Profile

Graham Mort was born in Middleton, now part of Greater Manchester. He went to school in Chadderton and later graduated from Liverpool University, working as a gardener, mill labourer, dairy operative and psychiatric nurse, then training as a teacher. He became a freelance writer, working extensively in educational settings before taking up a post as lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in 2001. There, he is a member of the Moving Manchester: Mediating Marginalities research team, leads the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research, and has worked extensively in Africa for the British Council. He holds a doctorate in Creative Writing and is an expert in distance and eLearning. He writes poetry, short fiction and radio drama and has won a number of literary awards and prizes. His 8 published collections of poetry, include Visibility: New & Selected Poems, Seren, 2007. He is available for readings, workshops and consultancy.

Creative Work

Pianoforte

Big in the music business, our father
once kept thirteen pianos in the house.

People found this hard to believe, so we
pictured it for them: a house never short
of ivory or ebony, our fingers waltzing over
slave-trade arpeggios; a house where we
dined from the lid of a baby Broadwood,
skated to school on the Steinway’s
borrowed castors, stood pianos on pianos -
the mini-piano inside the concert grand -
and at night whispered the scary German
consonants which captured sleep.

On winter evenings we lit candles in ornate
brass brackets, softening the rooms with
Edwardian light, with homesick songs of
patriotic loss, even employed a blind piano
tuner who only worked at night, each dawn
stepping over traps of snapped strings where
he’d tempered scales to pour cornflakes
or grill toast, the daylight he couldn’t see
twisting down figured walnut legs.

My parents slept or argued or made love
on a Bechstein’s broken sound-board, behind
a bedroom door of lacquered panels inlaid
with fleur de lis; how much of our childhood
was pianissimo, the timbre of felted hammers
falling, how much spent listening then, we never
say, hearkening for wrong chords to brood,
gather, darken the piano’s terrible voice.

from, A Night on the Lash, Seren, 2004

Reflection

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Pianoforte (literally soft/loud) is a poem that draws upon my own childhood experience in North Manchester. We lived in a small terraced house that was much the same as when my grandparents moved in around 1916 – a toilet down the yard, a zinc bath hanging in the outhouse, an ancient gas cooker in the living room. My grandfather, a keen singer, had been a mule spinner. My father worked for the Co-op and played the piano, yearning for music but lacking education and opportunity. In the same terraced row lived a talented violinist and another pianist – both mill workers.

When I was a child my father began to renovate pianos for a living, often modernising Edwardian instruments with candlestick holders, elaborately turned legs, and ornate veneered panels. This occupation brought me into contact with Manchester as a manufactory, travelling in my father’s old Triumph Mayflower to pick up strings, pins and piano felt from little workshops in Salford or tucked under the railway arches on Deansgate. The pianos were exotic, with their German names inlaid in brass, their ebony and ivory keys. We lived with and around them, their hammers laid out in neatly in trays as my father renovated an action. They brought rumbling undertones of empire, of conquest, of Africa itself. In my poem, I wanted to get across that sense of cramped domestic space with its expanding imaginative dimension of music and the mystery of elsewhere.

I chose an irregular stanzaic form for the poem, adopting an ironic conversational voice that gradually gives way to a darker tone. I suppose that I had DH Lawrence’s poem ‘Piano’ at the back of my mind, with its near-sentimental evocations of domesticity. My poem exaggerates in a different, almost magic-surrealist way, drawing upon the exotic nature of the piano and its music. The blind piano tuner was also a real memory, fabulated into the poem, though my father could often be heard at work when we were in bed and the house vibrated under the ping of the tuning fork and the tap, tap, tap, of middle C being minutely calibrated.

The technological miracle of the piano (the first instrument that could be played in any key) was fading fast by the 1960’s as radio and television replaced home entertainment. Pianos and pneumatic player-pianos had been like the Internet of their day, allowing music from around the world to be played in the home. My father was recycling the past and I wanted to capture something of the futility and frustration of that enterprise, ending the poem on a note of danger and domestic discord: the clamour of voices and bass notes that were somehow indistinguishable as I lay awake under the shriek of telephone wires, inside all the jangling noises of the house. To write the poem, I had to imagine myself back then, drowsing in our house at the edge of the city, partly in Manchester, partly in this world, and partly in the world beyond.

Publications

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Visibility: New & Selected Poems, Seren, 2007

A Night On The Lash, Seren, 2004

Circular Breathing Dangaroo Press, 1997 (Poetry Book Society Recommendation)

Snow From The North Dangaroo Press, 1992

Sky Burial Dangaroo Press, 1989

Into The Ashes Littlewood Press, 1988, illustrated by Janet Samson

A Halifax Cider Jar Yorkshire Art Circus, 1987, limited hardback edition, illustrated by 8 individual artists, forward by Barry Sheridan,

A Country On Fire Littlewood Press, 1986 (major Eric Gregory award)

Contact & Links

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Email: graham.mort@mac.com

Website: www.graham-mort.com

Academic: www.transculturalwriting.com