As I’ll be speaking and reading poems at this year’s Maryport Literary festival, I’m delighted to bring you the following news item:

“The Venus Stone, focal point of this year’s innovative literary Festival in Maryport at the end of November, has just undergone a historical facelift. It seems she may be a true Venus after all!

Always interpreted as a representation of a ‘lady of the night’, the Venus was thought to be hanging about outside the fort gateway, with more than literature on her mind, and was possibly a sign for a brothel in the fort. However, new insights into the greater significance of the Venus Stone have recently come to light.

The figure next to the gateway is probably a true statue of Venus standing in a substantial temple dedicated to her, says stone expert Dr. Peter Hill. Dr Hill, in a Review of the collections at the Museum, has pointed out that the sculpture itself is of high-quality workmanship with the gateway shown with pillared arches. The temple has finely carved columns with capitals supporting an arch.

The stone itself would have been part of a major gateway within the fort. The gateway, the only contemporary representation of a gateway to a Roman fort, is the pattern used for reconstructions on Roman sites and films.

Archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones has further interpreted the sculpture as representing Venus in her role as a protector of men, but this year’s LitFest, the third to be based around a stone in the Roman collection, will be exploring every aspect of the Goddess of Love!”
Maryport LitFest
25-28th November
Read all about it at www.senhousemuseum.co.uk
or contact Jane Laskey at the Museum on 01900 816168

Well, time to catch up. So much (too much) has happened! A couple of weekends ago I spent Saturday at Manchester’ Contact Theatre, taking part in UNSUNGFEST, an independent festival of art, poetry, performance and music. 

It was a brave venture, organised by Matt Byrne, Justin Dooley and James Byrn. They took over the whole theatre space for the day and had a constant, rolling audience with people coming in and out throughout the day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

My share was the 7 p.m. slot, reading poems with fellow Manchester poets Jon Glover and Linda Chase – both notable teachers of creative writing as well as local celebrities. It was a great session: Jon magisterial, reading his moving and nearly-surreal poems about adventures in America (snakes under the house!) and the weirdness of having MRI scans; Linda, chromatic in the spotlight with matching red shoes, hair and A4 binder, entertaining us with her sexy and colourful poems about love on the bohemian fringes of the US counterculture.

Before that I was able to catch a good set from Steven Waling and Simon Rennie (loved a line from his poem ‘Carbon Copy’ – ‘The cocooned insect dreams the same dream as the dozing philosopher’. I can imagine Blake coming up with that!) And a fine reading from the sensitive Helen Tookey, with her haunting, introverted poems coloured and perfumed by the Wirral seashore.

Matt organised the whole thing on a shoestring and it was an amazing achievement. Let’s hope he’s already planning next year’s FEST and that it won’t remain UNSUNG!