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The 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Round-up

We think we’re allowed still to be basking in the afterglow of our most successful Aldeburgh Poetry Festival ever. Happy poets + happy punters = happy Poetry Trust!  We’re thrilled that our rich programme of inter-connecting events translated into an all-time high at the box office (14% up on 2010) with over 5,000 tickets issued (22% up on 2010). And book sales were up by 33%, helped no doubt by storming readings and three new collections launched during the weekend. Aldeburgh audiences aren’t simply huge and hugely attentive; they’re avid book buyers too!

Of course everyone has their own Festival highlights – we’d love to hear more about yours – and ours this year would have to include a series of wonderfully arresting female readings: from Emily Berry, Jane Draycott, Leontia Flynn and Luljeta Lleshanaku. We’d also add the all-too-brief quarter of an hour with Scottish Island poet Robert Alan Jamieson who set the Jubilee Hall alight, in Shetlandic; memorable poems by Fleur Adcock, Fergus Allen, Christian Campbell, Amjad Nasser, Oliver Reynolds and Maurice Riordan; and the overwhelming generosity and scintillating contributions throughout the weekend from this year’s Americans, Robert Hass and Kay Ryan. We were blessed with notable ‘conversations’ too: the Saturday morning discussion (brilliantly chaired by Robert Seatter) saw Fleur Adcock, Christian Campbell, Robert Hass and Luljeta Lleshanaku tackling The 21st Century Poem in front of an audience of 180 at 9am. Yes, 9am! And later that day, Robert Hass and Andrew Motion relished their first encounter in a searching and moving exchange about 21st war poetry.

There’s been seriously high-class blogging about the Festival too – thanks to Charles Boyle, his pre-Aldeburgh posting, Charles Christian, Katy Evans-Bush, Olivia Fairweather, Fiona Moore and Alicia Stubbersfield (via The Rialto) among others. We’ve greatly welcomed their Festival experiences and thoughts.

The Poetry Trust’s Director, Naomi Jaffa, was surprised to find herself giving a brief and unscheduled interview in the middle of the Aldeburgh weekend. Hear what she said about why poetry festival’s matter in Radio 4’s recent ‘Guns, Roses and Poetry Readings’, presented by Bill Herbert and Zoe Skoulding.

 

The Festival’s Best Words & Pictures

Festival attenders will know that we converted the old HSBC office in Aldeburgh into our headquarters for the weekend – unfortunately they didn’t leave any money behind! –successfully banishing the stale corporate aroma with vibrant poem and Festival posters. As usual, our Festival ‘poetcatcher’ Peter Everard Smith was on hand to record the Aldeburgh ‘experience’ and you can see a gallery of his weekend’s work on our website.

We’ll also be uploading a series of Festival podcasts to The Poetry Channel early in the New Year – with maybe some in time for Christmas: Poem Shows, behind the scenes interviews and edited highlights of the best events from 2011. What was your favourite poem of the Festival? Or maybe you had a ‘best event’? Is there something you’d love to ‘listen again’ to? Please do let us know – we’re always happy to receive possible podcasts suggestions.

 

The Poetry Paper, Edition 8

Not only did 2011 see probably our best poetry festival ever, we also think that this year’s Poetry Paper is the issue we’re proudest of. And, miraculously, it’s still free. We’re endlessly grateful to our advertisers and to Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts for ensuring this year’s publication. This attractively substantial edition includes interviews with Jackie Kay, Helen Dunmore and Alice Oswald, an essay from Robert Hass on literature and violence, and a short but all-observing stroll with Kay Ryan. Plus new poems from Fleur Adcock, Fergus Allen, Roger McGough, Oliver Reynolds and even a fiendish cryptic crossword in which all the answers are the names of poets who’ve read at Aldeburgh. How to get your hands on a copy? We suggest you get in touch with us pronto and we’ll post one direct to your door (in the UK only and while stocks last), or alternatively you can read the Poetry Paper online anywhere in the world through our interactive flipbook. We’ve spent more money this year to ‘optimise’ the e-read experience – so it’d be great to know if it’s made a difference. Do email and tell us.

 

Aldeburgh First Collection Prize Winner

Many congratulations to Nancy Gaffield who has won this year’s Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011 for her CB Editions-published Tokaido Road. As announced at the Festival in November, Nancy receives an invitation to read at next year’s event, a week’s paid protected writing time in Suffolk, plus a cheque for £1,000.

Nancy, who was still waiting to hear if her book would be published a year ago, said she was simply astonished at the news of her win. “For me, Tokaido Road was a book that just had to be written: how it would be received was a complete unknown. I never imagined that it would achieve such recognition. Aldeburgh attracts support from so many distinguished poets and commands so much respect, that I could not have wished for a better reception for my work.”

The book (which was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection) was described by Robert Seatter, one of this year’s three judges, as: “a remarkable piece of subtle, sustained and surprising writing. Taking as its starting point a set of period Japanese prints, Nancy reinvents these images as a revelatory journey which feels both fresh and timeless. It’s as if every word must have been written before, but comes new off the page.”

We look forward to welcoming Nancy to the Suffolk coast next autumn!

 

Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition Winners

We were also delighted to hear the winners of our Young Poets Competition 2011 in person at Aldeburgh’s traditional opening event, the Family Reading with Roger McGough. We received 650 entries from 33 schools and awarded a total of ten prizes (£20 book tokens) to the young writers – aged 8 to 15 – who delivered their terrific poems to a packed Jubilee Hall audience (234) and certainly provided a hard act for Roger to follow.

For the first time, Bramfield Primary achieved the great distinction of being the school with the strongest overall entry – for which they received the Hardiman Scott Cup, awarded annually by The Suffolk Poetry Society. All the prizewinning poems were featured in a National Poetry Day double page spread in the East Anglian Daily Times which has sponsored the Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition from the very beginning. And you can read them here.

Details of next year’s Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition will be available in Spring 2012.

 

Outstanding Live Poetry At UEA

Three of the UK’s most assured and impressive poets will feature in a series of solo evenings as part of the Spring Literary Festival 2012 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. All start at 7pm, will take place in Lecture Theatre 1, and will offer a properly in depth mix of conversation and poems. John Burnside last read at Aldeburgh in 1994, Sean O’Brien in 1992 and Paul Farley in 2003, and so it’s fair to say that fans in the East of England are well overdue an update on their necessary poetry. The Poetry Trust will be very much present at all three evenings (we’ll have copies of The Poetry Paper to give away too) and we recommend you put these dates in your diary now.

