Profile
Academic
Cliff Forshaw is a poet. He teaches Creative Writing as well as
convening or contributing to a wide spectrum of literary courses
focusing on Elizabethan, Romantic and contemporary literature.
Cliff has particular interests in classical and Renaissance satire
and myth, translation, and contemporary poetry: all areas in which
he welcomes research proposals. He is currently supervising a
thesis on Tony Harrison and has recently, for a visiting Chinese
student, supervised work on Auden’s influence on the Chinese poet
Mu Dan. Cliff also acts as a consultant on prosody for the OED.
Creative
Cliff has been: a Blue Nose Poet-of-the-Year, International
Writer-in-Residence at Hobart, Tasmania; Writer-in-Residence at
Borsec, Transylvania; twice a Writing Fellow at Hawthornden Castle,
Scotland; a Djerrassi Resident Artist in California; and, as a
performer, winner of the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. A
recent chapbook Wake won the Flarestack Pamphlet Prize
2009. His most recent full-length collection Trans
includes an updating of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cliff,
working with the musicians Roddie Harris and Bethan Jones (who also
teaches in the Department), translated Trans itself from
page to stage performance. A new full-length collection,
Pilgrim Tongues, is due from Arc in 2012.
His first short film from the collaboration Drift was
shown at the Humber Mouth Festival 2008. Cliff also trained as a
visual artist and his work has been exhibited in the UK and USA. He
produced two series of paintings and many of the photographs for
the Hide and Postcards from Hull commissions
(Humber Mouth Festivals 2009 and 2010). Over twenty of his
paintings and drawings were shown, together with work by
poet-painters Malcolm Watson and John Wedgwood Clarke, at the
university gallery artcafé in June 2010 to celebrate the
launch of Postcards from Hull. For ebooks of these and
other Humber Mouth collaborations http://www.ihull.org/larkin/publications/
For poems, downloads, and more, go to Cliff's
website and also Poetry pf http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/cliffforshawpage.html
. Cliff’s Larkin Centre page:
http://www.ihull.org/larkin/featured-writers-from-the-larkin-centre-2/clii-forshaw/
Latest Project: Under Travelling
Skies: book, film and exhibition.
Larkin25 Words Award winner 2011.
Cliff’s proposal for a project involving
writers and artists associated with the Larkin Centre, won the
first Larkin25 Words Award. Cliff will lead a project to
produce a book of poems, prose, photographs and paintings
responding to the theme of Larkin’s Hull. The book, accompanied by
a short film and an exhibition of paintings, will feature work by
poets Peter Didsbury, Christopher Reid, Carol Rumens,
Maurice Rutherford, David Wheatley, novelist Ray French, poet and
short-story writer Kath McKay, poets and painters John Wedgwood
Clarke, Cliff Forshaw and Malcolm Watson, film-maker and visual
artist Quentin Budworth, musician and writer Amanda Lowe, writer
Mary Aherne, and Larkin scholar James Booth. Under
Travelling Skies will be launched in summer 2012 in Hull to
coincide with the Humber Mouth Festival.
Selected Publications
Poetry collections
- Tiger (HappenStance,
2011)*
- Wake (Flarestack Poets, 2009)*
- A Ned Kelly Hymnal (A Paper Special
Edition/Cherry on the Top Press, 2008)*
- Trans (The Collective Press, Wales,
2005)
- The Dade County Book of the Dead
(NPF, 1995)
- Minus Twenty-Seven: Three Poems for a Russian New
Year (Weasel, 1995)*
- Strange Tongues (Weasel Productions,
1994)
- Esau’s Children (NPF, 1991)
- Himalayan Fish (Peacock Books,
Orissa, India, 1991)
(*chapbooks)
Forthcoming
Pilgrim Tongues (Arc, 2012)
Co-authored poetry collections
- Postcards from Hull, book and a
series of postcards, which included paintings and photographs by
Cliff (with John Wedgwood Clarke, Ray French, Kath McKay, Carol
Rumens, David Wheatley and others: Hull City Council,
2010)
- Hide book, which also include
paintings by Cliff (with John Wedgwood Clarke, Ray French, Kath
McKay, Carol Rumens, David Wheatley and others: Hull City Council,
2007)
- Drift book and film (with David
Kennedy, Simon Kerr, Christopher Reid and David Kennedy: Hull City
Council, 2008)
- Architexts book (with David Kennedy,
Christopher Reid and David Wheatley: Hull City Council, 2007)
ebooks of all the above collaborations:
http://www.ihull.org/larkin/publications/
Forthcoming: Under Travelling
Skies, Larkin25 Words Award winner, book,
film and exhibition, due June 2012.
Papers and chapters in books include:
- “All Protean forms in Venery: the textual and
apparitional body in Marston’s Verse Satires” in
The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds.
N. Taunton & D. Grantley, Ashgate, 2000. pp 169-185.
- “Cease Cease to bawle, thou wasp-stung Satyrist:
Writers, Printers and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599.”
EnterText Vol. 3. No. 1: Renaissance
Renegotiations. Brunel University, Spring 2003. http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/entertext/issue_3_1.htm
- “ ‘Wanton Woord Or Matter Lewd’: Presenting Ovid in the
Renaissance and Now.” in The Survival of Myth:
Innovation, Singularity and Alterity, eds Paul Hardwick
& David Kennedy, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010.
- “ ‘Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge’:
Metamorphic Forms and Personae in Poems from Page to
Performance.” in Contemporary Myth and the
Construction of Identity, eds. Aminal Alyal and Paul Hardwick,
Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.
As co-editor
- "Poetry and Myth”, supplement co-edited with David Kennedy,
Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, 6
(2008), 271-437.
Research
Latest Project: Under Travelling Skies: book, film and
exhibition. Larkin25 Words Award winner 2011. Cliff’s proposal for
a project involving writers and artists associated with the Larkin
Centre, won the first Larkin25 Words Award.
Cliff will lead a project to produce a book of poems, prose,
photographs and paintings responding to the theme of Larkin’s
Hull.
The book, accompanied by a short film and an exhibition of
paintings, will feature work by poets Peter Didsbury, Christopher
Reid, Carol Rumens, Maurice Rutherford, David Wheatley, novelist
Ray French, poet and short-story writer Kath McKay, poets and
painters John Wedgwood Clarke, Cliff Forshaw and Malcolm Watson,
film-maker and visual artist Quentin Budworth, musician and writer
Amanda Lowe, writer Mary Aherne, and Larkin scholar James
Booth.
Under Travelling Skies will be launched in summer 2012 in Hull
to coincide with the Humber Mouth Festival.