Voices on the Bridge at Storyville Books on Saturday 21st June 2025
A fundraiser for the Children of Gaza
Starts 6.30pm
With Sabrin Hasbun, Patrick Jones, Abeer Ameer, Mike Jenkins, Leanne Evans, Fiona Cullen, Des Mannay, Tracey Rhys, Ben Wildsmith plus one other waiting to be confirmed. An evening of poetry, spoken word and song.
Menna Elfyn couldn’t be with us but has generously donated 20 copies of – Y Bachgen a’r Wal – The Boy and the Wall made by the young people at Lajee Centre near the city of Bethlehem.
There will also be food and music.
This event is part of The Pontypridd Great Big Community as Super Power Day.
Watch out for further posts with more information about the evening. We hope you can join us.
Moneys raised will go to the UNICEF GAZA APPEAL FOR CHILDREN IN CRISIS.
Come along to VoicesontheBridge and enjoy an evening of Poetry, Spoken Word & Song!
Pete Ak’ spoken word performer and vocalist/songwriter with the S.Wales based band TaffyWasAThief. His spoken word pieces are strong on narrative, rhyme and humour, enjoying word play and ingenious metaphors. His pieces reflect his admittedly confusing childhood, growing up in a Barnardo’s children’s home as the only black child in a small Welsh valley town in the 1960’s.
Pete’s performances strongly feature emotional and energetic renditions which add colour and verve to his pieces. He has appeared at Llandeilo and Hay (fringe) ‘ Where the Light Comes In’ literary festivals and also appeared on BBC Wales’ feature programme Jonathan Davies’ Six Nations Quiz performing his poem ‘A Nation Hold its Breathe Again’ a signature piece which integrates patriotism with rugby lore and passion. He has yet to publish independently but has had numerous pieces featured in various publications both online and in print.
Reading and performing with Pete will be – Rachel Carney, Carole Burns, Sion Tomos Owen, Ben Wildsmith, Nick McGaughey, Johnny Giles & Rob Cullen.
Voices on the Bridge is hosted by Clwb Y Bont and is a free event!
Voices on the Bridge is organised by Rob Cullen.
Your all welcome to share this post helps enormously to get the word out there!
Voices on the Bridge Thursday 7th July at 6.00pm @Storyville Books Pontypridd- Lineup confirmed…Stephanie McNicholas, Des Mannay, Stephen Payne,Ben Wildsmith, Nicholas Mcgaughey, Susie Wild and yours truly Rob Cullen presenting and reading. Let me know if you’d like to read in the openmic.
Sadly due to work committments Sion Tomos Owen will not be readingas originally advertised. …
Bio’s VoiceontheBridge Thursday 7th July 2022
Stephanie McNicholas trained as a journalist in Cardiff in the 1980s and went on to write for national and regional newspapers and magazines. Steph published her second book – WHEN PONTY ROCKED! – in 2021. It tells the stories of the many musicians from her home town in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. …
Nicholas McGaughey lives in Pontypridd. He has new work in Bad Lilies/Stand/Lucent Dreaming/The Friday Poem and Spelt Magazine. …
Stephen Payne was born in Merthyr Tydfil and lives in Penarth, South Glamorgan. His first full collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published in 2015 by HappenStance Press and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. The Windmill Proof (September 2021) and The Wax Argument and other Thought Experiments (February 2022) were published by the same press. …
Susie Wild is author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. Her work has recently featured in Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project WRITE Where We Are NOW, The Atlanta Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Poetry Wales. She has placed in competitions including the Welshpool Poetry Festival Competition, the Prole Laureate Prize and the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition and performed at festivals including The Laugharne Weekend, Green Man and Glastonbury. …
Ben Wildsmith was born in Birmingham at an early age and began crawling westwards immediately. He is a songwriter, journalist, support worker and anarcho-syndicalist carbuncle on the body politic. He is a Literature Wales bursary recipient and Hay Festival Writer at Work. You can read him each Sunday in Nation Cymru. …
Des Mannay is a Disabled, Welsh writer of colour. Poetry collection, “Sod ’em – and tomorrow” (Waterloo Press). Co-editor ‘The Angry Manifesto’ journal. Prizewinner in 4 competitions, shortlisted in 7. Performed at many venues/festivals, in numerous poetry journals, 36 anthologies. Judge in ‘Valiant Scribe’ competition. …
Rob Cullen has organised VOB since 2017. He is a gardener, environmentalist, poet, writer, artist…though not in that order at any particular time….. Throughout lockdown he was frequently published in Resistance Poetry, & The Lark, US – plus The Atlanta Poetry Review; also in the mix Culture Matters anthologies Ymlaen/Onward & Gwrthryfel/Uprising & A Fish Rots from the Head as well as “The Learned Pig” Arts Journal, Cambridge, UK. Rob’s work regularly appears in the Red Poets annuals. He’s completed two novels and trying to get these published.
