The Garden, a PJ Harvey Discussion Site

Super-exciting and unexpected news - Polly has been added to the Glastonbury festival livestream! It’s on 22nd May with a repeat screening on 23rd May. Tickets are £20 and available internationally.

The Guardian reports that “...the five-hour show will thread together musical performances with a spoken-word narrative delivered by Harvey, Cocker, Kae Tempest, George the Poet, Kurupt FM, Little Amal, Caleb Femi and Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis.”

So, although it doesn’t seem as though she’ll be performing any music, it’ll be wonderful to see her standing on a stage for the first time in ages! Weirdly, Polly was in my dream last night - it’s like my subconscious knew!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/ ... tream-bill

Update from her official Facebook - Polly will perform two original poems written in Dorset dialect! Wowzers - the queen of endless surprising turns!

£20 is a bit too much to shell out for PJ reading two poems and a 'guest appearance' by Róisin Murphy (since I don't really care about anyone else on the billing) but I assume this might mean a new poetry collection coming out soon? Dorset dialect, my goodness, I will need annotations by a native speaker!

I revised the thread title to include the date & "Poetry". It's coming up soon.

Hopefully someone will snag this.

There's a 5-second Instagram story on PJ's official account showing Polly, her mom (?), and Todd Lynn backstage (??) during filming for Glasto (???). Filmed by her manager.

No idea how to save Insta stories but I made a screengrab:

Oh and there's a proper post now:

That dress, must be one of her own drawings

And 'Ira' appears in a number of the poems we've heard so far - searching the forum, I see I misinterpreted it a couple of years ago, but it does seem to be the proper name of a recurring character. Gosh, this collection is taking a long time!

^ Oh yes, you're right, I remember you transcribing and annotating some of the new poems from her previous readings (for which I am very grateful) and Ira did make an appearance indeed. Recurring characters and motifs make me even more interested in her latest work; I wonder if she structured it as a poem cycle of sorts?

When the collection gets finally released I bet I will have a ton of questions for you regarding the Dorset-specific vocabulary and references!

I'm intrigued to know what 'Dorset dialect' will turn out to mean ... Oddly I've just read Thomas Hardy's introduction to an edition of the poems of 19th-century Dorset poet William Barnes in which he regrets the fading-away of the real old Dorset speech - and that was in 1908! I'm exactly Polly's age and, while I grew up in suburban Dorset rather than a small village, my mother's family were all farm workers and the like, yet I never remember them using dialect words, just standard English with strong West Country accents (hers is quite gentle, really). Perhaps in Corscombe the old villagers in the early 1970s still used dialect words they'd picked up from their grandparents, and that seems to be the setting of this cycle of poems.

AineteEkaterini wrote:(hers is quite gentle, really)

To be honest, as a non-native English speaker, I can't really hear the Dorset accent in her speech. I know it's there – many journalists writing pieces about Polly made sure I'm aware of it! – but my ears just fail to detect it.

Of course I can only pick up the most pronounced British dialects (e.g. Yorkshire, cockney, Scottish, Geordie, Scouse etc.) because of how different they sound from standard RP. With Polly's subtle West Country accent it gets tricky. One thing I've noticed is her pronunciation of 'idea' with an intrusive /r/ – idear – but that's quite common in other UK and US accents as well, so not Dorset-specific.

I digress, apologies. Has anyone actually accessed and watched the stream tonight?

the stream has been made free after technical issues https://watch.glastonburyfestivals.co.u ... ream1.html


https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment ... li=AAnZ9Ug

Well, since it's free I suppose it's alright to post Polly's 3-minute segment?

https://we.tl/t-lSnTth2Hh8

The link will expire in 1 week so perhaps someone can host it on their permanent online storage?

TheNightingale wrote:Well, since it's free I suppose it's alright to post Polly's 3-minute segment?

https://we.tl/t-lSnTth2Hh8

The link will expire in 1 week so perhaps someone can host it on their permanent online storage?

Thanks!

I've uploaded it to mediafire https://www.mediafire.com/file/jmrogvyc ... 1.mp4/file

Can someone do a transcription?

Thanks !