Welcome to Stuff. The Poetry Trust's latest news, events, podcasts and publications.

23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Preview

4-6 November 2011

All 24 poets are booked and the events and timetable are just about in place. We’re now busy putting the programme booklet together – which means it’s all hands on deck from our ever-smaller team to deliver originality and perfection. Poets biogs, funder credits, logistical details, event descriptions – plus of course Naomi checking all those apostrophes, lost itallics and inconsistent spellings of unfamiliar names! Late night office stints guaranteed for the rest of the month. But hurrah for our newly arrived projects intern – Alice Knapp – a UEA English graduate who shares our passion for contemporary American poetry. It’s June and this is where the year turns for The Poetry Trust – it may still be early summer (and five months away) but the countdown to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival has begun.

In previous editions of STUFF we’ve already given a few sneak previews of the poets involved in this year’s Festival including our starry American contingent – two former US Poet Laureates Robert Hass and Kay Ryan. Hass is appearing at Poetry International (Rotterdam) this week and a live-stream of his reading will be available here at Poetry International website.

We can now also confirm that we’ve got our first poet from Albania coming to the Suffolk coast this year and we’ll be launching her first UK publication – Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) – at the Festival. Luljeta Lleshanaku is a completely original voice and something of a poetry pioneer. Born in Elbasan in 1968, Luljeta grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family’s opposition to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. She was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the Communist regime in the early ‘90s. Among the first generation of poets to emerge out of the ‘wasteland’ of enforced socialist realism, she’s helped reinvent Albanian poetry almost entirely from scratch. She will be an extraordinary voice to hear at Aldeburgh in November.

It’s Not Time For…

It’s not time for a change.
For as long as I can remember
it’‘s never been time for a change.

The house dampens. Perhaps everything is a forgery:
the wild pears, wedding rings, the milk van,
the children faltering like a tailor’s pins
in an unfinished jacket
awaiting another try.

Passed from generation to generation, like haemophilia,
change is carried by the male chromosome.
You can recognise these men by their profiles –
like Caesar’s face, a laurel on his head,
staring into the failure,
stamped forever on Roman coins.

Women, on the other hand,
never forget to turn on the veranda light late in the evening,
the bulb covered in mosquitoes,
believing that in spite of what they do,
what is written, will happen.

Luljeta Lleshanaku
from Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 2011)

 

Poetry Prom Profile: Alice Oswald

Tickets are now on sale and selling briskly (nearly 400 gone, around 300 to go for a full house) for the ninth 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’ll be putting all three Poetry Prom poets in the STUFF spotlight throughout the summer, starting with Alice Oswald.

Alice Oswald’s first poem was prompted, at the age of eight, by a feeling of relief after a wakeful night in a frightening bedroom. She has written poetry ever since, believing it to be “an escape from the self – not solipsistic, not ego-driven – a way of opening up to whatever else is out there.” Often labelled a landscape or nature poet, she insists on differentiating herself from the Romantics, especially Wordsworth: “It’s something I’ve always reacted against – the human imagination colonising nature. I’m interested in mind as something different from what’s inside my head, the different sources of thought and feeling that are out there in the natural world. It’s a question of direction. I don’t want the mind to be coming from my life and story; I want it to be coming from something out there.”

To hear more from Alice Oswald, go to The Poetry Channel where we’ve just uploaded a podcast of her absorbing and revelatory 2007 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival interview about ‘Poetry & Landscape’ with former Arvon Director, Ariane Koek.

The Poetry Trust is very glad to be presenting this year’s Poetry Prom in partnership, for a ninth successive year, 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 / .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
www.aldeburgh.co.uk

 

Poetry @ The Pumphouse

Last few tickets left! Poetry @ The Pumphouse: Matthew Hollis on Edward Thomas
Friday 24 June at 7pm, Aldeburgh

‘The Last Years of Edward Thomas’ by Matthew Hollis is proving to be a hot ticket and you’ll have to be quick (or lucky about returns) if you want to catch this atmospheric Pumphouse preview of Matthew’s long-awaited new biography of Edward Thomas, complete with audio clips and photographic illustrations.

