Poetry in the City at Exeter Central Library on March 23
Poetry in the City is the first in an occasional series of poetry readings from Exeter Library Live and Exeter Poetry Festival.
Damian Furniss first full collection Chocolate Che was highly commended in the Forward Prize. His pamphlet The Duchess of Kalighat won the Tears in the Fence competition. He is currently co-editing The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy, singled out by The Guardian as a book to watch out for in 2011. Using forms as varied as their subjects – travelling among revolutionaries in Latin America, taking on the voices of the great artists of the twentieth century, working with dying destitutes in India – his poetry works
images into narratives that are both darkly humorous and strangely moving.
David Woolley has been writing poetry since the age of eight, but he’s still not sure what he is doing or why. His favourite poets are usually Keats, Dylan Thomas and Roy Fisher. He has published one pamphlet and three collections, mostly from Headland Press, the latest being Pursued by a Bear. He mistrusts the terms ‘performance poetry’ ‘spoken word’ ‘page poet’ etc – “it is either well-crafted or it isn’t, and you either enjoy hearing/seeing it read aloud or you don’t. I hope you do…”
Jos Smith grew up in Canterbury and has lived in Liverpool, Nottingham and Exeter. He has had an enduring interest in poetic geographies and the writing of place. In 2005 he ran an outdoor poetry and visual art project, No Man’s Orchard, funded by the Arts Council. More recently he has had poems published in Poetry Wales and Brittle Star and is currently writing a PhD on the ‘New Nature Writing’ movement in British and Irish literature.
The event takes place at Exeter Central Library on Wednesday 23 March, at 7pm. Tickets are £4 and are available from the lending library or on the door on the night. Tickets can be reserved by calling 01392 384201
Elisabeth Rowe and Christopher North in Exeter
Just a reminder from Rachel at ExCite Poetry that open mic spaces are available for the ExCite/Oversteps event, which sees Christopher North and Elisabeth Rowe launching their books Explaining the Circumstances and Thin Ice respectively.
Thursday 18th November, 7:45pm, Exeter Phoenix, tickets available at the Phoenix Box Office and on the door, £5/£3 conc. To book an open mic space, reply to this email address or give me a call on 07854598552.
Download the poster here: oversteps_north_rowe
THE POETRY SCHOOL: Special last minute Andy Brown offer!
Special Offer to Exeter Poetry Festival Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers!
20% off the fantastic Poetry School workshop below if you phone by 4pm today!
The Material of Words: a way to new poems
Tutor: Andy Brown
Venue: St Sidwell’s Centre, Sidwell St, Exeter EX4 6NN.
Date: Saturday 30 October
Time: 10.30am – 4.30pm
Price: £53, £41, £35
Level: open to all
A workshop to get new poets writing and to help more advanced writers who need something engaging to perk up their ideas and techniques. You’ll be ranging from the personal to the topical, reading some published poems, and finding ways to freshen up our ideas by playing with the material of words, and should leave with a group of new poems/ideas in strong draft form.
To book: call 0207 582 1679 by 4pm today!! Say, “I’m an Exeter Poetry Festival Follower/Friend – can I have 20% off my Andy Brown workshop please!”. You could also say, “I love you and your Poetry School is brilliant” but on reflection, we’d advise against it …
Exeter Poetry Festival 2010
Exeter Poetry Festival ran from 7-10 October 2010. We would like to thank all the poets, audiences, supporters, volunteers, venues and sponsors for your support in making it happen.
This weekend at the Festival
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After two brilliant opening days, in the company of Alice Oswald, Andy Brown, Jen Hadfield, Ronald Tamplin and the Fire River Poets, the Festival weekend is here already!Jen Hadfield’s ‘Credo’ workshop is sold out, so is ‘Up With The Bard’ with Liv Torc. There are still some tickets left for the other events, and in the library today we’re looking forward today to the University of Exeter Creative Writing Programme Reading (featuring top festival volunteer, Jos Smith), Greta Stoddart and newly Forward Prized, Julia Copus. Later, in the Phoenix, Cyprus Well, ExCite Poetry and Apples & Snakes have the Meter 2010 Networking Event (only a few places left for that one) with a performance by Dorothea Smartt. Saturday finishes off with Apples & Snakes Live, with Bard of Exeter Liv Torc, and Aoife Mannix with accordion hero Janie Armour.