John Burnside – Tuesday 17 January
His recent collection Black Cat Bone won the Forward Poetry Prize and is currently shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. His acclaimed novels include A Summer of Drowning, recently shortlisted for a Costa Novel Award.
A poet whose rapt, floating verse conjures up effects of great beauty in both the ear and the imagination. The Independent

Sean O’Brien – Tuesday 20 March
His latest collection November has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Forward Prizes. His last – The Drowned Book – won both.
Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, but it’s a masterful writer who manages, like O’Brien, to get both into his verse. The Independent

Paul Farley – Tuesday 27 March
Winner of the Forward Best First Collection for his first book and the Whitbread Poetry Prize for his second, The Dark Film is his most recent investigation into ‘the art of seeing’ – what lies out of sight, at the edge of vision or under our noses.
Poems that are rich in thought and memorable in expression, tuning in to a cosmic white noise. TLS

Tickets cost £6 per reading, but you can buy a ‘Poetry Passport’ for just £12 which covers all three evenings. Telephone 01603 508050 to book. Full programme information here.

 

Other STUFF you might like

TS Eliot Poetry Prize Reading
Don’t miss this unique live reading by the shortlisted poets live in the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 15th January 2012. Tickets are selling fast for the year’s biggest single poetry gathering (the PBS recorded an amazingly full house last year) so we’ve made sure to book ours this side of Christmas!

Christopher Tower Poetry Competition
The UK’s most valuable competition for young poets is now open for entries – with prizes of £3,000, £1000 and £500. This year students between 16-18 years are challenged to write a poem on the theme of ‘Voyages’. Closing date 2 March 2012.

The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition
Judges: Andrew Motion and Mark Cocker who, we’re assured, will be giving the term ‘Nature Poetry’ a very wide interpretation. Prizes are £1000, £400 and £300. Closing date 30 April 2012.

More attractions via The Rialto website in the shape of Hannah Lowe who was part of the popular ‘New Voices’ reading at Aldeburgh 2011 and who’s reading on video here.

Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2012
Judge: Dean Parkin, closing date 30 April 2012. For poems of up to 50 lines with prizes of £500, £200, £100. Download the flyer.

 

And Finally…

We hope you’ll understand (and forgive) our decision to make the forthcoming editions of STUFF occasional rather than monthly. The Poetry Trust has been reduced to a skeleton part-time team and consequently we must focus on doing all we can to secure a brilliant future for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Also, if we’re honest, the period between January and May is always when we’re much busier behind the scenes – raising money, developing partnerships, programming – and there aren’t that many ‘public’ Poetry Trust activities to report. We’ll let you have details for our Poetry at the Pumphouse (June 2012) and the Poetry Prom (probably 23 August 2012) in the New Year. And of course we’ll keep you posted about the 24th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (which will either take place over the weekend of 2-4 or 8-10 November – dates to be confirmed asap).

In the meantime, stay in touch with us via Facebook (make sure you ‘like’ The Poetry Trust page) and we’ll sign off with enthusiastic compliments of the season to all STUFF readers.

 

The 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 4–6 November

With just two weeks to go, preparations are in more than full swing for the 23rd International Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Aldeburgh’s shop windows are already festooned with poster poems (newly sponsored by Legal Technology Insider) by the 25 poets from all over the UK and far beyond who’ll be gathering on Suffolk’s easterly edge to turn a small coastal seaside resort into ‘Poetry Town’ for one weekend only. We hope you’ll be there because we’ve been planning all year to make this the finest celebration of the artform we love. If you’ve never made it to Aldeburgh before, we strongly recommend you get yourself to it this time. It’s going to be one of the best (and also, given our total loss of secure Arts Council funding, the Festival’s future – though brightly envisioned – is some way off being secure…).
Box Office Telephone 01728 687110 or Book Online

 

Festival Poets Preview

Here’s a reminder of some poets and events we don’t think you’ll want to miss.

We certainly weren’t alone in being delighted at the appearance of a new Fleur Adcock collection – Dragon’s Tale – in 2010. After a lengthy period of not writing this was a sparkling comeback. At Aldeburgh, in addition to her Friday night reading and her sold-out talk reconsidering the work of George MacBeth, Fleur will also be taking part in this year’s Festival Discussion, searching with Christian Campbell, Robert Hass and Luljeta Lleshanaku for the identity of The 21st Century Poem.

Named a Next Generation Poet in 2004, Jane Draycott has published three acclaimed collections and her new translation of the 14th century poem Pearl (2011) is also attracting the accolades (PBS Recommended Translation, Stephen Spender Prize winner). She’s known as a highly skilled tutor – unsurprisingly her workshop quickly sold out – so don’t miss her expertise in action at the Masterclass (generously sponsored for a 14th successive year by The Rialto) where she’ll be leading the annual collective scrutiny of three unpublished poems by three graduates of this year’s Aldeburgh Advanced Seminar – Fiona Moore, Jocelyn Page and Luke Yates.

Maurice Riordan has published three collections – each one striving to break new ground. As a former Editor of Poetry London (and also a teacher, anthologist and translator) he should be well-suited to the Blind Criticism event on Saturday morning when he’ll be joining forces – and gut instincts – with Sam Riviere to evaluate a pair of anonymous poems specially chosen to stimulate debate.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s first collection was published fifty years ago and the seventeen collections that have followed have all been characterised by an unflagging inventiveness and enthusiasm for the artform. He’s also a prolific essay writer, critic and editor, so his Short Take on the 21st Century Poem on Sunday morning is sure to be good value. With his international university teaching credentials and status in Australia, Chris has to be one of the great poet/teachers and amazingly, there are still places on his Friday afternoon Workshop (just wish we’d got the time to attend and benefit from his approach to reviving ‘stranded poems’) – so snap up a last ticket quick!

 

SAUCER

who first spotted the lack
not that is the slip
in between the cup and lip
but down under a hot mug or cup?
yet if it comes to that
a plate would merely be over the top

something then to stop the drips
or keep the pea soup off your lap
complicate the washing up
stop a simple splash or slop
and sit here for the waiter’s tip

sad without a cup

Chris Wallace-Crabbe
from Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet 2008)

 

Smith Doorstop Reading

A trio of poets to celebrate the 25th birthday of The Poetry Business. This month sees the publication of Early Train, Jonathan Davidson’s long-long-awaited second poetry collection. Jonathan also writes radio plays and adapts work for radio and the stage. Jackie Kay says of his work: “Distant and yet close, intimate and yet somehow objective, the quiet power of these tender and true poems pulls you in.”  Allison McVety is marketing manager at TPB but most likely won’t read from that side of her work at the Festival! Instead she will draw from The Night Trotsky Came to Stay – shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Best First Collection Prize – and last year’s Miming Happiness. As mentioned in last month’s STUFF, Ed Reiss is on the shortlist for the 2011 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for Your Sort – the winner of which will be announced at the opening main reading on Friday 4 November – so he’s got to be doing something right!

