Antics Sound Archive

Audio recordings from The Manager and other poems and collaborations by Robin Vaughan-Williams

Features:

• The Manager. 'A must for those at the mercy of managers. Even more of a must for managers themselves.' The Manager was published by Happenstance Press in March 2010. Find out more at zeroquality.net, or purchase a copy at the Happenstance online shop.
• Time Is Running Out! (restart your system now). An extract from part 1 of 'Time Is Running Out!', a poetry and music piece performed at Off the Shelf Festival in Sheffield on 27 October 2009. Poetry by Robin Vaughan-Williams, music by the Ella Luk Project.

Spoken Word Antics on Sheffield Live

All tracks in this section were recorded for the Spoken Word Antics radio show on Sheffield Live, presented by Robin Vaughan-Williams. All works are copyright of the authors.

Highlights:

• Tina McKevitt sings 'On Raglan Road', by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), set to a traditional tune.
• Tom Stafford reads '1968', the true story, based on transcripts from the 'Chicago 8' trial, of Abbie Hoffman, how he tried to levitate the Pentagon 300ft in the air to exorcise it of evil spirits and was accused of 'symbolically urinating' on (or at) its walls.
• Trinny and Suzanna, throw-away smiles...Matt Black does love poems his way.
• Anna Robinson brings together voices and memories from a Waterloo housing estate: 'how much sky can you see above the rooftops?'.
• Jim Caruth reads from his Staple 2006 Manuscript Competition winning A Stone's Throw.
• Philip Howarth's 'Nice Weather'—a touch of blanc-noir—on the day it snowed feelings and 'children [...] ran towards their parents in slow motion'.
• 'Trig Points' is a series of haiku that capture the excitement of an encounter with nature. Accompanied by Simon Heywood's shimmering guitar sounds, Matt Clegg maps out the Lake District as a symbolic landscape where everything—from cars to stars, a campsite tap, chimney smoke merging / into the slow lapse of light—seems ready to burst into meaning.
• A bilingual reading of the Serbian poet Vasko Popa's 'Give Me back My Rags', with two voices. The discussion covers Popa's use of folklore, his opposition to socialist realism in Yugoslavia, and his current position in both Serbian and Croation literary culture. Thanks are due to Jonathan Baxter for providing the initial impetus for this project.
• The latest in Tom Stafford's series of historical vignettes, '1983' dives into one of the crisis points of the cold war and contemplates the politics of 'doing nothing'.
• Steve Scott's 'On the Wonk', the story of a blind date. Read in a Rizla light voice and with an eye for the truly cringeworthy moments of conversation. Listen out for the laugh.
• Michael Greavy—comically dour poems, full of tightly exaggerated imagery, worlds collapsed together, strawberries and war.
• Nell Farrell on pissing outside for girls in 'Splash' and what if Mena from Bram Stoker's Dracula got post traumatic stress syndrome in 'Mena: Afterwards'.
• Find out about the origins of International Womens Day in the US labour movement and the meaning of the word 'womanist' in a discussion with Nell Farrell and Corinne Salisbury.

Spoken Word Antics 3rd birthday, 10 January 2006

Recordings made by Andrea Milde, edited by Robin Vaughan-Williams.

All works are copyright of the authors and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Highlights:

• Roy Blackman's 'Ode to a Skylark', an exhilerating evocation of the age of industry, reminiscent in its driving rhythm and accumulating cadences of Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'The Windhover'.
• 'Crookesmoor Cannibals'—Matt Black digs up aspects of Sheffield's pre-regen. history that others would rather ignore, and reveals the moral stratification of cannibal society.
• Jonathan Woolley's The Clutches of Harrier Jasmin, a hilarious monologue on the absurd adventures of Harrier Jasmin and his criminal racket.
• Corinne Salisbury's poems—cool, mesmerising, sultry lyrics leave you with a sense of the world brooding.
• Doreen Bottomley's sharp and mischievous musings on growing old in 'That Old Woman'.
• Philip Howarth delves into the mysteries of masculinity in 'World's Bloke'.
• Graham Roos's 'Death stretches out his fingertips...', heartfelt and elegant iambics on the death of a friend;
• Matt Black's 'The Garden'...not just any garden, a wilderness of physician's delights.
• Roy Blackman's song 'Ginger Cornet Player in a Yorkshire Sally Band', in which the author demonstrates his skill at whipping the audience into a deranged participatory frenzy.

ReVerberate: Live Literature Comp 001 (CD)

Edited by Zoe Lambert and Dave Maass

ReVerberate is a collection of recordings made at the Manchester live lit. night Verberate. It includes material from two poets familiar at Spoken Word Antics, Robin Vaughan-Williams and Corinne Salisbury, as well as performances from a number of writers based in Manchester and Liverpool.

The CD costs £3, and can either be picked up at Spoken Word Antics, or ordered by post (+p&p). Email for details.

Highlights:

• Robin Vaughan-Williams: poetry meets The Office.
• Eleanor Rees, transformations in the city by night.
• In 'ETC' John Hall offers some deeply ironic observations on his bull's-eye sweater, the humiliation of death, a bouncing cat, and being a man.
• 'My Sweetheart', Kate Gilbert's moody song-poem.
• Chanje Kunda, 'sensual afro-centric womanist poetry'.
• Corinne Salisbury, a sense of the world brooding.

Tracklisting:

Elly Rees 1. Night River (1:33) / 2. Extract from 'A Nocturnal Opera' (3:52)
Chanje Kunda 3. Empty Rooms (2:30) / 4.Fat Sparkin(2:18)
Gary Parkinson 5. Extract from Land Of Cakes, a novel (5:12)
Kate Gilbert 6. My Sweetheart (5:33)
Robin Vaughan-Williams 7. Mantra (1:25) / 8. Photobooth (0:57) / 9. Health and Safety Incident (1:34) / 10. Untitled (1:28)
Corinne Salisbury 11 .Twenty-One (1:19) / 12. January After the Break (1:51)
Tony Curry 13. I'm Sick Of It (1:02) / 14. The Return of the Noble Savage (3:20) / 15.The Gorilla Was on Ecstacy (2:33)
Zawe Ashton 16. Kaleidoscope (2:24) / 17. Dreams Are For Those Who Sleep (2:23) / 18. It's Now (1:34)
John Hall 19. And Still I Cannot Wake From Their War (4:21) / 20.The ETC Poem (2:14)
Bonus Track: 21. Julian Daniel, Prince of Comedic Poetry (11:59)