Creatures of the Voice / Voices of the Creatures | by Paula Thompson

Creatures of the Voice / Voices of the Creatures is a new pamphlet of poems by Paula Thompson.

Contents:
Anarchist’s Dream
Life is Not an Audrey Hepburn Movie
Soul Medicine
The Turn Around
On Life’s Last Hands
Poor Door
Left to the Imaginary
Silk Cut Blues
River of Piss
The Calling
Muppets and Ladders

& “Literature Wakes Us Up”: a conversation between Paula Thompson and Lotte L.S. about poetry and everything in between.

Paula Thompson lives in Great Yarmouth. Her passion is writing and performing to bring together music, theatre and poetry. Paula is currently working towards a theatre for the senses, in which theatre, music and poetry are utilised for self-determination and self-transformation, influenced by the politically and socially engaged theatre of Augusto Boal and Antonin Artaud. Scraps, an EP of 4 tracks made in collaboration with the poet, musician, and artist Jason Parr, was recorded and released in 2020.

56 pages, A5 | Edited, typeset & printed by red herring press in Great Yarmouth.
First printing January 2022 | Second printing January 2024.

£5 including UK shipping. | £10 including shipping to rest of world. | £3.50 to Great Yarmouth residents: collect from red herring press, 135 King Street, Great Yarmouth (or get in touch).

Free to anyone who can't afford it. Get in touch: [email protected]

Extract from Muppets & Ladders:

Look at us.

Here we sit, year after year at these old,

tabby-scratched canteen tables

Watching the next generation of dilated pupils

Pace up and down like lost dogs,

searching for their absent minded tales

There is no sign of a youth’s nurtured pride

In the dormancy of ‘Keep Britain Tidy!’

Nobody cares, except a vexed myriad

of mops and buckets

Who are hardly paid to do so

And here, people dare not breathe a word of truth

In fear of losing their positions,

which stand solid as jelly

Meanwhile…

The queen of clocks spies on us,

Moving her golden fingers

En route for our demise

What if we leave this miserable institution

of grave chance?

Constantly convincing ourselves

We are sort of safe, sort of secure and grateful for work

Until that starched iron suit of the cold faced cobra

slits you in two

And you wonder: Why am I here?