Coffee House Poetry

#poetrymondays

mon 9 dec, 7.30 pm: troubadour international poetry prize night: judges jane yeh & glyn maxwell (free online event) with 2024 prizewinners!

With winners notified in week commencing mon 2 dec & all results embargoed until tonight, this is the first chance to join us online to celebrate the very best poems submitted to Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2024, hear the poems read by the winning & commended poets, discover why our 2024 judges made their choices, & listen to both reading from their own work!

• Jane Yeh was born in New Jersey, educated at Harvard & University of Iowa, now lives in London, & has degrees from Manchester Metropolitan, & London’s Royal Holloway Universities. She lectures in Creative Writing at the Open University, writes on books, theatre, & fashion for, among others, Poetry Review & Village Voice, & has published (with Sally O’Reilly) Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings (Routledge, 2022). Her first collection, Marabou, was shortlisted for Whitbread, Forward, & Aldeburgh prizes, she was named as a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet for The Ninjas & her latest, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation & one of the Guardian’s best books of 2019, is The Discipline (Carcanet).

• Glyn Maxwell, poet, playwright, novelist, librettist & critic, born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, has studied at Oxford & Boston, & taught in Amherst, New York & London. His poetry collections include The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, & The Breakage, Hide Now, Pluto, & his latest, How the Hell Are You (Picador, 2020), all of which were shortlisted for either Forward or TS Eliot prizes. His plays have been staged in London & New York, & his opera libretti at Glyndebourne, Royal Opera House, & on tour. He has edited Derek Walcott’s collected poems, & published (with Oberon) On Poetry, a guidebook for the general reader, & Drinks with Dead Poets, a uniquely inventive novel encounter with poetry’s greats.

Watch this space for booking details…

talking transatlantic with mark doty & d. nurkse: two more free online reading & in-conversation events, early 2025

Next two guests in our US poets’ reading/interview series (with poet & critic Cahal Dallat) in early 2025, following Jane Hirshfield’s Mon 18 Nov reading above, will be Mark Doty & Dennis Nurkse, dates tbc. These events are still free & online but booking’s essential (limit 100) so watch out for details re event links in future emails. (And sign up here if you’re not already on our list!)

recent

photo: Curt Richter

mon 18 nov 8pm: talking transatlantic with jane hirshfield: reading & in-conversation (free online event)

New-York-born poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield makes a welcome & much requested, much anticipated return to our #poetrymonday talking transatlantic reading/interview series (with poet & critic Cahal Dallat), following her recent tour of China & the publication of her eleventh book of poetry, The Asking: New & Selected Poems, earlier this year by both Bloodaxe in the UK & Knopf in the US.

Recognised by The New York Times Magazine as ‘one of the most important writers in the world today’, Hirshfield has been praised by Nobel-Prize-winner Czesław Miłosz for her ‘profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings’, & celebrated by former US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan as an ‘eloquent and exacting’ poet. Her poems, according to Judith Kitchen ‘negotiate the difficulty of living while, at the same time, paying homage to what life has to offer’.

Hirshfield has long explored the poetry/science relationship (including as artist-in-residence at a Univ. California neuroscience program), is one of American poetry’s leading ecological thinkers, founded an online and travelling exhibit exploring the poetry/science interface/intersection, & in July 2024 became the first American & the first woman to receive the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize at Peking University.

Always an engaging conversationalist on the subject of poetry & the writer’s life (& author of two collections of essays on the world of poetry), Jane, like all our #poetrymonday interviewees, will be asked will be asked to reveal one specific secret in her poetry practice!

thu 13 jun, 7.30 for 8pm, £10: bedford park festival — yeats-birthday poetry night: ‘in the deep heart’s core’ with special guest jeremy vine

…plus guest poets hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat

Celebrating WB Yeats’s famous line (written in Bedford Park!), tonight’s poets read poems that touch the ‘deep heart’s core’, along with broadcaster Jeremy Vine who, last year, launched (with a great Yeats reading!) Bedford Park’s unique Yeats smartphone audio trail.

Join us on Nobel-Prize-winning ‘local poet’ WB Yeats’s birthday, for poems of love — of people & place, past & present, home & elsewhere — introduced by Coffee-House Poetry organiser, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe (preceded by music & drinks on the lawn by the #EnwroughtLight artwork from 7:30 pm)…

…with, after the interval, Chiswick resident Jeremy Vine, reading & discussing favourite poems with poet & Yeats/BedfordPk project-founder Cahal Dallat.

And do bring your own ‘heart’ poem (max. 25 lines) for a chance to read!

Hosted by: Bedford Park Festival
Booking: Bedford Park Festival
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX
All proceeds go to Bedford Park Festival charities

tue 26 mar, 8pm, free, online, troubadour international poetry prize night with judges mona arshi & tom sleigh, & 2023 prizewinners!

Join us as Troubadour International Poetry Prize winners/commendeds Zoom in from, this year, Britain, Ireland, US, Canada & Australia (see below) along with judges, poets Mona Arshi (Cambridge) & Tom Sleigh (New York), for a celebratory prize-night reading!

• First Prize, £2,000, Traceries, Jennifer Harrison, Windsor, Victoria, Australia
• Second Prize, £1000, A child’s Christmas in alcohol, Simon Walsh, Brattleboro VT, USA
• Third Prize, £500, Zebra haworthia, Jane Wilkinson, Norwich

Commended poems:

• The King’s Raven, Afra Kingdon, Northam, Devon
• The Influencer’s Prayer, Anne Casey, Northbridge NSW, Australia
• Generational Trauma, Bronagh Mallon, Belfast
• Zulu, Catherine Edmunds, Bishop Auckland, Durham
• This is also true, Charlotte Salkind, London
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Deb O’Rourke, Toronto, Canada
• Sometimes Life, Deveraux Baker, Mendocino CA, USA
• The Ilium, Diana Valk, Surbiton, Surrey
• Landscape with inner child, Jane Lovell, Lynton, Devon
• Dust, Jane Williams, South Launceston, Tasmania
• hostage situation, Kate Kruimink, Cygnet, Tasmania
• Five Sleep Potions for Troubled Nights, Leah Larwood, Plumstead, Norfolk
• my mother, wearing a pencil skirt, in a meadow, Liz McSkeane, Dublin
• Olly and Pepper are safe, Martyn Crucefix, London
• Calling on the New House, Mick Wood, London
• Sharing a Koch with You, Nicky Melville, Edinburgh
• No More Wind, Peter Ross, Honiton, Devon
• The House Where Benjamin Zephaniah Didn’t Live, Sallie Durham, Lewes, East Sussex
• Mary Shelley’s Babies, Stephanie Green, Edinburgh
  plus readings & judges’s comments from this year’s judges

• Mona Arshi worked as a Human Rights lawyer at Liberty before starting to write poetry: her collection, Small Hands, won the 2015 Forward Prize, her poems have featured in Poems on the Underground, was recently commissioned to write a programme on The Odyssey for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week & she is Visiting Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her latest poetry collection Dear Big Gods (Pavilion Poetry, 2019), was followed by her debut novel, Somebody Loves You, in 2021.
• Tom Sleigh’s ten poetry collections include House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed &, just published, The King’s Touch (Graywolf, Feb 2022): he is the author of the essay collections The Land between Two Rivers & Interview with a Ghost. A Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College (City University of New York), Tom lives in Brooklyn, & during the last ten years, has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, & Libya.

free online event, numbers limited, advance booking only,
email info@coffeehousepoetry.org & Zoom link will be forwarded

2023

wed 14 jun, 7.30 for 8pm, £10: bedford park festival celebrates yeats’s birthday: only my dreams with special guest marina warner

…plus London and local poets hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat

1923-Nobel-Prizewinner WB Yeats, wrote ‘I being poor have only my dreams’ in his Bedford-Park-era poem that inspired Conrad Shawcross RA’s dazzling #EnwroughtLight artwork!

And so he wrote, right here in Bedford Park, as a young man, of his dreams of love, of art, of elsewhere, of literary greatness.

Join us in this year’s Festival poetry-evening marking Yeats’s June 13th birthday & hear today’s poets with their poetry of dreams, introduced by Coffee-House Poetry organiser, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe. (Preceded by music & drinks on the lawn by #EnwroughtLight from 7.30pm)

And after the interval, listen to author Marina Warner, who’s written on Yeats, myth, fairytale & symbol, read & discuss her choice of literary favourites with poet & Yeats/BedfordPk project-founder Cahal Dallat.

And bring your own poem on dreams, wishes, aspirations & desires (max. 25 lines) for a chance to read!

Hosted by: Bedford Park Festival & WB Yeats Bedford Park Project
Booking: Bedford Park Festival
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX

2022

mon 5 dec, 7.30 pm: troubadour international poetry prize night: judges victoria kennefick & joshua bennett (free online event) with 2022 prizewinners!

With winners notified in week commencing mon 21 nov & all results embargoed until tonight, this is the first chance to join us online to celebrate the very best poems submitted to Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022, hear the poems read by the winning & commended poets, discover why our 2022 judges made their choices & listen to both reading from their own work!

• Victoria Kennefick lives in County Kerry, studied at University College Cork, then at Emory University, & Georgia College & State University as part of a Fulbright Scholarship, co-hosts the Unlaunched Books Podcast & is a Listowel Writers Week committee-member. Her 2021 collection Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet) was a ‘best poetry book of the year’ in both Telegraph & Irish Times, in addition to being shortlisted for the 2021 TS Eliot Prize.

• Joshua Bennett has read at the White House at the invitation of President Barack Obama, is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, & author of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard, 2020) & Spoken Word: A Cultural History (forthcoming from Knopf). His poetry collections are The Sobbing School (2016, a National Poetry Series Selection & NAACP Image Award finalist), Owed (2020) & The Study of Human Life (publ. Sep 2022), all from Penguin.

mon 13 june, 7.30 for 8pm: £10, bedford park festival poetry evening: the poetry of things

Poems about things everyday & eclectic, keepsakes curious or commonplace, that make up our world, our memories; plus launch of Chiswick poet Cahal Dallat’s latest poetry collection Beautiful Lofty Things (Salmon Poetry, 2022).

So do bring a favourite poem, about an object or artefact, whether by you or from a well-known poet (max. 25 lines).

With special guest: Cahal Dallat, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Plus: music and refreshments.
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels (opp. Turnham Grn Tube), Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

mon 23 may, 8pm (UK time): tom sleigh & cahal dallat: reading & in-conversation (free online event)

Two poets, two new collections, & a change in our transatlantic #poetrymonday format as US poet, Tom Sleigh, & Coffee-House Poetry’s London-based Irish poet Cahal Dallat — who’s interviewed our guests for many years — both read from their latest publications & talk about their own & each other’s work/writing-lives.

• Tom Sleigh’s poetry collections, include House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed &, just published, The King’s Touch (Graywolf, Feb 2022): he is the author of the essay collections The Land between Two Rivers & Interview with a Ghost. A Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College, Tom lives in Brooklyn, & during the last eight years, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, & Libya.

• Cahal Dallat’s latest collection is Beautiful Lofty Things from Salmon Poetry. Poet, musician & critic, he is founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project, winner of the 2017 Keats-Shelley Prize, & a regular BBC R4 contributor. He has been Writer-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory NC & a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin TX. His previous poetry collections include The Year of Not Dancing & Morning Star.

photo: Curt Richter

mon 17 jan 8pm: jane hirshfield: reading & in-conversation (free online event, see mon 18 nov 2024 above)

Next guest in our US poets’ #poetrymonday reading/interview series (with poet & critic Cahal Dallat) is New-York-born poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield, an ‘eloquent and exacting’ poet according to Kay Ryan.

Author of nine poetry collections, Hirshfield has been praised by Nobel-Prize-winner Czesław Miłosz for her ‘profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings’: & Judith Kitchen has written on how Hirshfield’s poems ‘negotiate the difficulty of living while, at the same time, paying homage to what life has to offer’.

Hirshfield has long explored the poetry/science relationship (including as artist-in-residence at a Univ. California neuroscience program), an intersection that takes on new global/climate-crisis urgency in her just-launched latest collection Ledger (Penguin, Fall 2021).

2021

mon 6 dec, 8pm: troubadour international poetry prize night: 2021 judges john mcauliffe & linda gregerson (free online event) with 2021 prizewinners

With winners notified in week commencing mon 22 nov & all results embargoed until tonight, this is the first chance to join us online in celebrating the very best poems submitted to Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2021, hearing them read by the winning & commended poets, & discovering why our 2020 judges made their choices!

• Linda Gregerson studied at Oberlin, Northwestern, Iowa Writers Workshop & Stanford, is Professor of English at University of Michigan, a Renaissance scholar, a classically trained actor & a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets: her poetry collections range from The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) to Prodigal: New and Selected Poems (Mariner, 2015)

• John McAuliffe (b. Listowel) has published five collections with Gallery Press including The Kabul Olympics (2020), is Professor of Poetry at Manchester University, where he directs the Centre for New Writing & Literature Live, founder & co-editor of Manchester Review, assoc. editor at Carcanet Press, & was chief poetry critic at the Irish Times (2013-2020) where he founded & chaired the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

mon 20 sep, 8pm: mark halliday: reading & in-conversation (free online event)

Meet Mark Halliday, latest in our US poets’ #poetrymonday reading/interview series with poet & critic Cahal Dallat

Discover a voice that’s ironic yet intimate, nuanced but disarmingly humorous, a Whitman in a supermarket (says the New Yorker).

Influenced by Frank O’Hara & New York School poets, Mark Halliday has published seven collections ranging from Little Star in 1987 by way of Jab to his latest, Losers Dream On, alongside three books of poetry criticism including a study of Wallace Stevens.

Born, Ann Arbor, Michigan, raised in North Carolina & Connecticut & studying at Brown & Brandeis universities, he has taught at Ohio University since 1996 where he is now distinguished professor.

free online event, advance booking only, email info@coffeehousepoetry.org to book

(photo: Los Angeles Times)

mon 14 jun, 8pm: naomi shihab nye: reading & in-conversation (free online event)

Join us in a Zoom! #poetrymonday with Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, reading & in conversation with poet & critic Cahal Dallat

Born in St. Louis Missouri, poet, songwriter & novelist Naomi Shihab Nye, spent her adolescence partly in the West Bank, Palestine, & partly in San Antonio where she still lives, working as Professor of Creative Writing at Texas State University in nearby San Marcos.

Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Nye has written & edited some 30 books including 3 novels & 12 poetry collections from Different Ways to Pray (Breitenbush, 1989) to The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019) by way of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) written after the 9/11 attacks when she became a crucial voice for Arab Americans, speaking out against both prejudice & terrorism.

A world-poet with complex roots, Palestinian father & American mother of Swiss/German heritage, Nye’s personal experience of, & engagement with, issues of identity & migration (east/west &, in US/Central/South-American terms, south/north), & her advocacy for younger poets, are evident in the anthologies she has edited including This Same Sky (129 poets from 68 countries), Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 & This Tree is Older Than You Are, poems, stories & paintings by Mexican artists.

(photo: Ricardo DeAratanha (Los Angeles Times)

mon 22 mar, 8pm: dana gioia: reading & in-conversation (free online event)

Join us in a Zoom! #poetrymonday with California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, reading & in conversation with poet & critic Cahal Dallat

Son of a Sicilian immigrant father & a Californian ‘mostly Mexican’ mother, Gioia was first in his family to go to college, & studied at Stanford & Harvard. His latest publication, Studying with Miss Bishop (2021) talks of Elizabeth Bishop’s classes, & of his other poetic influences.

After college Gioia wrote poetry by night while working for General Foods for 15 years, during which time he published two collections, followed by Can Poetry Matter?, a seminal text exploring poetry’s role/relevance &, in the 2000s, undertook ten years as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote libretti & textbooks, edited anthologies & published further collections including 99 Poems: New & Selected (Graywolf), winner of the 2018 Poets’ Prize.

As California’s Poet Laureate from 2015 he made it his mission to read – over a two-year period – in all 58 Californian counties, many of which never feature on major poets’ itineraries.

#poetrymondays 2020

mon 30 nov, 8pm: joshua bennett: reading & in-conversation (free online event)

Hear rising US poetry star Joshua Bennett read from just-launched Owed (Penguin, Sep 2020) & The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), & talk with poet & critic Cahal Dallat

• Joshua Bennett has read at the White House at the invitation of President Barack Obama, is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire &, in addition to his poetry publications, is the author of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020) & Spoken Word: A Cultural History, forthcoming from Knopf. His 2016 collection The Sobbing School — a National Poetry Series Selection & NAACP Image Award finalist — was described by Gregory Pardlo as an arresting debut…abounding in tenderness and rich with character.

mon 23 nov, 8pm: troubadour international poetry prize night: 2020 judges mona arshi & mark doty read (free online event) with 2020 prizewinners

With winners notified on mon 16 nov & all results embargoed until tonight, this is the first chance to join us online in celebrating the very best poems submitted to Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2020, hearing them read by the winning & commended poets, & discovering why our 2020 judges made their choices!

• Mark Doty is an American poet & memoirist, winner of Stonewall, Robert Creeley, Lambda Literary & National Book Awards & a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His books of essays include Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, memoir includes Firebird & Dog Years, & his 13 poetry collections range from Turtle, Swan (1987) to Deep Lane: Poems (Norton, 2015). His latest publication is What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in my Life (Norton & Cape, April 2020).

• Mona Arshi worked as a Human Rights lawyer at Liberty before starting to write poetry: her debut, Small Hands won the 2015 Forward Best First Collection Prize, her poems have featured in Poems on the Underground & she was recently commissioned to write a programme on The Odyssey for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Her latest collection is Dear Big Gods (Pavilion Poetry, 2019).

mon 10 feb: poems of love & death with US undertaker-poet thomas lynch plus troubadour poets with new takes on desire & demise…

Love & Death…an unlikely pre-Valentine’s pairing, though both come wreathed in roses, & both, it would seem, are all that poets ever write of: the death of love, a love of death, undying love, dying for love, Eros & Thanatos.