I was born and raised in a former South Wales mining village in the Rhondda in the heart of the coal mining area. The mining complex of the Glamorgan Colliery had long been shut down, but the vast hulk and expanse of the colliery yard remained. A place that once had been the work place of four and a half thousand men and six pit shafts, was now left a brooding silence filled haunted shell. It was the place my grandfather and great grandfather worked. Although there were fewer working deep mines my parents were determined that this was not where their children would work -well two daughters couldn’t, so that left me. The message was clear the mines were not going to be my future. Though my dad probably struggled with the reality of a dreamy, artistic son whose only serious interest seemed to have been reading books, drawing and play. Nevertheless gaining an education was the primary goal.
with thanks to Rhondda Cynon Taff’s Library Photography Archive.
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My parents lived through both inter-war depressions, the First World War and the Second World War. They met in 1930’s London. My mother had been found work as a young teenager as a maid in a bankers Chelsea Mansion. My father had left Ireland to find work in difficult times and experienced the racism towards Irish people — which was also thrown at Jewish and Black people. My father served for five long years, during which time he was listed as “Missing and presumed dead”. At wars end my fathers employment in London had been kept for him — but he moved to Wales. Finding work wasn’t easy but he got a job cutting grass outside BOAC’s engine plant on the promise that if a vacancy as a fitter came up he could apply for it. And that’s what eventually followed — a position as an engineering fitter and eventually as an inspector of the engines for air safety. So with this background I fully understood my fathers difficulty with a son’s artistic inclination and studying at Art Schools for five years.
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During Art Teaching studies I was impressed by A S Neil’s statement that “Play is the work of children”. I came to understand that the concept could also be attributed to Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian educationalist and philosopher and creator of the Waldorf-Steiner system of schooling. Steiner schools often quote him saying, “Play is the work of childhood. When children play they are experiencing the world with their entire being…” But Montessori and Piaget could also lay claim to the concept as well as Frobel and Rousseau.
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I think at the center of artistic and creative activity is “play”. Artists and creatives have retained a plasticity in their thinking processes — something that is generally lost for most people as adulthood looms, indeed it is often discouraged with the words “time to grow up”!
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Throughout the lockdown I have had growing concern over the invasiveness in the child’s world by the extensive use of online teaching methods. I worry that the extensive use of computer technology has led to a generation of children who have little “independent” experience of the outside world. Adults seemed to increasingly invade the child’s world with technology and increasing supervision. The old bogeys of “stranger danger” and the risk of being groomed by paedophiles (pedophiles) on the internet has led to a heavy price being paid in exchange for protection. Is this an exaggeration?
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My memory of my childhood and well into my teenage years was an extended period of play. As young children the street was our play ground. There were generally very few cars in the 50’s, there were only two cars in our street which would miraculously disappear taking their owners off to a workplace. For the entire day the street was our paradise; as teenagers, the mountainside immediately beyond the village was the place we explored, sometimes being away from our homes for the entire day. No one seemed to worry much about our disappearances — we’d turn up for meals, and then back out to play in the darkness of the street.
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Iona & Peter Opie’s book “Children’s games in street & playground” (1969) opens with the following commentary:
“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the street therof.”
Zachariah, viii. 5
“When children play in the street they not only avail themselves of one of the oldest play-places in the world, they engage in some of the oldest and most interesting games, for they are games tested and confirmed by centuries of children, who have played them and passed them on, as children continue to do so, without reference to print, parliament, or adult propriety.”
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Observing as an older adult children playing in the local park, supervised by adults, all with one eye on the blue screened mobile in their hands; or when I listen to my wife a Steiner Arts & Craft teacher coming to terms with the difficulty presented by online teaching — I grieve that children are losing something which is of crucial importance to childhood development and the mental health of the adult that child will become. Play and games not overlooked by adults.
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“A true game is one that frees the spirit. It allows of no cares but those fictitious ones engendered by the game itself”. Iona Opie.
*Pen y fan is the highest mountain in South Wales.
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In February 2020 a storm hit South Wales. A month’s amount of rain fell in two days. Pontypridd town was flooded, and so many homes and shops were devastated by the floodwater. Three Bridges were closed — thankfully not the Victoria Bridge, which carries one of the main road arteries connecting the town to the motorway network. Shops have moved to vacant premises which are above the flood zone. It’s a slow process. And even now many retail premises are closed, and the town has the feel of a place that is going through hard times and an unstoppable decline.
Homeowners who suffered the worst of the flooding were those whose homes had been built along the sides of the river, but sometime back had been flood-proofed and thought safe. Such was the scale of the flooding on this occasion, no flood-proofing stood a chance of holding the floodwaters back. It was a warning that, with climate change and the ominous reality that flooding on this scale in these narrow spate river valleys will become regular events, we had better be prepared and change so much of what we do.
Mountains stripped of trees by clear-felling so that the ability of the mountains to “hold” water and slow its movement to the river are seriously impeded; together with farm land left bear over winter so that there is a continuous erosion of soil and, again, no holding back of rain water. And everywhere the concretisation of large areas so that water just runs off even more swiftly into a river already gorged with flood.
