Dear Charles,
Thanks for letting me borrow your house. Honestly it feels like you'll be back any moment! I know I said I came with a cat; I'm sorry I didn't bring him after all. He looked so settled where he was, I couldn't bring myself to uproot him. And I ... Read More
The Charles Causley Trust and Literature Works are delighted to announce their next Writer in Residence for 2018, Jen Hadfield, who has arrived all the way from Shetland to live at Cyprus Well, home of the late Charles Causley and now a retreat for writers and artists, managed by The ... Read More
To navigate a place is to traverse it, to propel oneself through it, to make one’s own way. It requires agency and decision-making as a path is chosen (often around and between obstacles and boundaries). Navigation involves weaving and intermingling with place; forking and delineating. Originally the word was used ... Read More
I’m now three weeks in to this three-month residency and have been sufficiently immersed in the places and the stories about the places to at least be orientated – to have found my bearings. Orientation is the beginning of a journey – a looking eastwards for the sunrise. It is ... Read More
Jack Thacker was the winner of The Charles Causley International Poetry Competition 2016 with his fantastic poem ‘The Load.’ Judged by Sir Andrew Motion with the exciting prize of £2000, and the added prestige of the backdrop of Charles Causley’s centenary year, the standard of entries was fantastically high.
Jack ... Read More
Not so much putting poetry in its place, or keeping poetry in its place, but speculating, at the end of a poetry ‘placement’ in what has become, over the months, one dear perpetual place (to quote WB Yeats) on the possible interconnectedness of inspiration and location, location, location.
Living in Cyprus ... Read More
I was born on an Irish sea of eggs and porter,
I was born in Belfast, in the MacNeice country,
A child of Harland & Wolff in the Iron forest.
My childbed a steel cradle slung from a gantry…
‘HMS Glory’: Charles Causley
Home and AwayIn earlier musings (and in a Literature Works interview last ... Read More
No ideas but in things (William Carlos Williams) .
A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces,
An airline ticket to romantic places…
‘These Foolish Things’ (Holt Marvell & Jack Stracey)
Thinking of ThingsNot that I’ve spent 4 weeks of my 3 months in Charles ... Read More
There are two podcasts left to share with you, and they are both readings by the 7*******s writers. Over the last three months during Andrew’s residency and my own involvement with the Charles Causley Trust we have shared many conversations, poetry group meetings, workshops and come to discuss our own ... Read More
Life at sea demands an economy of language…
Skylark (afterword) from Hands to Dance and Skylark – Charles Causley
– In A Glass of Salt Water – his introduction to the 1979 edition ... Read More
The Last Week of Residency and Bowden DerraAlthough another blog and podcast will appear here next week, last Friday was officially the end of my mentoring residency with Andrew Fentham and The Charles Causley Trust. We had the great pleasure of facilitating a poetry workshop with the residents at Bowden ... Read More
Here at The Charles Causley Trust, we are excited to announce that our next resident of Cyprus Well will be Cahal Dallat. Cahal will be with us from May to July, under the kind sponsorship of Literature Works, and we are excited to share his plans with you via a ... Read More
I’ve listened to a lot of solo piano music over the last few months while wondering if I can imagine Charles Causley’s interest in and appreciation of the piano – an instrument that for centuries has been so beautifully composed for and often so beautifully played. I wonder as ... Read More
The latest Podcast begins with a series of poems and piano pieces arranged by Marcelo and Mac. The first poem is “Tabacaria” written as an homage to the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under the ‘heteronym” Alvaro de Campos, a fictitious character who lived in Tavira where Marcelo ... Read More
Translate, I hear you say. Translate.
‘Sorel Point’ – Charles Causley
– William Jay Smith – reviewing Secret Destinations: Selected Poems in 1990 – praised Causley as cool and chaste – perhaps untranslatable to the omnipresent and overestimated baroque buffoonery of Smith’s contemporary American scene ... Read More