ELEANOR REES

Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, ‘Storm and Golden Sky’ offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape; experimental, lyric, performance and all that is in-between, and brings them, two at a time, hand by hand, into the city bounds for a reading series which revels in the intensities of our art.

Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets, Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees, we aim for a literary experience felt in your bones as juxtaposition and surprise correspondence. New metaphors will be forged, similarities caught, trajectories flown.

Invited poets will read for substantial half-hour sets introduced by new works from the collective.

Storm and Golden Sky  tumblr

Next up 27th June Holly Pester and Evan Jones

18th July Niall Campbell and tbc

And monthly thereafter…

Readings start at 7.00pm on the dot in the upstairs room of The Caledonia. £5 entry. And free mag! Arrive early to get drink and the best seats.

Eleanor is very pleased to be working on a new collaborative poem for performance with the artist and writer, Justin Coombes, for an event ‘Writing on Water’ in Oxford, May 14th 2014 at the Fordham Gallery, a 60ft x 12ft canal barge, travelling art gallery and residency for national and international artists moored on the Oxford Canal.

http://fordhamgallery.co.uk/.

 

 

 

Next session  Tues April 8th, 7-9 pm 

Tues 8th

Thurs 17th

Then tuesday thereafter

Eleanor will be hosting a Writing Cafe at  Cafe 81 Renshaw Street.

The session is for all writers and will be primarily practice-based with Eleanor leading a range of creative writing games and exercises to stimulate your imagination. Perfect for developing an ongoing writing project, finding time in the day to focus on your writing or just having fun making things up! There will also be sharing of work-in-progress and close readings of poems and prose.

The notion is to run a writing workshop like a dance, yoga or life drawing class with the focus on learning through doing! Eleanor is an experienced writing workshop tutor specialising in creativity. She has taught in HE and is currently working on a PhD, ‘Re-imagining the Local Poet’.

The cafe will stay open for 15 mins at the start of the class for tea,coffee,cake etc which may well be needed on these cold winter nights.

£6..00/5.00 concession per class, sessions ongoing through Jan. Dates will alter in February.

You can drop-in on the night but if you are coming do let Eleanor know if you can make it and for more details reeseleanor@hotmail.com  or https://www.facebook.com/events/543356339079942/?ref_dashboard_filter=calendar

http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/online/the-magic-and-metamorphosis-of-metaphor.php

A new online poetry course with Eleanor running in the New Year. xx

‘Eliza and the Bear’, the book which became a performance, became a band, http://elizaandthebear.com, became well we’ll see… is now available in paperback!

http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844717859 and at other sites across the internet.

xx

Eleanor is pleased two new poems have found their way into the pages of this quality literary magazine. For more, to buy and details of the contents see

http://newwalkmagazine.bigcartel.com/product/new-walk-magazine-18-month-subscription-postage-free-worldwide

Eleanor will be giving a practice-based paper at this conference on the procedure and reconfiguration panel, on ‘Re-imagining the Local Poet’.

16th November, London

http://generativeconstraints.tumblr.com/

Next session 26th November, 7-9 pm Eleanor will be hosting a Writing Cafe at  Cafe 81 Renshaw Street.

The session is for all writers and will be primarily practice-based with Eleanor leading a range of creative writing games and exercises to stimulate your imagination. Perfect for developing an ongoing writing project, finding time in the day to focus on your writing or just having fun making things up! There will also be sharing of work-in-progress and close readings of poems and prose.

The notion is to run a writing workshop like a dance, yoga or life drawing class with the focus on learning through doing! Eleanor is an experienced writing workshop tutor specialising in creativity. She has taught in HE and is currently working on a PhD, ‘Re-imagining the Local Poet’.

The cafe will stay open for 15 mins at the start of the class for tea,coffee,cake etc which may well be needed on these cold winter nights.

£6..00/5.00 concession per class, sessions ongoing until Christmas (excluding 5th and 19th Nov).

You can drop-in on the night but if you are coming do let Eleanor know if you can make it and for more details reeseleanor@hotmail.com  or https://www.facebook.com/events/543356339079942/?ref_dashboard_filter=calendar

Eleanor is pleased to have two new poems ‘Mossley Hill’ and ‘In My Ears and In My Ears’ included in ‘The Clearing’.

THE CLEARING is an online magazine published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. Our contributors are encouraged to go forth and find distinctive visions that startle us, rural or urban, modern or prehistoric, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical, natural, political, however they come. But each must be meaningful, surprising, felt. We welcome cross-fertilisations of genre and discipline, collaboration and innovation. We want to be inspired and challenged by cultures, practices and stories of places that may be going untold.

To read them see here

 

Eleanor has written her first song lyric, ‘High Tide’,  for the award-winning folk singer, Emily Portman. Emily and Eleanor share a fascination with metamorphosis and shape-shifting, a theme which Emily has eerily captured in her ghostly and tidal melody.

‘High Tide’ will be played for the first time at the Irish Sea Sessions, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 18th October 2013, part of Liverpool Irish Festival, 2013.

For more on Emily Portman

This from the Philharmonic on the Irish Sea Sessions:

The groundbreaking, part super-group part sessions project returns with a radically new and exciting line up of the most talented musicians in their field. Now in its fourth year, 13 hand-picked multi-instrumentalists and singers from traditional and contemporary music backgrounds, and from both sides of the Irish Sea, come together with the audience for another night of impassioned exposition of the shared music and the special bond between Liverpool and Ireland.

The line-up changes each year. This year, singers Declan O’Rourke (Galileo, Sarah), Emily Portman (BBC Radio 2 Folk Award Winner 2013 Best Contemporary Song ‘The Hatchling’), Robert Vincent (Life In Easy Steps), Pauline Scanlon (one half of the duo Lumiere) and Alan Burke (Rambling Boys of Pleasure, Afterhours, Tulsk) provide most of the songs.

