The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

Nine months from conception to birth, with three fathers and seventy bobparents, 'The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy' was published on May 11th 2011 by Seren books. Edited by  Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley with a foreword by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, all information is here:

http://thecaptainstowerdylanbook.blogspot.com/

The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

JEWELS & BINOCULARS, published by Stride/Westwords in 1993, featured fifty poets who celebrated the life and work of Bob Dylan and his influence on their own. Among them were Wendy Cope, Allen Ginsberg, Sophie Hannah, Lachlan Mackinnon, Glyn Maxwell, Adrian Mitchell, Linda Chase, Geoff Hattersley and Matthew Sweeney.

The book is out of print and has become a collector’s item. A changing revue of poets and musicians played venues from London’s Troubadour to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to promote its publication.

On May 24th 2011 Bob Dylan will reach seventy, after almost fifty years in the music industry. To mark the occasion, SEREN will publish THE CAPTAIN’S TOWER: SEVENTY POETS CELEBRATE BOB DYLAN AT SEVENTY. It will combine the best from the original with new work from established and up-and-coming writers.

Among submissions already received are poems by Roddy Lumsden, Luke Wright, Simon Armitage, Tamar Yoseloff, Mark Ford, Jeremy Reed, Matthew Caley, Tim Dooley, Peter Finch and Roger McGough. Others are arriving daily from all over the world. We’d be delighted to hear from other poets and of other poems. Contact thecaptainstower@gmail.com

By the end of the year we hope to have collected seventy poems by seventy writers. An accompanying tour is being scheduled for Spring and Summer 2011.

We are asking all authors to donate their royalties to CRISIS, the charity for the homeless that Bob Dylan chose as the UK beneficiary of the proceeds of his Christmas in the Heart album.

Editorial Policy

· Submissions are welcome and should be sent to thecaptainstower@gmail.com

· The deadline for submissions is December 10th 2010.

· Submissions will only be provisionally accepted by unanimity of the editors – Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley.

· Shortlisted submissions won’t be confirmed for publication until early 2011.

· Publication will be in May 2011.

· Any previous publication should be noted and will be credited. Copyright will remain with the author.

· We expect most accepted submissions to come from established writers with one or more collections published by well known publishers. However, exceptional work by less known writers will be considered.

· In the submission email, the poet should state his or her willingness to be published in the first and any future editions of the book, their royalties going to Crisis in perpetuity.

· He or she should also provide a biographical note saying when and how Bob Dylan most deeply touched their lives.

· Contributors will receive a copy of the book and may be invited to participate in performances marking the publication.

· Information on any poems relating to Bob Dylan already in existence would be much appreciated, with contact details of the poet if possible.

Editors

Phil Bowen has published four collections of poetry, his first full collection, ‘Variety’s Hammer’ (Stride) being selected for inclusion in The Forward Anthology of 1998. His last collection ‘Starfly’ was also published by Stride in 2004. ‘Nowhere’s Far: New and Collected Poems 1990–2008’ was published by Salt in 2009 and recently reviewed in Poetry Review, to be followed by ‘Cuckoo Rock’, his first collection for children, later in 2010.

He is the editor of two Stride anthologies: ‘Jewels & Binoculars’ (fifty poets celebrate Bob Dylan) and ‘Things We Said Today’ (poetry about the Beatles). He has also written four plays : ‘A Handful of Rain’ – an imagined meeting between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, ‘A Case of the Poet’, ‘Parlez Vous Jig Jig’ and ‘Anything but Love’ – in which Dorothy Parker meets the lyricist Dorothy Fields.

Born in Liverpool in 1949 ,where he taught Drama until 1979, he now lives in Newlyn in Cornwall and works all over the country as a freelance writer, performer and teacher.


Damian Furniss is a poet whose first full collection, ‘Chocolate Che’, was published by Shearsman Books earlier in 2010, and recently highly commended in the Forward prize for best first collection. His pamphlet ‘The Duchess of Kalighat’ won the Tears in the Fence competition.

