Everybody's Got Talent

 This poem — now [23 November] in its second draft — is toward introducing the poem 'The Arts Manager' as one of my open mic contributions for Amnesty International Worcester Group's Human Rights Day Poetry presentation, a Zoom event for the evening of Thursday, 10 December 2020.

In Praise of Human Potential

While Zen Buddhists pose the question:
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
I propose an image for you to imagine:

“Imagine a scene that I have witnessed,
Of a spoon-fed woman’s joyousness
Upon being given a musical shaker
That I — as cabaret entertainer —
Had offered for audience participation
At a 'come-all-ye' for adults
With learning difficulties”

Some adjustments are more delightful
Than ‘reasonable,’ and no-one
Is truly ‘ineducable’.

By Alan the Poet Therapeutic

21 November 2020

© 2020 by Alan Raymond Wheatley

 

Birthday greetings to guitar teacher Ray Gallo of London N8

Getting back to this blog just now to upload photos for Birmingham folk music scene contacts, I got to looking back through my previous postings.

There I found a photo taken of me with guitar teacher Ray Gallo, whom I first connected with via adult education classes around 1985, and later reconnected with around 2011. And by coincidence, it is Ray's birthday this week, so that gives me a great excuse send him birthday greetings via blog posting!

Ray (left) and pupil Alan (right) show off to Ray's wife Karina
in March 2017

See also http://alanthepoettherapeutic.blogspot.com/2017/03/music-therapy-poem-for-my-guitar.html

Reconnecting with Birmingham Folk Music scene

I'm an ex-Brummie. (I lived in Birmingham, England from 1965 to 1977.) In my last few years as a Brummie I got involved with the Birmingham folk music scene through folk clubs The Grey Cock, The Old Crown Folk Club, the Black Pig Folk Club, and then Birmingham Traditional Music Club (BTMC) from early 1975 to my departure from Birmingham in October 1975. (My introduction to the clubs other than BTMC was a friend Maggie Whetnall whom I met via a New Year 1975 'Folk Revels' event at the Mayfair Ballroom; so Maggie was the first in a chain of links.)

Over the decades I kept faith with BTMC by visits around Christmas time as long as I had family living in Birmingham or Solihull, and kept the vinyl album BTMC regular singers made at the time of my departure in 1977, of which I had a leaving gift copy. Dave James of BTMC and his then wife Janet remained on my Christmas card list even after BTMC folded a few years ago.

Now that I'm

• an Herefordian (again a West Midlander)
• more musically accomplished person than I was as a Brummie, and 
• approaching State Pension entitlement that brings with it fewer restrictions

I've got the urge to reconnect with the Birmingham Folk Music scene. So I found History of Folk Clubs in Birmingham by way of an Internet search, and then the website of Black Diamond Folk Club. It turns out that Black Diamond Folk Club is another name for what I knew as The Old Crown Folk Club but at a different location.

E-mail contact with Paul Ryan of Black Diamond Folk Club helped update me about the BTMC regulars I had last seen at BTMC. And I told Paul that I treasured the memory of a "You should have kept on singing" pep talk he gave me one day on a bus after I'd fouled up in singing the verses of a chorus song but been pulled more in tune by the audience while there were two people laughing embarrassingly at my performance.

Paul also asked me for a photo that he could share with the BTMC regulars who had known me. Though I e-mailed two photos — one from 1989 and one from a recent Wye Ruin It? demonstration against Herefordshire Council's proposed 'Western Relief Road' — Paul told me the photos did not come into his inbox okay.

So the big cue for this blog post has been to make these two photos more accessible to those now with Black Diamond Folk Club who would remember me, and also celebrate the support that experienced performer Paul Ryan gave me way back in 1975.

Alan (top right) in 1989 with Jean-Marie Lavillard, Marianne Segal,
Julie Felix and Sjoukje van der Luit.
Photo: Adapted from Watford Observer

Alan at the start of the 'Wye Walk' organised byWye Ruin It? on Saturday 4 August 2018

Hereford Misteletoe

Misteltoe grows in our Hereford air,
High up in the trees.
Hereford winds will blow our fences down
But can't dislodge it from our trees.

