Throughout the modern age artists, performers, poets and musicians have rallied the battle-cry that the show must go on and continued to amaze and entertain beyond adversity. No more. Today the music venues, concert halls, theatres and clubs are empty as we look towards unknown futures. We see flood waters recede leaving green fields that once played host to summer festivals that will now only offer solitude in a land confused with itself.
Watching the news, it was with some inevitability that the launch of our new anthology Green Fields would succumb to the virus but we were still deeply saddened and shocked to hear that the whole of the Huddersfield Literature Festival was cancelled. Whilst we hope to see some of the festival events re-arranged, unfortunately due to other commitments later in the year and the number of readers involved it’s simply not possible to re-arrange another event for Green Fields.
Green Fields will be released on the 25 March and you can pre-order now to make sure that you’re one of the first to receive this wonderful collection of poems inspired by music and music festivals. Whilst we can’t pretend that poetry will make the world a better place we can say that Green Fields is the perfect antidote to our current situation. Let us transport you to the hazy lazy summer days, filled with music and love.
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Kaiser Cheese
Eyesh tryna get in
Eyesh tryna she Kaiser Cheese
Eyesh shaving up all year
Eyesh adshum bevvies on coash
Bounsher dushnt lemme in
Nosh fish shtate he shez
Eyesh shed you black you black eyesh shed
Thashit enough he shez and chush me out
Oushide Shraymansh
Eyesh mesh fish Fishfaysh man
From Shalfur Harfish Shellowfish
And Fishfaysh shez
Geeshush nailed to crosh
For my shin
Ed Reiss
Underneath the Stars
The people have no wish to be a ‘folk’ – Bertolt Brecht
We’re a fair field full of folk,
assembled here for music in the last,
long August days of sunshine,
in a Barnsley hinterland as beautiful
as any Tuscan landscape.
We are modern people: friends and families
from everywhere, and though we love
our shared mythology — green fields, green men,
chalk horses, standing stones and sullen ghosts
on still more sullen moors — we’re wary
of what those who’d have us be ‘a folk’,
would do with it: plunge us in blood
and ancient hatred; re-fight wars whose hell
few now live on to recollect; make us so scared
of what’s outside, we’re pliant to their will.
We are gathered in the big tent. Billy Bragg
tells us he isn’t ‘folk’ and sings words from a world
as anxious and dishonest as our own. He sings us
You fascists are bound to lose: we sing it back –
three thousand voices underneath the stars.
Mike Farren
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