Even The Loved One’s simply a US euphemism for the just-departed, so to headline our slightly un-Valentine-ish theme we welcome back #coffeehousepoetry’s favourite undertaker-poet, Thomas Lynch from Michigan, author of several poetry collections, & of Bodies in Motion & at Rest: On Metaphor & Mortality, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, & New & Selected Essays: The Depositions (Norton, 2019). 

Plus great Troubadour poets with their newly-written-for-the-occasion poems of love, death or both! That’s Ingrid Leonard, Ian McLachlan, Jo Roach, Mark Huband, Heather Moulson, Tim Waller, Lady Poe, Michael Dench, Karen Rydings, Tessa Anslow, Dino Mahoney, Mary Mulholland, Julie-Ann Rowell, Steve Kendall, Karen Littleton, Adam Buckley, Katie Griffiths, Warren Czapa, Caroline Hammond, Mark Chamberlain, Fiona Larkin, Angus Strachan, Michelle Penn, Steve Boorman, Mary Powell, Katarina Grabowsky, Matthew Paul, Jude Vermeulen, Kiran Chitta & Fran O’Leary

#poetrymondays — oct-dec 2019

mon 21 oct: october revelations with richard scott, rebecca perry, hannah sullivan & lisa kelly plus 20 troubadours with new odes to autumn

Kicking off Keats’s season of mists & mellow with four happening poets —

• Londoner Richard Scott has won both Wasafiri New Writing Prize & 2016 Michael Marks Poetry Award: Soho (Faber, 2018) is his debut collection & he teaches at Faber Academy
• Rebecca Perry has worked in theatre in Slovenia & edits online journal Poems in Which; her first collection Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe, 2015) won the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize
• Hannah Sullivan studied at Harvard, taught in California & is Assoc. Prof. of English at New College, Oxford: her first collection Three Poems (Faber 2018) was awarded the TS Eliot Prize
• freelance journalist Lisa Kelly is half-Danish & half-deaf: A Map Towards Fluency (Carcanet, 2019) follows pamphlets Bloodhound in 2012 & Philip Levine’s Good Ear
• plus something autumnal from singer/guitarist Henry Fajemirokun
• plus 20 autumnal odes — reflections on summer’s-end or winter’s coming-in, post-holiday blues, memories of back-to-school, odes to fallen leaves, toast-&-honey, nuts, apples, fireworks — especially written for this October celebration by Troubadour regulars including Digby Howard, Mark Huband, Oliver Comins, Nic Stringer, Tessa Anslow, Dino Mahoney, Karen Littleton, Rachel Donati, Alice Thurling, Mary Muir, Michael Harris, Diana Pooley, Bernadette Reed, Michelle Penn, Tim Richardson, Gillie Robic, Iain Whiteley, Lesley Sharpe, Alex Josephy, Jo Roach & Tim Waller
             

mon 4 nov: behind the blue door with blue door press poets pamela johnson, jennifer grigg & jane kirwan, plus 20 troubadours with new poems on the open & closed subject of doors

Blue Door Press is a co-publishing venture involving writers, editors & designers with the aim of producing high-quality, thought-provoking books — fiction, memoir, & poetry. 2018 saw the publication of Stories & Lies bringing together three very different voices:

• Pamela Johnson, Assoc. Tutor on Goldsmiths’ Life Writing MA, has published three novels, Under Construction, Deep Blue Silence & Taking in Water
• Jennifer Grigg moved here from Boston 20 years ago, has researched & written on art & artists, & founded Green Bottle Press in 2015
• Jane Kirwan, co-author of Born in the NHS with Wendy French & Second Exile with Ales Machacek, has published a novel & two poetry collections including The Man Who Sold Mirrors
• & helping us celebrate Blue Door Press poetry with 20 newly commissioned poems on the subject of doors, doorways, entrances & exits, locked or wide-open doors, old or slightly creepy doorways, porches, garage doors, shed doors, doors from distant memory & doors seen every day, we’ll have — Fiona Larkin, Katie Griffiths, Caroline Hammond, David Bottomley, Mary Powell, Helen Adie, Heather Moulson, Steve Boorman, Angela Kirby, Wendy French, Nisia Studzinska, Vanessa Lampert, Mary Mulholland, Audrey Ardern-Jones, Jean Hall, Jan Heritage, Edwina Gleeson, Matt Barnard, Andrew Ball, Susannah Hart, June Lausch, Jennifer Nadel & Karen Rydings
             

mon 18 nov: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with stephen sexton, greta stoddart, richard douglas pennant, stuart silver & peter foggitt plus, before the break, 20 troubadours with new poems on the theme of words, spoken or unspoken

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Watch our wordsmiths’ web of words & wit weave their way through the air in & around impromptu musical interludes & improvisation — & enjoy specially-chosen poems from our 20 before-the-break guests on things we said or didn’t say, words heard, overheard, misheard or unheard, on magic words, forgotten words, missing words, on speech or silence…

Weaving the word-wide-web, we’ll have

• Stephen Sexton who won the National Poetry Competition & teaches at Belfast’s Seamus Heaney Centre — his If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin 2019) is on this year’s Forward Best First Collection shortlist
• Greta Stoddart — first book At Home in the Dark won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; latest, Alive Alive O was Roehampton Poetry Prize shortlisted; & her long poem Who’s There? was BBC Radio4’s Pick of the Week
• Richard Douglas Pennant who divides his time between Cyprus & his native North Wales: his latest collection Lines in the Sky (Cinnamon, 2017) is accompanied by a CD of poems set to music
• all interwoven with pianist/composer Peter Foggitt’s imaginative improvisatory soundscape
• & sparkling philosophical intrusions/infusions from Perrier-Award-winning writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver
• plus word poems from our 20 first-half poets including Michael Dench, Fran O’Leary, Mark Chamberlain, Katy Mack, Angus Strachan, Barney Ashton Bullock, Ingrid Leonard, Adam Buckley, Matthew Paul, Ian McLachlan, Elaine Baker, Steve Kendall, Warren Czapa, Katarina Grabowsky, Eleni Cay, Stewart Carswell, Lady Poe, Charlotte Baldwin, Scarlett Sabet & Jude Vermeulen
             

mon 2 dec: over the rainbow, a multi-coloured end-of-season poetry-party celebration

Red wheelbarrows, white chickens, blue Mondays, scarlet letters, red, red roses, pink panthers, purple rain, indigo moods, yellow wallpaper, scarlet ribbons, silver spurs, lapis lazuli, white cliffs, red October, green gables, blue murder, rose-red cities, green eggs and ham, whiter shades of pale, crimson petals, green tomatoes… novelists, film-makers, songsters & poets play with a seemingly infinite & dazzling colour-spectrum!

Come along and hear the primary colours or subtle shades that our invited guest poets have come up with: specially written or selected from their shelves, to celebrate the end of a colourful season with a hint of this, a dash of that, all with a splash of colour to enliven our poetry carnival – with a know-your-colourchart quiz to test your wits & take-home prizes in red & white!

#poetrymondays — may-jun 2019

mon 27 may @8 pm: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with pat boran, martina evans, richard douglas pennant, a.f. harrold, & peter foggitt plus, before the break, twenty-one troubadours with poems on the theme of chance…

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Fortune, chance, accident, serendipity, synchronicity… you name it, but that’s what happens in a What We Should Have Said sequence at the Troubadour as the poems, the links & connections, the flow, the performance, all come together in pure mercurial poetic spontaneity… with quicksilver philosophical bon mots & a sparkling score of off-the-cuff harmonic interludes & interpolations.

And playing on that game-of-chance element you’ll have the chance to hear Twenty-One new poems by Twenty-One Troubadour poets — written specially for the event, and premiered on the night — on themes of luck, coincidence, contingency, risk, probability or improbability, hazard, fluke, fate, & destiny…

Taking a spin on our poetic wheel of fortune we’ll have:

• Pat Boran, editor of Dedalus Press: has written memoir & fiction, edited anthologies, presented The Poetry Programme on RTÉ, & written 8 collections of poetry including Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (Orange Crate, 2015)
• Martina Evans, poet, novelist, & Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow, grew up in County Cork: her 2016 new & selected is followed by Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet, 2018)
• Richard Douglas Pennant divides his time between Cyprus & his native North Wales: his latest collection Lines in the Sky (Cinnamon, 2017) is accompanied by a CD of poems set to music
• & immensely witty & inventive writer A.F. Harrold, latest collection, The Point of Inconvenience, (Two Rivers, 2013)
• all interwoven with pianist/composer Peter Foggitt’s improvisatory soundscape
• plus our Twenty-One Troubadours, Steve Boorman, Jo Roach, Karen Rydings, Caroline Hammond, Andrew Ball, Michael Dench, Tessa Anslow, Adam Buckley, Steve Kendall, Angus Strachan, Mary Powell, Katy Mack, Barney Ashton, Ian McLachlan, Katarina Grabowsky, Ingrid Leonard, Stewart Carswell, Lady Poe, Mark Chamberlain, Jude Vermeulen, Sue Chamberlain, Mark Huband & Warren Czapa, each with a new lucky poem!

mon 10 jun @8 pm: born in the usa! with dan o’brien, kathryn maris, mark halliday, university of north florida poetry group, plus singer/guitarist mark ari, & 21 troubadour poets each with a favourite american poem

Celebrate American poets & poetry with:

• Poet, librettist & playwright Dan O’Brien (b. Scarsdale NY, lives in Los Angeles) won the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Prize & 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for his poetry – latest collection New Life (CB Editions, 2016) — & has been shortlisted for Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright for The Body of an American which won major US honours including PEN Center USA drama award
• Kathryn Maris (b. Long Island, NY, lives in London) praised in TLS for her Deadpan humour and cool dissection of domestic dysfunction in poetry that is playful, obsessive, irreverent has published three poetry collections – latest, The House With Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin, 2018) with a selection of her work appearing in Penguin Modern Poets 5
• Mark Halliday (b. Ann Arbor MI) whose seven poetry collections include Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018), teaches at Ohio University, has been poet-in-residence at The Frost Place & has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship & the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
• with contributions from Univ. of North Florida poets Clark Lunberry, Sarah Fogleman, Monica Burch, Samantha Addy, Aaron Colina, Michelle Gonzalez, Savvy McLeod, Katherine England, Mikayla Woolwine. Jessica Woodman, Henry Fullerton, Kenny Craig & Christyn Kelly
• singer/guitarist, (& writer, painter & EAT Poems editor) Mark Ari
• & 21 Coffee-House Poetry poets, Mary Mulholland, Barbara Marsh, Scarlett Sabet, Katie Griffiths, Pam Johnson, Nancy Hynes, Charlotte Baldwin, Jennifer Wong, Barbara Barnes, Matt Barnard, Michelle Penn, Catherine Davidson, Sue Greenhill, Oliver Comins, Tim Richardson, June Lausch, Karen Littleton, Lesley Sharpe, Susannah Hart, Rosie Johnson & Tim Waller (a number of whom are Americans living in London) each reading a favourite from a poet Born in the USA!

wed 12 jun, @7.30 for 8 pm, poetry places with special guest imtiaz dharker

Bedford Park Festival Poetry Evening 2019 hosted by: Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
@ St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX

We’ll be celebrating ‘poetry places’, from Wordsworth’s Lakeland to Clare’s Northamptonshire, from Yeats’s Sligo to Burns’s Ayrshire and Dylan Thomas’s Swansea, from rural idyll & Celtic mists to our great diverse, energetic, multicultural capital cities. So do bring a favourite poem of place, your own or by a well-known poet (max. 25 lines), to read in the first half. And after the interval, meet this year’s guest, poet, artist, film-maker & Queen’s Gold Medal award-winner, Imtiaz Dharker, with her personal literary choices. Born in Lahore, brought up in Glasgow, Imtiaz now divides her time between Wales, Mumbai and London.
Tickets: £8 from Bedford Park Festival

mon 24 jun @8 pm: endings: end-of-season poem-party celebrating finales, conclusions, and the last of anything & everything…

At the end of the day endings may be even more important to writers than beginnings, not just last lines, happy endings, twists-in-the-tail, poetic punchlines, final movements, literary denouements, epilogues, wrappings-up & post-scripts…

… but real-life endings, the end of summer, end of childhood, of a friendship, a relationship, job, the end of the rainbow, the year’s end, Land’s End, coming to the end of the line, dead ends, the light at the end of the tunnel, Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Graham Greene’s End of the Affair, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Van Morrison’s Dark End of the Street or Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love.

Come along and listen to invited guests read their poems on this open-ended, never-ending theme, listen to endings-themed music (final movements, The Last Waltz and more…) & join in our not-too-serious ‘endings’ quiz: answers — & wine prizes — at the very end & we have, as ever, the final say!

#poetrymondays — oct-dec 2018

mon 15 oct, 8pm: to look for america, with j chester johnson, elizabeth powell, & 20 troubadour poets reading current us poetry

First #poetrymonday of the season with two US guest poets, guest readers with US poem-choices, & a ‘Paul Simon’ guitar spot … all come to look for America

• poet & dramatist J Chester Johnson (latest collection Now & Then: Selected Longer Poems) is noted for his writing on 9/11, on racial injustice, & on the Civil Rights struggle: his collaboration with WH Auden is the subject of Auden, The Psalms and Me (2017)
• poet & professor Elizabeth Powell is a winner of the Philip Levine Prize, latest collection Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances
• plus, J Chester Johnson & Elizabeth Powell ‘in-conversation’ with Cahal Dallat
• with 20 Troubadour poets each with their contemporary US poem choices including Warren Czapa, Steve Kendall, Matt Barnard, Jan Heritage, Catherine Davidson, Miranda Peake, June Lausch, Sue Greenhill, Diana Pooley, Matthew Paul, Michelle Penn, Barbara Barnes, Elaine Baker, Betsy De Lotbiniere, Mary Powell, Rosie Johnston, Jo Roach, Karen Rydings & Nancy Hynes
• plus, as poet & troubadour Paul Simon hangs up his guitar after his last London gig this summer, we celebrate his (1964) first London gig at the Troubadour with singer/guitarist, Henry Fajemirokun

mon 29 oct, 8pm: the best new writing with fiona moore, scarlett sabet, oliver comins, mara bergman, fiona larkin, & bryony littlefair, plus troubadour-poets with new poems…

Six guest poets currently making waves, & readings of new work from a few of our Troubadour regulars:

• just out from Happenstance, Fiona Moore’s first collection The Distal Point is a PBS Autumn Recommendation following pamphlets, The Only Reason for Time (a Guardian book-of-the-year) & (Michael Marks shortlisted) Night Letter
• Scarlett Sabet, London-based poet/performer, has read at The Groucho, Shakespeare & Co & William Morris House: her third collection, Zoreh was launched at San Francisco’s City Lights this spring
• after three pamphlets, Yes to Everything, Staying in Touch & Battling Against the Odds, Oliver Comins – from Kenilworth but now lives & works in London –launched his first full collection, Oak Fish Island in May 2018
• launched this summer, Mara Bergman’s debut collection The Disappearing Room follows Crossing Into Tamil Nadu, & The Tailor’s Three Sons and Other New York Poems (which won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition)
• Fiona Larkin’s poems have appeared in Magma, The North, Under the Radar, Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 & In Transit: Poems of Travel (Emma Press): she has a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway, & is working on a first collection
• poet, blogger, project co-ordinator for The Reader – & former cupcake-baker, editorial assistant & dementia support worker – Bryony Littlefair has had poems in Popshot, The Cadaverine, Clear Poetry & Ink, Sweat and Tears
• new poems from new & established Troubadour poets Jenny Wong, Stuart Carswell, Ali Thurm, Ellen Morrissey, Michael Harris, Tim Waller, Karen Littleton, Kevin Connelly, Steve Boorman, Sarah Van Gogh, Jean Hall, Soul Patel, Lady Poe, Audrey Ardern-Jones, Gillie Robic, Paul Crichton, Angela Kirby, Lesley Saunders, ME Muir, Robin Houghton, & Wendy French

mon 12 nov, 8pm: the voyage out with anne-marie fyfe, cahal dallat, & 21 new maritime poems written by guest poets

Following a writing/workshopping & performing coastal tour that has taken her to Suffolk, Cornwall, Devon, Swansea, Scotland’s Highlands & Islands, Antrim, Cork & Wexford, Massachusetts, Maine & Canada’s Maritimes, Troubadour organiser Anne-Marie Fyfe brings The Voyage Out to London, presenting her sequence on writers and the sea, with selections from favourite novelists, travel-writers & poets, from the constant, recurring presence of the sea in her first five collections of poetry, & from her new writing project combining poetry & prose memories, of growing up, of life by the sea in Cushendall, and of other coastal locations she’s experienced on her travels. With sea-music by Troubadour musician Cahal Dallat (accordion/mandolin/flute & piano)…

… with a first half of 21 Troubadour poets each with their own new poems of sea-coasts, harbours, voyages, headlands, tidelines & dangerous undercurrents, both real & metaphorical: Angus Strachan, Jude Vermeulen, Barney Ashton, Mark Chamberlain, Ian McLachlan, Adam Buckley, Tessa Anslow, Katarina Grabowksy, Katy Mack, Lesley Sharpe, Mark Huband, Fran O’ Leary, Charlotte Baldwin, Mary Mulholland, Susannah Hart, Tim Richardson, Ingrid Leonard, David Loffman, Helen Adie, Lynne Helmgaard, Michael Dench & Andrew Ball

mon 26 nov, 8pm: troubadour international poetry prize night: 2018 judges jo shapcott & daljit nagra read with 2018 prizewinners

With winners notified by mon 19 nov & all results embargoed until tonight, this is the first chance to join all of literary London in celebrating the very best poems submitted to Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2018, hearing them read by the winning poets, & discovering why our 2018 judges made their choices!