By Alan the Poet Therapeutic
Sunday, 28 January 2018
(c) by Alan Raymond Wheatley

Stairs of Practice

Stairs of Practice poem text, with drop capital

Digging deep for Campaign Against Arms Trade — a mini-speech to advance the fundraising of an excellent cause

Remember, remember, this 5th of November, BAE Systems,(1) slush money,(2) and Britain arming dictators again and again!(3)

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) seeks nonviolently to put an end to all that.(4)

CAAT pursues peaceful economic revolutions in the name of 'conversion':(5)

• Swords into ploughshares
• Spears into pruning hooks
• Missile delivery systems into more accessible and energy-efficient transport modes
• Carpet bombs into a cornucopia of pastures of plenty and
• Bullet holes into boreholes and artillery into artesian wells (6)

So please dig as deeply as you can
To help make such peaceful economic revolutions possible
As you donate to Campaign Against Arms Trade.(7)

Take part in peaceful economic revolutions for pastures of plenty.

By Alan the Poet Therapeutic

Notes

1. https://www.caat.org.uk/search?q=BAE+systems
2. https://www.caat.org.uk/search?q=slush+money
3. https://www.caat.org.uk/search?q=britain+dictators
4. https://www.caat.org.uk/about
5. https://www.caat.org.uk/search?q=conversion
6. Some poetic licence here.
7. https://www.caat.org.uk/support-our-work/donate

Backdrop to the birth of the poem 'The Arts Manager'

I had volunteered at a charity for adults with learning difficulties as 'Basic Education Learner Support Volunteer' in its 'Computer Club' and become more aware of what else was going on around me within that charity. It had a Thursday night 'drop-in' cafe for service users at which wholesome food was prepared for the customers.

Through discussion with the Acting Arts Manager of the place, who was also the main organiser of the 'drop-in' cafe, I also realised that as an amateur entertainer I might have something to contribute in a reciprocal way with an audience of [other] adults with learning difficulties.

It was some years since I had been 'Resident Court Jester' at Julie Felix' and Marianne Segal's Magic Messenger Club, and communicating with an audience had always appealed to me more than Simon Cowell-type-competition 'stardom'. The then Acting Arts Manager was very welcoming of my idea of my entertaining that audience, and so I went along with my guitar and provided musical shakers to audience members to help further their participation and inclusion. That also tied in with a renaissance period regarding my creativity and I made the most of it while I could, writing new words to a traditional melody presenting a sense of common cause with the socially undervalued audience, and sharing humorous and children's songs from my Magic Messenger Club act, and more.

The Arts Manager also told me in a very inspiring way that while she was not comfortable with using computers, she had done a presentation about Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the Kenyan Wangara Maathai in a PowerPoint slide show.(1) I felt that Maathai's work against deforestation was an excellent metaphor for what we were creating in that 'drop-in' cafe where I was a cabaret performer, despite having been told many years ago that I had no potential as a singer.

Though my cabaret singer role there fizzled out as an Arts Manager with different priorities was appointed instead of The [Acting] Arts Manager for whom that poem was written, I treasure the memories of what we shared together in that space and will leave this story with an image that highlights what we created there.

One of the service users was a wheelchair user requiring intensive care including the care required in being fed. (The word 'require' connotes rights as well as need and responsibilities, as Disability Equality Trainer Michèle Tayler told a class I had participated in in 2004.) The one-handed use of a musical shaker helped ensure her inclusion and a transformation in her mood, as her face and her whole being 'lit up' and she might as well have been 'The Belle of the Ball', as her smile beamed so radiantly!

It's years since I was last in touch with that [Acting] Arts Manager who facilitated such transformations in service users, and as I thus don't have her permission to name her here, I shan't but I take the opportunity of celebrating what she accomplished by publishing this story and the poem The Arts Manager.(2)

Link references

1. https://uk.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=wangara%20maathai&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-100&type=newtab
2. http://alanthepoettherapeutic.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-arts-manager.html