April 2016

After the Live from Worktown Festival 2015 (see Links) a chance to recharge the batteries. Here Dave Morgan and Kevin Bates perform at Bolton Socialist Club as part of the International Beat Poetry Festival. The event organised and hosted by Scott Devon, included a Skype link with legendary writer/composer David Amram in New York. David added Manchester to his itinerary in November when visiting Britain and it was a great privilege to see and hear him live.

I was asked to chair the Irwell Vallet Sustainable Communities Project in September 2015. Two months later we received a United Nations award for developing community resilience in the face of climate change. On Boxing Day East Salford was inundated by the River Irwell for the first time in 70 years. See how the community responded.

The New Year heralded the start of Live from Worktown's monthly Cabaret night at Bolton Socialist Club, ably hosted by Paul Blackburn. Now we are preparing a third Live from Worktown Festival bid for October. Watch this space.

Who knows where the time goes July 2015

It seemed a long full dreary wet winter which went on forever. My creative juices were at a low ebb throughout with little new work. Most of my energy seemed spent on running an enterprise and business planning course spread across Bolton and Salford. With learners attending from ten different countries it was more than interesting and getting them to the point of completion and achievement by March was satisfying. In parallel the Live from Worktown team was engaging with the Arts Council In an attempt to get funding for a 2015 festival. 2015 seemed an appropriate time for a poetry celebration being 50 years since the famous 1965 Poetry International at the Royal Albert Hall and closer to home, ten years since the death of Hovis Presley (Richard McFarlane). I had been talking to a number of people since October 14 and worked with Paul Neads of Flapjack Press to create a new edition of “Poetic off Licence”. The last was sold out ages ago and is washing up on ebay at a silly prices. Thanks to Paul and the McFarlane family it came off the press in April.

At one point we had an impressive line-up but no budget. By March we had a budget and quickly had to confirm a programme to start at the end of April. The results can be seen on www.livefromworktown.org.

Another Busy Few Months : October 13-July 14

October : Green Door Ensemble at Marsden Jazz Festival with 20 minute set of four new poems backed by James Hartnell and Kevin Bates. Did it again at George’s Gallery Bolton in November. Must make more of an effort to learn the words

January : finished our research project in Old Trafford and all the researchers achieved a Level 3 Open Award in Research Skills. The team pulled out all the stops to generate nearly 400 in-depth interviews with community members of all ages and cultures. Had a couple of weeks in Goa with old friend Phillip Goodwin. Things have changed since he was last there but the second hand book shop at Colva remains. The owner remembered Goodwin from ten years ago. He Is an interesting, humble and humane man with a good sense of humour.

February : Coming back and feeling bored I thought ”lets have a poetry festival” so after a few phone calls and chats to some key people at the Octagon Theatre, Council and Library, Scott Devon and I submitted an application to the Arts Council for Bolton’s first International Poetry Festival to be held in June.

 Busy Few Months : June-September 2013

Let's start in June.
Big turn out at the Community Fun Day on the Meadows in Lower Salford. Beautiful day and a big opportunity for our team to conduct lots of interviews about the future of Peel Park. Everyone was so co-operative, challenging all those views about being over-consulted. Salford Bee Collective meeting.
Yes we have become a Co-operative. Scary.

It’s a mark of durability when a novel makes Penguin Modern Classic status, and is reprinted often enough to sport a number of iconic book covers. Yet when it was published, in 1957, On the Road by Jack Kerouac was written off by many critics both for its content and its style.

Kerouac’s first novel The Town and the City , a thinly disguised autobiography, revealed the conflict in post-war America between stereotypical conservative home and family values, and a rising tide of dissent and individualistic existentialism among the young. On the Road went further by appearing to romanticise this post-war deviance. If it had only described the empty and valueless lives of rebellious youth it may have been seen as a work of social significance much as the Chicago novels of Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell before. Kerouac however was not concerned to inflict either moral retribution or remorse on his characters. They appear to inhabit their world without regret, without fear, and without guilt. As such their threat to the moral order of Eisenhower’s post-war American Dream was palpable. Kerouac may have even have been forgiven for the wilder excesses of his automatic writing style, which Ginsberg described as “spontaneous bop prosody”, but which Truman Capote famously wrote off as “that’s typing, not writing”.