 

THE GREAT

At the public meeting on ‘European Union
and National Identity’
the speaker asked rhetorically:

You who cling to Englishness –
which of you could say when Englishness
supposedly began?

He paused to underline the point.
People considered the possibilities, stared
at their toes, waited for him to move on.

Then my mother, sitting next to me,
spoke up loudly: ‘ALFRED PROBABLY’.

Ed Reiss
from Your Sort (Smith/Doorstop 2011)

 

Aldeburgh’s Alternative Slots

Away from the serious business of ‘page’ poetry, there’ll be at least two events at Aldeburgh providing the best words in the funniest order. Project Adorno hits town on Friday night – or Praveen Manghani and Russell Thompson as they are also known – described as a ‘lo-fi, sci-fi performance poetry double-act spectacular’. Combining poems and pop songs with off-the-wall humour, they’ve been performing together for over a decade and are Edinburgh Festival Fringe regulars, with Project Adorno’s Top Ten of Popular Culture as their 2010 show. And we can even point you to a video of Project Adorno in action at Oxfringe earlier this year – performing a song ‘written in Basic, on my Commodore 64’. It’s a romp through an early computer geek’s 1980s childhood and worth watching for the duo’s Xylophone and Rubic’s Cube solo alone.

On Sunday lunchtime don’t miss the chance to catch up with Rachel Pantechnicon at Aldeburgh. She really is one of the UK’s most charmingly peculiar poets – part Pam Ayres, part Eddie Izzard, purposefully prim and absurd in abundance. To give you a flavour of her wonderful world, we recently asked Rachel some questions about the business of writing, particularly how she shapes her poems. “I like a poem to be shaped like one of those heraldic pennants with long tassels” she replied thoughtfully, “a gonfalon I think is the word. Preferably pre-battle.” (You’ll be able to read more of her musings on this subject in the forthcoming Poetry Paper.) Pantechnicon’s poetry, usually co-written with Harold the cat, holds the masterful rhythm of the treadle and delves into philosophical issues such as the Protestant Reformers, hurting your coccyx and which is better, the steam-pixie or the real pixie. Expect captivatingly kooky poems from the best-dressed woman on the poetry scene.

 

Aldeburgh In Other Places

To spread the benefits of bringing international poets to Aldeburgh, we’re feeling chuffed to have organised partnerships with Poet in the City, the Southbank Centre and the Scottish Poetry Library who’ll be hosting the following additional readings for four of this year’s Festival poets:

Robert Hass and Kay Ryan will give a ‘Poet in the City’ reading at Kings Place in London at 7pm on Monday 7 November. There are only 100 seats available and they’re selling out fast – which is hardly surprising given that Hass hasn’t read in the UK since the 70s and Kay Ryan never before.
Book here

Luljeta Lleshanaku and Amjad Nasser will be part of a ‘State of Emergency’ reading at the Southbank Centre at 7.45pm on Tuesday 8 November. Luljeta will be making her UK debut and everything about her poems and her interview in The Poetry Paper suggests she’ll be very exciting in person.
Book here

Kay Ryan will give a solo reading for the Scottish Poetry Library – taking place at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh – at 7.30pm on Wednesday 9 November. As a Pulitzer Prize winner and recently announced MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Kay’s star is rising ever higher this year – and it’s great she’s getting to Scotland before flying back to the USA.
Book here

 

Winners Of Young Poets Competition

Ten gifted young writers have been selected from nearly 700 school children taking part in the Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition this summer. The young poets, aged from just five up to seventeen, will receive their £20 book tokens, read their winning poems at the opening Family Reading event at 6pm on Friday 4 November. They’ll then get to sit back to enjoy the rest of the event in the company of the one and only Roger McGough. The best way to start the Festival weekend. And if you want McGough for grown-ups, then there are a few seats left for his Q&A (with The Poetry Trust’s Dean Parkin, a great McGough fan) and for Roger’s Saturday night Performance (sponsored by Fairweather Stephenson & Co, the Suffolk firm of solicitors who really like live poetry) where he’ll be previewing new work.

 

Poetry Paper

The Poetry Paper is now at the printers and will arrive in all its word-and-image brilliance by 1st November. Highlights include interviews with Jackie Kay, Helen Dunmore and Alice Oswald, an essay from Robert Hass on literature and violence, and a short but all-observing stroll with Kay Ryan. Plus new poems from Fleur Adcock, Fergus Allen, Roger McGough, Oliver Reynolds and lots more. Instead of illustrations, we’ve put our fabulous photographer Peter Everard Smith’s work to even better use. (And if you’ve not yet enjoyed his amazing gallery memorialising poets at Aldeburgh then give yourself a treat.) Free hard copies of The Poetry Paper will be available for Aldeburgh Poetry Festival audiences and then distributed nationally. Alternatively, the internet-savvy can soon peruse online at leisure through The Poetry Trust website – details forthcoming through Facebook/Twitter/next month’s STUFF. The not-for-profit magazine is only made possible by the advertising revenue generated from the literature/arts sector. We thank – and applaud – these organisations for their shrewd business investment (and, of course, for their generous support).

 

Festival Bloggers

We do wish that ‘blogger’ was a more appealing word (can’t someone come up with something better?) because we’ve been really getting into some excellent poetry and cultural blogs in recent months. Better late than never, you might say…  As a result, we’ve asked Fiona Moore (Displacement), Charles Boyle (Sonofabook) and Olivia Fairweather (Magnetic Kid Liv) to provide their singular ‘takes’ on Aldeburgh this year – and we’re greatly looking forward to some highly engaged and engaging perspicuity! Maybe even some controversy (given how quiet and well-behaved the poetry world has been this year…). We’re sure there’ll be more audience-member-bloggers adding to the conversation so do please us know if you’re one of them so we can do the whole Facebook/Twitter-linky thing. Sonofabook has already shared a pre-Aldeburgh posting which is well worth reading.

 

Other Stuff You Might Like

The prestigious 2012 Christopher Tower Poetry Competition for young poets opens Friday 4 November when it’s launched at the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (where Helen Mort, Tower-commended in 2004, will be reading). Last year’s winner, Elizabeth Johnson, and the 2010 third prize winner, Megan Owens, both came from Farlingaye High School in Woodbridge, Suffolk – which is only 20 miles away from Aldeburgh!

Places available for the forthcoming Mendham Writers Creative Writing Workshop with Brandon Robshaw on an ‘Animals’ theme here in Halesworth at The Cut Arts Centre, on Saturday 29th October from 10am-3pm. £35 including refreshments.

Entries are now invited for the 2012 Café Writers Competition and its associated new Norfolk Commission – supported by Ink Sweat and Tears – which offers £3,000 and the publication of a pamphlet in 2012.