His poetry, prose and reviews have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and he has read at festivals and arts centres around the country and at the Indian High Commission. He is currently working on two novels: Shin Kicking and Life Before Death. He is the co-host of Blah Blah Blah, an arts magazine radio show on Phonic FM.

Conceived on the night England won the Football World Cup, he was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-Upon-Avon (where he was taught in the same room as Shakespeare) and Keble College, Oxford. He lives in the West Country and works in social care.

David Woolley is a poet, performer, writer, tutor, broadcaster and arts consultant. He has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which, ‘Pursued by a Bear’ (Headland Publications) was launched in June 2010. He edited and published Westwords arts magazine and poetry press for ten years.

He was the inaugural Chair of the National Association for Literature Development, Chair of Festivals of Wales for three years, and has been on the Boards of Dylan Thomas Prize Ltd, Swansea Fringe Festival, and the Advisory Panel for New Welsh Review.

Between 1996 and 2010 he was Literature Adviser for City & County of Swansea and Arts Programmer for the Dylan Thomas Centre where he directed the annual Dylan Thomas Festival. He is currently a regional literature officer for the Arts Council.

Poetry: Les Murray, Damian Furniss, Phil Bowen and more at The St Ives Literature Festival May 1st - 8th 2010

Yes, dear reader that is your host looking unusually bearded and brown. In unashamed acts of self-publicity, I'll be using The Blah Blah Blah Show's blog to publicise events around the launch of my new book 'Chocolate Che' starting on Friday 7th May 2010 at 8.30pm in St Ives Arts Club in a double bill with Phil Bowen. What better way to escape the post-election blues (or yellows, or reds - we abide by Ofcom guidance here) than a weekend in the westernmost tip of Cornwall. The St Ives Literature festival is curated and hosted by Bob Devereux, spans the whole week and ends with an appearance by Les Murray on Saturday 8th. Details of both events below.

Damian Furniss and Phil Bowen - Friday 7th May - 8.30 pm - St Ives Arts Club - £6.00
DAMIAN FURNISS reads from his new book CHOCOLATE CHE (Shearsman). The poems in Chocolate Che were written in Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes and recovering from tuberculosis; travelling up and down the spine of the Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks.Damian Furniss works images into narratives that are both darkly humorous and strangely moving. Using forms as varied as their subjects, with characteristic verbal intensity and a probing wit, he returns to the fixations of his youth in wry but reflective maturity. Along the way, he encounters the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa; visits the houses of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, only to find no one's at home; and collects the stubs of cigars that might once have been smoked by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, but probably weren't. Praise for his chapbook, The Duchess of Kalighat, several poems from which are included in this, his first full collection: 'Furniss explores India in many varied and astonishing images . . . no poet of promise but a poet of arrival.'- Derrick Woolf, Poetry Quarterly Review. 'The fire in the poetry roars. In this book the subject is hot and so is the language.' - Tim Allen, Terrible Work. 'This has a vitality all of its own.' - Brian Hinton, Tears in the Fence. 'Has strong convictions and a clearly defined sense of purpose. These are moving, transforming poems.' - Emma Neale, Scratch. By popular demand PHIL BOWEN reads ALL THAT STUFF. Phil Bowen was born in Liverpool in 1949. His collections of poetry include: The Professor’s Boots (Westwords) 1994, Variety”s Hammer (Stride) 1997, selected for the Forward Book of Poetry-1998, and Starfly published by Stride in 2004. He has also edited two anthologies Jewels and Binoculars (in which 50 poets celebrate Bob Dylan), and Things We Said Today (Poetry about the Beatles) one biography A Gallery To Play To (The story of the Mersey Poets) reprinted by Liverpool University Press 2008 and Nowhere’s Far (collected poetry published by Salt 2009) All That Stuff is a twenty minute poem. 'The Wasteland of the Twentieth Century' - Dave Wooley (Dylan Thomas Centre). 'A real tour de force' – Roger McGough. 'Amazing ……Quite incredible' – Mel Scaffold (Apples and Snakes). 'A work of genius' – John Cooper Clarke. Les Murray - Saturday 8th May - 8.00 pm - St Ives Society Of Artists Crypt Gallery - £10.00       Australia's leading poet and one of the greatest contemporary poets writing in English. His work has been published in ten languages. Les Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and the prestigious TS Eliot Award (1996). In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. He will be visiting St Ives as part of a UK tour and will be reading a selection of his work. For more information and a bibliography visit his website: www.lesmurray.org