Sunday kicks off in the library with the ExCite Poetry Lunch with Rachel McCarthy, Fiona Benson and Rachael Boast. This is followed by the Shearsman Showcase with Elisabeth Bletsoe, Damian Furniss and Jaime Robles. The festival closes with Ruth Padel at 4pm, reading and in conversation with Rachel McCarthy of ExCite Poetry.
But not quite … supported by Exeter Phoenix, the Festival finally heads off into the night with the utterly brilliant Devon Incarnate Folk Singer and Folk Hero, Jim Causley.
Full details in the programme, and tickets are available from Exeter Phoenix.
A huge thank you to our audiences this week, and we look forward to seeing you this weekend!
Festival Star wins Forward Prize!
Exeter Poetry Festival star Julia Copus has won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem for her poem, ‘An Easy Passage’.
You can read Julia’s winning poem in The Guardian here.
Visit The Forward Prize Page here.
Congratulations too to SW poet Hilary Menos, winning Best First Collection for Berg, and Seamus Heaney for Best Collection, Human Chain.
Exeter Poetry Festival Begins! Happy National Poetry Day!
It’s National Poetry Day, and it’s the first day of Exeter Poetry Festival! There are some tickets left for tonight’s opening event with Alice Oswald and Andy Brown, but not many, so pick up your tickets quickly from the Phoenix today if you’re planning to go! Look out for a host of amazing poets over the weekend, including Julia Copus, Greta Stoddart, Ruth Padel, Aoife Mannix, Damian Furniss, Fiona Benson, and many more! The full programme is available here.
Hope to see you at the Festival!
FESTIVAL INTERVIEW: Jen Hadfield
Exeter Poetry Festival was delighted to get the chance to catch up earlier this week with festival star Jen Hadfield.
Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland, whose landscape and language persistently influence her poetry and visual art. Her work often pivots on the idea of the secular-sacred, relating to landscape – “It is in heaven as it is on earth” “it is on earth as it is in heaven.” Liturgical rhythms underpin many of her poems about place, home, ecology, space – an idiomatic mythology of the here-and-now.
Of her two books published by Bloodaxe, Almanacs was written in Shetland and the Western Isles in 2002 thanks to a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council, and it won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Nigh-No-Place, written in Canada and Shetland, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2007 and won the T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008. She is currently working on her first novel. A CD collection of Jen reading her work is available from The Poetry Archive.
Sir Andrew Motion, one of the judges when Jen Hadfield won the TS Eliot said of her, “she is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career.”
Winning the TS ELiot Prize is a real achievement – has it altered how you approach your poetry in any way?
Not really. It’s something I try and forget about and this is quite easy, because the award came some time after writing Nigh-No-Place. It was confusing, if anything: I’m a very present tense sort of writer and maker; and when a work’s completed I feel quite rapidly distanced from it. Poetry is something that is ultimately the present tense I think: when I’m writing, I’m a poet, when I’m not, I’m not sure what I am! Every time I start to write something it’s like I’ve never written before, it’s like learning from scratch every time. It’s just distracting and bewildering to try and compare or connect the new work to the old whilst you’re making it. Or maybe it’s new lamps for old. At any rate you don’t lose what you learn in the writing.
I like Don Paterson’s take on all this: “All praise or damning only serves to interpolate the author – again – between the work and its source, and can only interfere with the
abstract and inscrutable mechanism by which that work is delivered. Those who find praise an aid to their production will produce nothing of value; the source is impure, already turbid with self-hood. Burn your reviews, and warn your friends to give you no word of them.”*
The T.S.Eliot has changed my life of course, it has simply, practically enabled me to approach my writing full stop after a long, long lay-off. For which I am very, very grateful.