Exciting news from the Poetry Book Society about the T S Eliot Prize Shortlist plus new three-year funding support from Aurum

Following the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival weekend is another of the town’s amazing cultural treats – the 17th Documentary Film Festival from 11–13 November and directed by Diana Quick. Of special appeal to poetry audiences will be the Fringe screening – in nearby Walberswick – of the exciting poetry slam film ‘We Are Poets’.

And finally, check out the new Aldeburgh Poets Video Show to whet your Festival appetite – just posted on The Poetry Trust’s website. Enjoy!

 

First Collection Prize Shortlist

We’re delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2011 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize – one of the most influential and established poetry prizes in the UK. Judges Michael Laskey (Chair), Robert Seatter and Penelope Shuttle found plenty of common ground in their selection of five distinctive new voices from the 74 entries. The winner of the £1,000 prize (plus a week of ‘protected writing time’ and a paid invitation to read at the next Aldeburgh Poetry Festival) will be revealed at the start of the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Friday 4 November 2011. And you can read more about the Prize and its previous winners here. In the meantime, here’s the shortlist and plus a short note on each of the lively five:

Sidereal by Rachel Boast (Picador)
Born in Suffolk in 1975, Rachel studied at Wolverhampton and St Andrews universities. Sidereal is now shortlisted for three prestigious prizes – the Forward and the Guardian First Book Award as well as Aldeburgh. She’s reading at the Exeter Poetry Festival (6-9 October) and there’s an interview on their website.

The Hiding Place by Tom Duddy (Arlen House)
Tom was born in the west of Ireland and has lived in Galway City since the early 70s. He teaches philosophy at the National University of Ireland and his pamphlet The Small Hours (Happenstance) was published in 2006. He’s had poems in, among others, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, The SHOp and Other Poetry.  His website is here.

Tokaido Road by Nancy Gaffield (CB Editions)
Nancy works at the University of Kent and her first collection is also shortlisted for the Forward and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Poetry publisher extraordinaire CB Editions are certainly getting lots right these days (e.g. Christopher Reid’s Song of Lunch, JO Morgan’s Natural Mechanical, Aldeburgh winner in 2009.)

Your Sort by Ed Reiss (Smith Doorstop)
Although the back-of-the-book blurb is minimal – “Ed Reiss lives in Bradford” – we happen to know that Ed was one of our eight Advanced Seminar poets in 2010 and he’s got a ‘highly commended’ poem on this year’s Forward list. Also he’ll be reading at Aldeburgh in November as part of the Smith/Doorstop reading, to celebrate 25 years of The Poetry Business.

The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions by Jacqueline Saphra (Flipped Eye Publishing Limited)
Jacqueline moved on to ‘songwriting, playwriting, screenwriting and stand-up comedy before I re-discovered poetry, my first love.’ Her pamphlet Rock ’n’ Roll Mamma was published by Flarestack in 2008.  Her website is here.

 

40 Days Until Aldeburgh

With no time at all to acclimatise to summer (what summer?) being gone, we’re over half-way through September. The Poetry Paper’s with the designer and goes to print soon, and in just over 40 days we’ll be turning Aldeburgh into poetry town. Every year, time speeds up from this point on.

There’s good news on the box office front and tickets are selling fast. Some workshops and events have already sold out – like Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Craft Talk and Fleur Adcock’s talk on George Macbeth – and you won’t be able to get seats for lots more for by the end of the month. So we do urge you – and this isn’t hype – to book now to avoid disappointment. Aldeburgh stuggles with limited venue capacity (we’re not complaining!) and although we’d love simply to put more chairs out – fire and health & safety regs would have something dire to say…

We’re continuing to preview Aldeburgh poets in this edition of STUFF, at the same time as learning some unusual things about this year’s line-up. We’ve watched Robert Hass playing ‘The Poet’ (and nearly getting a screen kiss with Daryl Hannah) in the movie Wildflowers; we’ve discovered more of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s amazing life in Albania plus a taste of her reading style online; Fergus Allen celebrated his 90th birthday on 2 September (many happy returns Fergus – the first nonagenarian poet we’ll be hosting at the Festival!); Sam Riviere thinks that poets seem ‘like compulsive types who enjoy worrying things into a lean sort of order’; and Kay Ryan estimates that ‘the lofty condition enjoyed by the poet takes up only perhaps two hours, or 1/84, of a week’. Kay is one of the newly-announced 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellows and will receive a £500,000 no-strings award in recognition of her exceptional poetry. And it’s down to The Poetry Trust that she’ll be making UK reading debut at Aldeburgh 2011!

And our pick of the programme for September? Naomi says you shouldn’t miss the chance to see Andrew Motion’s intense and moving debut play Incoming at Aldeburgh. Dean would like to nudge you towards one of his own Festival favourites – Blind Criticism (a very civilised way to start a Saturday morning). And Michael Laskey always loves celebrating small press achievements: the Smith/Doorstop reading has a really brilliant line-up of poets.

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival full programme
To book tickets: telephone 01728 687110 or online

 

Festival Preview: Amjad Nasser

Shepherd of Solitude: Selected Poems 1979-2004 is the first selection of works by Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser to be translated from Arabic to English and published (by Banipal) in book form. The collection comprises 56 poems from seven of Nasser’s Arabic collections translated by the world-class Libyan-born scholar and poet, Khaled Mattawa.

Poetry from around the world has always been at the heart of the Aldeburgh programme and hearing poets reading ‘in translation’ is key to the Festival every year. That’s why in recent years a packed Jubilee Hall has been left buzzing with the unfamiliar sounds of Afrikaans and Chinese, (as well as Dutch, Italian, Russian and Swedish). In many ways it can be the most compelling and surprising kind of reading – when the ‘music’ of a foreign language is unleashed. This year we’re looking forward to hearing Albanian for the first time at Aldeburgh (Luljeta Lleshanaku, featured in June’s STUFF) and also Amjad Nasser’s Arabic – with his Banipal publisher, Margaret Obank, reading the English translations.

Amjad was born in Mafraq, Jordan in 1955 and was brought up in a recently-settled Bedouin community. In the mid 1970s he changed his name and left home with the desire to become a poet, journeying first to Amman and then on to Beirut which, in 1977, was in the midst of a civil war but it was here that he encountered an exciting new wave of Arab poetry. However, he was forced to leave Beirut in 1982 (he was a supporter of the Palestinian cause when the resistance was expelled from the city) and at first settled in Cyprus before moving on to London in 1987 where he became the cultural editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. Meanwhile, he was writing this journey of displacement and exile into his poems – his first collection was published in 1979 and seven volumes later, Amjad is a major voice in contemporary Arabic literature.