Plus a chance to listen to both judges reading their own award-winning work:

• Jo Shapcott has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry & has won a number of literary prizes including Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, Forward Prize for Best Collection, National Poetry Competition (twice), & the Costa Book Award for her most recent, Of Mutability. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book & My Life Asleep are gathered in a ‘selected poems’ entitled Her Book.

• Daljit Nagra was the first poet to win the Forward Prize for both his first collection of poetry, in 2007, and for its title poem, Look, We Have Coming to Dover!, three years earlier. His other publications include a retelling of the Ramayana, a Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition winner, Oh My Rub!, & two further poetry collections, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy Machine & his latest, British Museum (Faber, 2017).

mon 10 dec: no snowflakes: a themed poetry-party with invited guest readers, music & prize quiz

Snow-poems – like snow-scene paintings – can wallow in slushy sentiment, in a calm & contemplative blanket, in a world made temporarily beautiful: or they can swirl us into a blizzard of darkness, drifts, treacherous roads & pathways, the misery of isolation, of cut-offness, the ugliness of thaw & floods.

Captain Oates, of course, meets an icy end with composure in Derek Mahon’s Antarctica, but perhaps the ubiquity, the depressions, the impracticality/impossibility of snow in Jenni Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, in the Leningrad of Gillian Slovo’s The Ice Road, in Karl Ove Knausgård’s native Norway, in Northern Exposure’s Alaska, in the Coen brothers’ Fargo (North Dakota), all offer a realistic corrective to David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, to Don McLean’s virgin snow, Paul Simon’s silent cloud of freshly fallen snow, to Irving Berlin’s sleighbell-tinkling White Christmas (although Ocean Vuong’s Aubade with Burning City has already taken those delicate snowflakes to new places…)

Whether your feelings for snow are closer to Karl Ove’s or to those of Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla, you’ll enjoy hearying our guest-poets’ snow-inspired selections & creations, their own poems, or those by famous poets, discovering whose wins the evening’s bonus-prize, listening to snow-themed music (& not just Irving Berlin or Dr. Zhivago), & testing your degrees of snow-ology in our not-too-serious prize-quiz!

#poetrymondays — may-jun 2018

mon 28 may, 8pm: first things first: amy key, mary jean chan, claudine toutoungi & eleni cay along with 21 poets reading — for the first time — new poems on first things

Springing straight into summer’s Troubadour #poetrymondays with 4 ‘first collection’ poets:

• Mary Jean Chan is an editor of Oxford Poetry & a major National Poetry Competition prizewinner — her debut, A Hurry of English (ignitionpress) is PBS 2018 Summer Pamphlet Choice & she has a first full collection due from Faber in 2019
• Claudine Toutoungi, studied at Oxford & Goldsmiths — a dramatist & drama producer, her plays have aired on BBC Radio4, & have been staged at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre: Smoothie (Carcanet, 2017) is her debut collection
• Slovakian-born Eleni Cay’s first book, A Butterfly’s Trembling in the Digital Age was published in Slovakian — A Small Love Dictionary of Untranslatable Japanese Words (Eyewear, 2017) is her first full collection in English
• Amy Key, whose first collection Luxe was published by Salt, has a second collection, Isn’t Forever due from Bloodaxe this June — in 2014 she edited Emma Press anthology Best Friends Forever, poems on friendships between women

plus, 21 first-outings for poems specially written for this evening’s event, on the theme of firsts… first impressions, perhaps, first dates, first jobs, first nights, initial reactions, first-floor flats, firstfooters, firstborns, first-day-covers & more, by 21 guest poets: Elaine Baker, Angus Strachan, Andrew Ball, Caroline Hammond, Mark Chamberlain, Kate Noakes, Barney Ashton, Tessa Anslow, Scarlett Sabet, Ian McLachlan, Victoria Grigg, Katy Mack, Charlotte Baldwin, Katerina Grabowsky, Mark Huband, Rachel Donati, Jude Vermeulen, Adam Buckley, Lesley Sharpe, Michael Dench & Fran O’Leary

mon 11 jun, 8pm: uncommon language: with american poets kathryn maris, sandy solomon & linda gregerson plus: 21 poets read their favourite american poems…

US-based/US-born poets have always had a major impact on London’s poetry scene — despite our being divided by a common language — both as guest readers &, for some, living here & enlivening the poetry world with distinctly US influences, ideas & energy. Hear the American poems that really matter to 21 of our Troubadour poets, & listen to 3 great US poets reading their own work:

• Linda Gregerson is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & teaches creative-writing & Renaissance literature at University of Michigan: latest publication Prodigal: New & Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2015)
• Sandy Solomon was raised in Baltimore, Maryland, has directed the US’s National Neighbourhood Coalition & Coalition on Human Needs, & now directs the Creative Writing Program at Vanderbilt University: her collections include Pears, Lake, Sun (University of Pittsburgh)
• Kathryn Maris was born on Long Island, moved to NYC & has lived in London since 1999: a selection of her work appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 5: Occasional Wild Parties & her latest collection is The House With Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin, May 2018)

plus 21 Troubadour poets reading their all-time favourite American poems: that’s Barbara Marsh, Steve Kendall, Jan Heritage, Warren Czapa, Miranda Peake, Michelle Penn, Matt Barnard, Catherine Davidson, Tim Waller, Susannah Hart, Sue Greenhill, Oliver Comins, Barbara Barnes, Martyn Crucefix, Sue Chamberlain, Tim Richardson, Diana Pooley, Matthew Paul, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Betsy De Lotbiniere, Gale Burns & June Lausch.

mon 25 jun, 8pm: sounds & silence: a themed poetry-party

Noise & its absence have long divided poets & philosophers: silence is golden, apparently, — Whatever you say, say nothing, says Seamus Heaney, with Wordsworth waxing lyrical on the bliss of solitude.

Yet poetry’s continually working its own aural, audible music, its subtle sound-effects… & the mere mention of traffic noise, the barking dog, distant voices, a Sunday lawn-mower, a jarring ringtone or forgotten album track, all instantly conjure up place, time, mood & emotion!

WB Yeats longed for peace, far from the rumbling city, but still ached for the sound of lake water lapping: Thomas Hardy was redeemed from centennial gloom by the ecstatic sound of a darkling thrush, TS Eliot peppered his poetry with snatches of overheard conversation, while Emily Dickinson was wary of the taciturn: I fear a Silent man she admits, a sentiment seemingly echoed by Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech!

So noise & its opposite number continue to battle it out, between Douglas Dunn’s The Noise of a Fly & Fiona Sampson’s Rough Music, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Silence & Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise, between Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence & Robert Crawford’s Full Volume…

Come along & listen to the sound of our guest poets reading poems aloud(!), their own or by other poets, on the subject of either sounds or silence, hubbub or tranquility, chatter or taciturnity… listen to the sounds of silence-themed music, join in our supersonic prize quiz & speculate (quietly) on who’ll win the night’s bonus prize for the best, or best-sounding, poem on the theme of sound … or silence.

#poetrymondays — jan-mar 2018

mon 5 feb: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with inua ellams, richard douglas pennant, anne-marie fyfe, huw warren & stuart silver plus, before the break, pop-up poetry

Listen as star wordsmiths spark off each other’s words, themes & ideas at arbitrary angles in a uniquely unpremeditated sequence, interspersed with impromptu counterpoint & off-the-cuff wit & wisdom…

• Inua Ellams’s poetry pamphlets include Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars & #Afterhours (Nine Arches); his first play The 14th Tale won an Edinburgh Fringe First & his latest Barber Shop Chronicles has sold out its current National Theatre run
• Anne-Marie Fyfe has run Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for 20 years: her fifth collection is House of Small Absences (Seren, 2015) & her next book involves exploring (& writing about!) coastal locations in Britain, Ireland, US & Canada
• Richard Douglas Pennant divides his time between Cyprus & his native North Wales; his latest collection Lines in the Sky (Cinnamon, 2017) is accompanied by a CD of poems set to music
• with odd observations & droll discursions from Perrier-Award winning writer-perfomer-director Stuart Silver
• all interwoven into a subtle soundscape by Huw Warren, leading fusion/multi-genre pianist/composer — who also plays with trumpeter/composer/arranger Neil Yates on Richard Douglas Pennant’s Lines in the Sky CD
• plus our before-the-break pop-up where guest poets read one poem each – that’s Jude Vermeulen, Mark Chamberlain, Charlotte Baldwin, Katy Mack, Mary Powell, Steph Morris, Ingrid Leonard, Ian Mclachlan, Jan Heritage, Angus Strachan, Ella Frears, Lesley Sharpe, Barney Ashton, Elaine Baker, Fran O’Leary, Rachel Donati, Andrew Ball, Stewart Carswell, Katarina Grabowksy, Kate Ghyll & Helen Adie

mon 19th feb, 8pm: heart of the matter: celebrating valentines night & the hippocrates book of the heart

Since ancient times, the heart has been understood as the seat of the emotions, of the will, even of the soul…

Wendy French, who co-edited The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) with Michael Hulse & Donald Singer, introduces poets Martyn Crucefix, Diana Pooley, Lesley Saunders, Gillie Robic, Geraldine Clarkson, Audrey Ardern-Jones, Jane Kirwan, Penelope Shuttle, Mimi Khalvati, Kate Miller, Fiona Moore, Danielle Hope, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs & Nick MacKinnon each reading their own poem from this recently-launched anthology on the heart of the matter, while Anne-Marie Fyfe introduces a troupe of Troubadour poets, Victoria Grigg, Mark Huband, Lady Poe, Miranda Peake, Sue Chamberlain, Rishi Dastidar, Barbara Barnes, Matthew Paul, Sue Greenhill, Kate Noakes, Claire Dyer, Matt Barnard, Paul Crichton, Tessa Anslow, Jenny Wong, Steve Kendall, Rosie Shepperd, Adam Buckley, Fiona Larkin, Caroline Hammond, Karen Littleton & Mark Winfield, all with their poetic post-Valentines-Day thoughts on matters of the heart.

mon 5 mar, 8pm: mirror, mirror, themed poetry-party

Poetry holds the mirror up to life, so we’re holding the mirror up to poetry for a change, or to the poetry of mirrors at least, to discover how our world looks Through the Looking Glass.

Poets have long been fond of reflection & refraction, for their metaphysical/metaphorical possibilities, & wisely wary of the lore & luck associated with the looking-glass: Tennyson certainly knew it was all up with his Lady of Shalott, when the mirror through which she watched the world crack’d from side to side, though Yeats’s admonition, to gaze no more in the bitter glass, would have saved Snow White’s stepmother from the magic mirror’s infuriating answer to her daily mirror, mirror on the wall interrogation.

So what do contemporary poets make of the myriad of mirror images & random reflections that face us daily?

Come & listen to invited guest poets’ choices: their own poems — some of them, no doubt, written in our Smoke & Mirrors themed Sunday workshop — or those by famous poets from John Donne to John Ashbery, all on the magic of mirrors. Plus, of course, a mirror-themed (and not-too-serious!) prize-quiz that will certainly require reflection! And, as always, a bonus-bottle prize for the most dazzling poem of the night.

#poetrymondays — oct-dec 2017

mon 16 oct, 8pm: twenty-firsts: with jo shapcott, maura dooley, michael laskey & mimi khalvati plus twenty-one first-half readers

Celebrate Coffee-House Poetry’s twenty-first Troubadour year with four major names in poetry who first read here in our first year, all award-winning poets & poetry-activists:

• Jo Shapcott (Of Mutability, Faber, 2010) has won the National Poetry Competition (twice), the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize & a Cholmondeley Award, & has co-edited Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times with Matthew Sweeney & published her Newcastle University lectures in The Transformers;
• Maura Dooley’s collections Kissing a Bone & Life Under Water have both been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize: a former Arvon centre director, she has directed the South Bank Literature Centre & is Reader in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London; latest collection, The Silverings (Bloodaxe, 2016);
• Michael Laskey co-founded (& directed for a decade) the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, founded & co-edited Smiths Knoll poetry magazine & is currently editor of The Garlic Press, as well as publishing five collections, including Weighing the Present (Smith/Doorstop, 2014) & a new-&-selected poems, The Man Alone (2008);
• award-winning poet & teacher, Mimi Khalvati founded, co-ordinated for many years, & has edited three anthologies for, The Poetry School: her work has been translated into 9 languages & her 8 Carcanet collections include The Weather Wheel, The Meanest Flower & Child: New & Selected Poems 1991-2011, a PBS Special Commendation.
• plus, before the break, twenty-one poets making their mark today in our twenty-first year, many with first publications, first pamphlets, first collections & first prizes to their credit, including Rachel Donati, Eleni Cay, Fran O’Leary, Charlotte Baldwin, Ingrid Leonard, Fahima Sahabdeen, Elaine Baker, Katy Mack, Mark Huband, Caroline Hammond, Katarina Grabowksy, Matthew Paul, Jennifer Wong, Fiona Larkin, Tessa Anslow, Tiffany Anne Tondut, Louisa Campbell, Karen Littleton, Helen Adie, Lesley Sharpe & Chloe-Louise Adegoke

mon 30 oct, 8pm: charles causley, troubadour: with john mole, alyson hallett, rory waterman, cahal dallat, bernadette reed & jim causley

Join our Causley-Trust/Coffee-House Poetry words&music 100th-birthday bash for Charles Causley (1917-2003), one of the century’s most popular poets whose modern ballads, subversive wit, & odes to everyday experience, captured the imagination in a way few poets have done. Join our guests as they read Charles’ poems & their own, discuss & perform new musical settings of his work in part#1, & talk about, in a part#2 Troubadour ‘colloquy’, his imagination, influences & legacy:

• John Mole, loves language, uses it with subtlety & skill, Charles Causley said, describing his as the work of a true poet; winner of Eric Gregory & Cholomondeley awards, his many collections include Gestures and Counterpoints (Shoestring, 2017)
• Alyson Hallett was first Causley Trust poet-in-residence in Charles’s Cyprus Well house on Launceston’s Ridgegrove Hill: her books include On Ridgegrove Hill (Atlantic, 2015) & Suddenly Everything (Salzburg, 2013);
• Rory Waterman’s 2nd Carcanet collection, Sarajevo Roses, is just out; Belfast-born Sen.Lect. at Nottingham Trent Univ, his Belonging & Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, RS Thomas & Charles Causley is published by Ashgate (2014);
• Causley Trust musician/poet-in-residence (& regular Troubadour piano-player), Cahal Dallat, has spent 2017 writing new music/poem-settings & exploring Charles’ musical/poetic influences, with performances at Edinburgh Book Festival, Launceston Castle, Cornwall Folk Festival, Causley Festival, Tamar Valley Classical Festival etc;
• Bernadette Reed, poet & vocalist, (latest album, Walking on Water, 2012) will sing some of Cahal’s new Celtic, salsa, & jazz settings;
• Charles’s relative, Jim Causley, (accordion & piano), finest singer of his generation, according to Mojo Magazine, & nominated for BBC Radio2 Folk Singer of the Year 2017, has written & recorded versions of Charles’s poems at Cyprus Well (on CD, Cyprus Well) & has appeared at Causley-Centenary celebrations around the country.

mon 13th nov, 8pm: off-the-wall wordsmiths: with lorraine mariner, a.f. harrold, jane yeh & paul stephenson + 21 off-beat first-halfers!

… if Poetry is Truth (da Vinci) & Truth is always Strange, Stranger than Fiction (Byron), then poetry has a right to be strange, quirky, & obliquely out-of-kilter… come & hear oddball offerings from four prominent practitioners of the peculiar, plus offbeat openers from poets of perplexity & unpredictability in part#1!

• Lorraine Mariner’s second collection says There Will be No More Nonsense (Picador, 2014): her favourite quote is from conceptual artist George Brecht: There is so little to do & so much time to do it in.
• A.F.Harrold says he has published many books. Some of them made sense. Some made a resounding tinkle. Helen Mort, however, points out that The Point of Inconvenience (Two Rivers, 2013) is alive to the absurdities and contradictions that underwrite human tragedies.
• Open University Creative-Writing lecturer, Jane Yeh, was a PBS Next Generation poet with her collection, The Ninjas (Carcanet, 2012): poetry so unsettling … is seldom as funny, clever, & downright charming … narrated by androids, posses of ghosts … & worried baby pandas (Aingeal Clare, The Guardian)
• Paul Stephenson has twice been a Troubadour International Poetry Prize prizewinner with The Teenage Existential (2nd, in 2012) & Baltic Woman, his first pamphlet, Those People, was a Poetry Business 2015 winner, he was visiting researcher at Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, & his latest publication is The Days That Followed Paris (Happenstance, 2016);
• &, before-the-break, spiky surreallism & skewed stanzas from Steve Kendall, Matt Barnard, Christopher Reid, Andrew Ball, Seraphima Kennedy, Diana Pooley, Iain Whitely, Roisin Tierney, Abigail Parry, Soul Patel, Susannah Hart, Kate Ghyll, Geraldine Clarkson, Mark Winfield, Rosie Shepperd, Steph Morris, Marianne Burton, Scarlett Sabet, Richard Price, June Lausch, Betsy de Lotbiniére & Rishi Dastidar

mon 27 nov, 8pm: troubadour international poetry prize night, with 2017 judges imtiaz dharker & michael symmons roberts read with 2017 prizewinners plus music from the manning sisters

Not just a chance to join the literary world in celebrating news of 2017’s Troubadour International Poetry Prize winners but an opportunity to hear them read, to hear our judges report on what/why/how they decided, & to listen to both judges reading their own work:

• Imtiaz Dharker, poet (visual artist & prizewinning film-maker) was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, & now divides her time between London, Wales & India. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is a prescribed poet for GCSE English, has appeared on Desert Island Discs, & has been awarded both the Society of Authors’ Cholomondeley Prize & the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Latest of her six poetry collections is Over the Moon (Bloodaxe, 2014).
• Michael Symmons Roberts has also published 6 collections of poetry, all with Cape, including Drysalter (2013) & is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has won the Forward Prize, Costa Book Award & Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Born in Preston, Lancs, he grew up in Newbury, Berks, &, in addition to his much-awarded poetry, has written & presented radio documentaries & dramas, & has written novels, libretti, & texts for oratorios & song cycles.
• plus a special prize-night guest appearance from classical duo, Aisling & Julie-Anne Manning:
• Aisling Manning works with (& has toured the world with) BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, has worked with major orchestras in Britian, with Camerata Ireland under the baton of Barry Douglas, & was founding member & 1st violin with Palomino Quartet.
• Cellist Julie-Anne Manning is a member of the Hallé Orchestra, has performed as principal cellist for a number of orchestras including Camerata Ireland & RTE Concert Orchestra, & regularly performs with the Rossi Quartet. Her many awards include the Sir John Barbirolli Prize.

mon 11 dec, 8pm: down by the riverside, a ‘waterways’-themed poetry party

Rivers run through Alice Oswald’s Dart, Sarah Howe’s Yangtze, Philip Levine’s On the River, Mary Oliver’s At the River Clarion, Billy Collins’s Fishing on the Susquehanna in July, & Mimi Khalvati’s River Sounding, while the Thames – just a mile from the Troubadour – flows from Eliot’s Lower Thames Street pub right back to Geoffrey Chaucer (who actually lived on Upper Thames Street).

