Introduction
Allan Sutherland: Paddy Masefield poems
Paddy: A Life - cover page
Allan Sutherland is Director of Disability Arts think-tank the Edward Lear Foundation. As a performance poet, he is a long-established figure on the disability circuit and was festival poet for Above and Beyond. His book Disabled We Stand (1981) won awards in the UK and the US, and is still required reading on university courses. Allan is an adviser to the National Disability Arts Archive (at Holton Lee) and is leading a project to create an oral history of Disability Arts.
The interviews with Paddy Masefield on which these 32 poems are based are the first outcome of that project.
Paddy Masefield is one of the leading figures of the Disability Arts movement, loved and respected by the people who know him. He has been a key spokesperson for disabled people in the arts, and worked tirelessly to demolish the barriers that stand in their way.
Prose undressed, becomes naked poetry
Paddy Masefield adds some thoughts on the process behind the telling of his story in Paddy: A life
Every one of us who comes home and switches on the radio, can instantly tell whether they are listening to a play, or an interview. For, while dramatists write in taut, articulate, comprehensible language, those of us who have worked in journalism or the media still remember the shock of seeing our first verbatim transcript and discovering that most of us in real life speak a garbled, at times nonsensical and largely unpunctuated ramble, verging on the incomprehensible, when it is read back out of context, shorn of the speaker's fleece of gestures, facial emotions, and forceful expressions of distaste or approval.
37 years after editing my first arts radio programme, this was still my embarrassed reaction on reading Allan Sutherland's faithful transcript of 8 hours archive recording of my lifetime recollections, and especially my fascination with disability arts, in the 18 years of my disability consciousness.
Even though I am a dramatist, Allan Sutherland's writing skills encompass journalism, drama, prose and poetry. So that from this daunting pool of words, he was able to detach small sections, hang them up to dry, and then let them unfold into small abstract poems. While the thoughts are mine. The art, this time is his.
- Paddy Masefield
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Paddy: A Life
last updated: 2005-07-01 00:00:00
More by this author : X’08 London's 8th International Disability Film Festival What is Disability Arts? Celebrating disability arts Disability Arts Chronology
tags : poetry interview_profile history disability arts creative writing