 

DOG’S TAIL
My mother died in 2000 after she learned that all
the clocks and calendars had changed, and
possibly after she heard about something called
‘the millenium’. But she, who was illiterate and
who did not need to handle complex numbers,
knew, perhaps because she was preparing to
depart, that the world she left behind would not
be any different with a change of clocks and
calendars. Her guide in this regard was her
favourite Bedouin proverb. In this story, a dog’s
tail is placed in a mould to straighten it and it
emerges as crooked as it had ever been when it is
pulled out forty years later – a parable, which it so
happens, perfectly encapsulated my mother’s
opinion of me.

Amjad Nasser
translated by Khaled Mattawa
from Shepherd of Solitude: Selected Poems (Banipal Books, 2009)

 

Festival Preview: Scottish Islands Poets

In addition to the international poets in translation, we like to feature different UK dialects and languages at Aldeburgh. In 2011, the year of Sorley Maclean’s centenary, we’re bringing the lilt of three Scottish Islands’ poets to the Suffolk coast – Meg Bateman (Skye), Rody Gorman (Skye) and Robert Alan Jamieson (Shetland). Meg Bateman says, “Gaelic is a rather lovely language for poetry with its long and short vowels and its tradition of assonantal rhyme. As a language that in recent centuries has mostly been used in domestic and agricultural settings, it gives concrete expression to abstract ideas.” Aldeburgh Poetry Festival veterans with long memories might remember Sorley Maclean’s storming performance back in 1992. Nearly twenty years on, Meg and Rody will help us celebrate his work and his legacy.

 

New on The Poetry Channel

Over 700+ people relished an evening of poems by three great British women poets – Helen Dunmore, Jackie Kay & Alice Oswald at the 2011 Poetry Prom in Snape Maltings Concert Hall at the end of August. Alice wondered how on earth we get an audience of over 700 to a poetry gig in deepest Suffolk. But for the ninth year in a row that’s exactly what happened – with more than a third of the audience experiencing live poetry in the incredible setting of the Snape Maltings Concert Hall for the very first time. And if proof were needed that most poetry books sell at readings, then look no further than the Poetry Prom: it took the poets quite a while to sign many of the 250 books that were sold. You’ll be able to read exclusive interviews with each of our Poetry Prom poets in The Poetry Paper this November, but for now tune in to two podcasts on The Poetry Channel.

The Poem Show 11 – Poetry Prom Special
Listen to or download both these podcasts
Three poems from the 2011 Poetry Prom’s magnificent trio of great British women poets: Helen Dunmore, Jackie Kay and Alice Oswald, punctuated with feedback from some of the 700+ audience about the live listening experience. ‘Glad of These Times’ allows Helen Dunmore not to moan about modernity; Jackie Kay sweetly follows the course of a life-long friendship with ‘Fiere’, the title poem of her latest collection; and Alice Oswald closes with an extract from her book-length poem Dart and a striking series of similes about water.

Alice Oswald & Memorial
Listen to or download both these podcasts
After her triumphant performance at The Poetry Prom in Suffolk in August, Alice Oswald – in conversation with Naomi Jaffa – discusses her motivation and approach to writing Memorial, her new book length poem which is a version of Homer’s Iliad. This is followed by a short extract from her Prom performance where she introduces and shares the opening three pages.

 

Herbert Lomas (1924–2011)

Everyone who knew Herbert Lomas knew him as ‘Bertie’ – and we’re much saddened by the death of a particular Poetry Trust friend last weekend. He was part of Aldeburgh’s original Poetry Festival committee and a regular and supportive presence for the last 20+ years. It always felt good to have such a major poet living year-round in Aldeburgh and the town won’t feel the same without him. We’re planning a short commemorative free event at the Festival, to pay tribute to Bertie’s achievements as a poet – on Saturday 5 November at 10.15am in the James Cable Room. His friend and fellow Suffolk-based poet Wendy Mulford will say a few words and introduce three poems – read by Bertie himself and recorded at his last reading for us in 2007. Make sure you add this special gathering to your Aldeburgh weekend timetable. There are particularly fine obituaries in The Guardian and The Independent.

 

Other Stuff You Might Like

Roger McGough’s adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe will be performed by English Touring Theatre at The New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, Tuesday 25 – Saturday 29 October. Roger will be part of this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival but here’s a chance to enjoy a less familiar but no less brilliant side to his writing. The website is here.

An enthusiastic nudge to all STUFF readers on behalf of our friends at The Poetry Archive: please do complete their online survey so they can get as much information from Archive users as possible to inform their future poetry download plans.  Go on, it doesn’t take long and there’s even a prize draw if you need an incentive!

Film-maker and travel writer Hugh Thomson (who blogged the 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival) has just released his new 15 minute verse film about 9/11 – The Skull Beneath the Skin – another creative collaboration with the Irish poet Damian Gormon, following their celebrated verse film about the Troubles, ‘Devices of Detachment’.

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

Calling Suffolk poets: make sure you enter the new Waveney & Blyth Poetry Competition. Closing date 30 October. £100 first prize plus a reading at The Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft on 4th December. The website is here

 

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.

 

Aldeburgh programme – coming soon!

By the end of July the printed programme will be available for the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 4 - 6 November 2011. We’ve a team of volunteer envelope stuffers booked for the great mailing or you can download a PDF from the website.

Austerity measures have inspired Silk Pearce’s design this year. To save paper, production, postage and distribution costs, our programme booklet is shorter and in black and white. And instead of commissioning a new illustrator, we’ve been recycling, using photographs from Peter Everard Smith’s unique Festival archive (Peter’s been our ‘poet catcher’ with a camera since 2003). We think it looks really stylish and certainly there’s been no cut in the quality of the artistic programme.

With 25 poets and 52 events (14 free), you can expect nothing less than this year’s ultimate poetry weekend. Popular events do sell out so to make sure you get the tickets you want, you need to be a Friend of The Poetry Trust. For just £15, as well as enjoying a two-week priority booking period you’ll also be really helping us deliver this year’s programme – the Festival, The Poetry Paper, the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition, podcasts for The Poetry Channel and more. Friends subscriptions make a real difference. Friends priority booking for the Festival opens 16 August 2011 (public booking opens 5 September), so join now!
How to become a Friend

 

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Poet Preview – Fergus Allen

In recent editions of STUFF we’ve been giving sneak previews of some of the poets involved in this year’s Festival, including our stellar Americans – two former US Poet Laureates Robert Hass and Kay Ryan – and our first Albanian Luljeta Lleshanaku.

