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Bill Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Oxford, where he did a BA in English Literature and then a D.Phil. His thesis was published as To Circumjack MacDiarmid (OUP, 1992). He has held a series of residencies in Dumfries and Galloway and in Morayshire. He was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham (1994-96), Writer in Residence on Cumbria Arts in Education's Skylines project (1997), and is currently Writing Fellow for the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. Since 1996 he has taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University.
His books of poetry include Sharawaggi, written with Robert Crawford (Polygon, 1990); The Testament of the Reverend Thomas Dick (Arc, 1993); and, with Bloodaxe, Forked Tongue (1994) and Cabaret McGonagall (1996). Forked Tongue was a PBS Recommendation, a New Generation title, and was shortlisted for the Saltire and T.S. Eliot Prizes. It won an SAC Book Award. Cabaret McGonagall was shortlisted for the Forward and McVitie's Prizes, and won an SAC and a Northern Arts Book Award.
He has also taken part in various collaborative projects with other artists, most recently Time Prints: a stained glass piece by the artist Bridget Jones which is now part of the Dumfries and Galloway Tourist Information Centre in Dumfries. Other projects include:
· Four Seasons in Woodland with composer Keith Morris, an extended musical piece for choir, brass band, street band, octet, two singers and poet. Premiered at the Caedmon Hall, Gateshead in December 1996; other performances include the 1997 Durham Literary Festival.
· On your Nerve: collaboration with Glasgow poets David Kinloch and Donny O'Rourke, a dramatic performance piece about New York poet Frank O'Hara. Performed at the 1997 Glasgow Mayfest at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, also as part of Buxton's Fringe Film Festival.
· Cross-Cuts: South Bank Centre initiative to produce poem-films for Poetry International at the Royal Festival Hall (December 1996). Citizen Babel was a collaboration with Anton Hecht and the pupils of Berwick County High School.
· Poetry and Film: conference at Queen's Hall, Hexham, organised in collaboration with the Northern Poetry Library (February 1996). The programme comprised discussions, screenings, lectures and performance, involving poets, producers and film-makers.
· Rising Sun: a sculpture trail at the Rising Sun Country Park, Newcastle upon Tyne, (December 1995). Based around a 'legend' for the park, built up from poetry and story-telling.
I would like to contribute pieces to each of the main ideas (the Hotel, the Drowned Book, possibly the Newspaper). I keep thinking of the monks' scriptorium in Jarrow, full of people becoming talented then dying of the plague; or John Lydgate in Bury St Edmunds churning out 145,000 lines of verse on anything at all; or the author of the Gawain poem possibly writing the Pearl but no one knowing anything else about him; or the people who actually put the good bits of the Border Ballads in.
I'd like to be some nameless monastic figure on the cutting edge of dark age technology or local medieval priest who seems slightly heretical but you can't pin anything on him guvnor or Jacobean university wit gone loopy tunes back at the bankrupt family seat or minor eighteenth-century lawyer who produced an epic on fly fishing (fortunately lost) but whose minor works weren't as bad as all that or Edwardian draper's assistant who got TB and Baudelaire and Whitman all at the same time. Not that I want to produce pastiche of any of these periods, but poems with some sense of this infused through them.
But the main thing I would like to work on in terms of requiring computing skills is a kind of glass tower, spiral staircase or other construction, based on the text and designs I produced with the stained glass artist Bridget Jones. This would be The Glass Alphabet. I'd like to build something that would be very unlikely to be replicated in reality. (I'd also like to create a Shetland island in the shape of Hugh MacDiarmid, where Rilke and Valery could nest on a raised beach of obscure geological terms).
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