It being the end of another year of ups, downs and sideways
shunts, here’s something by way of an overview. A perilous one, in some ways,
2015. The great summer of dearth wasn’t much fun, without work or prospects
thereof, but then the twelve months as a whole weren’t so bad – at least in
terms of having stuff to do and feeling like some of that might have been
useful. Teaching settled in as part of the routine and there was just enough
other paid stuff to keep the wolf from the proverbial. That said, the Tories
getting back in and the racist hysteria over the refugee ‘crisis’ confirmed
worst fears and the daily march to the newsagent to pick up fags wasn’t made
any brighter by having to read the easy malice in the red-top headlines.
Personally, perhaps one of the highlights was starting to feel
that banging on about getting more writing from SE Europe translated was
bearing fruit. Both Modern Poetry in
Translation and Raceme published
translations of the Bulgarian poet Iliyan Lyubomirov this year and other irons
are certainly warming up in other fires. In the autumn I joined the editorial
team of the international poetry website Iris
News – again mostly translating poetry from Bulgarian - while our online
Anglo-Bulgarian art/poetry collaboration Colourful
Star notched up its 100th post and has been featured in both Iris News and Ink Sweat and Tears. It was also quite something to make my own
publishing debut in Bulgaria, with the poem ‘Everything You Need for a Poem’
translated into Bulgarian by Yuliyana Todorova.
Elsewhere, it was also great to have some work published by Blackbox Manifold, Antiphon, Message in a Bottle
and Black Sheep Journal – not to
mention some psychogeographical rambling in Bristol
24/7 and Star & Crescent.
The best thing, though, was having been part of Theaster
Gates’ project Sanctum. To be honest,
when I first heard of it, I was deeply cynical (‘Yeah, yeah, American artist
gets paid loads just to have an idea and we’ll get bugger all for providing the
“content” – typical of the bleedin’ “content provision” mentality” ... etc
etc), but as it turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong. As a space, it was
great to perform in (despite the carefully deployed buckets to catch the
rainwater) and I soon got to learn that whenever I turned up it was going to be
different. Finishing a 20-minute set at 10am and finding that our neighbours
across the street were in the audience – not having known that I’d be on or
even knowing that I wrote stuff and read it out loud – was quite something –
though not quite so much of a ‘something’ as meeting them a few days later on
the street and discovering that they’d become ‘addicted’ to the strange
unfurling endlessness of this ongoing project. I was lucky enough to be in on Sanctum’s last 30 minutes – the ensuing
silence after so many days of non-stop performance was quite something as well.
Next year, then, there will be stuff. There will be translations
and collaborations, there will be arguments and advocacy. There may well be
books and anthologies. There will almost certainly be conferences, meetings and
Skype calls. There may even be cricket in the Balkans.
