’s only dedicated spoken word open mic event, The Spoken Word Shindig for over two years now and resident poet for the Rochdale Canal Festival 2012 and The Hebden Bridge Arts Festival 2012-14. His surrealist collection of list poems derived from the images found on drinks glasses, Telephones, Love Hearts & Jellyfish was published in 2016 by Electric Press. www.winstonplowes.co.uk

Supported by special guest appearances from Natalie Rees and David Nixon and your compere and host for the evening, Sean Kavanagh.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1724227737789811/permalink/1724229444456307/

Price: £5.00. (£5 (£3 con))

Time: 7:30pm for 8