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23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

The programme for this year’s Festival is now available – we hope you’ve already seen it! A fresh line-up of 25 poets from all over the world – Albania, America, Australia, The Bahamas, England, Ireland, Jordan, New Zealand, the Scottish Islands, Wales – all heading for the Suffolk coast this autumn to take part in 52 interconnecting events (14 are free) to generate the ultimate poetry weekend. It’s tricky to squash the anticipated highlights into a paragraph or two – but here goes:

The 21st Century Poem will be the topic of our main discussion and three Short Takes: what are its characteristics and how can today’s poems tackle the big issues of the day? Over a decade into the 2000’s and time for some ready-reckoning. Former US and UK Laureates Robert Hass and Andrew Motion will be extending the conversation to look at the question of 21st Century war poems. And Andrew will be in town to watch a performance his first play Incoming – our first partnership with the HighTide Festival at Aldeburgh.

National treasure Roger McGough will open the Festival with a family reading, and he’ll also be ‘in conversation’ about his 40+ years as a pioneering popular poet, on top of which he’ll deliver the late night Saturday performance with his ‘Work in Progress’ show. New McGough poems, live from the man himself – such a treat.

We’ll be hearing from the northernmost offshore reaches of the British Isles when three Scottish Islands poets – Meg Bateman, Rody Gorman and Robert Alan Jamieson – bring the rhythms and music of Gaelic and Shetlandic to the east coast of Suffolk.

Robert Hass will give year’s Poet-on-Poet lecture on Czeslaw Milosz; Maurice Riordan and Kay Ryan will share their enthusiasm for Philip Larkin; and Jane Draycott will lead this year’s Masterclass. And look out for the all-new Floating Boat – a series of three interviews with Festival poets in three different venues, with broadcaster, cult-cartoonist and singer-songwriter Peter Blegvad at the helm.

The full programme is online here, including readings, workshops, craft talks, discussions, performances, masterclass, exhibition and lots more.

If you’d like a hard copy sending to you, please email or call 01986 835950.

Booking for Friends of The Poetry Trust opened on 16 August – and if you join as a Friend now for just £15 a year you will still be able to take advantage of the priority booking period.
Click here to join

Advance postal booking opens 24 August, but Friends have priority until public booking opens 5 September.

 

Festival Poets Preview: Leontia Flynn & Oliver Reynolds

This year in STUFF, we’re aiming to preview all the poets who’ll be at Aldeburgh this autumn. This month’s spotlight falls on Leontia Flynn and Oliver Reynolds.

Born in County Down in 1974, Leontia Flynn was an Eric Gregory Award winner in 2001 shortly before winning the Forward First Collection Prize for These Days, soon after which she was announced as one of the Next Generation poets in 2004. A second book, Drives, was published in 2004 and her third from Cape – Profit & Loss – will be launched at Aldeburgh in November and is the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Choice. She’s a poet on a consistently upward climb and the new book is full of compelling, ambitious, impressive, witty and tender responses to the uncontrollable march of time.

At Aldeburgh she’ll also be leading a Craft Talk on ‘Advancing The Sequence’ – focusing on how a narrative or repetitious patterns can generate each next poem. “I particularly like writers of sequences,” she says, “Robert Lowell and John Berryman and Shakespeare (of the sonnets)…  I admire poets who have great overarching structures at work behind their poems which allow them to keep producing.”

Hear Leontia Flynn read at The Poetry Archive

A recent Guardian review labelled Oliver Reynolds a poet in need of a revival. We concur. His four fine and attractively idiosyncratic collections from Faber between 1985 and 1999 were followed by an 11-year silence before his triumphant and welcome return with Hodge in 2010 (thank you Areté). We’re really looking forward to hearing some of these wonderfully knowing, rueful, surprising, teasing and accomplished poems live at the Festival. Oliver will also be talking about ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Animals’, looking at multiple contexts in her poems – and what they tell us about themselves, about Bishop and of course about us.