The event is another partnership between The Poetry Trust and Aldeburgh Music and part of the 64th Aldeburgh Festival.
More thanks are due to Fairweather Stephenson & Co for additional sponsorship.

Tickets £7
box office 01728 687110
or book online

Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
by Matthew Hollis will be published by Faber in August 2011

 

Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011 – open for entries

There’s just over a month left to enter this year’s Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. The prize is a unique and well-thought out package – the winner not only gets a cheque for £1,000 but also a week’s ‘protected’ writing time on the Suffolk coast and a fee-paying invitation to next year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Established in 1989, this is one of the most important and long-established poetry prizes in the UK, and the only one to offer significant professional development as well as cash.

The 2010 winner was Christian Campbell for Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree) who responded to the news with: “Let’s just say that I’m ‘feeling good’ in the Nina Simone way! I’m honoured to be a part of a moment of great energy and transformation in contemporary poetry in the UK. It’s very, very difficult for any young poet, and for any Caribbean poet, to get this level of recognition.” Christian will be reading at the Festival this November.

Recent First Collection Prize winners have proved to be some of the most memorable and best-selling readers at the Festival (the Aldeburgh audience is also a dedicated book buying audience) –- Tiffany Atkinson and J O Morgan immediately spring to mind. Morgan said of his 2009 win: “I felt like it was happening to someone else…. for the book to have been shortlisted was a wonderful gift. And then to have experienced and respected poets pick it from that shortlist is something very special.”

The closing date for entries is 25 July 2010.

 

The Poetry Channel

News of another fine podcast newly available at The Poetry Channel and featuring Alice Oswald, one of this year’s Poetry Prom poets, in her unique and revelatory ‘Poetry and Landscape’ interview recorded live at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 2007. We can’t believe we’ve not got around to sharing this half-hour treasure – and as good as anything you’ll hear on Radio 3 or 4 – from the Festival archive before now. It’s completely absorbing – thanks in no small part to Ariane Koek’s skill of asking perfect questions and then getting out of the way!

 

Ip-Art with Simon Armitage

Can it really be six years since Simon Armitage read with Matt Harvey and Carol Ann Duffy at the Poetry Prom to the Snape Maltings Concert Hall audience of 800? Well, Simon is heading back to Suffolk this July to take part in the Ip-Art Festival at 7.30pm on Thursday 7 July in the Council Chamber at Ipswich Town Hall. As well as reading from a selection of his work – including his recent outstanding collection Seeing Stars – Simon will be ‘in conversation’ with Naomi Jaffa, Director of The Poetry Trust. He’s always fantastically good company and this is an evening not to be missed if you’re based in Suffolk, North Essex or South Norfolk (or even London – Ipswich’s only a hour by train!).

Like the Angel of the North, Simon Armitage towers above the rest of his generation and is often regarded as the natural successor to Ted Hughes. He is extraordinarily prolific, inventive, entertaining and versatile, producing award-winning poetry, novels, plays and scripts for radio, television and film. With his unique talent for taking the pulse of the times with maximum artistic integrity, he is gratifying proof that the best poets’ writing can also be the most popular.

Tickets: £8/£6 concessions
box office 01473 433100
or book online

 

Other STUFF you may like:

Ledbury Poetry Festival 1-10 July 2011.
Among many others: Ian Duhig, Annie Freud, Helen Ivory, Jackie Kay, Lorraine Mariner, Jo Shapcott, Penelope Shuttle, Matthew Sweeney, George Szirtes, Brian Turner – and The Poetry Trust’s very own Dean Parkin doing his one man show, Dean’s Dad’s Ducks (on Sunday 3 July).

Third annual T S Eliot International Summer School, to be held in Senate House, University of London, July 9-16.

2011 International Poetry Competition – 1st Prize £1000, judge Glyn Maxwell.
Deadline 29 July 2011. Entry fee £4 per poem or £10 for 3 poems. £3 per poem if poems are submitted by the ‘Early Bird’ 22nd June deadline.

New MA Creative Writing course at the University of Essex