Barefoot in the Park is an annual one-day festival of poetry, storytelling, theatre and music that takes place in Leeds’ beautiful Hyde Park. For the last four years it has been fulfilling the Barefoot team’s ambition to bring poetry and the arts to new audiences, whether seasoned poetry fans or tasting the joys of verse for the first time.
The leafy green environs of central Leeds have rung with the tones of many fantastic performers, like poets Carole Bromley, Mike di Placido, Swithun Cooper, David Agnew and Patrick Kavanagh-award winner Michael …

World Literature Weekend
London Review Bookshop
British Museum
Birkbeck College London
18th – 20th June 2010
———————————————————
All photographs copyright Alex MacNaughton
June 2010 saw the London Review Bookshop’s second annual World Literature Weekend, themed around exile and displacement: both linguistic and geographical, voluntary and forced. In the words of Alain Mabanckou, the festival brought together writers able ‘to create something within the local that is open to the world,’ and The Literateur didn’t miss a thing.
———————————————————–
The Railway: Hamid Ismailov and Robert Chandler, Friday 18th June, 4pm
On 16th June, two days before the Kyrgyz-born Uzbek writer Hamid …

by Edward Randell
I was jet-set; she was jetsam,
Sea-shed, she said. I thought I’d get some.
Her father, fathom five, a pearly king – and mine
A king of men. My vowels cut-glass, hers estuarine.
The voiceless act was her idea. She thought,
Rather than bray with ladies of the court,
She’d bottle every glottal, stop her gob,
Avoiding censure from Papa (a snob
Who’d hear her accent’s tang of wave and wharf
And promptly call the wedding off.)
So, not another word was said.
Except within the curtains of our bed
Where, whispering sweet dark language of the …

Jocelyn Meermans
I had heard the term “hillbilly” when I was growing up in Cleveland, and though I didn’t understand what it meant, my parents made sure I believed that our family was not.  We didn’t have dogs chained in our front yard.  We didn’t have stray cats searching for food on our porch.  We didn’t have roosters living in our garage.  We didn’t have fleas in our house, and we certainly didn’t have shit in our yard.  So even though Dad came home with oil under his fingernails and spent …

Guy Cuthbertson

Today, I bought a green tie on ebay. Not green in the trendy ‘Green’ sense, but it might be that too. It might be an ecologically-responsible, fair-trade, biodegradable, organic, non-conflict, planet-friendly, environmentally-aware tie, and I rather hope it is; but that might well be too much to expect (given the unfair-trade peanuts I paid for it), and, for now, the important thing is that the tie was a rather nice shade of green. I don’t want to get too excited, but I do have a sense that the green-coloured …

Anna Towers

I’m onto my third cup of coffee.  Penny still hasn’t decided what she’s going to have.
‘The Prawn Cocktail jacket potato filling,’ she says, licking her lips and biting her thumbnail, ‘will be at least four Weight Watcher’s points.’
I ate at home.  A tuna and sweetcorn baguette.  I’m still hungry now.  But I shouldn’t have two lunches.  It would be greedy.
I rip the top off another tubular packet of brown raw cane sugar.
‘Forget bloody Weight Watchers,’ I say, then close my mouth around the hole in the top of the …

Alex Christofi
And when the light came, the darkness was confused and flew under the skirting. We tried to get it out with a broom handle and a ruler but it was like the time my friend’s room was infested with ladybirds which bred like ladybirds in her wainscot. I made the others leave and tried to coax it out. We talked about everything the moon and space what the darkness wanted to be when it grew up but still it hugged the insulation between the walls like a blanket. Eventually …

Alan Fielden
Throw,
the first stone, lover.
Who brought me from nothing
and to whom I have given less.
If I lie and promise sunlight,
would you understand.
And when I flail, through glassy words and porous silence.
Can I smile and say,
“That wasn’t me”?
Whilst the moon, calm and bare, reflects the inferno so honestly?
That three-tier phrase, the pyrrhic one,
that means one to the mouth
and two to the ear,
how far can you throw it?
Trust it thus.
Before love there was a feeling that needed a name.
We gathered today to live and love;
ever after there will be nothing ever was …

Joshua Roche
The largest pearl in the world was ruined when the shell was boiled open
– Prose note to Paterson, William Carlos Williams
‘Yes, yes, the salty Pleiades,
Language under your knuckles,
But there were hundreds of us.’
Toes deep, Tom, at the bottom of the fall;
Collecting dirt deep down in Paterson.
Sedimented grain by grain,
Echoes battered in the river bed among
Citizen body parts;
The eyes of Sam Patch, an ear from the Reverend’s wife.
Culled, hunting
For Pearls of the Passaic.
She squats, ladylike under thundering;
A cool American at four hundred
Grams just kissing Tom Carson’s big toe.
This was Solomon’s …

A Found Poem
Anna McKerrow
Opposite a block of control / Him to make him / a woman / Crowded on a table / Protest that she is not /
In fact / A-real / And next door to / a garage! / She picks up smile /Says, help / Talking / Help with the papier mache /
She says, / It’s actually a dummy / Or at least that’s what I think / She says, / Actually made of rubber / Isn’t that interesting /
Dress, monkey, she says, / That does not awaken …