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Bob Beagrie:
The Sentinel Literary Quarterly Interview
By Nnorom
Azuonye
Tell me a
little about your years at Cleveland Arts as a
Literature Development Officer.
I worked as the
Literature Development Officer at Cleveland Arts for
five years. It was a very exciting post that
included helping to run the annual Writearound
Festival, supporting some of the local independent
presses, a regular programme of live literature
events, writing workshops for adults and children
and some very experimental projects such as Beyond
Trainspotting and A Fortnight in Seaton Carew and
The Undercover Artists. The former was a project
delivered in partnership with Hartlepool and
Stockton Library and Youth Services to encourage
reading and break down some of the preconceptions
around libraries. It involved writers and artists
working with a number of targeted youth groups
including a boxing club and young offenders. They
developed installations for the libraries and then
ran a series of themed events in them to showcase
the work. These included a Boxing Day in which the
art work and texts were displayed, the libraries
displayed their book stock that related to the
theme, we showed some movies, ran workshops with
visiting authors, and had a boxing ring in the
library with some of the lads sparing, followed by a
poetry slam from the ring. One of the other events
was all around Sci Fi, another one was gritty
realism. The project brought people into the
libraries that hadn't been since they were in
primary school, but it also made a large impact upon
the library staff.
A Fortnight in
Seaton Carew was a project that involved 14 writers,
each was commissioned to go on a day trip to the
seaside town of Seaton Carew, take photos and write
a poem or piece of prose in response to it, which we
then published as a book.
The Undercover
Artists was a group of young people from Stockton
who worked with myself and artist Adrian Moule, who
began to create public installation pieces,
including objects and texts, performance art and
spoken word, in odd places, town centres, car parks,
railway stations etc. They wore white boiler suits
and dust masks, documented the installations with
photos and then mysteriously vanished. It was a
great way of developing their self esteem,
cultivating a group identity but also making them
reconsider the urban environment in which they
lived.
One of the most
exciting things that emerged from the work at
Cleveland Arts was The Verb Garden, a live
literature cabaret which I co-ran with Dougy Pincott,
and which was a fantastic amalgamation of live
music, top notch visiting poets, local poets, visual
art, film, open mic slots etc. It kind of paved the
way for The Hydrogen Jukebox Cabaret of the Spoken
Word which Andy Willoughby and Jo Colley founded in
Darlington and our later KENAZ LIVE showcase events.
I really enjoyed
the time at Cleveland Arts and it gave me a broad
insight into the breadth of literature development
within the different communities of Teesside. I was
lucky enough to be able to have a very hands-on
approach to the programme which kept me directly
involved in most of the projects.
I am thrilled
about your residency at Teesside, especially in the
aspect of your work – helping members of the general
public produce creative works. How successful has
this been?
The residency at
Teesside
University was really valuable, Andy Willoughby and I shared the position and it
allowed us to develop some of the foundations for
KENAZ magazine, a Live Literature Society and the
M.A. in Creative Writing. We held drop-in writing
surgeries for the public and came across some very
promising writers, some of whom have gone on to be
published, others to become very strong performers.
We mentored a few individuals and ran workshops for
students and the general public. It was an important
stepping stone in bringing lots of our disparate
activities together under the focus of the
University.
Are mentoring
schemes for young writers something you strongly
believe in?
Yes, mentoring
gives promising writers the opportunity for some
intensive one to one learning which is tailored
precisely to their own particular needs. It creates
a reciprocal, flexible working relationship between
mentor and mentee that you can't get through set
classes, courses or workshops. I think it's vital
for new writers to see themselves as part of a scene
or a writing community, and mentoring programmes
need to be a part of this along with live events,
publishing programmes and workshops.
How did you
come about having your texts incorporated into
artworks and sculptures in the Tees Valley area?
Mainly through a
series of commissions, which involved working with a
group or a targeted community, to explore the local
community and personal histories of the sites and
produce a poem for the sculpture or signage. So some
of the pieces are my own interpretations drawn from
the research, but others are more collaboratively
written pieces that I arranged and edited from the
writings of a particular group.
Do you recall
your earliest encounter with poetry in general and
when you actually confronted the poetic spirit
within you?
I didn't study any
poetry at school. I was far from being an achiever
at school so I didn't do English Literature. However
I always wrote stories as a kid. It wasn't until I
went to University to study creative writing that I
really encountered poetry. I remember us looking at
Buffalo Bills by E.E. Cummings and feeling like
doors in my mind were suddenly being flung wide
open. I realised poetry wasn't what I'd thought it
was and I fell in love with it and all of its
possibilities.
What and what
are your major influences as a writer?
That’s a very
tough question and I could go on for ages listing a
whole host of writers but a few world famous poets
would be Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, Seamus
Heaney, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Sharon
Olds, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan has got to be in
there too. There are a lot of poets from the North
East who have also had a big impact on me such as
Basil Bunting, S.J. Litherland, Andy Croft, Paul
Summers, Julia Darling and Andy Willoughby.
With book
titles like Gothic Horror, and Masque: The
Art of the Vampyre. I would like to know if you
are drawn to or excited by the supernatural.
Yes I guess I am.