As well as championing new talent, Aldeburgh has a tradition of celebrating much older poets (Maureen Duffy, Philip Levine and Alastair Reid, all in their eighties, spring to mind as stars of recent Festivals). Fergus Allen – celebrating his 90th birthday in 2011 – will occupy the role of this year’s most senior participant. Having written poetry throughout his life, Fergus only saw the publication (by Faber) of his first collection – The Brown Parrots of Providencia – in 1993 at the age of seventy, after retiring from his position as First Civil Service Commissioner. Born in London in 1921, Allen grew up in Ireland and studied engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, before moving to England during the Second World War. He has published five books of poetry, including most recently Before Troy (2010), a handsome volume from CB Editions (which incidentally also published JO Morgan’s Natural Mechanical which won the 2009 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize). The typical Fergus Allen poem offers an attractive mix of erudition, bracing clarity and wry deprecation – and he’s a strong reader of his own work.

“84 years young, Allen writes poetry that is limpid, very subtle and marvellously wise.”
William Boyd, summer 2006 reading recommendations, The Guardian

 

Wine With Lunch

Sitting aged eight in the dining room
Of the old Marylebone Hotel,
I remember the panic engendered
By the glass of tongue-corroding Graves
Poured for me by a Wimpole Street doctor,
A one-time admirer of mother,
To whom he was talking of times past.
Even with added water the stuff
Was still a penance not to be borne.

And people paid real money for this!
My mother was clearly in good spirits
And Bertie too (so I’d heard him called)
Soon shook off his initial reserve.
Anyway the sparkle in their eyes
Made them as unaware of my suffering,
As I was of the subtext to their talk.
Meanwhile I covertly rinsed my mouth
With tepid water from the big glass jug.

Fergus Allen
from Before Troy (CB Editions 2010)

Hear Fergus Allen read at The Poetry Archive

 

 

Poetry Prom Profile: Helen Dunmore

Tickets are now on sale and selling well (nearly 500 gone, around 200 to go for a full house) for the 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’re putting all three Poetry Prom poets in the STUFF spotlight throughout the summer. Last month it was Alice Oswald; now it’s Helen Dunmore’s turn.

Helen Dunmore started writing poetry and stories at the age of seven. “In a large family” – she has three siblings and her father was the eldest of twelve – “you hear a great many stories.” Her early encounters with ballads, hymns and fairy tales can be heard in the music of her poems, particularly in their skilful use of repetition. “Words always had a power for me,” she says. “It was like a naturally musical child heading for the piano. My instrument was language, right from the start.” Love and loss – the triumphs and transience of nature and of human lives – are explored in a series of close-up and wide-angle views on history, people and places. Always with her characteristic combination of sensuality, lyrical lightness and unsettling imaginative depths.

“What I look for initially in a poem is that first shock of delight. It comes from so many different things: the musicality, the words, meanings, associations – but it’s almost a physical experience, like when you look at a certain picture. Full of emotion and feeling. Of course there’s an intellectual content, and layers that maybe you won’t get if you don’t have a certain background, speak a certain language or get certain references. But I don’t want to write sealed poetry, a hermetic poetry that’s only accessible to people who are prepared to climb a very difficult mountain and be huffing and puffing when they reach the top of it, because poetry is so essential to our lives.”

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 / box office email / box office website

 

New Podcasts at The Poetry Channel

Two new podcasts available this month at The Poetry Channel.

Poets’ Hour in the Tower
available now
This is an irreverent ‘podumentary’ (podcast + documentary?) looking at an experiment we conducted at the 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival – inviting poets to take an hour-long retreat up one of the beach’s historic look-out towers, armed with nothing more than pen, paper, water (and biscuits). All we asked in exchange was for them to talk with Nick Patrick (our podcast producer) before and after their ‘incarceration’. Bill Manhire, Dorianne Laux and Jack Underwood were three Festival poets to brave the scarily steep spiral staircase… (special thanks to Caroline Wiseman for ‘donating’ the South Lookout Tower for the Festival weekend)

Simon Armitage ‘In Conversation’
available Friday 22 July
Edited highlights of Simon Armitage’s recent sell-out evening at the Ip-Art Festival when he was on great form talking to Poetry Trust director Naomi Jaffa about how Peter Sansom helped him find his voice, early poetry ‘stardom’, the film/poem process and how they provide a voice for young offenders, his big Olympic project – Poetry Parnassus, and lots more.

Have a listen to these podcasts or scan our archive for similar treasures atThe Poetry Channel

 

Advertise in The Poetry Paper

With the Festival programme at the printers we’re about to focus on the next big publication job. The Poetry Paper is our annual newspaper – interviews, articles and new poems from the poets we’ve brought to Suffolk during the year for the Festival and the Poetry Prom. Content-gathering, and the essential advertising drive, will shortly be underway.

The Poetry Paper is only possible thanks to the income from advertisers and the generosity of poets who donate their words. Despite our loss of future Arts Council core funding, we’re determined to go ahead with this year’s 8th edition and make it more eye-catching and content-rich than ever.

The 5,000 copies are free, nationally distributed and always snapped up fast. And there’ll be an e-read edition available from our website. It’s a stylish and effective place to promote all things poetry – and advertising space is limited and selective. Details are here or email us to find out more.

 

Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition

”The Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition shows that you don’t have to be famous or rich to have your talents recognised.” Peggy Jones (aged 12), prizewinner

One of the most magical events at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival every year is the reading by the winners of our Young Poets Competition. It’s a big deal to walk up onto the Jubilee Hall stage and deliver your own poem to an audience of around 200 – and the mix of primary, middle and upper school pupils always get the Festival’s opening Family Reading off to a flying start. This year they’ll be in especially good company as the second half will feature the one and only Roger McGough. And we know that Roger will appreciate the way we present the young winners with the same respect we offer to all poets taking part in the Festival.

The deadline for this year’s competition is Friday 29th July and so there’s still time to send in entries– we welcome poems from individuals as well as from schools in Suffolk. We’re looking for surprising and individual poems with a sense of imagination and fun. More details here

Read all of last year’s winning poems or enjoy one right now.

 

My Grandad

My grandad has got a wonky nose.
And he has grey hairs inside his nostrils.
His nose is like my dad’s nose.
When he hugs me his nose feels rough and hard.
He always stays indoors with his cup of tea
and falls asleep on the kitchen chair.
He has a kind of wiggly mouth.
I dream about my grandad, because he
cares about me when I feel sad.

Lewis King (8)

 

Other STUFF you may like

Aldeburgh First Collection Prize – Final call for submissions (deadline 25 July 2011) can be from publishers or individual poets. £1,000, plus a week’s ‘protected’ writing time and a fee-paying invitation to read at the next Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Judges: Michael Laskey (Chair), Robert Seatter & Penelope Shuttle
How to enter

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.

Poetryeater – excellent poetry, almost every day (Frederick Seidel, William Carlos Williams etc.)

