Brockley Max 2019 Noon and Knots

Posted on 05/05/2019 by Cherry Potts

We are involved in Brockley Max Festival again this year, with readings in a church, and a brewery!

Sunday 2nd June 7pm

St Hilda’s Church Courtrai Road SE23 1PL

Math Jones will be reading from his new poetry-collection-as-novel, The Knotsman

The Knotsman does not exist, you will not find him in history books or collections of ‘bygone’ skills. But there he is, going from house to house, village to village, poem to poem, battlefield to gallows, unravelling knots and problems, physical, emotional and psychological; a new kind of cunning man, not always welcome, not always quite as clever as his fingers and picks would have him believe.

Wednesday 5th June 7pm

We will be at the lovely Brockley Brewery, 31 Harcourt Road London SE4 2AJ

for NOON

Readings of poetry and short stories on the theme of Noon from the Solstice Shorts Anthology of the same name

Everyone thinks of noon as being a split second as the clock’s hands draw together, the bell tolls twelve times – but there is so much more to it than that.

with

Stuart McKenzie, Michelle Penn, Laila Sumpton, Marika Joseph, Liam Hogan

Happy birthday Shakespeare and a consideration of knots

Posted on 23/04/2019 by Cherry Potts

Is it actually Will’s birthday? No one knows, but there is a tradition that ties it to 23rd April because he was baptised on the 26th.

Anyway happy birthday Will.

As we recently published Math Jones‘ The Knotsman, which is set about a century after Shakespeare’s time and in Worcestershire, rather than Warwickshire, and is in any case, a not quite historie, as Shakespeare’s histories are not quite historie, I’ve been looking for links.

this is not quite research – a lighthearted look at the knot in Shakespeare.

Was Shakespeare a knotsman, or did he know someone who was?

He uses knot to mean a group of people, often when that group is not entirely to be trusted, and ocassionally to mean a meeting of said group.

And to mean a contract, or bond, particularly of marriage.

He shall not knit a knot in his fortunes with the finger of my substance
Page, of a suitor in Merry Wives of Windsor

I’ll have this knot knit up tomorrow morning
Capulet, when Juliet submits to the marriage with Paris Romeo & Juliet

Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven… The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolv’d, and loos’d; And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus discovers Cressida is promised to another.

To hold you in perpetual amity, To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts
With an unslipping knot …
Agrippa proposing a marriage in Anthony & Cleopatra

Math Jones takes this imagery literally and has his characters tie, and untie, betrothal ropes, with terrible consequences. Lives and loves unravel, and the Knotsman must run for his life.

Math is in Worcester, the Knotsman’s stomping ground, tonight, reading alongside Claire Trévien and Charley Barnes at the Hive. see facebook event

Knot pictures from the recent Anni Albers exhibition at Tate Modern

Final Video from the Launch of The Knotsman

Posted on 22/04/2019 by Cherry Potts

Math Jones reads Mr Swarthye

at the launch of The Knotsman