‘A tang of existential regret redolent of Derek Mahon… a vein of caustic sexual satire… For those in search of an alternative to the familiar star turns of British poetry today, the alternative may be closer than we imagine.’ The Guardian

 

17 Melbourne Road

A room at the top of the street
preserving his life in sunlight
square-bottled brilliantine
a comb centre-parting a brush

work-boots on a page of the Echo
and the black jacket on its hanger
with the gold-threaded breast badge
of the South Wales Boxing Federation

Mondays my mother cleaned for him
the builder’s mate and weekend referee
quiet and dependable as the man
sent ahead to hire a room for our Lord

still there as I close the door on emptiness
then and now looking back at our lodger
Mr Pudge caught in the honest ‘60s
small blue flowers pressed in a book

Oliver Reynolds
from Hodge (Areté Books, 2010)

 

New Voices at Aldeburgh: Preview

Helen Mort is one of four young poets featuring in our New Voices event at the Festival this year. Helen is just 26 but already has quite a track record – starting out winning the Foyle Young Poets Competition (just five times!) and more recently winner of a Gregory Award and the Manchester Young Writer Prize. In addition she’s a ‘graduate’ of the Aldeburgh Poetry Seminar, our annual retreat since 2007 for poets either at or near first or second collection stage. She’s the youngest ever poet-in-residence at The Wordsworth Trust and in 2010 took a live literature show to Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And to top it all, her first collection will be published by Chatto in 2013.

We asked Helen about events in her life that have shaped and changed her writing. “Probably being dropped on the head in B & Q as a child! My dad put a large block of cement in the other end of the shopping trolley from where I was sitting and I was catapulted out onto the concrete floor. Years later, I was knocked out by the wing mirror of a bus in Cambridge, so that must have sealed it… I think writing has a strange relationship with life and it’s always dangerous to infer too much autobiography from a poet’s writing: I tend to follow Rita Ann Higgins maxim that getting to the ‘poetic truth’ often involves a good deal of lying. A sense of landscape always shapes my work and a sense of being separated from landscape, whether it’s the post-pit-closure landscape of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire I knew when I was growing up or the mountains that I feel at home in wherever I am.”

You’ll be able to read more from Helen in The Poetry Paper this autumn. For now though we recommend a visit to her website

Helen will be reading with Emily Berry, Hannah Lowe and Sam Riviere at the New Voice Reading, Saturday 5 November. This event is supported by the Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation and The Idlewild Charitable Trust.

Further listening/reading:
Check out Eric Gregory award-winner Emily Berry’s poems on Poet Casting

Faber New Poet Sam Riviere’s latest work is 81 Austerities – a response to the Coalition government’s ‘austerity measures’.

Hannah Lowe – another graduate of the Aldeburgh Advanced Seminar – had her first pamphlet The Hitcher published by The Rialto earlier this year. You can read an interview with her.

 

Poetry Prom Profile: Jackie Kay

Last call to get to Snape for Tuesday 23rd August…

There are only around 100 tickets left for our 9th Poetry Prom which takes place on Tuesday 23 August in the glorious setting of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Suffolk. We’ve brought together three great British poets (and our first all-women trio) – Helen Dunmore, Jackie Kay and Alice Oswald – who’ll deliver an unmissable night of poems to what’s always a very special audience, many of whom are unfamiliar with live poetry.

We’ve put all three Poetry Prom poets in the STUFF spotlight throughout the summer. Last but by no means least, it’s Jackie Kay’s turn.

Jackie Kay is sure she turned into a writer “because of the way my mum told me stories. My brother’s adoption and mine were the two first big real stories I heard and I found both fascinating.” A good reason for her commitment to “keeping the conversation open between myself as an adult and myself as a child.” But what precipitated the discovery of her vocation was being knocked off her moped as a teenager and enduring sixteen weeks in plaster with a badly broken leg. “I suddenly saw the world differently and knew that I wanted to write about what I saw. I wrote long poems about the accident, and apartheid and poverty and peace and housewives and anything else that interested me… it was like somebody had given me an extra room to live in, a room that was all mine.”