Brandon Robshaw creative writing workshop – Saturday 13th August, The Cut Arts Centre, Halesworth. 10am – 3pm, £35, concessions possible. To book contact email or website

Forward Poetry Prizes 2011 – shortlisted books, poets and the debate about the all-male shortlist for Best Collection
Visit the website

 

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

 

Incoming at HighTide Festival

The first four performances of Andrew Motion‘s debut new play Incoming – the first collaboration between The Poetry Trust and HighTide – were packed out at the HighTide Festival over the weekend of 6–8 May. It’s both a love story about grief and loss and a searching exploration of ‘the pity of war’. Many congratulations to Andrew, Director Steven Atkinson and the outstanding trio of actors – Penny Layden as Steph, Christian Bradley as Danny and Timon Greaves as Jack – for creating such an emotionally-charged and intellectually-engaging 75 minutes. National reviews include a three-star from Michael Billington in The Guardian and a four-star in Whatsonstage.

Look out for future performances of Incoming (and brilliant excuses to come to Suffolk!) exclusively at Latitude Festival 15-17 July and at the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 4–6 November.

 

Poetry @ The Pumphouse: The Last Years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis

The Poetry Trust is delighted to announce this year’s Poetry @ The Pumphouse, in partnership with Aldeburgh Music as part of the Aldeburgh (music) Festival in June. On Friday 24 June at 7pm, Poet and Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis will be giving a special preview of his forthcoming and long-awaited new biography of Edward Thomas, complete with audio and photographic illustration.

Wintering in Minsmere in 1907 at the age of 29, Edward Thomas was unceremoniously asked to leave when he developed ‘inappropriate feelings’ for the eighteen year old daughter of his hosts. Already gaining a reputation as a prose writer and critic, it would take the intervention of Robert Frost and the First World War to bring him finally and dramatically to poetry. Matthew Hollis will explore the personal and literary friendships that led Thomas on his path to poetry and war – and ultimately his death at Arras in 1917.

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

Tickets £7, available from the box office: tel 01728 687110
Box Office email
Box Office website

 

The Poetry Prom at Snape Maltings Concert Hall

On Tuesday 24 August, Helen Dunmore, Jackie Kay and Alice Oswald will take to the great Snape Maltings stage for an unmissable night of poems. The Poetry Trust is thrilled to be presenting this unique trio of great British women poets in partnership with Aldeburgh Music as part of the Snape Proms season. And we are particularly grateful to our sponsors Fairweather Stephenson & Co for maintaining their generous support.

“In these times, we should be glad of this voice.”
The Guardian on Helen Dunmore

“Kay’s humour and optimism are transcendent.”
The Sunday Herald

“Oswald emerges as an inheritor of some of Britain’s greatest poetic voices, an heir to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.”
The Times

Tickets £14, £12, £10, Prom £6.50
Booking opens Monday 6th June
Box Office 01728 687110
Box Office email
Box Office website

 

The Poetry Channel – help us programme the summer podcasts

Are there any stand-out poems or talks you remember from previous Aldeburgh Poetry Festivals?
We’re programming for The Poetry Channel this summer and would love to hear about favourite poems (or poets) you’ve heard at Aldeburgh which we can then add to a special Poem Show, or perhaps one of the other fabulous Festival events (a Craft Talk or Close Reading) which you’d really like to hear again.
Let us know and we’ll see what we can do…

In the meantime, we have two more podcasts available in May, gleaned from the rich Aldeburgh archive.

Aldeburgh Backchat: Bill Manhire
available Friday 13 May
Inventive, stylish and endlessly imaginative – some of the words constantly used to describe Bill Manhire, here in conversation with Nick Patrick at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival last November.

Aldeburgh Backchat: Inua Ellams
available Friday 27 May
We catch up with Inua, who brought his latest one-man show ‘Untitled’ to Aldeburgh last autumn. A potent performer and poet, Inua discusses his influences and his Festival experience.

 

Brilliant poetry at UEA Spring Literary Festival 2010

Poetry has been a highlight of the UEA Spring Literary Festival, with both David Harsent and Alice Oswald reading at the University of East Anglia in February and March. Next up is this year’s Costa Prizewinner, Jo Shapcott, who will be appearing on Tuesday 24 May at 7.00pm at UEA’s lecture theatre. Jo takes intellectual and sensuous risks in her memorable engaging poems. Fiona Sampson accurately describes her “a pioneer among contemporary British writers.”

To hear one of Jo’s poems – Somewhat Unravelled – listen to The Poem Show 8 available at The Poetry Channel.

Tickets £6 – telephone 01603 508050
Full programme information here

 

Wanted! Poetry Trust Volunteers

If you’re Suffolk-based and have some spare time over the coming months, you could be the very person we need. The Poetry Trust’s very small team is looking for capable volunteers to assist with various administrative jobs including Aldeburgh Poetry Festival mailings and distribution.
If you’re keen to get involved, please drop us an email here.
We’d be very glad of your help!

 

Short Cuts Cabaret and Open Mic Night

The Cut, Halesworth, Friday 3 June, 7.30pm

Summer will be sizzling at Short Cuts – Suffolk’s very own cult-status cabaret and open mic nights – with the coolest of special guests: the one and only Peter Blegvad, singer-songwriter and cult-cartoonist extraordinaire.

Hosted by Dean Parkin, accompanied by Maurice Horhut on the piano, Short Cuts is always a heady mix of comedy, music, spoken word, live poetry and audience participation. Plus, of course, plenty of weird and wonderful Open Mic talent.

To apply for a performance slot (3 minutes), contact Dean
by telephone 01986 835950 or by email
Tickets cost £6 – call The Cut Box office on 0845 6732123

To check out two of Peter Blegvad’s best songs on YouTube, listen to Daughter or Meantime.

 

Other STUFF you might enjoy

Martin Figura and Molly Naylor at the Norwich Arts Centre, May 15th, as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival Speak Easy Week-End.
More info here

An evening with Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell at the Norwich Playhouse, May 19th, presented by Writers’ Centre Norwich and The Rialto as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival.
Full details here

The Bridport Prize 2011: £5000 first prize for a poem (of up to 42 lines). £6 per poem. Adjudicator - Carol Ann Duffy.
Closing date: 30th June 2011.
Enter online here.

Crabbe Poetry Competition. Open to anyone either born, resident at any time or educated in Suffolk.
Judge: Elaine Feinstein, closing date: 31 May 2011
Full details here

Essex Poetry Festival 11th Open Poetry Competition.
Entry £3 per poem or £10 for 4 poems. Prize giving will be in October at the Essex Poetry Festival. Adjudicator: George Szirtes. First Prize £500, Second £250, Third £100 and 4 runner-up prizes of £25. Closing date 30th July 2011.
Full details here

 

NPO Funding Decision – The Aftershock

You will probably have heard that The Poetry Trust has not been awarded NPO status from Arts Council England for the period 2012–15, meaning we have no secure public funding for the future. The news – received on 30th March – came as a big shock and disappointment – not least because the Arts Council has been a motivating force and loyal funder of our successful development since 2003. We’ve been deeply heartened by the quality and quantity of offers of support coming in from poets, publishers, other poetry organisations and of course our audiences.