Should’ve mentioned Eliot’s Sweet Thames source, of course, Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, (Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song) which flows us sweetly into songs from Ewan McColl (Sweet Thames Flow Softly), Lindisfarne (Fog on the Tyne), Bruce Springsteen (The River) or Julie Driscoll (Cry Me a River)… Many Rivers to Cross, as Jimmy Cliff puts it, all flowing into the same poetic sea.

So go with that flow, on a night of the new & the well-known, some by poetry greats, contemporary & canonical, with surprises, invariably, from poets who’ve been Troubadour-Sunday River Deep workshoppers this season… And river-music will flow, as will wines from Rhine, Rhone or Napa river valleys, as the prizes in our literally littoral fun quiz with a special (drinkable) party-night bonus prize for the evening’s most powerful river poem.

#poetrymondays — may-jul 2017

mon 15 may: spring fever: with elaine gaston, jon stone, claire dyer, alistair noon, ruth sharman, nick makoha, michael scott & penny boxall, plus singer/guitarist henry fajemirokun

Step into summer with superb poetry from some super summer-season Troubadour poets:

• Elaine Gaston (latest collection, The Lie of the Land, Doire, 2015) lectures at Ulster University, has won the Seamus Heaney Centre/No-Alibis award & had poems in Poetry Ireland: The Rising Generation;
• London-based Jon Stone won Poetry London’s annual competition in 2014 & 2016, & co-edited, with Kirsten Irving, the four-volume Birdbook project: his School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) is a PBS Recommendation;
• Claire Dyer’s poetry collections, Eleven Rooms & Interference Effects are published by Two Rivers Press. Her novels, The Moment & The Perfect Affair & her short story Falling for Gatsby are published by Quercus;
• Alistair Noon has lived in Berlin since the early 90s. His publications include two collections from Nine Arches Press, Earth Records (2012), shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, & The Kersoene Singing (2015);
• French translator Ruth Sharman lives in Bath; Birth of the Owl Butterflies, title poem of her debut collection, won an Arvon 2nd prize: her latest collection, Scarlet Tiger (2016) won the Straid Collection Award;
• Nick Makoha, whose debut, The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man launched the Flippedeye pamphlet series, is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, won the Brunel International African Poetry Award, & represented Uganda at the London Cultural Olympiad’s Poetry Parnassus;
• Michael Scott co-founded the Swindon Festival of Poetry: his debut chapbook Little Usherette (Red Ceilings Press, 2016) has been described as like Citizen Kane written on the back of a fag packet;
• Penny Boxall’s debut collection is Ship of the Line (Eyewear, 2014); she won both the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award & first prize in the 2016 Elmet Poetry Competition;
• plus singer/guitarist Henry Fajemirokun

mon 29 may: states of writing: with d. nurkse, reading & in-conversation plus, before the break, poets from university of north florida, plus singer/guitarist mark ari

• We’re delighted to have back, by popular demand after last year’s stunning Troubadour reading, former Brooklyn poet-laureate Dennis Nurkse, whose parents fled Nazi Europe during World War II, & who has written on human rights issues, worked with Amnesty International, & published numerous books of poetry with Knopf in the US. Dennis reads from Voices over Water (2011) & A Night in Brooklyn (2012), both with CB Editions in the UK, & discusses writing, roots & relevance (among other things) with CL Dallat;
• plus, before the break, poets from University of North Florida Ash Kemker, Avelina Acosta, Emly Kubacki, Gabriel Bugarin, Teresa ‘T’ Jacobson, Gina Olson, Tiffany Butler, Joseph Lusi, Kim Brown, Kimmie McKibbin, Corrine Schmaltz, Sidney Brooks;
• plus singer/guitarist, (& writer, painter & EAT Poems editor) Mark Ari.

mon 12 jun: a matter of life & death: the much-loved, & award-winning, Michigan poet, essayist & undertaker, thomas lynch, reading & in-conversation, with special guest appearance by aisling & julie-anne manning

A Troubadour return visit for another US poet, Thomas Lynch, reading, & discussing poetry, life & death, with CL Dallat. Tom last read with us at the end of 1999!

• Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems (including Walking Papers: Poems 1999-2009, WW Norton). His essays, poems & stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Times, New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, & Paris Review. He lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, & in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage. His work has been the subject of two film documentaries, PBS Frontline’s The Undertaking, (2007) & Cathal Black’s BBC film, Learning Gravity, where it was awarded the Michigan Prize by Michael Moore.
• Aisling Manning works with (& has toured the world with) BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, has worked with major orchestras in Britian, with Camerata Ireland under the baton of Barry Douglas, & was founding member & 1st violin with Palomino Quartet. 
• Cellist Julie-Anne Manning is a member of the Hallé Orchestra, has performed as principal cellist for a number of orchestras including Camerata Ireland & RTE Concert Orchestra, & regularly performs with the Rossi Quartet. Her many awards include the Sir John Barbirolli Prize.

mon 26 jun: planet earth: poetry party with guest readers, music & prize-quiz, with a theme of planets & perseids, stars & satellites, orbits, galaxies & constellations…

John Gray insists that Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, & Gustav Holst had both heavenly bodies, & the rest, in his 1916 Planets Suite (all except Pluto which wasn’t discovered until 1930). And David Bowie who gave us Life on Mars had Major Tom observe that Planet earth is blue.

But what do our favourite poets make of the power, or the presence, of planets? John Donne was fascinated with the skies as optical advances allowed his contemporaries to discover so many new planets in the firmament. And even in 1930 scientists & cartoonists named their respective latest discoveries (a new element, & Mickey Mouse’s dog) after the newest planet (which also features in Mary Ruefle’s Cold Pluto). But that was after just about every ancient culture had attributed meaning, character, personalities, godlike qualities or auguries of doom to the objects, asteroids, comets & celestial spheres that fill our night-skies.

But the planetary sense is still strong in poems like Auden’s Moon Landing, Robert Lowell’s Pity the planet, all joy gone/ from this sweet volcanic cone, Jamie McKendrick’s Seventh Planet, discovered by William Herschel, Caroline Herschel’s comet-sweeper in Lesley Saunders’ Cloud Camera, Peggy Seeger or Roberta Flack singing Ewan McColl’s the moon & stars were the gifts you gave, or a whole generation of contemporary poems about space travel, space exploration, fictional or factual interplanetary craft.

Join us on a journey through poems & planets, astronauts & asteroids, Greek deities & science-fiction geekdom, through constellations, orbits, space-warps, star treks, & yes, not to be forgotten, the ever popular moon, stars & sun that illuminate our poems & our lives. Hear guest poets’ planet-inspired poetry, or their astronomically-inspired choices from poets past & present, join in our Extra Terrestrial prize poetry quiz, listen to planet-themed music & hear whose planet poem wins the Troubadour-bonus space race…

poetry mondays — jan-mar 2017

mon 23 jan: salon d’hiver with abigail parry, raymond antrobus, susan wicks, matthew caley, rachel long, alex josephy, wendy klein, cliff yates plus singer/guitarist henry fajemirokun

Kick out the winter blues with this classic Troubadour poetry night that’s all about happening poets & latest publications:

• London-based toymaker/Eng.Lit.-teacher Abigail Parry won the 2016 Troubadour International Poetry Prize; her work has appeared in various journals & in the anthologies The Best British Poetry 2011 & Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam;
• British-Jamaican poet/educator & events curator Raymond Antrobus (b. Hackney) is one of the first recipients of a Goldsmith’s Spoken Word Education MA; 2nd pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter (due from Outspoken, Apr’17);
• Susan Wicks has won (among many awards) both Aldeburgh First Collection Prize & Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; her seventh collection, The Months (Bloodaxe, 2016), is a PBS Recommendation;
• Matthew Caley (5th collection, Rake, Bloodaxe, 2016) has read in Prague, Paris & Novi Sad, among many places; his last two collections, Apparently, & Professor Glass, both featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb;
• Rachel Long is Assistant Tutor on Barbican Young Poets programme, founded Octavia poetry collective for women of colour (at Southbank Centre) & has been commissioned by BBC & Courtauld Institute;
• based in London & Italy, Alex Josephy (pamphlet, Other Blackbirds, Cinnamon, 2016) has won The McLellan Prize & Battered Moons Prize, & was Poet-in-Residence at Rainham Hall gardens in Essex in 2016;
• US- born Wendy Klein has two collections from Cinnamon, Cuba in the Blood & Anything in Turquoise (2013), plus Mood Indigo (2016) from Oversteps, & has won Buxton, Havant & Cannon poetry competitions;
• Cliff Yates (b. Birmingham, latest collection, Jam, Smith/Doorstop, 2016) is RLF Fellow at Aston University, won Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, & wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society, 1999) when Poetry Society poet-in-residence;
• plus singer/guitarist Henry Fajemirokun

mon 6 feb: sibling poetries: maura dooley, tim dooley & terence dooley, swap poems & themes in an inventive impromptu, plus, before the break… faber academy alumni

A unique Troubadour fusion with three sibling poets each of whom has taken a distinctively different route through the literary world, all onstage together for the first time, reading poems in an unplanned sequence where each idea, thought, or association, sparks off another in unpredictable directions…

• Maura Dooley (latest, The Silvering, Bloodaxe, 2016) teaches at Goldsmiths, founded & directed Literature at the South Bank, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature & has twice been short-listed for the TS Eliot Award;
• Tim Dooley is a Poetry School Tutor, visiting lecturer at Univ. of Westminster & former Poetry London Reviews/features editor; latest collection, The Sound We Make Ourselves: Poems 1971-2016 (Eyewear, 2016);
• with The Why of It just out from Argent (Oct 2016), Terence Dooley’s translation of Eduardo Moga’s Selected Poems is also due from Shearsman in Apr 2017; he has edited Penelope Fitzgerald’s selected essays, A House of Air, & letters, So I Have Thought of You;

plus, before the break, twenty Faber Academy alumni: Mary Powell, Soul Patel, Rachel Donati, Iain Whiteley, Caroline Hammond, Chloe Louise Adegoke, Charlotte Baldwin, Mark Huband, Susie Pentelow, Ian McLachlan, Geraldine Clarkson, Matthew Dixon, Katy Mack, Fran O’Leary, Kate Ghyll, Jan Heritage, Deborah Sibbald, Paul Crichton, Edward Doegar, & Richard Scott.

mon 20 feb: weather report: poetry party with guest readers, music & prize-quiz, on/around the themes of wind, hail, showers, cloud-cover & sunlight…

I get all the news I need from the weather report, Paul Simon says: but writers get more than news from the weather’s infinite variety, from Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain to The Beatles’ Good Day Sunshine, or the range of mood-altering possibilities experienced in sunnier, or wilder & more tempest-riven, climes…

… from George Herbert’s Storm & TS Eliot’s yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes, through to more contemporary poetic evocations Medbh McGuckian’s Snapdragon, choosing cloudy weather, the mantle of weather in Jorie Graham’s San Sepolcro, Paul Muldoon’s New Weather, Ruth Padel’s Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire & former Troubadour prizewinners, Marilyn Francis’ The Waltzer in Sunlight, Diana Pooley’s Heatwave & Mary O’Donnell’s A Young Fisherman Waits for the Weather to Change.

The use of weather similes & metaphors is ubiquitous, with Wordsworth lonely as a cloud, mercy dropping, according to Shakespeare, as the gentle rain from heaven, & weather a substitute for something, surely, in Emily Dickinson’s last words: Let us go in:, she said, the fog is rising.

Book, film & song titles abound too… Gone With the Wind, Stormy Weather, The Sun Also Rises, Snow Falling on Cedars, House of Sand & Fog, Cloud Atlas, The Ice Storm, Henderson the Rain King… But if we list too many of these, our quiz-questions on the night (which are always easy-peasy) will be even easier!

Come along to hear invited guest poets’ weather-report poem-choices, their own work, some written in Troubadour Sunday Gallery workshops perhaps, or poems by famous weather-watching poets of the past, listen to meteorologically-themed music; pit your weather-wits against our famously not-too-literary literary quiz & hear whose storm-tossed, rain-beaten, snow-drifted poem & performance wins our party-night bonus prize!

readings – oct-dec 2016

mon 17 oct: cornucopia: scarlett sabet, paul casey, sue boyle, john greening, afric mcglinchey, heidi williamson, angela kirby & michelle cahill

Cream of the 2016 crop of new collections & new work with:

• Scarlett Sabet, London based poet/performer, has read at The Groucho & William Morris House: second collection, The Lock And The Key launched at Shakespeare & Co in Paris, July 2016
• Paul Casey edits the annual Unfinished Book of Poetry (teenage writing) & founded Cork’s legendary Ó Bhéal reading series: second collection Virtual Tides (Salmon, 2016).
• Bath-based poetry activist Sue Boyle’s sequence, Report from the Judenplatz, has been performed at poetry & drama festivals: her first collection is Safe Passage (Oversteps, 2015)
• TLS poetry reviewer John Greening is a Cholomondeley & Bridport winner: latest books, To the War Poets (Carcanet, 2013) & Heath (Nine Arches, 2016, with Penelope Shuttle)
• Afric McGlinchey is featured as one of Ireland’s ‘Rising Poets’ in Poetry Ireland Review #118: first collection, the lucky star of hidden things, (Salmon, 2012) now also in Italian (L’Arcolaio, 2015)
• Heidi Williamson’s first, Electric Shadow, was a PBS Recommendation & shortlisted for Seamus Heaney Centre Prize: second collection, The Print Museum (Bloodaxe, 2016), shortlisted for 2016 East Anglian Book Award
• Angela Kirby from Lancashire lives in London: her poems have been read on BBC TV & Radio4 & appear in four collections, latest, The Days After Always: New & Selected Poems (Shoestring, 2016)
• & Arc poet Michelle Cahill from Sydney, (b. Kenya), winner of Val Vallis Award & Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize: latest collection, The Herring Lass (2016)

mon 31 oct: troubadour international poetry prize: 2016 judges jane yeh & glyn maxwell read along with our 2016 prizewinners including first-prize winner, abigail parry…

Join the poetry world in celebrating the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2016 hear the £5,000 prizewinning poem from Abigail Parry, plus 2nd, 3rd and 20 more prizewinners (click here for full list), plus this year, for the first time, winners of the two Troubadour-Coffee-House sponsored prizes. And a chance to listen to poems (& comments on the prizewinning poems, & on the business of submitting, & winning!) from the highly-respected judges who made those difficult poem-choices from so many poems submitted from around the world:

• Glyn Maxwell (b. Welwyn Garden City) was named as a Poetry Book Society ‘New Generation’ poet in 1994 & has written novels, libretti, drama, radio drama, & prose including On Poetry & its sequel Drinks with Dead Poets (Oberon, 2016), as well as editing a collected edition of Derek Walcott’s poetry. Glyn’s nine collections of poetry include a ‘selected poems’, One Thousand Nights and Counting (2011) & his latest, Pluto (Picador,2013).
• Jane Yeh (b. New Jersey, ed. Harvard University) holds master’s degrees from Iowa Writers’ Workshop & Manchester Metropolitan University. Her first collection Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for Whitbread, Forward, & Aldeburgh prizes; her latest is The Ninjas, (Carcanet, 2012). She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University & was named a ‘Next Generation’ poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014.

mon 14 nov: guest-choice: dom bury introduces jon stone, kate wakeling, rachel long, alex mcdonald, & an eclectic set of up-&-coming new voices

First in a series of guest-hosts, Troubadour associate Dom Bury selects/highlights what’s new in poetry:

• London-based Jon Stone won Poetry London’s annual competition in 2014 & 2016, & co-edited, with Kirsten Irving, the four-volume Birdbook project: his School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) is a PBS Recommendation
• Kate Wakeling studied music at Cambridge & SOAS, debut pamphlet, The Rainbow Faults (Rialto, 2016); Moon Juice, her poems for children, will be published by The Emma Press.
• Rachel Long is Assistant Tutor on Barbican Young Poets programme, founded Octavia poetry collective for women of colour (at Southbank Centre) & has been commissioned by BBC & Courtauld Institute
• Alex MacDonald’s poems feature in Best British Poetry 2015: he is a 2016 Eric Gregory Award recipient, lives & works in London, & is one of the editors of the online magazine Poems in Which

plus, in part one, Dom’s ones-to-watch: Edward Doegar, Abigail Parry, Donald Futers, Soul Patel, Ali Lewis, John Canfield, Ella Frears, Raymond Antrobus, Joey Connolly, Rishi Dastidar, Rachel Piercy, Susannah Hart, & Rowena Knight

mon 28 nov: luke kennard, louis jenkins, martina evans, marios takoushis & stuart silver in what we should have said, an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig plus, before the break, live canon’s, responses to shakespeare’s sonnets

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Poetry, harmony & wit on a roll… in the Troubadour’s unique words-&-music rollercoaster featuring three poets:

• Luke Kennard, one of PBS’s 2014 Next-Generationers, lectures at Univ. of Birmingham & has published 5 collections of poetry including the latest Cain (Penned in the Margins, 2016) with his debut novel The Transition due from Fourth Estate in 2017!
• Louis Jenkins, wryly absurd Minnesotan prose poet, on a rare London visit for the opening of his play Nice Fish starring (& co-written with) Mark Rylance: latest collection Tin Flag (Will o’the Wisp, 2013)
• Martina Evans, poet & much-awarded novelist, grew up in County Cork and is currently Assoc. Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University: her latest publication is a ‘new & selected poems’ from Carcanet, The Windows of Graceland (2016)
• with pianistic improvisations from film-score composer Marios Takoushis
• & the perplexing reflections & ineluctable wit of the one-&-only Stuart Silver

plus, before the break…
…selected poets from Live Canon’s 154 Poems in Response to Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets, including Lorraine Mariner, NJ Hynes, Jon Stone, Andrew George, Tim Richardson, Rosie Shepperd, Valerie Darville, Jacqueline Saphra, Robin Houghton, Nick Makoha, Rosie Johnston, Gillie Robic, Lesley Saunders, Mark Huband, Penny Boxall, Sue Wrinch, Nick McKinnon, Anthony Fisher, Miranda Peake, Ann Kelley & Abigail Parry

mon 12 dec: here comes the night: an end-of-season poetry party with invited guest readers, music & prize-quiz

Hey, well here it comes, Van Morrison warns, as someone leaves the world to darkness & to Thomas Gray, Lord Byron forswears so-late-into-the-night a-roving, WH Auden’s Night Mail snorts noisily as she passes, The Platters rhapsodize over heavenly shades of night, John Lennon hears a blackbird singing in the dead of night, Charles Baudelaire reflects on the moon’s tristesse, & Louis MacNeice recalls only that the lamp was dark beside my bed…

How are they for you, the witching hours between twilight & dawn? A Long Day’s Journey, perhaps, into Eugene O’Neill’s Night, into James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night? Or are they rich with Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune or a Frederic Chopin Nocturne, as one by one small cafés shut on Seamus Heaney’s warm Night Drive through France?

