Monday, 10 October 2016

Blog: THE COLD BOAT LAUNCH - Tracy Gillman

Well, the Cold Boat’s 1st podcast was launched at our event on 29th September, setting sail across the choppy cyber-waves of the world wide web and hopefully reaching welcoming destinations and safe havens; not turned back at the borderlines of prejudice, but given a fair hearing and safe passage onwards into the collective consciousness.

At the event we updated on recent events and developments: In the summer Joanne and I ran a Poetry of Witness creative writing workshop for the New Writing North Young Cuckoos Writers Group, it was held at Live Theatre’s new young writer’s premises – Live Tales which is across from the recently developed outdoor space and garden at the back of the main building. Having no prior awareness of Poetry of Witness the young participants responded positively to the workshop in the calm and inspiring atmosphere of the Live Tales creative space. We created poetry of witness from a news report about a refugee family and discussed what it means to be a second-hand witness to concerning events across the world and focused down on more local concerns of what we, closer to home, may have been witness to and how those two perspectives are linked by poetic expression.

We’re also currently in conversation with the ‘Home and Belonging’ project which works creatively with refugees in Newcastle, we’re hoping to run creative writing workshops with the group and incorporate their work in an event we’re planning as part of a wider project funded in part by Newcastle University, more news to follow as we get it…

At the podcast launch event I read Bajun Matur’s ‘The Winds Howls Through the Mansions’, which is available as part of the Cold Boat digital archive.  Linda Anderson read Ilya Kaminsky’s   - ‘that Map of Bone and Opened Valves’, which is available here: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2009-winter/selections/that-map-of-bone-and-opened-valves/ We had readings from Joanne Clement, Bill Herbert and Sean O’Brien, which will be available on this site soon.

We encourage audience participation here at The Cold Boat, so in response to those poems we invited the audience to make contributions of poems they would like to share, one brave audience member accepted the invitation and read ‘Sorry!’ by Amir Darwish which is available here: http://communist-party.org.uk/arts-hub/poetry/item/2177-muslims-say-sorry-the-poetry-of-amir-darwish.html

After the event we also received a contribution from the writer Helen Limon, all of these poems have either been added to our digital archive or will be in due course.
Please listen to the podcast, share it widely and let us know what you think here, on FB, Twitter or email your suggestions.

Solidaridad, The Cold Boat

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