Poetry Course / Writing Holiday / Writers' Retreat with Phil Bowen in Andalucia, Spain

Those of you who know me well will be aware I disappear to Andalucia, Spain from time-to-time to rest, recuperate and write. I stay at Vacas Gordas (or Fat Cows) Guest House. It's where most of my prose and much of my poetry has been written over the last five years.

My testimonial is quoted on their new website:

"A few years ago, I searched the Internet for a hideaway where I could escape the demands of my working life and devote myself to my chosen practice - writing poetry and fiction. By chance, I blundered across http://www.fatcows.net/, booked a trip, and have been coming back ever since, sometimes for a few days, often a few weeks. There are no distractions but the landscape, which is arresting, and the weather, which rarely lets you down. The accommodation is simple but soulful and the hospitality friendly but respectful of purpose. The food and drink the best that the region has to offer, lovingly prepared and presented. For days on end I do nothing but walk, think, read and write. I have a book coming out in 2010 with two more in the pipeline, and most of the creative work was done here in Andalucia, where the mountains meet the sea. Whatever your reason for retreat, alone or in a group, you will find refuge and reinvigoration at Cortijo Vacas Gordas".  Damian Furniss, February 2010

It's good to hear that Phil Bowen, a past guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show, is running a creative writing course there this autumn, focusing on poetry.

23 - 30 October 2010
A Fresh Look and A Fresh Listen
A sharply focused 4/5 day poetry-driven creative writing course designed to enliven, enlarge and enlighten. Through challenging yet approachable and time-honoured exercises, the course is guaranteed to free up hitherto dormant source material and be both stimulating and highly enjoyable. Free time for relaxation and visits. Course led by Phil Bowen - poet, performer, biographer and playwright.

Cost is about £100 per day all-inclusive of accommodation, food and drink and tuition.

Enquiries welcome, some places still available.

the venue is also perfect for retreats alone, in a couple, or a small group. Rates for B&B and fully catered accommodation are quoted on the website.

Flybe has regular flights from Exeter to Malaga. 

Poetry: Recommendations from 2009 (4 of 6) Phil Bowen 'Nowhere's Far'

'Nowhere's Far: New and Selected Poems 1990-2008' by Phil Bowen

A clown writes by candlelight, hands stained with greasepaint, made-up cheeks rubbed and streaked. The audience has gone home, the rest of the circus left town, leaving his battered old caravan marooned in a field that's empty as the blank page he's staring at, waiting for the words to come.

If Phil Bowen's stage act is in debt to Roger McGough and John Cooper Clarke, his page craft owes more to Larkin and Auden. We should never assume that the make-up is the man, the performance the writer, although changing audience experiences and expectations has put any serious poet in a dilemma As Don Paterson has said, it is dangerous to read before a paying audience too often. First, you read for them. Next, you act for them. Finally, you write for them. It's difficult to distinguish between boredom and contemplation, but laughter is an explicit reaction, and the temptation is that's what you seek. And if jokes work on the page at all, they only work once. Humour has it's place in poetry, but it has to be of a darker, deeper hue to sustain its impact over multiple readings.

Because Phil Bowen puts on a funny act, many first experience him as a funny man; they then find it difficult to shift their perception of him to incorporate his qualities as a writer, which don't exclude humour but go far beyond it. Nor is his persona that of the archetypal sad clown I opened this piece with, although some of his work has that aspect, not least the pieces from 'Professor's Boots' and 'Variety's Hammer' concerned with comedians on and off stage, which have pathos in spades, as well as some belly laughs. 'Chubby's Turn' has both, but 'When Elvis Met Hitler' is braver with ultimately greater impact, and I have read it - or heard it read - many times.