Tonight, says Leonard Bernstein, won’t be just any night…: John Donne called tonight the year’s midnight. So come along & hear invited guest poets’ favourite odes to the small hours, their own or by famous poets… Enjoy a little night-music, test your night-knowledge with our Hard Day’s Night not-too-literary prize-quiz & join in the excitement of hearing whose gets chosen as winning ’Night-Poem’ of the Night.

readings – may-jun 2016

mon 9 may: across oceans: with d. nurkse, geraldine paine, lynne hjelmgaard, paul deaton, robert peake, claire williamson & joshua weiner plus henry fajemirokun

A US/UK evening featuring voices from both sides of the Atlantic:

• D. Nurkse lives in New York, has written on human rights issues & worked with Amnesty International, & has published 10 poetry collections including A Night in Brooklyn (Knopf, 2012, CB Editions, 2013)
• Lecturer & former actress Geraldine Paine lives in Kent, is a founder member of poetry group Scatterlings & has two Lapwing pamphlets, latest, The Beginnings of Trees (2013)
• Former art-teacher & sailor, Lynne Hjelmgaard (b. NYC), moved to Denmark in 1971 & now lives in London & Copenhagen: latest from Seren, A Boat Called Annalise (2016)
• Bristol-based art-consultant & runner, Paul Deaton has had poems in The Spectator, PN Review, London Magazine & The Dark Horse: his debut poetry pamphlet Black Knight has just been published by Eyewear
• US-born Robert Peake (now lives in Hertfordshire) created the Transatlantic Poetry series: Nine Arches Press published his first full-length poetry collection, The Knowledge, in 2015
• Claire Williamson has written libretti for Welsh National Opera & Bristol Plays Music: latest poetry publication Split Ends (Eyewear, 2016)
• Boston-born Joshua Weiner grew up in New Jersey, studied at Northwestern & Berkeley, & edited At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn: his latest poetry collection is The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (Univ. Chicago, 2013)
• plus guitarist & singer Henry Fajemirokun

mon 23 may: sarah howe, michael symmons roberts, caitriona o’reilly, marios takoushis & stuart silver in what we should have said, an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig plus, before the break, faber academy poets

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Poetry, harmony & wit on a roll… in the Troubadour’s unique words-&-music rollercoaster featuring:

• TS Eliot 2015 prizewinner Sarah Howe, (Loop of Jade, Chatto, 2015), born in Hong Kong & now Harvard University Fellow
• Michael Symmons Roberts, who has won Forward, Costa & Whitbread prizes, has written oratorio & has published 6 books of poetry including Drysalter (Cape, 2013)
• Caitriona O’Reilly, 2016 Irish Times Poetry Now Award winner for her third collection Geis (Bloodaxe & Wake Forest, 2015), an associate lecture at Sheffield Hallam, she lives in Lincoln
• with musical interpolations by London-based film & television composer Marios Takoushis
• & freakily philosophical intrusions/infusions from writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver
• plus, before the break… a selection of current & new faber academy poets read one poem each: Chloe-Louise Adegoke, Brian Buchanan, Aniqah Choudhri, Matthew Dixon, Rachel Donati, Kate Ghyll, Mimi Haddon, Catherine Humble, Jessica Jackson, Ian McLachlan, Steph Morris, Fran O’Leary, Susannah Pentelow, Soul Patel, Miranda Peake, Tim Richardson, Emily Voukelatou & Iain Whiteley

mon 6 jun: the end of the page?: a coffee-house colloquy, with hannah lowe, gregory leadbetter, richard price, carrie etter & c.l. dallat

We all read more & more poems on e-zines & blogs, via e-mails, on poets’ & poetry orgs’ sites & apps, even on social media, as well as consuming whole collections on Kindle, i-Phone or Android.

Fiction & journalism are already registering the impact of change from print to digital… but will poets & their readers still hanker after a ‘proper’ printed page, hold out for the perfect font, crisp endpapers, the heft of a slim volume, the avoirdupois of a lifetime’s collected? Or are we perfectly happy to right-click on link after hyperlink, to Google & surf our way through sonnets & sestinas?

Do new platforms positively increase poetry’s scope? And what’s the negative impact on sales at readings, on book signings? Bring your webworld thoughts, hopes & worries for/about virtual poetry to our Troubadour colloquy, hear four state-of-the-art poets read from their latest (print) collections & join in the biggest poetry publishing debate since Gutenburg!

• Chick from Next-Gen poet Hannah Lowe won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Award, Long Time, No See was a 2015 BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week & Chan is due from Bloodaxe in June
• Director of Inst. of Creative & Critical Writing at Birmingham City Univ, Gregory Leadbetter was a scriptwriter on BBC drama Silver Street, writes on Coleridge, & has published The Body in the Well (Happenstance, 2007)
• Richard Price has worked with musicians, sculptors & digital artists & is British Library Head of Contemporary British Collections (including print, digital, manuscripts, & sound); latest poetry publication, Small World (Carcanet, 2012)
• Bath Spa University Senior Lecturer Carrie Etter (b. Illinois) edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman) & has published 7 books of poetry including Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014)
• chaired by poet & BBC R4 Saturday Review critic, C.L. Dallat, latest, The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009)

mon 20 jun: the hidden life of cities: An end-of-season poetry party with invited guest readers, music & prize-quiz

The most visible, obvious, populous places on the planet, our urban spaces nonetheless abound in hidden quarters, from lost subterranean workings, abandoned bunkers, unused underground tunnels, forgotten alleyways, closed-up shops, secret corners of railinged parks, a night-time roofscape of chimney-pots & parapets…

… to a vanished address in Berlin, an overgrown courtyard in the 8th arrondissement, a figure in a dimly-lit Venetian passagio, a children’s playground amid Manhattan skyscrapers, the 2 am cyclist on Blackfriars Bridge…a couple disappearing into the glow of a Waterloo Sunset, Eliot’s passageways, Wordsworth’s London lying still at dawn or Hopper’s Nighthawks café.

Come to the city’s liveliest cellar-club hotspot & hear invited guest poets read favourite poems, their own & those by famous poets fascinated by the city’s hidden life… Listen to city-themed music & join in our ‘sous-les’pavés’ prize quiz!

readings – jan-mar 2016

mon 25 jan: salon d’hiver with jessica traynor, kate bingham, tamar yoseloff, carole bromley, lesley saunders, owen lewis, greg freeman & maura dooley with henry fajemirokun

The classic Coffee-House Poetry prelude to spring, a scintillating winter salon of new voices & new collections featuring:

• Jessica Traynor was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary in 2014 & is a 2015 Troubadour Prizewinner. Her first collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Strong/ Shine Award.
• Screenwriter & novelist Kate Bingham has had her poetry shortlisted for a Forward Prize twice. Infragreen (Seren, 2015) is her third collection: full of sensuous, imaginative and beautifully accomplished work (Poetry Review).
• Tamar Yoseloff’s collaborations with artists include Formerly (with photographer Vici MacDonald) which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems (Seren, 2015) is her fifth poetry collection.
• Carole Bromley blogs regularly for digital mag YorkMix & teaches creative writing at York University’s Lifelong Learning Centre. She has won first prize in the Bridport Prize & Bronte Society Prize. The Stonegate Devil (Smith/Doorstop, 2015) is her second collection.
• Lesley Saunders is a featured poet in Carcanet’s latest New Poetries VI (Carcanet 2015): her latest collection, The Walls Have Angels (Mulfran, 2014) was inspired by a residency at Acton Court, & by its 1535 visitors, Henry VIII & Anne Boleyn.
• Physician & Columbia University professor, Owen Lewis has won a number of awards for his poetry including London School of Jewish Studies: his collections include March in San Miguel, Sometimes Full of Daylight, and Best Man (Dos Madres, 2015).
• Poet & former newspaper sub, Greg Freeman, is news editor for the essential poetry gigs & reviews website Write Out Loud. His 2015 Indigo Dreams pamphlet Trainspotters was launched in the pub at King’s Cross Station.
• Maura Dooley teaches at Goldsmiths’ College & has edited a number of anthologies including Making for Planet Alice: several of her collections have been Eliot-shortlisted & her latest The Silvering, due from Bloodaxe, in spring 2016, is a PBS Recommendation.
• with guitarist/singer Henry Fajemirokun.

mon 8 feb: the poem as selfie-stick: a coffee-house colloquy with fiona sampson, r.a. villanueva, fiona moore, tim liardet & c.l. dallat

Self-portraiture’s slicker on Smart-phone than it was in Rembrandt’s 17c studio but he managed ninety(!) nonetheless: & would’ve had to change his profile picture every few months on social media. But long before the ‘selfie’, the poem has always allowed us a variety of poses, personae, dressing-up, trying on studied looks, allowed us to explore identity, adopt identities… Is the ‘I’ in poetry always ‘me’? Is it ever really ‘me’? Is the ‘you’ or ‘he/she’ sometimes ‘I/we’?

Hear four significant poets read their work in the first half and, after the break, join in a Coffee-House Colloquy on how they regard, or disregard, the self-portrait in poetry, self-expression, the sense of self, the divided self…

• Fiona Sampson is Professor of Poetry at Univ. Roehampton, where she is Director of the Poetry Centre & edits Poem: latest colllection The Catch (Chatto, publ. Feb. 2016);
• R.A. Villanueva (b. NJ, lives in Brooklyn & teaches at NYU) was 2013 recipient of the Ninth Letter Literary Award; latest collection Reliquaria (Univ. Nebraska Press, 2014);
• Fiona Moore blogs on displacement-poetry.blogspot.co.uk & is Assistant Editor on The Rialto; her second pamphlet, Night Letter, was published by Happenstance Press in 2015.
• Tim Liardet is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University; his poetry collections include The World Before Snow (Carcanet, 2015), shortlisted for the 2015 TS Eliot Prize
• chaired by poet & BBC R4 Saturday Review critic, C.L. Dallat, latest collection, The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009)

mon 22 feb: malika booker, peter sansom, paul maddern, huw warren & stuart silver in what we should have said, an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig plus, before the break, a selection of troubadour international poetry prize winners

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Further adventures & extravagations in yet another episode of the Troubadour’s unique Cegin-sponsored poetry segué with musical & philosophical interventions…

• writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver offers his own idiosyncratic take on life & its meanings,
• pianist Huw Warren creates a classical/jazz counterpoint to the poetry pulse…
• & providing the spontaneous, off-the-cuff, un-prescheduled poetic foreground, our three guest poets:
• Malika Booker spans literature & education, & crosses genres, disciplines & art-forms: she toured with Bittersweet (1999/2000); featured in Kin (Barbican, 2004); her musical play Catwalk ran at Tricycle (2001) plus UK tour; & her latest poetry collection is Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree, 2013);
• Peter Sansom is a director of The Poetry Business where he edits (with Ann Sansom) The North magazine and Smith/Doorstop books: he is also guest poet at TES, company poet with the Prudential, & writer-in-residence with Marks & Spencer. He has published Writing Poems (Bloodaxe) & five collections with Carcanet including Selected Poems (2010)
• Paul Maddern was born in Bermuda and lived in Canada, the USA, and England before moving to Ireland in 2000. In 2009, he was a winner in the Templar Poetry pamphlet competition with Kelpdings. His 2010 collection, The Beachcomber’s Report was shortlisted for the Eithne and Rupert Strong Award for Best First Collection.
• plus, before the break, a selection of 2015 & previous Troubadour International Poetry Prize Winners including: Sue Rose, Katy Mack, Tiffany Tondut, June Lausch, Diana Pooley, Rishi Dastidar, Alex Josephy, Josh Ekroy, Barbara Marsh, Richard Meier, Pam Johnson, Martyn Crucefix, Jacqueline Saphra, Jenny Vuglar, Karen Green, Rachel Piercey, Mara Bergman, Caroline Smith & Louise Warren

mon 7 mar: the sea, the sea: invited guest poets read their own & others’ poems of sea & shore, of bays & boats, of tides & tempests …plus sea-themed music & nautical prize quiz

La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée, Paul Valery wrote in 1920, giving Iris Murdoch the title for her 1978 Booker-winner The Sea, the Sea, both testifying to the tidal pull the mercurial element that covers two-thirds of the world surface has had on the literary imagination from Jorie Graham’s Sea Change back through Louise Glück’s All her life she dreamed of living by the sea, Mark Doty’s last outpost in the huge indetermination of sea & Seamus Heaney’s timeless waves, bright, shifting, broken glass…

… via John Masefield’s Sea Fever, Eva Gore-Booth’s Little Waves of Breffny to Shakespeare’s multitudinous seas incarnadine & Homer’s wine-dark sea.

Emily Dickinson relishes the divine intoxication/ of the first league out from land while Matthew Arnold hesitates where the sea meets the moon-blanched land & Walt Whitman indulges in marine metaphors in O Captain! My Captain!. But all is not Baudelaire’s flat, calm, vast mirror, with sea-faring tragedies like Longfellow’s Wreck of the Hesperus, Richard Murphy’s Cleggan Disaster & Gerald Manley Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland.

