BARRY SMITH

Exploring, celebrating, developing the written and spoken word.

Barry Smith Poetry

Barry Smith is the host of Open Mic Poetry at New Park Centre, Chichester, which runs on the last Wednesday of most months at 7.30pm. Together with Joan Secombe, he is the director of Chichester Poetry and editor of Poetry & All That Jazz. Barry is the director of South Downs Poetry Festival. His collection, Performance Rites, is available from Waterloo Press.

Barry Smith has worked in education, as a theatre director and reviewer of books and plays (TES), as well as being the author of various articles on creativity in education. Barry is currently the Co-ordinator of the Festival of Chichester, a month long celebration of the arts. He is Director of Chichester Poetry, which runs the Open Mic Poetry and A Celebration of Poetry events in Chichester, as well as the Poetry & Jazz Café as part of the Festival. He is co-editor of the magazine, Poetry & All That Jazz. In 2018, Barry became Director of the South Downs Poetry Festival.

Barry’s work has appeared online, on youtube and in magazines. He was runner up for the BBC Proms Poetry Competition with Bruckner’s Eyeglass and shortlisted for the Bread & Roses Songwriting and Spoken Word award 2021 for The Masks of Anarchy. Recent readings include performance poetry and jazz with the Charlotte Glasson Band at Blakefest. Recent poetry publications include Clown Town in the online magazine London Grip (December 2016), Being & Nothingness in Acumen magazine (January 2017), River in the Stony Thursday Book (January 2017), This Way Up in Ver Poets Anthology (July 2017), Home Front in London Grip (December 2017), Pilgrims of Night in Acumen (January 2018), Transubstantiation in The Frogmore Papers (91, Spring 2018), Dallas Belle in South Poetry (May 2018), Antigone in the Stony Thursday Book (Oct 2018), Gift in The Journal (Summer 2018), Synaptic and I and I (Indivisibility) in Agenda Online Supplement (June 2019), Home Front in Agenda vol 52 (Nov 2018), Elizabeth, Expectant in South 60 (Oct 2019), Deep Water in London Grip (June, 2020), Looping the Loop in The Journal (June, 2020), River in Poetry South East (June 2020), On the Rocks in South 62 (Oct 2020), The Masks of Anarchy in Culture Matters (Jan 2021), The Music of the Spheres in Littoral, Candlemas edition, (Feb 2021), Between a Rock and a Hard Place/Artistic Licence in Orbis 195 (March 2021), Noli Me Tangere in Littoral, Spring Equinox edition (March 2021), Towards Church Norton in South 63 (April 2021) and Broken Glass in London Grip (Sept, 2021).

Barry Smith - Performance Rites

After featuring in the BBC Proms Poetry and the Bread & Roses awards, Barry Smith's debut collection explores the notion of life as performance. There are poems on both classical and popular music, art, theatre, poetry and clowns. It is a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows in a richly cultured landscape where readers, as both protagonist and audience, are called upon to measure their own experiences against the poet's multi-layered exploration of the rituals of performance.

Barry Smith, Performance Rites, Waterloo Press, £12

Praise for Performance Rites:

'Nourished by the poet's deep love of music, art, and place, these are wide-ranging poems, full of observed detail, wit, and a fully-realised sense of history. In keeping with the title, the poems possess a vivacious performative energy. A rewarding collection.' Penelope Shuttle.

'The poems vividly and sonorously celebrate moving connections between the communal culture of music, theatre, art and the individual's imaginative journey.' Stephanie Norgate.

'In these poems, the reader's awareness is sharpened wonderfully to the different perspectives and values the everyday can perform...versions and performances of all things seen.' John Haynes (Costa Poetry Award winner, 2006)

'A wordsmith has crafted the poems in this collection. The title poem, Performance Rites, is both powerful and poignant. In structure and development, it is a masterpiece.' Mandy Pannett (The Sentinel Literary Quarterly).

'The fusion of poetry and jazz was often near-perfect..' Greg Freeman on Barry Smith and the Charlotte Glasson Trio at Blakefest.

Performance Poetry:

Barry works as a performance poet reading his own poetry with jazz and roots musicians, including Jamie Leeming (jazz guitar), Liam Ruth (roots guitar), David Johnson (keyboards) and the Charlotte Glasson jazz trio. You can view Barry performing On the Rise with Charlotte Glasson band at Blakefest 2019 by clicking on the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLc0SkBsR1M&feature=youtu.be

You can watch videos of Barry reading some of his poetry at Write Angle by clicking on the link below. Poems featured include: Bosham Harbour, Bath Comforts, The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, Off Your Trolley, Endgame, Eternal Riff, Broken Glass and Strictly X Factor: the Return of Dirty Den.

http://www.petersfieldwriteangle.co.uk/videos_barrysmith.html

Reviews:

Blakefest 2019 - Smith’s own poetry contribution involved a fine collaboration with Charlotte Glasson’s jazz trio...The fusion of poetry and jazz was often near-perfect, particularly in poems about legendary bassist Herbie Flowers’ role in Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, and another about a Paul Klee painting that transmuted into powerful and moving lines about the Holocaust. (Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud)

Smith's set with the Charlotte Glasson jazz trio was fabulous. (Louise Taylor, poet, comedian, workshop leader)

Thank you to 'Beatnik' Barry Smith for his properly jazzed up poems, performed with Charlotte Glasson and her band. (Naomi Foyle, poet, novelist, editor).

Knight Life:

For 25 years, Barry Smith and Joan Secombe edited the multi-prize winning magazine of young people’s creative writing, Knight Life. Awards included W.H. Smith Young Writers, Cadburys, Poet of the Month (TES, many times), Ver Poets, Poetry on the Buses, Foyles, Mary Glasgow, the Roald Dahl Foundation, Shelter/Waterstones and the Poetry Society. Contributors include Sam Meekings, James Simpson and Liz Adams who have all gone on to publish full poetry collections.

Bruckner's Eyeglass

At the exhumation of Beethoven

the disciples and the ghouls gathered to watch

dank earth that smothered the master’s mortal

remains shovelled aside: see it crazily

piled on the graveside, gradually

releasing the casket which imprisoned

the emperor of music; did those assembled

edge closer in hope to hear the gathering

whisper of the hymn of joy, or step back

in disdain, dismay and stifled despair?

As cold iron lever ground on splintered wood

the diffident, bucolic maestro

leant forward to stare, ear and eye to eye and ear.

All being accomplished, and Beethoven

returned to rest, the spectators dispersed

in a solemn diaspora of presence.

Herr professor, said one of Bruckner’s crowd,

where is your eyeglass? Bruckner, enraptured,

absently brushed his brow and realised

ocular absence. He stopped, searched and shyly

smiled: it lay now with his love for ever.

Barry Smith