The town is steadily pulling itself back together. I’m constantly amazed by the resilience folk are showing in the face of what has been two devastating blows, the flood and Covid19. But the struggle to survive the hardship life throws is at the heart of valleys people.
But like Covid19, the floods and extreme weather events, such as the floods of February 2020, have been a warningthat lifestyles and industry have to change. Its dismaying to hear of the call for a return to the old days, when the economy will get back to “normal” and the destruction of Earth continues. The announcements of the release of the vaccines has been accompanied by a call to return to normality. But what on earth does that normality mean? And at what price?
The floods that besieged Pontypridd, a small town in Wales have also been replicated all over the world. A flag is being waved. Sit up and take note.
And we wait for February’s rain whatever that will bring!
Rob Cullen artist, writer, poet. Rob runs “Voices on the Bridge” a poetry initiative in Wales. Walks hills and mountains daily with a sheep dog at his side.
“Our lives are brief, a mere fluttering in time. So open the door wide and let the light in!”
So we cut the roses for your grave and let them rest on the wet grass — your life was a golden thing, hope filled and hope given to so many! You will never leave us.
In the early afternoon of Thursday 16th June 2016, after leaving a meeting with her local constituents, the 41-year old British Labour politician Helen Joanne Cox, a married mother of two young children, was chased down the streets of Birstall, England by a man intent on killing her, a killer who was patiently lying in wait. The man subsequently stabbed her, then shot her, and left her to bleed to death in a car park behind the local library.
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Murder of an activist
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Dress it up whichever way you want,
but what it breaks down to
is the senseless murder
of a woman by a man.
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Senseless the loss.
Senseless the pain.
The resort to violence.
The resort to hate.
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And the mindless murder
of a defenseless mother.
Whichever way it breaks down,
it’s male violence again.
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A tribute to Jo Cox, MP, radical activist, mother of two.
Born 22 June 1974 murdered 16th June 2016.
Jo Cox was murdered by a far right white nationalist. A male.
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“It’s not about creating an equal country, but it is about stopping the development of an underclass cut off from the rest of society.”
“Every decade or so, the world is tested by a crisis so grave that it breaks the mould: one so horrific and inhumane that the response of politicians to it becomes emblematic of their generation — their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us.”
In 1942 Juliette Greco, who has died this week, wrote in her autobiography that she and her sister were arrested by the Gestapo when she was sixteen, as her mother was active in the Resistance.
She was held in a small cell with a light permanently on, the usual sleep deprivation, before interrogation. She later wrote of her Gestapo interrogator “I will never forgive him” — “I know that I myself will fight until the last day of my life, against oppression, against intellectual terrorism, indifference and the denial of the only treasure that is worth preserving at all costs: the right to live as we choose, to think, to laugh, to give, to change, to love without fear whatever and whoever we love.”
Juliette Gréco, singer and actor, born 7 February 1927; died 23 September 2020.
In these times more than any other it is crucial — mandatory that all people oppose the politics of hate, and those who use violence and fear to promote hate to destroy our freedoms. Freedoms that have been hard won by our forebears and should now be cherished and not let go of easily!
My entire professional career of 37 years involved working with men who were violent, abusive and above all hated themselves — transferring that hate onto others as some kind of vindication of their worth, but like all bullies they make themselves feel alright by making other peoples lives miserable and not alright. Women and children, the most vulnerable are their victims — which tells you everything you need to know about them.
In the most extreme cases these men end up killing others whether its Jo Cox, MP in Birstall England or Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia and so many black lives because they are African Americans living in America. If our political leaders espouse or are sympathetic to those who project violence and hate within our society — we only have one choice. Vote them out! And to paraphrase Juliet Greco “I know that I myself will fight until the last day of my life, against oppression, against intellectual terrorism, and indifference”.
In the Cymer*, a gold eyed, grey white heron, stilted stands, where two rivers collide, commands the stream in its stiff eyed gleam, one peat whiskey brown, the other bottle green.
In the break and rush of an old fords remains, in its broken, rapid cold crackling ice water, among worn rounded scoured stones, Graylings, Queens of the Stream, gleam and glide, ride the current, sails aloft, hunting nymphs unseen.
In the slow wash of the silt drop zone, Goosanders dive through darkened swirls, hunting with sharpened eyes and beaks, while green necked mallards cruise serene, and gold skinned eels burrow roots of trees, lie glass-eyed grey through winters dream, and the Cymer’s deep dark pool, waits the run, of spawning silver spring Atlantic salmon.
Meanwhile horse eyed on the rivers path, blinkered people thumbing dull blue screens, walk their way, virtually oblivious to the snare.
*Afon — Welsh for river.
*Cymer — Welsh for the meeting of two rivers.
Afon Rhondda will be published in The Atlanta Poetry Review Spring 2020 Edition.
Rob Cullen artist, writer, poet. Rob runs “Voices on the Bridge” a poetry initiative in Wales. Walks hills and mountains daily with a sheep dog at his side.
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