There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail (as Tennyson says): catch that tide & come along with us to celebrate the thrill of the ocean wave, the lure of harbour lights, in poems by our invited poets &/or by their favourite famous poets, listen to themed maritime music & join in our not-too-nautical prize-quiz…

wed 30 mar to sat 2 apr, AWP (assoc. of writers & writing programs) annual conference

Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry & Troubadour International Poetry Prize at Stand 632, LA Conference Centre, 1201 Figueroa St, Los Angeles CA 90015

readings – oct-dec 2015

mon 19 oct: cornucopia with jonathan davidson, maggie sawkins, kate noakes, matt howard, sarah hesketh, jane clarke, eleni cay & jo bell

• Latest collection from poet & radio dramatist Jonathan Davidson (b. Didcot, lives in Coventry) is Humfrey Coningsby: Poems, Complaints, Explanations and Demands for Satisfaction
• Tongues&Grooves (Portsmouth) founder/organiser Maggie Sawkins won 2013 Ted Hughes Award for Zones of Avoidance: collections include The Zig Zag Woman (Two Ravens, 2007)
• Welsh Academy member Kate Noakes (fifth collection, Tattoo on Crow Street, Parthian, 2015) lives & writes in Paris and London.
• RSPB-worker (& New Networks for Nature member) Matt Howard was one of the 2014 Aldeburgh Eight: debut pamphlet, The Organ Box (Eyewear, 2015)
• Former Age Concern Poet-in-Residence Sarah Hesketh was shortlisted for 2014 Kim Scott Walwyn Award: latest collection The Hard Word Box (Penned in the Margins, 2014)
• The River (Bloodaxe, 2015) is the first collection from Trocaire/Poetry-Ireland-shortlisted Jane Clarke (b. Roscommon, lives in Wicklow)
• Poet-in-Residence at Westbury Arts Centre (Bucks), Eleni Cay, from Slovakia, has had English-language poems reimagined via film & dance: her collection A Butterfly’s Shivering in the Digital Age is being translated into French & German
• Poetry Society Canal Laureate Jo Bell lives on a boat in the English Midlands: second collection Kith (Nine Arches Press, 2015)

mon 2 nov: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with glyn maxwell, jane draycott, richard douglas pennant, huw warren & stuart silver plus, before the break… faber academy poets

Experience your poetry impromptu, as our poets catch ideas from the ether & respond to each other’s thoughts & themes, to philosophical and philharmonic inventions & interventions…

• Glyn Maxwell has written plays, novels, libretti, screenplays, nine poetry collections including the Forward-shortlisted Pluto (Picador, 2013), & On Poetry (… the best book about poetry I’ve ever read…, The Guardian)
• Next-Gen poet Jane Draycott teaches at the universities of Oxford & Lancaster: latest collection Over (Carcanet) was shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize
• Welsh poet Richard Douglas Pennant divides his time between Cyprus and his native North Wales – collections include The Alabaster Jar (Ogwen, 2008) & Old Stones New Tales (CD, Cegin Productions)
• plus philosophical interpolations & epigrammatic excursions from Perrier-Award winning writer-perfomer-director Stuart Silver
• with harmonic counterpoint provided by Huw Warren’s rhythmic grooves & eclectically melodic inspiration

plus, before the break… a selection of current & new faber academy poets read one poem each: alice erskine, charlotte baldwin, matt dixon, robert sloan, rose arbuthnott, rose maher, fran o’leary, deborah sibbald, katy mack, kate ghyll, mark huband, mary powell, tim richardson, miranda peake, jan heritage, susannah hart, daphne astor, geraldine clarkson, alison nolan & soul patel

mon 16 nov: an evening with new-york poet, tom sleigh, reading & in-conversation plus former troubadour prizewinners paul stephenson & mona arshi

• Award-winning poet Tom Sleigh was born in Texas, lives in New York, is director of Hunter College’s Creative-Writing MFA, & has published ten books of poetry including Station Zed (Graywolf, 2015), plus a full-length translation of Euripides’ Heraklitus & a book of essays, & has had five of his plays produced.
• plus former Troubadour International Poetry Prize prizewinners:
• Paul Stephenson (b. Cambridge) lives in Paris, & has won second prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize: his first pamphlet Those People was a winner in last year’s Poetry Business book and pamphlet competition, judged by Billy Collins, and was published in May 2015.
• Mona Arshi, also a Troubadour prizewinner, was joint winner of last year’s Manchester Creative Writing Prize: first collection is the Forward-shortlisted Small Hands (Liverpool University Press, 2015)
• plus, after the break, Tom Sleigh, in-conversation & Q&A with poet & critic, C.L. Dallat

mon 30 nov: troubadour international poetry prize: 2015 judges john mcauliffe & jean sprackland read with 2015 prizewinners

• Join the rest of the poetry world in the excitement of discovering who’s won the prestigious £5,000 Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2015, listen to the 23 best poems chosen from all those submitted by poets around the world, & listen to poems (& comments on the prizewinning poems) from the highly-respected judges who’ll have made those choices.
• John McAuliffe (b. Listowel, Co. Kerry, 1973) has published four books with The Gallery Press: A Better Life (2002), Next Door (2007), Of All Places (PBS Recommendation, 2011) and The Way In (2015). He lives in Manchester where he teaches at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and writes a monthly poetry column for the Irish Times.
• Jean Sprackland (b. 1962) lives in London and has published four collections of poetry, Tattoos for Mothers Day (Spike, 1997), Hard Water (Cape, 2003), (shortlisted for both the TS Eliot Prize & the Whitbread Award), Tilt (Cape, 2007) & Sleeping Keys (Random House, 2013). She is also the author of Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach (Cape, 2012), winner of the Portico Prize for Non-Fiction. Originally from Burton upon Trent, she studied English & Philosophy at the University of Kent & is Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

mon 14 dec: a winter’s tale: invited guest poets read their own & others’ winter words …plus midwinter music & prize quiz

A sad tale’s best for winter, Mamillius tells Hermione in A Winter’s Tale: & poets have long revelled in the bleak midwinter (Christina Rossetti), the dead of winter (W. H. Auden), a winter’s day/ in a deep and dark December (Paul Simon)…

But winter has other moods: consider the emotional range of Schubert’s Winter Journey, the potential for mystery in Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, satire in Simon Armitage’s Snow Joke, irony in W.R. Rodger’s White Christmas, pathos in Thomas Hardy’s Music in a Snowy Street, optimism in his Darkling Thrush… And what about all those contradictory winter titles: Wild Decembers (Edna O’Brien), Summer in February (Jonathan Smith), The Snow Party (Derek Mahon), December Bride (Sam Hanna Bell)?

Yes, there’ll be poems about snow & ice, poems such as Frost’s Stopping by Woods…, Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight, MacNeice’s snow & the huge roses, Sharon Olds’ True Love, right through to Edward Thomas’ Thaw, Ted Hughes’ Thaw & Louise Gluck’s End of Winter…

But there’ll certainly be poems, too, about winter light & warmth, with lines like …after-image of lamps/ swinging through the yards/ on winter evenings (Seamus Heaney, from Wintering Out), poems about December cityscapes exploding in festive light, about interiors becoming warmer, more inviting, about Christmas, & Twelfth Night, & all the seasonal revelry that dispels the lengthening darkness…

Come along & celebrate some or all of the myriad hazy shades of winter in poems by our invited guest poets &/or by their favourite famous poets, listen to themed midwinter music & join in our seasonal prize-quiz…

readings – may-jun 2015

mon 11 may: spring into summer with r.a. villanueva, miranda peake, inua ellams, tim richardson, scarlett sabet, will burns, roisin tierney, & mark huband with henry fajemirokun

Come along & listen to some of the happening voices in & around London in our spring/summer showcase:

• R.A. Villanueva (b. NJ, lives in Brooklyn & teaches at NYU) was 2013 recipient of the Ninth Letter Literary Award: his 2014 Reliquaria (Univ. Nebraska) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize
• London poet/artists Miranda Peake organises dance classes in schools for Royal Academy of Dance: Florence her first published poem won MsLexia’s 2014 Women’s Poetry Competition
• Inua Ellams (b. Nigeria, 1984) has published two poetry pamphlets including Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars & his one-man (written & acted) show The 14th Tale won a Fringe First at Edinburgh
• author/critic/journalist Tim Richardson writes on gardens & landscape design: his first full poetry collection is due in 2015 from Live Canon
• Scarlett Sabet is a London-based actor, director & poet of French & Iranian descent: her pamphlet Rocking Underground was launched in December 2014
• one of 2014’s four Faber New Poets, Will Burns abandoned his uni Eng.Lit degree to form a band with his brother & is still in the music industry having been, meantime, a factory-worker, window-cleaner & house-painter.
• Irish poet Roisin Tierney has taught in Dublin, Granada & Valladolid: Dream Endings (2012) won the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award & her first collection The Spanish-Italian Border (Arc, 2014) was a Forward ‘highly-commended’
• author & award-winning journalist Mark Huband has spent the past 25 years travelling the world, from Africa and the Middle East to South-East Asia & the Americas: American Road (Live Canon, 2014) is his debut collection.
• plus singer/songwriter Henry Fajemirokun

mon 25 may: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with michelle boisseau, robert seatter, frances leviston, huw warren & stuart silver plus, before the break… LetterPressPoets

Experience your poetry impromptu, as our poets catch ideas from the ether & respond to each other’s thoughts & themes, to philosophical and philharmonic inventions & interventions…

• born in Cincinnatti, Ohio, Michelle Boisseau is Eng.Lit professor at Univ. Missouri-Kansas City: her 4th collection is A Sunday in God Years (Univ. Arkansas, 2009).
• Robert Seatter has worked as an EFL teacher in France & Italy, as an actor & in journalism & broadcasting: his third collection is Writing King Kong (Seren, 2011).
• Frances Leviston (b. Edinburgh) grew up in Sheffield: her first collection Public Dream (Picador, 2007) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize — a second collection Disinformation is due from Picador in Feb. 2015.
• plus philosophical interpolations & epigrammatic excursions from Perrier-Award winning writer-perfomer-director Stuart Silver
• with harmonic counterpoint provided by Huw Warren’s’ rhythmic grooves & eclectically melodic inspiration

plus, before the break… LetterPressPoets: daphne astor, patrizia longhitano, angela croft, mark huband, teresa mayoub, george beddow, bear shaw, gill petrie, fiona larkin, jim alderson, angela croft, katherine lockton, kate ghyll, derek summers, katy mack, caroline donnelly, mel hormead, marian fielding, michael baron, janet remmington, mary powell

mon 8 jun: smiths knoll pamphlets: with phil hancock, marianne burton, stephen payne, lydia harris, chris dodd, margaret wilmot, philip polecoff, kath mckay & andrew kerr introduced by michael laskey & joanna cutts

Joanna Cutts & Michael Laskey publish pamphlets under the Smiths Knoll imprint, initially as end products of a year-long mentoring scheme & now — since the much-loved magazine closed down in 2012 —helping poets whose work they have published & admired to put together short collections.

• Philip Hancock’s Hearing Ourselves Think (Smiths Knoll 2009) was a Guardian Book of the Year 2010: he has since featured OxfordPoets (Carcanet, 2010) and his short film/poem Jelly Baby was screened at the Budapest Short Film Festival.
• Lawyer Marianne Burton’s The Devil’s Cut (Smiths Knoll, 2007) was a PBS pamphlet choice: She Inserts the Key (Seren) was shortlisted for Forward Best First Collection 2013.
• Stephen Payne teaches Computer Science at the University of Bath: his 2010 Smiths Knoll pamphlet The Probabilities of Balance will be followed this year by a full collection from HappenStance.
• Lydia Harris lives on the Orkney island of Westray: Glad Not To Be The Corpse was the final Smiths Knoll mentorship scheme pamphlet in 2012.
• Chris Dodd is poetry editor of Canadian magazine Freefall, has lived in Trinidad, near the Rockies in Alberta, Canada, in Houston, Texas & now lives back in the UK: his at-present-untitled Smiths Knoll pamphlet will be launched at this event!
• Margaret Wilmot (b. California, educ. Univ. Berkeley) taught TEFL in the Mediterranean & New York, now lives in Sussex. Sweet Coffee (Smiths Knoll, 2013) is her first pamphlet.
• Philip Pollecoff grew up in Birmingham, now lives in Chorleywood & works as a lawyer. His first pamphlet is Carry This With You At All Times (Smiths Knoll, 2013).
• Novelist/short-story–writer Kath McKay lectures in creative writing. Her first collection, Anyone Left Standing, winner of 1998 Poetry Business competition, was followed by Telling the Bees (Smiths Knoll, 2014).
• Andrew Kerr from Huddersfield studied religion & anthropology, & now works with drug & alcohol users in West Yorkshire. Sweet Talk (Smiths Knoll, 2015) came out in January.

mon 22 jun: too darn hot! invited guest poets celebrate broiling city summers, simmering heatwaves, shimmering mirages, parched deserts & tropical weather: plus music & prize-quiz

Wm. Shakespeare advised us to Fear no more the heat of the sun (advice Clarissa Dalloway took to heart) & Noël Coward noted that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun but poets seemingly can’t avoid sweltering in the punishing sun (Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist), in that superlatively sweltering month, July (C.P.Cavafy, Bodies), can’t escape the sun’s hot eye (in Matthew Arnold’s A Summer Night), can’t ignore its petalled head of flames/ Continuously exploding (Philip Larkin’s Solar), in country — one afternoon/ Of heat (Edward Thomas in Adlestrop) – or city – It was stifling/ A starless drought (Eavan Boland in The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me).

Heat even produces its own derangements, John Donne & Frank O’Hara actually holding conversations with Phoebus/Apollo at his height, the potential suicide in Sharon Olds’ Summer Solstice, New York City, the killing à cause du soleil at the heart of L’Étranger by Albert Camus, subject of Derek Mahon’s Death and the Sun.

Literary genius is, apparently, only 1% inspiration & 99% perspiration as a host of novel-, film- & song-titles testify: Body Heat, Tropical Heat, Light in August, Under the Volcano, White Heat, Tropic Thunder, Hot-Hot-Hot, Instructions for a Heatwave, Steam Heat, The Heat of the Day, Some Like it Hot, Up on the Roof, August is a Wicked Month, In the Heat of the Night, The Big Heat, Heat & Dust…

So what better way to celebrate the height of midsummer than to join us in our summer in the city cellar-club as invited guests turn the thermostat to max with their own & others’ poems of heat-waves, dog-days, humid afternoons, tropical climates… with just a touch of le jazz hot & our am-I-getting warm? prize-quiz that’s not just for hotshots!

readings – jan-mar 2015

mon 26 jan: salon d’hiver with rishi dastidar, kate ghyll, agnieszka studzinska, soul patel, angela kirby, jacqueline saphra, nick mackinnon & laura scott with henry fajemirokun

A Troubadour prelude to spring with a sparkling winter wordfest from:

• Rishi Dastidar is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen a The Complete Works Fellow was a runner-up in 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition, & featured in 2014’s Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014)
• Kate Ghyll has worked for Poetry Society of America, published short stories, acted in filmmaker Sophie Fiennes’ Front Row Orchestra & is starting an online cultural magazine The Reconnaissance
• Agnieszka Studzinska’s debut collection, Snow Calling, was shortlisted for 2010’s London New Poetry Award: her second is What Things Are (Eyewear, 2014)
• strategy consultant & Capoeira (Brazilian dance/martial-arts) practitioner Soul Patel is a Faber Academy graduate & member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen
• Angela Kirby’s poems have been read on Radio 4 & BBC TV, & translated into Romanian — her 3rd Shoestring collection is A Scent of Winter (2013)
• Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye, 2011) was an Aldeburgh First Collection nomination – If I Lay On My Back I Saw Nothing But Naked Women (Emma, 2014) is an illustrated book of prose-poems
• history teacher Nick MacKinnon lives in Winchester & Cambridge — his recent prizes include 2012 Keats-Shelley, 2012 Hippocrates & 2013 Forward Best Single Poem
• Laura Scott’s magazine publications include Poetry Review & Tate Etc. – her pamphlet What I Saw (Rialto, 2013) won the Michael Marks Award
• plus singer/songwriter Henry Fajemirokun

mon 9 feb: blake morrison, theo dorgan, mona arshi, marios takoushis & stuart silver in what we should have said, an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig plus before the break… a selection of troubadour international poetry prize winners

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Further adventures & extravagations in yet another episode of the Troubadour’s unique Cegin-sponsored poetry segué with musical & philosophical interventions…

• writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver offers his own idiosyncratic take on life & its meanings,
• classical pianist/composer Marios Takoushis weaves a musical tapestry behind the words
• & providing the spontaneous, off-the-cuff, un-prescheduled poetic foreground, our three guest poets:
• multi-award-winning poet, poetry critic, & creative-writing professor at Goldsmith’s since 2003, Blake Morrison has worked as a literary journalist & written in a wide variety of fiction & non-fiction genres – his autobiographical And When Did You Last See Your Father? became a major feature film with Jim Broadbent – his latest collection is Shingle Street (Chatto, publ. 5 Feb 2015!)
• Theo Dorgan’s latest poetry collection is Greek (Dedalus, 2010) & his latest novel is Making Way (New Island, 2013) – a former Director of Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann, his songs have been recorded by a number of musicians, his texts featured in Riverdance, & he has presented literary programmes on TV & radio for RTÉ
• former Human Rights lawyer Mona Arshi was a winner in the 2013 Troubadour International Poetry Prize & joint first prizewinner in 2014’s Manchester Creative Writing Poetry Prize – her debut collection Small Hands is due in Spring 2015 from Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool University Press.

• plus, before the break, a selection of Troubadour International Poetry Prize Winners including Katy Mack, Ian McEwen, Alex Josephy, Louise Warren, Robert Peake, Rachel Piercy, Sue Rose, Cheryl Moskowitz, Diana Pooley, Caroline Smith, Christina Newton, Ellen Cranitch, Wendy French, Richard Aronowitz, June Lausch, Mara Bergman, Michael Swan, & Karen Green

mon 23 feb: an evening with john montague: rare chance to hear major irish poet john montague reading & in-interview, with songs from world runners, josie frater & steve taylor

• john montague is unwell & unable to attend: we’re having, instead, an evening with john montague’s poetry at which guest poets who know john &/or were influenced/inspired by his work will each read a poem with, after the break, a round-table discussion with c.l. dallat, maurice riordan & others…

• Father-figure to a cohort of 60s Irish poets, Brooklyn-born John Montague was raised in County Tyrone, educated in Armagh & Dublin, has taught at University College Cork & the Iowa Writers Workshop & has lived in Paris, Dublin & West Cork, his cultural life intersecting those of Richard Wilbur, Claude Esteban, Sean O’Riada & The Chieftains, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett & several generations of Irish poets in the years since his Forms of Exile (first of a dozen or so seminal poetry collections, plus essays, short-stories etc) first appeared in 1958.
• plus, after the break, John Montague, in-conversation & Q&A with poet, musician & broadcaster C.L. Dallat
• plus songs/world-music from World Runners – vocalist Josie Frater & drummer/percussionist Steve Taylor have appeared on Radio 2 & Jazz FM & at Jazz Café, Ronnie Scott’s & Glasgow’s Celtic Connections Festival

mon 9 mar: big yellow taxi! themed spring/easter reading on yellowhammers, yellow bicycles, yellow brick roads (& just possibly daffodils!) with invited guest poets, music, prize-quiz

After winter’s ‘blue’ what better hue to signal our spring season (and start our Easter break) than the yellows of sweetcorn, buttercups & egg-yolks: not to mention yellow cabs, smileys & custard.

But yellow doesn’t have it all its own sunshiny way. There’s that jinxing one-eyed yellow idol, &, topically, mustard gas: there’s the perjorative ‘yellow-bellied’, & being shown the yellow card & a host of literary & cultural references from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper & Gaston Leroux’s Mystery of the Yellow Room through Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow by way of Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

Poets certainly spotted yellow in nature — Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils, the blackbird’s bright yellow beak (in an 11th-century Belfast poem), James Fenton’s Yellow Tulips & Michael Longley’s Gorse Fires, with Yeats wishing men would love Anne Gregory for yourself alone/ and not your yellow hair. But subtler yellows often prevail, with paint-box variations including mimosas, primroses, jasmines, jonquils & ochres — & colour-chart imaginations running to Wild Primrose, Maize, Happy Daze, El Dorado, Egyptian Sand & Lemon Punch.

