Mardi Gras | Marie Marshall

February 9, 2015

Parade throws and other lovely stuff

When they speak of ‘Mardi Gras’ in New Orleans they don’t just mean Shrove Tuesday, they mean a whole season when parades and all kinds of other high jinks can take place. It may surprise you to know that the parade season has already started there. Part and parcel of the parade procedure is the ‘throw’. Throws are gew-gaws and souvenirs that the marchers give away – literally throw into the crowd. This means that on Saturday all the throws containing my quick-fire poems about Doctor Who landing the TARDIS in New Orleans have… gone! Not one remains! Well, what does remain is the blog record of the assembly line – check it out here!

Ben Crystal

In other news, renowned Shakespearean actor Ben Crystal, who is the son of linguist David Crystal and the brains behind the project to present Wm Shakespeare’s plays in their original pronunciation, declared my ‘A sonnet to explain why Veronica Franco misses the first hint of spring‘ to be “Lovely stuff!” Let me explain something: Ben really understands iambic pentameter, and I’m honoured that he should have even read my little piece of not-so-serious sonnetry.

Anything else been happening this weekend? Well, I have been working on some extra material for the possible TV adaptation of ‘Axe’, and have picked up one of my shelved novel projects, The Deptford Bear, to see if I can get it moving again. So far it stands at a little over 11,000 words and I think it can work.

July 5, 2014

Throwaway art and poetry

If you have not already done so, please check out, or even follow, my New Orleans collaboration for Mardi Gras 2015. Thanks.

April 23, 2014

Chewbaccalaureate!

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I have been asked to do some funny things in my time, but honouring the ‘Sacred Drunken Wookiee’ has to be one step beyond. Let me explain. Sort of.

I was recently approached by a member of the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, which is a Mardi Gras parade organization from New Orleans, and asked to provide a series of short poems. The poems would be integrated into a number of ‘parade throws’ – items to give away to the street audience as the parade passes.

The Krewe consists (according to the person who commissioned me) of in excess of five hundred wonderfully nerdy ‘sci-fi geeks’, whose mission is to save the Galaxy… one drunken nerd at a time. Their parade theme is science fiction taken not-too-seriously, eco-friendliness taken slightly more seriously, and whooping-it-up taken in deadly earnest.

We’ll be producing the parade throws between now and February 2015, when the parade season begins in New Orleans. They’ll be in the form of little boxes, into which will be placed little pictures, gew-gaws, and found items, as well as a little baked-and-painted TARDIS. The outside of the box will be decorated as a TARDIS, and the idea is either to inscribe my words on the back of the box, or include them in a little scroll inside. Whichever, I get my name and © on each poem.

It’s rather exciting knowing I’ll be part of next year’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, if even by remote control. It’s not my first remote connection with that city, as not only were several poems in my first collection, Naked in the Sea, inspired by what I knew of it, but also another poem was inscribed on an African drum which is now on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Not bad for someone frae Dundee…

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