Home turf hit for John McAuliffe and Matt Welton
Centre co-director John McAuliffe was joined by fellow Manchester-based poet Matt Welton for our penultimate Literature Live event on 7 April, when they presented and chatted about their work. The evening was introduced by Irish poet and Centre staff-member Vona Groarke, who planted a few red herrings about the pair's secret talents before handing over to John.
Fittingly, his first poem described his University office on the day he arrived, and he went on to describe his pleasure that his adopted city is so little written about. His own 'Middle Kingdom' cleverly associates categories from Thompson's Directory, to paint a mosaic-like picture of the colourful and sometimes sombre elements making it up.
John admitted to producing a tide of 'post-colonial' poems when he first arrived here, often describing a 'UK in ruin' using images he hadn't actually seen. Imagined realities clearly run in his family, as he found after writing about his father's tinnitus diagnosis: being subsequently told that this had never taken place!
'Road Safety' and 'Return' both describe John's Ireland via images of life in its undergrowth - be it roadside hedgerows or an ant-infested backyard. Still fresh from a term's writing sabbatical he then treated the audience to a selection of new poems, including an homage to Auden (written for the latter's centenary) and a unique interweaving of badgers and escaped IRA paramilitary Desi O'Hare as themes.
Presumably still with his writing leave in mind, John rounded up with a selection of poems about his children's high jinks - and endless capacity to interrupt him.
Matt Welton, who teaches creative writing at the University of Bolton, began his readings with a memorised description of the life of the character Jesus; portraying his photography, 'phone conversations, harmonica-playing and drinking habits among other aspects. The writer then credited John for the combination of work he would be reading, explaining that he had encouraged him to make public "the poems he didn't admit he wrote.""
Matt's "old stuff" selection included 'The Bees', 'He wore a lot of corduroy and he talked a lot of crap' and the noted 'Delicious to say', all of which were again recited from memory. He then deigned to pick up written drafts of new works 'Home Economics' and 'Poppy', admitting that he had previously tended to deny those poems which he couldn't memorise.
His section of the evening finished with the first person 'Sound of Things', also thought of by Matt as 'the monkey poem' with its references to "...the monkey in the mind". During the following Q and A session he explained that he had, until recently, banished the word 'I' from his poetry in a bid to avoid writing about himself, and that this was therefore one of the first 'I' characters he had written.
Among other things the audience was also interested in how teaching poetry affected the writers' own work, and whether they found themselves grading their own poems. John explained that most poets consistently 'grade' their poems as they work through progressive drafts, while Matt admitted that his writerly preoccupations often spill over into his teaching and set texts, before all repaired to the drinks reception for further discussion.