Lyricisits clearly find yellow’s trochaic mellifluity irresistible with several yellow brick roads, yellow suns, rivers & birds, yellow roses & even a yellow submarine. So there’s the chance to go for gold in our the-answer’s-a-lemon prize quiz with music to match the mellow-yellow mood!

readings – oct-dec 2014

mon 6 oct: stateside troubadours with poets: philip fried, margo taft stever, tim nolan, susana case, robert peake, jennifer militello, daphne warburg astor & owen lewis with henry fajemirokun

In celebration of the Troubadour’s American links over the past 60 years, we present an evening of US poets…

• Manhattan Review editor Philip Fried, is based in New York; Early/Late: New & Selected Poems from Salmon (2011) draws on his first 4 collections of poetry; his latest Salmon collection is Interrogating Water (2013)
• Margo Taft Stever founded Hudson Valley Writers’ Center & Slapering Hol Press; her award-winning first collection was Frozen Spring & her latest is The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012)
• Tim Nolan’s 2013 Troubadour Poetry Prize poem is shortlisted for the Forward Best Single Poem Prize; Tim is a lawyer, lives in Minneapolis, & has published two collections including And Then (New Rivers, 2012)
• poet & sociologist Susana Case is a professor at NY Institute of Technology: her collections range from The Scottish Café (2002) to 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press, 2014)
• Robert Peake is a British-American poet living near London, he created the Transatlantic Poetry on Air reading series; 1st-collection The Knowledge due from Nine Arches Press, 2015
• Jennifer Millitello lives in Goffstown NH, & has taught at Brown Univ. & Rhode Island School of Design in Providence RI; finalist in the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, her first collection is Body Thesaurus (Tupelo, 2013)
• artist & Faber-Academy poet Daphne Warburg Astor was part of the C4RD online residency & collaborated with Jason Hicklin on From Co. Donegal to the Inner Hebrides: Drawings & Etchings (2009)
• psychiatrist & professor at Columbia Univ., Owen Lewis has published extensively in professional journals; his first poetry chapbook was March in San Miguel (Finishing Line, 2012) & first collection is Sometimes Full of Daylight (Dos Madres, 2013)
• with songs from guitarist Henry Fajemirokun

mon 20 oct: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with paul farley, jean sprackland, richard douglas pennant, marios takoushis & stuart silver with — before the break — Faber Academy tutors jo shapcott & daljit nagra with recent Faber Academy poets…

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Further adventures and extravagations in yet another episode of the Troubadour’s unique Cegin-sponsored poetry segué with musical & philosophical interventions…

• writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver offers his own idiosyncratic take on life & its meanings,
• classical pianist/composer Marios Takoushis weaves a musical tapestry behind the words
• & providing the spontaneous, off-the-cuff, un-prescheduled poetic foreground, our three guest poets:
• poet & broadcaster, Paul Farley, b. Liverpool, has written on John Clare, Terence Davies, & on Edgelands with Michael Symmons-Roberts; won Forward Best First Collection 1998 for The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You; his 4th poetry publication The Dark Film (Picador, 2014) is a PBS Choice
• Richard Douglas Pennant divides his time and his poetic inspiration between Cyprus and his native North Wales – collections include The Alabaster Jar (Ogwen, 2008) and Old Stones New Tales (CD, Cegin, 2007)
• Jean Sprackland from Burton-upon Trent is Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan & has published 3 poetry collections including Sleeping Keys (Random House, 2013), & a collection of essays on landscape, Strand

with — before the break — Faber Academy tutors jo shapcott & daljit nagra reading & introducing recent Faber Academy poets… : catherine humble, miranda peake, bob palmer, sam peters, soul patel, nick sunderland, mark huband, marek urbanowicz, paul crichton, katy mack, jon sayers, rose maher, jan heritage, rishi dastidar, & kate ghyll

mon 3 nov: an evening with roger mcgough: leading liverpool poet, performer & radio4 poetry presenter, roger mcgough, with songs from bernadette reed

• Ever since his poetry first appeared in The Mersey Sound In 1967 (& sold over half-a-million copies) Roger McGough has been a fascinating & highly popular cross-cultural figure recording three Top-10 singles (& The Liver Birds theme) with The Scaffold, contributing to Yellow Submarine, appearing in a Beatles mockumentary, translating Molière, recording a one-minute version of The Wreck of the Hesperus, publishing around 30 poetry collections (with another dozen or so for kids) & currently presenting BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please: Roger is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature & President of The Poetry Society
• plus, after the break, Roger, in-conversation & Q&A with poet, musician & broadcaster C.L. Dallat
• … plus songs from jazz/acoustic singer/songwriter Bernadette Reed whose 2009 album Walking on Water explores sound, form and the silent radiant emptiness that permeates creation: with Ian Salmon (guitar) & Le’Voy Wilson (keyboards)

mon 17 nov: poetry school poets: plus poetry school tutors mimi khalvati & tamar yoseloff with songs from rosie taylor

The Poetry School was founded in 1997 by 3 poets, Jane Duran, Mimi Khalvati & Pascale Petit to provide poetry courses & workshops. Two current Poetry School creative-writing tutors, Mimi Khalvati & Tamar Yoseloff read their own work & introduce a selection of current Poetry School poets including:

• Inua Ellams, Saradha Soobrayen, Paul Armitage, Subhadramati, Sandra Galton, Matt Bryden, Judith Cair, Liz Devereaux, Mark McGuinness, Marilyn Hammick, Karen Littleton, Dharmavadana, Susan Watson, Samantha Jackson, Vishvantara, Jocelyn Page, Andrew George, Kate Ling, Helen Overell, Juliet Humphreys & Eve Ellis
• US-born poet Tamar Yoseloff moved to London in 1987: her publications include The City with Horns (Salt, 2011), two collaborative editions with the artist Linda Karshan, & (as editor) A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology. The Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems is due from Seren in 2015
• Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, grew up on the Isle of Wight & has worked as an actor & director in the UK & in Iran; Poetry School co-founder, & co-ordinator (1997-2004); her eight collections include a ‘selected’ & a ‘new & selected’ from Carcanet, & her latest, Earthshine (Smith/Doorstop, 2013)
• plus songs from singer/guitarist Rosie Taylor who has performed at Ronnie Scott’s & London Jazz Festival

mon 1 dec: eighth annual troubadour international poetry prize night: neil astley, amy wack & 2014 prizewinners

Join the rest of the poetry world in the excitement of discovering who’s won the prestigious £5,000 Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2014, listen to the 23 best poems chosen from hundreds submitted by poets around the world, & listen to poems (& comments on the prizewinning poems) from the highly-respected poetry-editor judges who’ll have made those choices: Wales based Seren Books editor, Amy Wack b. Florida, studied at San Diego Univ. & Columbia Univ. & Bloodaxe Books editor & founder Neil Astley, studied Newcastle Univ., 1982 Eric Gregory Award, has 2 poetry collections & 2 novels & edited the highly-acclaimed anthologies Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004) & Being Human (2011)

First prize sponsored by Cegin Productions

mon 15 dec: out of the blue! azure-themed end-of-season reading with invited guest poets & favourite poems of blue eyes, Mediterranean seas, indigo nights, deep blue moods…

Time for blue-skies thinking! We all remember Auden’s Refugee Blues & Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues …but blue has myriad lighter shades: in Mary Oliver’s Blue Iris, Lowell’s Waking in the Blue, Louise Glück’s blue sky, blue ice (in Blue Rotunda), Housman’s blue remembered hills, Jane Hirshfield’s net of blue and gold, Wallace Stevens’ Man With a Blue Guitar or the robin’s egg blue tiles in Medbh McGuckian’s Four O’Clock, Summer Street.

Blue abounds, not just in clothing (Hardy’s air-blue gown, Sharon Olds’ Blue Dress, Ted Hughes’ Blue Flannel Suit or Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat) but in nature, from Anne Brontë’s Bluebell, Hardy’s Pair of Blue Eyes, Lawrence’s fountains of blue (in Mystic Blue) & Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea, to the blue light in Jorie Graham’s San Sepolcro, the azure that triumphs in Mallarmé’s L’Azur…

The only place Billy Collins wants to visit, it seems is The Blue, not the Wild Blue Yonder, but ‘the blue’ that the unexpected comes ‘out of…’

A once-in-a-blue-moon chance to kick away the winter blues: come along & hear invited guest poets read kind-of-blue poems (their own & those by other poets) listen to blue-themed music, & try our prize quiz where the answers come, likely as not, out of the blue …

readings – may-jul 2014

mon 26 may: spring into summer: with poets lydia macpherson, ian house, jennifer wong, alyson hallett, barbara marsh, victoria field, jackie wills & special guest louis de bernières

An amazing line-up of new & established poetry voices to launch Troubadour60’s summer season, with

• special guest Louis de Bernières, selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists found fame with his Colombian Trilogy &, in 1994, with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (a film based on the book appeared in 2001); his first poetry collection is Imagining Alexandria: Poems in Memory of Constantinos Cavafis (Harvill Secker, 2013)
• Brighton-based freelance writer & OU associate lecturer Jackie Wills’ fifth collection is Woman’s Head as Jug (Arc, 2013); her Workshop Handbook is due for 2014 publication
• Victoria Field is a writer & poetry-therapist & has lived & worked in Turkey; her latest collection is Lost Boys (Waterloo, 2013)
• part of music duo The Dear Janes, Barbara Marsh was born in Rhode Island & now lives & teaches in London; To the Boneyard (Eyewear, 2013) is her first poetry collection
• Alyson Hallett grew up in Somerset, has been poet-in-residence at the Univ. of Exeter’s Geography Dept in Cornwall & has a poem carved into a pavement in Bath; The Stone Library was published by Peterloo in 2007
• Jennifer Wong grew up in Hong Kong; her publications include Summer Cicadas (2006) and Goldfish (2013), both from Chameleon
• Lydia Macpherson was born in the Yorkshire Pennines; published in Poetry London, The North & Poetry Wales; her first collection, Love Me Do, won the 2013 Crashaw Prize and is due from Salt (Spring, 2014)
• Ian House lives in Reading & has taught in Eastern Europe; Nothing’s Lost (2014) is his second Two Rivers Press collection

mon 9 jun: an evening with paul muldoon: pulitzer-prize-winning poet & New Yorker editor, paul muldoon, with music from christine tobin

• Paul Muldoon (b. Co. Armagh), studied at Queen’s University Belfast, has worked as a radio producer, has lived in the US since 1987 & in 2007 was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. His poetry collections range from New Weather & Mules (1973 & ‘77), to Horse Latitudes (2006) & Maggot (2010), with a selected, Poems 1968-1998, published in 2001, he has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Shakespeare Prize & Aspen Prize & is regarded as ‘the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War’ (TLS)
• plus, after the break, Paul, in-conversation & Q&A with fellow-Queens University-Belfast poet C.L. Dallat
• plus, songs from Irish-born, London-based, jazz-rooted, world-music-influenced, BBC 2008 Jazz Awards’ Best Vocalist, ‘24-carat-voiced’ singer-songwriter Christine Tobin

mon 23 jun: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with huw warren, stuart silver, helen mort, philip gross & imtiaz dharker with (before the break) jenny lewis, john harvey & christina newton

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Further adventures and extravagations in yet another episode of the Troubadour’s unique Cegin-sponsored poetry segué with musical & philosophical interventions…

• writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver offers his own idiosyncratic take on life & its meanings,
• classical/jazz-fusion keyboard virtuoso Huw Warren weaves a musical tapestry behind the words
• & providing the spontaneous, off-the-cuff, un-prescheduled poetic foreground, our three guest poets:
• Lahore-born poet, Scottish artist, documentary film-maker & Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Imtiaz Dharker whose five self-illustrated collections include Leaving Fingerprints (Bloodaxe, 2009),
• Sheffield-born, frequent Foyle Young Poets winner, recipient of both 2007 Eric Gregory Award & 2008 Manchester Young Writer Prize & current Derbyshire Poet Laureate Helen Mort, latest collection Division Street (Chatto, 2013, shortlisted for 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize) &
• Cornwall-born Philip Gross, professor of creative writing at University of Glamorgan: his 2009 collection, The Water Table, won the T.S. Eliot Prize & his latest collection is Deep Field (Bloodaxe, 2011)

plus, before the break…

• Jenny Lewis teaches poetry at Oxford University: her 3rd collection is Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford/Carcanet, 2014) & Mulfran Press published her verse drama After Gilgamesh in 2011
• Alison Hill runs the Rhythm & Muse poetry-&-music series at the Ram Jam Club in Kingston; she was Kingston Libraries’ first poet-in-residence (2012) & her first collection is Slate Rising (Indigo Dreams, April 2014)
• John Harvey is a crime writer & author of the ‘Charlie Resnick’ novels. He ran Slow Dancer poetry magazine for 20+ years. His poetry collections include Bluer than This & Out of Silence: New & Selected Poems (smith/doorstop, 2014)
• Christina Newton won the 2011 Poetry London Competition and was a prizewinner in the 2013 Troubadour International Poetry Prize: she has published two collections in her native Spanish and her first in English, Cry Wolf, received a Straid Award in 2012.

mon 7 jul: stop all the clocks! guest poets celebrate the timeless poetics of clock-watching, of punctuality & procrastination, sundials, time-checks, & the relentless ticking-away of minutes, hours, days… in our timely end-of-Troubadour60-summer-season poetry-party!

O let not Time deceive you, Auden wrote, though not in Funeral Blues, where stopping all the clocks marked a life’s end. Andrew Marvell heard time’s winged chariot catching up (or thought it at least a good chat-up line) while W.H. Davies regretted a world in which we’d no time to stand & stare, a line that’s joined a store of phrases about time & tide, killing time, no time like the present, a stitch in time, me-time, saving time, the best of times, wasted time, better late than never & it’s later than you think, not to mention Benjamin Franklin’s time is money & Einstein’s not-quite-so-useful observation, time is an illusion…

Yeats’s midnights were all a-glimmer as he longed for the coming of wisdom with time, there’s, Dennis O’Driscoll’s The Clock, Sinead Morrissey’s Clocks, Charles Simic’s The Clocks of the Dead & Billy Collins’ Bar Time which keeps, as all saloon clocks do, 15 minutes ahead of the outside world…

Novelists, playwrights & film-makers aren’t immune to time’s momentum either, with Priestley’s Time plays, John Ford’s High Noon, McEwan’s The Child in Time, Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, H.G. Wells’ Time Machine & Audrey Nilfegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife…

Enjoy our guest poets’ poetic version of A Brief History of Time with clock-wise poems from the famous & not-so-famous, & join in strictly-timed literary prize quiz (& the inevitable music round in six-eight time!)

readings – jan-mar 2014

mon 20 jan: salon d’hiver: patricia debney, susannah hart, dominic bury, malika booker, sharon morris, fathieh saudi, jo hemmant & harry man with music from bernadette reed & ian salmon

Coffee-House Poetry’s ‘winter salon’ kicks-off Troubadour60’s celebration year with a dazzling range of individual poetic voices:

• editor/copywriter Dominic Bury is widely published in magazines including Poetry Wales, Ambit & Iota
• London-based Poetry-London 3rd-prize-winner (2013) Susannah Hart has also had poems published in Smiths Knoll & Poetry News
• human-rights activist, translator & former paediatrician Fathieh Saudi (latest collection, Prophetic Children, Blue Lotus, 2012) writes in English & Arabic
• Harry Man won 2nd-prize in PEN’s Made-Up-Words & 3rd-prize in Cardiff International; pamphlet Lift (Tall Lighthouse, 2014)
• artist Sharon Morris teaches at Slade School of Fine Art; second collection, Gospel Oak (Enitharmon, 2013)
• Jo Hemmant (first collection, The Light Knows Tricks, Doire, 2013) is director of Pindrop Press & was a prizewinner in the recent Seventh Troubadour International Poetry Prize (2013)
• Malika Booker was inaugural Poet-in-Residence at RSC; one of the poems from her 2013 collection (Pepper Seed, Peepal Tree) was a PBS poem-of-the-week
• novelist & former Poetry-Business overall-winner (2004) Patricia Debney wrote Littoral (Shearsman, 2013) on a Kent-coast beach-hut residency
• … plus songs from jazz/acoustic singer/songwriter Bernadette Reed whose 2009 album Walking on Water explores sound, form and the silent radiant emptiness that permeates creation: with accompanist & former Arena guitarist Ian Salmon

mon 3 feb: what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with sean o’brien, vona groarke, ian gregson, stuart silver and huw warren

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Inventions & excursions in our unique words-&-music sequence with impromptu poetry choices, imaginative harmonic interpolations & unexpected philosophical interventions from a vibrant & varied line-up:

• poet, critic & dramatist Sean O’Brien lives in Newcastle & has published a dozen or so highly-praised collections including Cousin Coat: Selected Poems: 1976-2001 &, most recently November (Picador, 2011)
• Vona Groarke teaches creative writing at Manchester University; her awards include the Brendan Behan Award & the Strokestown International Prize; her sixth Gallery collection, ’X’, is due in 2014
• critic Ian Gregson teaches at Bangor University; his Call Centre Love Songs (Salt, 2006) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize; latest collection, How we Met (Salt, 2008)
• Huw Warren’s thoughtful & exploratory musical creations, fusions and collaborations have long been a gift to the numerous artists and writers with whom he’s worked;
• to which seamless blend of muse & music, writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver brings his own inimitable musings
• plus, (before the break…)
• afterlives: celebrating Troubadour60 by revisiting 21 prizewinning poems from 7 years of the Troubadour International Poetry Prize… with one prizewinning poem each from winners alex josephy, mona arshi, jane kirwan, karen green, katy mack, cheryl moskowitz, chris beckett, michael mckimm, ellen cranitch, jacqueline saphra, wendy french, judy brown, diana pooley, jenny vuglar, june lausch, louise warren, josh ekroy, martyn crucefix, paul stephenson, ian mcewan & ruth valentine

mon 17 feb: coffee-house colloquies: the art of choosing: listen to the poet-editors who bring us the best in magazine poetry: maurice riordan (poetry review), michael mackmin, (the rialto), patricia mccarthy (agenda) & ahren warner (poetry London)