She has an exceptional gift for inhabiting and engaging us in other people’s lives, and her trademark mix of sadness and humour takes us on unexpected journeys towards compassion and empathy. Questions of identity and belonging have always inspired her writing which is peopled with outsiders and the often overlooked: the middle-aged, the unloved, the overweight, the disappointed. For her, the best poems contain “strong feelings and strong sentiment. They’re a way of expressing those things that we find difficult. People turn to poetry often at moments in their lives which are extreme– they might be in love, or recently bereaved. Poetry speaks to people directly at moments like these.”

The Poetry Trust is very glad to be presenting this year’s Poetry Prom in partnership with Aldeburgh Music as part of the Snape Proms season. And we’re particularly grateful to our sponsors Fairweather Stephenson & Co for maintaining their generous support.

Tickets £14, £12, £10, Prom £6.50
Box Office 01728 687110 / email
website

 

New on The Poetry Channel

We’ll be celebrating the new US Poet Laureate and this year’s Poetry Prom on The Poetry Channel this month with two new podcasts:

Philip Levine’s Journeys
available now
A giant of American poetry and now newly crowned US Laureate, Philip Levine memorably appeared at Aldeburgh in 2009 and can be heard in conversation with Naomi Jaffa, The Poetry Trust director. In an absorbing, funny and wide-ranging interview, he touches upon growing up in Detroit, life at college with teachers Lowell and Berryman, his fascination with Lorca and Spain, Jazz, Wagner and which four writers he’d like to be stuck in a lift with.
This interview is full and unedited (45 minutes).

Read more of Philip Levine’s appointment

Poetry Prom
available Friday 26 August (if all goes according to plan…)
Poems and thoughts from the three Poetry Prom Poets, Helen Dunmore, Jackie Kay and Alice Oswald alongside some reactions from the 700+ audience – on and off stage at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall.

 

Poetry Archive Survey

Whether you’re already a regular at The Poetry Archive website or have never yet visited (serious poetry treats in store), The Poetry Archive invites you to take this short survey about their idea of offering downloads of recorded poetry.

Tell them what you think and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win your choice of a personally inscribed copy of Andrew Motion’s latest collection, a selection of five Poetry Archive CDs or a £20 Waterstones voucher (one entry per person).

To enter the prize draw, take the survey now

 

Wendy Cope at Bury St Edmunds

News of another of the nation’s best-loved poets heading for Suffolk in the early autumn. Wendy Cope has been captivating readers with wry wit, ironic humour and heart-stopping honesty for three decades and she’ll be on stage at the Theatre Royal in Bury St. Edmunds on Friday 30th September.

She’ll be reading from her most recent collection Family Values – which successfully navigates the bittersweet ponderings of older age – alongside favourites from earlier books. The evening will be rounded off by a question and answer session followed by a book-signing. Be sure to book early to enjoy this intimate event with one of the country’s best known and favourite poets.

Wendy Cope - Family Values
The Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds
Friday 30 September at 7.30pm
All tickets £15 (£12)
To book, telephone 01284 769505 or online

 

Bernadine Freud

The Poetry Trust’s local Suffolk community has been deeply saddened by the untimely death of one of our closest poetry friends – Bernadine Freud. We mourn her passing and will greatly miss her practical support, wisdom, humour and wonderfully good company. Our sympathy goes out to her family who have lost such a vibrant person from their lives.
Guardian obituary

 

Other STUFF you might like

Café Writers Norwich – the Open Poetry Competition 2011 is now open to entries.
Judge: Pascale Petit. Closing Date 30th November 2011.
Details

Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize 2011 – for the translation of Russian poetry into English.
Judges: Sasha Dugdale, Catriona Kelly and Paul Muldoon.
Entries must arrive no later than 31 August 2011.
Details

Michael Laskey’s free reading in Aldeburgh Library on Friday 23 September at 5pm – one of The Poetry Business & Smith/Doorstop’s 25 readings round the country to celebrate their 25th anniversary.

Finuala Dowling’s monthly online poetry workshop for the University of Stellenbosch’s literary website, SLiPnet.