They are backed by an ensemble of hand-picked instrumentalists: the Coyne Brothers – Mick on uillean pipes, Eamon on fiddle, and Terry Clarke-Coyne on flutes and whistles – are joined by Sean Regan on fiddle, Gino Lupari (of Four Men and a Dog) on percussion, David Munnelly on button accordion and piano, and Neil Campbell on guitars, all led by musical director Bernard O’Neill on double bass and piano. They are equally at home leading rollicking sets of reels or delicate airs. The musicians meet together for the first time just three days in advance, and put together a two-hour show that has all the atmosphere of the finest pub session, with all the quality of a major concert hall setting.

‘One of the highlights of the Liverpool musical year…people will boast for years to come – I was there’
Liverpool Echo

 

Edge Hill’s Creative Writing Department present Sculpted in the Rose Theatre

Tickets £4.50 all

Eleanor will read her poem ‘Salt Water’ and others as well as participating in discussion around Poetry in the North West.

How is a region created and defined? How does it shape us and how do we, in turn, shape a region? Sculpted is a definitive, ground-breaking anthology of poems by 62 of the North West’s best contemporary poets. As diverse as the area that inspired them, the poems dig beneath the skin of the region: its towns and cities, countryside, industries, history, geology, and above all, its people.

‘The poems are gritty, witty, wise, anarchic and tender when needed’. Mike Harding

The evening is hosted by the Creative Writing programme at Edge Hill. If you would like to know more about our courses, please contact the Course Information, Advice and Guidance Team on 01695 657000 or by email study@edgehill.ac.uk

 

In August Eleanor ran writing activities with children in the museum to gather content for a poem she subsequently wrote and presented in the story-tent over the course of an afternoon!  She read the poem one-on-one and to groups of visiting children (and adults!)  For a blog about the work

http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2013/08/remaking-the-world-writing-a-new-poem-for-telling-tales/

Here’s the full poem:

 

 

 

Night Tales

This poem was written with ideas and images created by young people visiting the ‘Telling Tales: The Art of Indian Storytelling’ exhibition, World Museum Liverpool, Aug 2013.  Children were asked to invent new creatures, half animal and half human, to describe where they lived, what they liked doing also to tell us something important! The poem below includes a range of the responses from the young people and was presented in the gallery, in a story-tent, to visitors 1^st Sept 2013.

 

Liverpool is buzzing with tales come alive,

hanging out in St John’s Gardens on a midsummer’s night.

 

The children had been dreaming strong and bold.

The tales sit on the steps at the front of the museum,

 

head in hands, uncertain where to go, –

all of the tales half animal, half human.

 

They flick long woolly tails, flutter wings

and run like children do all along the walls.

 

Tall tales rest on the bottom of the steps

stretching their long limbs against the cold stone.

 

The moon is full, and the night is warm.

“I came from the ocean,” says one woman.

 

Her silver dress glints, gold hair sparks, brown eyes blink.

“I was under the sea playing with fish bones.”

 

She shakes a shook of sea-weedy hair,

surprised to be enjoying the unsalted air.

 

“I came from New Brighton Beach,” says another –

her mermaid’s tail splashing on the sandstone.

 

“I came from Delemere, from the green of the woods,”

says a lion. ‘I came alone, teleported from my shady home.”

 

He roars and shakes his mane. A zebra with wings

and a girl’s legs giggles, flaps and flies a lap around the gables.

 

A butterfly with a boy’s head joins her in a dance

as out from the shadowy side streets sleeping children appear,

 

walking slowly from the tunnel mouth, out from the station,

out from the routes in from their cosy homes.

 

A bus without a driver stops in an empty layby.

Children parachute down from apartment blocks,

 

all gathering on William Brown Street outside the library.

A boy, about ten, in purple PJs is pushed forward by his friends.

 

He stands on the wall to address the crowd of Tales and children.

“Be quiet,” he shouts, and silence falls.

 

The moon coughs once. The stars sit on their hands.

 

All faces turn to him. “I need to tell you something,”

he says clear and loud. “Important things, now listen.”

 

The children behind him whisper and jostle.

“Go on, tell them,” breathes a girl.

 

“I have my heart in my head. I can feel all your thoughts.”

“Tell them about dancing, of course and reading, that’s important

 

and tender loving care and not biting,”

looking straight at the lion.

 

“Being with our families, helping others.

Tales are you listening?” The creatures nod slow and thoughtful.

 

A monkey scribbles words into a notebook.

The unicorn scratches ideas into the sand with his horn.

 

“You must do what good tales do!”

 

“Make roses,” shouts a boy from the crowd.

“Turn invisible,” says another.

 

“Save people,” declares a girl.

“Turn everything to chocolate, learn to fly.”

 

Until everyone is talking at once –

a cacophony of voices imagining the world.

 

A horse with a lion’s legs flies over the car park.

An octopus in a soap bubble rolls laughing down the street.

“When I was at sea I saw cities float on tides,” sings a merman.

“When I was in a zoo,” cries a zebra, “my cage flew away like a bird.”

 

A tried pony shakes his head, writes ‘To do’

on the top of his jotter. ‘Imagine more,’ he underlines

 

as all the children cry –

“Go out into the daylight Tales and do your work!”

 

With this the rain stutters and the sky shakes hard.

Everyone runs back into the shadows for shelter

 

and a dozy pigeon on the library roof

nods his head, ruffles his feathers

 

and shuts his eyes to dream till dawn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eleanor Rees, Aug 2013

photo by Graham Lester George