By 'Starfly' and the new poems that end this book, he'd gone well beyond that world, and also broken the back of the biographical pieces - in this case, a childhood in fifties and sixties Liverpool - that some writers never throw off the straitjacket of. Which isn't to say they should be skipped over, far from it. Some are public poems - vignettes of Liverpool life, character and narrative based, but capturing more than a time and a place, giving it a continuing purpose - while others are more private, the love poems or poems of mourning that you won't hear in a reading, but should do - the impression of the poet you'd be left with would be more complex, for sure.

The poems that leap off those closing pages are different in style and content, or rather a fulfillment of what the earlier work hinted at: they follow a mental process wherever the synapses take it, often into dark territory, always somewhere not entirely expected. He manages to combine an awareness of, and ability at, form with a deceptively conversational style that demonstrates an ear tuned into dialogue. The title poem refers back to The Scarecrow sequence that won his work national attention a decade before. 'An Awful Thought' gives presence to those lurking doubts and suspicions we all deal with. 'This is the Door' demonstrates why even the most tightly structured of his poems have sometimes been praised by critics more concerned with experiments in syntax, and a polyphony of language.

That's not to say that he's not continued to produce the party and performance pieces he's best known for, perhaps because it is those he often chooses to emphasise in his appearances, mixing them with stand-up routines and worked introductions that are as much a part of the stage act as the poems themselves. There are times when his love of comedy should be held in, his knowledge and instinct for poetry allowed its full expression, the vocal delivery informed more by dramatic - Bowen is also a playwright - and less by comic theatre.

Which isn't to suggest that Bowen doesn't understand restraint, it is tangible in the poems about his mother, for example. He also uses the constraint of form, rather than is used by it, and is a master of rhyme and metre when they serve the poem, only allowing the poem to serve them in the parodies and pastiches he sometimes resorts to. The best pieces - some of them unassuming next to their bed fellows, 'There Again' for example, or 'No Doubt' - have an assurance more akin to Louis MacNeice than the Mersey poets of the sixties he is sometimes likened to, perhaps because he wrote their biography. But then McGough, Patten and Henri too are sometimes shackled by their popular image and, indeed, by their popularity. As Bowen would say - and has said - at least they had a gallery to play to. Having worked hundreds of schools in dozens of counties over many years, maybe some of those now grown-up kids will see this book on the shelf and pick it up, remembering the funny man who inspired in them a love of poetry.

Guest November 2009: Phil Bowen

Phil Bowen was an ideal guest for our first show. He is based in the south-west, living in Cornwall. Although primarily a writer of poetry and plays, he's also been involved in film and visual art. And the day of the launch show coincided with the first night of his play 'Anything But Love' at the New End Theatre in Hampstead.

We have Phil's hour long interview in our digital archive and  it is now available on my co-host Rachel McCarthy's website - keep an eye out for future interview podcasts. I don't intend to transcribe or summarise our conversation which traced his life from childhood in Liverpool through college in Chester and onto careers as a teacher, publican and writer touching on his favourite music and how it has informed his work as a writer.

His New and Selected Poems 'Nowhere's Far' has recently been published by Salt. He has edited books about Bob Dylan and the Beatles. He is the biographer of the Mersey poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. His plays have been staged in England, Scotland, Wales and the USA. He conceived of 'Adrian's Wall', an art installation for Liverpool Year of Culture 2008. And he has inspired a love of poetry in thousands of children in hundreds of schools as well as staged plays and made films with young people.

There follows a list of links we used in preparing for Phil's visit to the studio:

PHIL BOWEN

Career Resume
Salt Author Page
Nowhere's Far
Shearsman Review
Stride Magazine Review
Anything But Love video
Books on Amazon
A Gallery to Play to - Preview
Dylan Thomas Festival talk in The Independent
Larkin Society talk
Database of Plays (incomplete)
Poetry in Schools
At Port Eliot Festival
Sample Poetry Lesson
Sample Poetry Workshop
Poets on the Buses