In a Troubadour60 return to our much-loved Coffee-House poets-in-discussion format, come along to hear what makes the editors of our four leading poetry magazines tick! Listen to them read their own poems &, after the break, hear them join in a panel discussion, with audience Q&A, on what makes a poetry magazine & what makes, for them, a magazine poem:

• Maurice Riordan (ed. Poetry Review), b. Lisgoold, Co. Cork, has taught at Goldsmiths, Imperial & Sheffield Hallam; latest collection The Water Stealer (Faber, 2013)
• Agenda editor Patricia McCarthy (latest collection, Around the Mulberry Bush, Waterloo, 2013) was born in Cornwall, has lived in Washington, Paris, Nepal, Ireland & Mexico, and won the 2013 National Poetry Competition
• Rialto magazine & books/pamphlets editor (& keen North-Norfolk bird-watcher) Michael Mackmin was one of the magazine’s founders in 1984; his own collections include Twenty-Three Poems (Happenstance, 2006)
• Eric Gregory Award-winner Ahren Warner was appointed as Poetry London’s poetry editor in Feb. 2013; his latest collection, Pretty (Bloodaxe, 2013) is a PBS Recommendation
• discussion chaired by poet & BBC R4 Saturday-Review critic, C.L. Dallat, latest collection, The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009)

mon 3 mar: fame academy! …celebrating 21 of faber academy’s new poets: introduced by poet/tutors jo shapcott & daljit nagra

with music from fabricio mattos & lucas jordan

Faber Academy poet-tutors read from their own award-winning collections:

• Jo Shapcott teaches at Royal Holloway & Faber Academy, has won the National twice, co-edited Emergency Kit, appeared in Penguin Modern Poets & Bloodaxe’s Poetry Quartets, has published translations, essays & lectures, & six poetry collections including Of Mutability (Faber, 2011)
• Daljit Nagra’s current masterwork is a retelling in verse of the epic Ramayana (Faber 2013); he was a judge for the Troubadour’s 2010 London New Poetry Award & won both the Forward Best Single Poem Prize, 2004, and Forward Best First Collection Prize, 2007, for Look We Have Coming to Dover

Daljit & Jo will introduce just 21 of the many diverse new voices who’ve honed their craft at Faber Academy over the past few years, names we’ve started to see winning prizes, appearing in magazines &, of course, reading at Troubadour events, including will burns, clair wilcox, nick sunderland, peter kravitz, pnina shinebourne, mark huband, victoria green, marek urbanowicz, aviva dautch, paul crichton, katy mack, jon sayers, sam peters, rosey wilkin, susannah hart, jan heritage, daphne astor, karen rhydings, edward doegar, rishi dastidar, richard scott & kate ghyll

mon 17 mar: wake-up call! themed end-of-Troubadour60-spring-season poetry-party with invited guests reading poems of morning, dawn, daybreak, sunrise, breakfast & new beginnings…

What’s the Story, Morning Glory? Oasis wanted to know, in 1995. Frank O’Hara had his rude awakening fifty years earlier from old Phoebus Apollo himself: ‘Hey! I’ve been trying to wake you up for fifteen minutes…’ (A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island), that same unruly sunne that Donne had challenged four centuries before: Why dost thou thus, through windows, and through curtains call on us? in his aubade (The Sunne Rising).

Aubades, poems of parting at dawn, were a staple of the Troubadour in the Middle Ages, though Philip Larkin offered an even bleaker view of the early hours in his own Aubade. Dymock poet, Eleanor Farjeon, takes a sunnier tack with mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning (Morning has Broken) & some writers focused exclusively on the day of rest: from T.S. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service & Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning (‘Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/ coffee and oranges…’), to Alan Sillitoe’s grittier 1958 novel Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Forget those Lazy Sunday Afternoons, forget Some Enchanted Evening: dawn, daybreak, the tedium or exuberance of each new day, are where it’s at lyrically from the moment I wake up… not forgetting Wednesday morning at five o’clock, every day she takes a morning bath, my baby takes the morning train, in the early morning rain, you might wake up some morning… even Dormez vous? Sonnez les matines!

Come along & find out if our guest poets, & their favourite poets’ poets, are morning creatures who rise’n’shine with each new day, or who greet the early hours with quotidian desperation. And join in our tous les matins du monde prize quiz!

readings – oct-dec 2013

mon 7 oct: an evening with mark doty: mark doty reading & in-conversation, plus singer/songwriter bernadette reed

A welcome back to Coffee-House Poetry for US poet Mark Doty, Professor/Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University, winner of (among others) the National Book Award for Poetry & the T.S. Eliot Prize & author of The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, four prose books including Firebird & Dog Years, & eight books of poetry including School of the Arts & Theories & Apparitions (Cape, 2008).

… including, after the break Mark, in-conversation & Q&A, with poet & critic C.L. Dallat

… plus songs from jazz/acoustic singer/songwriter Bernadette Reed whose 2009 album Walking on Water explores sound, form and the silent radiant emptiness that permeates creation (with guitarist Les Davidson)

mon 21 oct: cornucopia: an autumn harvest: hannah lowe, fiona moore, robert peake, hilda sheehan, alison brackenbury, matt bryden, angela france & kate white with henry fajemirokun

A seasonal gathering-in of the latest crop of new poets & poets with new collections featuring:

• Hannah Lowe — first collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2012), shortlisted for Forward/Felix Dennis Prize — lives in London
• poetry-blogger Fiona Moore lives in Greenwich: first pamphlet The Only Reason for Time (HappenStance, 2013)
• US-born Robert Peake coordinates Transatlantic Poetry on Air — latest pamphlet The Silence Teacher (Salzburg, 2013)
• Hilda Sheehan works for Swindon Artswords & Swindon Festival of Poetry, co-edits Domestic Cherry, first collection, The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood (Cultured Llama, 2013)
• Alison Brackenbury (b. Lincolnshire & lives in Gloucestershire) has published 9 collections including a ‘selected’ (1991) & Then, (Carcanet, 2013)
• poet/translator Matt Bryden has taught in Tuscany, Poland & Czech Republic — first full collection is Boxing the Compass (Templar, 2013)
• Angela France is features editor of Iota and runs Cheltenham’s BuzzWords poetry café – her books include Lessons in Mallemaroking, & Hide (Nine Arches, 2013)
• Poetry Society Membership-Assistant Kate White lives in Islington & won the inaugural Pighog/Poetry School Prize with The Old Madness (2013) &
• plus singer/guitarist Henry Fajemirokun

mon 4 nov: jo shapcott, chrsitopher reid, richard douglas pennant, huw warren & stuart silver in what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig … plus, before the break, abigail parry, jill abram, roderic vincent & daisy behagg

Experience your poetry impromptu, as leading poets catch ideas from the ether & respond to each other’s thoughts & themes, to philosophical and philharmonic inventions & interventions…

• Jo Shapcott teaches at Royal Holloway & has won Forward & Commonwealth Prizes, Costa & Colomondeley Awards & the National Poetry Competition, twice, featured in Penguin New Poets & Bloodaxe’s Poetry Quartets & published 6 collections including a ‘selected’ & Of Mutability (Faber, 2010)
• poet, essayist & cartoonist Christopher Reid is a former Faber poetry editor: his 15 books include Selected Poems (2011), A Scattering, winner of the 2009 Costa Book Award and The Song of Lunch, adapted for BBC TV with Alan Rickman & Emma Thompson
• Richard Douglas Pennant divides his time and his poetic inspiration between Cyprus and his native North Wales – collections include The Alabaster Jar (Ogwen, 2008) and Old Stones New Tales (CD, Cegin, 2007).
• plus philosophical interpolations & epigrammatic excursions from Perrier-Award winning writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver
• and harmonic counterpoint provided by Huw Warren’s rhythmic grooves & eclectically melodic inspiration

… plus, before the break —

• Abigail Parry, lives in London where she works as a toymaker; her work was shortlisted for the 2012 Manchester Poetry Prize
• Jill Abram is Director of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, was inaugural winner of Poetry Pulse Prize & has been published in Loose Muse anthologies
• Roderic Vincent is a chartered psychologist, has been shortlisted for Aesthetica, Live Canon & Bridport & has poems in the Iron Anthology of Humorous Verse
• Daisy Behagg grew up near Brighton & lives in Bristol — she was a runner-up in the 2012 Edwin Morgan & Bridport prizes.

mon 18 nov: magma #57 launch night with editors ian mcewen & hannah lowe — special guests patience agbabi & chris mccabe

A mega-moment in the history of the metropolis’ main mag, as Magma #57 launches with more than 57 varieties of poetry, on-the edge, urban, erudite, imaginative, imagist, esoteric, allusive, even over-the-edge — with a special emphasis in this issue on The Shape of the Poem plus ‘showcase’, ‘presiding spirits’, reviews &c. Latest guest editors Hannah Lowe & Ian McEwen introduce a cast of contributors and special guests including Patience Agbabi (Bloodshot Monochrome , Canongate 2008) who is currently reimagining Chaucer’s pilgrims on a Routemaster bus & Chris McCabe (b. Liverpool) whose Salt collections include Zeppelins and The Restructure (2012).

mon 2 dec: seventh annual troubadour international poetry prize night: george szirtes & deryn rees-jones & 2013 prizewinners

With submissions from all around the world, the annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize’s success is inseparable from the venue’s longstanding association with live literature, and from the significance of Troubadour Prize Night, the poetry-calendar’s mustn’t-miss autumn social gathering. Come along to hear twenty-three prizewinning poets, discover who’s won the £2,500 Cegin-sponsored top prize, and listen to fine poetry readings by the major poets who’ve been our 2013 prize judges: George Szirtes (b. Budapest) latest collection is The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009) — his numerous awards include the Gold Star of the Hungarian Republic, & the TS Eliot Prize; & Deryn Rees-Jones (b. Liverpool) who spent much of her childhood in North Wales — chosen as a PBS Next Generation poet in 2004, she has won an Eric Gregory Award & her latest collection, Burying the Wren (Seren) was shortlisted for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize.

mon 16 dec: stormy weather… themed end-of-season poetry-party

Stormy Weather, Billie Holiday sang, ‘when he went away…’ as raging weather so often echoes emotional ups & downs, in Ted Hughes’ ‘wind stampeding the fields’ (Wind), in Sylvia Plath’s Insolent Storm Strikes at the Skull, in Adrienne Rich’s Storm Warnings…

Seamus Heaney marvels at the ‘big soft buffettings’ that ‘catch the heart off guard and blow it open’ (Postscript) & Paul Simon notes, on losing love, ‘Everybody sees the wind blow/ everybody sees you’re blown apart’ (Graceland) though Dorothy Parker sagely observes, ‘they sicken of the calm, who only know the storm…’

But unmetaphorical tempests have their own dramatic roles to play, not just in the eponymous Shakespeare play, but in Milton’s Lycidas & Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland. Elizabeth Bishop thought ‘of the storm roaming the sky uneasily’ & Emily Dickinson admits to ‘GLEE!’ that ‘the great storm is over’ even though forty or so didn’t survive that particular tumult…

Come along & allow yourself to be swept off your feet as invited guest poets whip up a whirlwind with their favourite poems of emotional turmoil & tempestuous moments… & try our not-too-meteorological prize quiz!

readings – may-jul 2013

mon 20 may: transatlantic signals: us &uk poets featuring margot farrington, claire dyer, joshua weiner, kim moore, kathryn maris, janet rogerson, linda gregerson & sarah jackson

A change to the usual seasonal kick-off format — new & established voices — this evening’s programme offers a rare chance to hear what’s now & happening either side of the Atlantic with—

• NYC-based literature, visual-arts & theatre organiser, activist & reviewer Margot Farrington — 2nd collection Flares and Fathoms, Bright Hill Press, NY);
• Claire Dyer — debut poetry collection, Eleven Rooms, (Two Rivers, 2013) — also has a novel, What If, due from Quercus (October 2013);
• Joshua Weiner who holds the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship & has edited At the Barriers (on Thom Gunn) — third collection, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (Chicago, 2013);
• Kim Moore, a peripatetic brass teacher in Cumbria & a 2011 Eric Gregory & Geoffrey Dearmer award winner; If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a 2012 Poetry Business winner;
• Kathryn Maris from NYC, 2nd collection, God Loves You (Seren, 2013) — her poems appear in Best British Poets 2012 & Oxford Poets Anthology;
• Janet Rogerson who lives & works in the North-West of England; A Bad Influence Girl (Rialto, 2012) is her debut collection;
• Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North was a 2007 NBA finalist; she teaches at Univ. of Michigan & divides her time between London & Ann Arbor;
• Sarah Jackson’s first collection Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012) was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award & her pamphlet, Milk, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award.

mon 3 jun: simon armitage, frieda hughes, paul stephenson, huw warren & stuart silver in what we should have said: an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig

A fascinating & radically different way of experiencing music & the spoken word —

• award-winning poet & dramatist Simon Armitage has published 12 mainstream collections — in addition to small-press pamphlets — since Zoom! in 1989, the latest of which is Seeing Stars (Faber, 2010);
• poet & painter Frieda Hughes lived in Australia for many years; she has had numerous exhibitions, has published children’s fiction & five poetry collections — latest Stonepicker and the Book of Mirrors (Bloodaxe, 2009);
• Paul Stephenson won 2nd prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2012; his poems in Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012) have been singled out for praise by the TLS;
• Huw Warren’s thoughtful & exploratory musical creations, fusions & collaborations have long been a gift to the numerous artists & writers with whom he’s worked;
• to which magical, musical, metrical mix writer/perfomer/director Stuart Silver brings his own inimitable brand of wit & wisdom, of insight & inventive intervention…

plus, before the break, four new voices…

• Edward Doegar (grew up in Hull, lives in West London) selected for The Complete Works 2 run by Spread The Word, poems in magazines including The Moth, Poetry Review…
• Mona Arshi (b. Hounslow, lives in West London) human rights lawyer, studied poetry/creative-writing at UEA, published in Magma & Poetry Review, won first prize in 2012 Magma Poetry Competition
• Richard Scott (b. Wimbledon, lives in Hackney) teacher, musician, broadcaster, studied at Faber Academy & Goldsmiths College, won Wasafiri New Writing Prize, published in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Wasafiri…
• Victoria Grigg (b. Hillingdon, lives in Hackney) English tutor/examiner, studied at Sheffield & Birkbeck, short fiction in Mechanics’ Institute Review 9, finalist in 2011 Cinnamon Press Land & Travel competition.

mon 17 jun: a wnaed yng nghymru /made in wales with phil bowen, marianne burton, rebecca perry, robert seatter, judy brown, graham clifford, rhian edwards & kathryn simmonds

New poets, new collections, Poetry Wales Purple Moose pamphlet-winners & a new ‘Beatles’ anthology from Wales-based Seren Books, introduced by Seren editor, Amy Wack —

• Phil Bowen will read from Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After the Beatles which he’s co-edited; with poems by McGough, Armitage, Duffy, Rumens, Ginsberg…
• Rebecca Perry lives in London; her Purple Moose pamphlet little armoured was a PBS choice;
• Robert Seatter’s third collection is Writing King Kong (2012) —winner/commended in National, Forward & Poetry London competitions;
• She Inserts the Key is the forthcoming Seren debut from former lawyer/corporate-banker Marianne Burton;
• Assistant Head-Teacher Graham Clifford won the 2010 Purple Moose pamphlet prize with Welcome Back to the Country;
• Wordsworth Trust poet-in-residence, Judy Brown — Loudness (Seren, 2011) — won the Manchester Poetry Prize (2010) & the Poetry London Competition (2009);
• Clueless Dogs (Seren, 2008) is Rhian Edwards’ first collection; her pamphlet Parade the Fib was a PBS choice;
• Kathryn Simmonds’ Sundays at the Skin Laundrette won the Forward First Collection Prize — her next is The Weather in the Blood (Seren 2013).

mon 1 jul: magma #56 launch night with special guest, david morley

With guest editors Julia Bird & Helen Mort, magma #56’s sure to dazzle, delight, & deliver (as every magma does) an evening of edgy, engaging, eclecticism. to the invariably capacity Coffee-House crowd: hear what’s going on in the metropolis’s major-est mag, discover the gems in the current issue (theme: ‘clothes: workwear to haute couture’,) meet the members of the magma team, discover new ‘showcase’ poets & listen to special guests David Morley, author of nine poetry collections & editor of six anthologies of new fiction and poetry. His next collection of poems is The Gypsy and the Poet, (Carcanet, 2013) with a New & Selected Poems due in 2014 and Eric Gregory Award-winner Jack Underwood who teaches at Goldsmiths College and at the Poetry School, co-edits Stop Sharpening Your Knives, & reviews for Poetry London & Poetry Review.

mon 15 jul: simply red! themed end-of-season poetry-party

Happiness writes white, they say, but love, violence, fire, danger, wine, carnival, red-blooded passions, fury, and ruddy good cheer all call on shades from vermillion to crimson for their special effects: think of Red Riding Hood, the red, red robin, O’Casey’s Red Roses for Me, Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, Warren Beatty’s Reds, Mark Haddon’s The Red House, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Conan-Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, H.E. Bates’ The Scarlet Sword & Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

In poetic terms there’s Tennyson’s now sleeps the crimson petal, William Carlos Williams’ absolute dependence upon a red wheelbarrow, Yeats’ blood dimmed tide (and Red Hanrahan), Sarah Corbett’s Red Wardrobe, Louise Glück’s The Red Poppy, and Sharon Olds’ visceral He is wearing red/ like the inside of the body/ exposed (‘On the Subway’).

Come & listen to invited guest poets’ favourite poems, and their own poems, red in tooth and claw… and win vin rouge (ou vin blanc) in our come-on-you-reds not-too-literary prize quiz for the well-red!