To start with I’d like them to know that I really do look like my author pic. At the launch of SIT! at Ways With Words lit fest I projected the photo onto the wall and told the audience ‘this is what I really look like’ but they weren’t having it, choosing to believe their own eyes over the compelling well-lit evidence of photographer Benjamin J Borley.
Sit!
When I was four we got a dog, a collie who we called Alfie after Sir Alf Ramsay, which dates me. My Grandfather came over from Lancaster saying he’d train him for us. After one week of his training regime, Alfie ran away. Grandfather returned to Lancaster and Alfie trotted home. A few weeks later Grandfather returned to ‘finish the job’ and in a way he did – because Alfie ran away again, never to return. He was not my favourite grandfather.
People think Claudia illustrates my work but it’s the other way round. In SIT! there are only two pictures that came after the poem, the vast majority were my responses to Claudia’s drawings. I think of her as an artist rather than an illustrator. Check out her website www.claudiaschmid.co.uk
I love collaborating, and also work with composers. Stephen Deazley and I wrote the song cycle The Songbook of Unsingable Songs – which garnered my first ever five star reviews – and then The Little Book of Monsters and, for the Mahogany Opera Company, Peck! While Thomas Hewitt Jones and I wrote the song cycle The Same Flame and the hit musical Rumpelstiltskin.
My dog Tess is not very well trained but makes up for it by being very well-meaning. She’s no danger to anyone, unless they are allergic to affection, in which case there’s a real chance she’ll induce anaphylaxis.
People I regularly talk to on my walks with Tess include a ‘punk’ undertaker who is currently working with the KLF on the “People’s Pyramid” built from bricks fired with the ashes of dead people and, increasingly, various homeless people who camp by the river – with whom Tess is good friends. I’m accepted by default as her less demonstrative companion.
Looking at Amazon to see if anyone had reviewed SIT! (none yet) I scrolled down and saw the “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” section had two books: Deborah Moggach’s The Carer and The Art of Prowling, by Col. G A Wade, a reissue from wartime Home Guard Training Series, which is a delight. `It is extraordinary how reluctant the British soldier is to show cunning.’ Col Wade is urging the British soldier to be alert to, and even practice, artifice and skulduggery.
There are some pictures and poems in our book that I feel special attachment to, they speak of my own experience. In Carry Me, a small person sits atop a friendly, shaggy, larger than life hound, which Claudia assures me is based on Tess. This is the most sentimental poem in the book and sums up how I feel about having a dog in my life.
Although I’m known mostly as a poet and have various poems and performances up on YouTube, the most popular by far isn’t a poem but a 3 minute sketch of superhero Empath Man, who fights crime through his advanced listening skills and ability to stay open and vulnerable in a tight situation. One day Thomas and I will write the musical.