You’re writing a novel at the moment – do you find similarities between the way you work on that, and the way you approach your poetry, or is it very different?
As I say, it’s like learning to write for the first time. Almost like learning to speak actually. The novel is 60,000 words in and yet hardly past the holophrastic stage, and yet less efficient than holophrasis in children! I mean that the voice is muddy and unfixed still. This has been going on for some time…
The difficulty of it worries me quite a lot, but I remind myself that writing Nigh-No-Place also took me through effortful, impossible, tongue-tied phases, and that eventually I surfaced into something like fluency. Writing is both very hard and ridiculously easy I think. In both poetry and the novel, there doesn’t seem to be any shortcuts: you have to raise the masonry brick by unresounding brick in order to work out what a springing arch might be like, you can’t bypass that.
In both the goal is leaving yourself behind.
In general I think I do have similar experiences whether I’m writing poetry, writing prose, making porcelain limpets, teaching, reading, walking. The acts blur into each other when I’m working well, a sign usually, that I’ve begun to leave myself behind, although sometimes I play them off each other to trick myself into working…
What poets out there at the moment are you reading and enjoying?
Sharon Olds as ever. I can’t do without her. Charles Simic. After Ovid – a collection of contemporary poets who have rewritten episodes from the Metamorphoses.
Your workshop at the festival is called ‘Credo’, do you have your own poetic credo?
A constantly evolving thing. It’s a mixture of messages to myself to remind me what I do and don’t need to write; what it feels like being fluent; what I call poetry and what I don’t. Fluency is a bit of a theme! I think credos are maybe most useful when we’re not writing. It’s almost as if you don’t need them so much when you’re fluent. The whole thing is so intriguing to me, because the act of fluent writing seems to bring about such changes of perception (it’s definitely that way around) – from closed to open, from fearful to hopeful, from tongue-tied to fluent. Time changes. Everything becomes relevant to everything else. I like very much an idea that was put forward by Ray Tallis (I think) in Grayson Perry’s Creativity and the Imagination – that ‘creative people’ (let’s say ‘people in a creative state’) may not so much be using this part of their brain over that, but that they may be experiencing slower transmission of impulses between parts of the their brain. This really makes sense of the peculiar sensation of seeing things more thingily when you’re writing or making fluently; maybe we’re just getting a better look at the thoughts droning by …
But the credo question isn’t just about that change of state, of course It’s questions about voice and identity. Questions about who the art is for…about the specific natural laws that are unique to each poem. Like ‘what does the white space of the page mean?’ The credo question invites the poet to articulate their own assumptions about the poem, to justify what they call poetry.
Jen is reading at Exeter Poetry Festival, with Ronald Tamplin, at The Charles Causley Reading, Exeter Central Library, Friday 8th October at 7pm. Tickets are available from Exeter Phoenix, £6/£5 concessions. There are limited spaces for her workshop on Saturday 9th – tickets also from Exeter Phoenix.
*from ‘Aphorisms’
Don Paterson, in Strong Words, ed. W.N.Herbert & Matthew Hollis, Bloodaxe, 2000
Ian wins the Slam!
Back Row Left to right: Poets Liv Torc, CLive PiG, Ian Royce and Jon Freeman
Front, Slam Score Supremo, Kate Wilson
What a night! Laughing Arrow’s Exeter Poetry Slam kicked off Exeter Poetry Festival with verve and style! A huge thank you to audience, performers and to Bard of Exeter Liv Torc for making it all happen.
Sadly, all the poets couldn’t win, and here are the top three:
Ian Royce – first place
Clive Pig – second place
Jon Freeman – third place
Ian wins some stage time at the Apples & Snakes Live @ Exeter Poetry Festival on Saturday 9th October at 8pm in the Voodoo Lounge at Exeter Phoenix – starring alongside Bard of Exeter Liv Torc, and Aoife Mannix and Janie Armour. Tickets are £7/6 concessions and are available from Exeter Phoenix.