'Huggin & Munnin', my first full collection
was named after Odin's two ravens, which translate
as 'thought & memory'. My last collection 'Yoik' is
named after the Sami practice of sacred song in
which the spirit of a person, creature or feature of
the land is evoked through chanting. There are a lot
of poems in that collection which draw upon paganism
and shamanism. My next book, which will be released
in February 2010 by Smokestack Books is called 'The
Seer Sung Husband' and it is an epic poem telling
the story of Tobias Shipton, the husband of the
Yorkshire witch and prophetess Old Mother Shipton in
the 16th Century, so again a sense of
magic and the supernatural runs through it. Don't
get me wrong, I have written lots of poems that
don't touch on magic and the supernatural but it is
definitely a recurring theme in a lot of my work. I
guess growing up somewhere as 'uncompromisingly
real' as industrial Middlesbrough in the 70s and 80s
you need to cultivate a sense of the 'otherness' to
survive.
Do you write
anything that is not poetry?
I've written a few
short stories over the past few years and Andy and I
have collaborated on a few community/educational
plays around specific issues, and I enjoy writing in
other forms, but poetry is my real passion.
You have
obviously run several creative writing workshops.
What is the most important gift your workshop
participants take away that will always help them in
their creative pursuits?
Another tricky
question, Nnorom. I've run more writing workshops
than you can shake a stick at. Each group needs
different things but I guess my answer would be
inspiration, recognition of their own writing habits
and a broadening of awareness regarding the possible
approaches to writing. I remember the doors being
flung open for me when I started exploring poetry
and experimental prose like Kurt Vonnegut's
'Slaughter House 5' and Italo Calvino's 'If On A
Winter's Night A Traveller' and I think participants
of my workshops often go away with a similar kind of
realisation.
The interesting
thing about you is that you are not only a writer,
but a consummate performer, teacher and publisher.
That is serious multi-tasking. How do you deal with
the different facets of your work? Do you deem
yourself a master of any?
It's difficult to
juggle all of these things on a freelance basis and
sometimes it feels like too much. There are plenty
of nights when I can't sleep and when my own writing
has to be shelved for a while to deal with the
teaching, promoting, organising, editing etc.
However, working in partnership with Andy Willoughby
helps immensely. We seem to be able to support each
other well and calm each other down when things
start to feel unmanageable. Andy says we are Ronin
of the pen and its a pretty good description of how
we work. And no I don't deem myself as a master of
any.
Talking about
performance. What is the Sampo? You are taking it on
a national tour, correct?
Bob: Sampo is a
mythical object from the Finnish myth cycle 'Kalevala'.
It's kind of like the Holy Grail. During the eight
years we've been working with Finnish poets and
visiting Finland we've become fascinated by the
Kalevala. In the last year Andy and I have
collaboratively written a joint collection of poems
called 'Sampo: Heading Further North' which is
inspired by and retells parts of the first 10 books
of the epic, but recontextuialises it in
contemporary settings and situations. We have worked
with two musicians Kevin Howard and Milo Thelwall to
set 18 of the poems to music which we recorded for a
c.d. And we've toured the show around the North East
and in North Yorkshire. We are working at the moment
on setting up the national tour so we can get it out
to wider audiences and take it back to Finland. Its
a very exciting, entertaining and challenging show,
in which we do a lot of multi-vocal effects and
perform the poems together, and with the array of
musical instruments from guitar, slide guitar,
double bass, fiddle, singing bowls, birembau,
dordeseal, bodhran and throat singing from Kev and
Milo it really is a spellbinding shamanic voyage
from Northern England to Finland and back.
Every time I
read something about you, or Andy Willoughby, your
names always roll out together. I find myself
thinking you’ve got a partnership like Walther
Mathau and Jack Lemmon did. How did this partnership
begin and in what special areas are you working
together now or plan to work together in the future?
I'm not sure which
one of us is Walter and which one is Jack. I often
think we are more like Laurel & Hardy, but now and
then we are Butch & Sundance. I've known Andy for 20
years or so, but we didn't hang around together when
we were younger, though we had a few mutual friends.
It was when Andy came back to Teesside from living
in London and I was working at Cleveland Arts and
running the Verb
Garden that we met up again. Andy performed a few times at The Verb Garden
and then I went to some of The Hydrogen Jukebox
events. Our working relationship started really when
we set up the first leg of the Anglo-Finnish Writing
Exchange Project where six poets from
England went to
Finland to work with six Finnish poets and then the
Finns came to England. After that we got the
residency at Teesside
University and we've been working in partnership ever since. I must stress though
that we are not joined at the hip and we do
individual projects as well, but it is a very
productive partnership. There is no way we could do
as much individually as we do together.
100 years from
now, students of poetry, especially in the
Middlesbrough area will keep running into you in one
way or another. What would you like them to find as
your most outstanding contribution to poetry and
learning in the area?
Wow, that's a
really tough one. I reckon it would have to be that
other people have written and become successful
writers due to my encouragement. In terms of my
poems I'd hope people might recognise a sense of
authenticity which transcends time.
By the way,
thank you for working with Andy Willoughby in
judging the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry
Competition (July 2009). Your report is pretty
comprehensive. Is there anything you might want to
add?
Just to reiterate
the fact that the entries were of an exceptionally
high standard and it was really difficult to narrow
the shortlist down to the three winning poems.
However, it was a real pleasure reading them all.
Thank you very
much for your time, Bob.
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