In the short term, the good news is that there will DEFINITELY be a 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November (and we think this year’s line-up is one of the best yet – more news of that below). But the longer term future of The Poetry Trust is uncertain and we’re letting the blood soak into the dirt (as they say) before making any big decisions about what may happen next.

What’s plain is that the Arts Council is no longer willing to support The Poetry Trust as a national organisation for poetry, delivering an ambitious year-round programme (Advanced Poetry Seminar, The Poetry Channel podcasts, The Poetry Prom, The Poetry Paper, Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, outreach projects etc). However ACE has indicated that it does value the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and we’ll be meeting with officers in Cambridge in early May to discuss Lottery and other funding options to secure the future of the Festival. Meanwhile we are also, as ever, exploring and pursuing other sources of income. We’ll keep you posted.

I just wanted to be another poet adding to your bulging in-box to say how very saddened I was to read of the ACE outcome. It’s all the more surprising as Aldeburgh is I think the finest and most intelligently-programmed of the specialist poetry festivals. Your festival is always full of interest, rather than simply a publishers’ tours round-up of usual suspects; at the same time, it never falls into the opposite trap of being a club for not-yet-very-good poets. It’s terrific to attend, and terrific to take part in.
Fiona Sampson

 

23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

If you are intending to come to just one Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (or if you’ve not been to the Festival for a while), make sure you get to it this year. And join The Poetry Trust as a Friend to be sure of priority booking – because events are bound to sell out faster than ever. Friday 4th through Sunday 6th November is the weekend when you really need to be on the east Suffolk coast. It’s going to be one hell of poetry gathering and we think one of the best line-ups ever.

The Poetry Trust and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival have a fantastic international reputation – poets from all over the world have heard by word of mouth about the ‘Aldeburgh Experience’ – and that’s why we can attract the best poets despite our flat-rate and necessarily modest reading fees. We’ve a particular tradition of bringing outstanding American poets to the UK and this year will be no exception. We’re delighted – and more than a little excited – to have Robert Hass and Kay Ryan confirmed for Aldeburgh 2011. Both are former US Poet Laureates; both will be celebrating new UK publications of Selected Poems; Hass hasn’t read in Britain for 35 years and Ryan will be making her debut at Aldeburgh. So, a lot to celebrate.

Robert Hass is a giant of American poetry and one of those poets who warms the soul with his acute intelligence, emotional honesty and deeply moral sensibility. He dissolves the usual boundaries between the personal and the political; his poems are at once intimate and of global significance. Also a brilliant translator, Hass is famous for his contrasting affinities with the poetry of Poland’s Czeslaw Milosz and Japanese haiku masters Bashō, Buson and Issa.

The gloriously singular Kay Ryan is often compared to Emily Dickinson and was a real poetry ‘outsider’ for many years before finally achieving recognition. With prestigious recent awards including Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she’s certainly visible and cherished in America now. (And John Glenday’s Close Reading of her poem ‘Blandeur’ at Aldeburgh last year proves she’s already got fans this side of the pond.) She describes her writing process as “a self-imposed emergency… if I don’t write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.” Her simultaneously condensed and expansive poems are shot through with humour and her trademark love of surprising rhymes.

We’d walk to Aldeburgh with a stone in our shoe to hear these poets (OK, we’ve perhaps not got as far to go as some of you, but you get our drift!). Here’s two YouTube tastes of the pleasures in store from Robert Hass and Kay Ryan.

 

Three new podcasts for National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in America and we’re marking this on The Poetry Channel by showcasing some of the leading contemporary US poets we’ve brought to Aldeburgh in recent years. Don’t miss three terrific new podcasts available this month.

Aldeburgh Backchat: Marie Howe
available now
Marie Howe in conversation with Nick Patrick at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival last November, talking about how art gives our hearts the opportunity to break open (or close), her quest to get rid of the desire to be the hero of her own poems, and how “death is always the mother of beauty…”

Aldeburgh Close Reading: Dorianne Laux on ‘Curtains’ by Ruth Stone
available now
Close Readings have been a part of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival since 2003 and are now undoubtedly one of the most popular items on the programme. They’re free fifteen minute events where we ask a Festival poet to talk about a favourite poem, an essential poem they just can’t help going back to. At last year’s Festival, Dorianne Laux introduced us to fellow American Ruth Stone and her powerful poem ‘Curtains’.

Poem Show: USA Special – American English
available from 20th April
We’re delighted to plunder the Festival archive to create this American dream trio – three poems celebrating language in all its richness – Barbara Hamby with her ‘Ode to American English’, Tony Hoagland’s ‘When Dean Young Talks About Wine’ and Stephen Dunn’s ‘Decorum’.

You can listen to or download all these podcasts - and more - here

 

Don Paterson / The Poetry Foundation

Continuing the theme of The Poetry Trust’s international reach and our ‘assistance’ with America’s National Poetry Month celebrations, we’re delighted that last year’s Festival Poet-on-Poet lecture – ‘Frost as a Thinker’ by Don Paterson – will be available from 21^st April on The Poetry Foundation’s fantastic website. If you weren’t at Aldeburgh, this is your chance to catch Don’s inimitable, invigorating and insightful ‘take’ on Frost as a metaphysical poet. His close reading of ‘West-Running Brook’ delivers a particularly rewarding exploration of how Frost uses the drama of natural speech to introduce complex ideas.

Check out the Poetry Lecture page at the Foundation’s website from 21^st April.

 

Andrew Motion’s ‘Incoming’ at HighTide

Not long now until HighTide’s brilliant Festival of Theatre comes to The Cut in Halesworth, Suffolk – 6th to 8th May. We’re especially excited at the prospect of seeing Andrew Motion’s first play ‘Incoming’ – brokered by The Poetry Trust in a new partnership with HighTide. The Poetry Trust’s director, Naomi Jaffa, had a sneak preview of the script and was taken aback to find herself really moved while reading the draft on a recent train journey. Naomi says: “The dialogue leaps off the page as being wonderfully true to how people actually speak. And I found it structurally really satisfying – simple, logical, balanced. It raises important questions yet never overtly or heavily – they flash by, implicit – and there’s a passionate conflict of belief between the dead soldier and his widow about the pointfulness/pointless of war. I can’t wait to see how page translates to stage!”

HighTide Festival’s main venue is The Cut Arts Centre (home of The Poetry Trust) and makes imaginative and brilliant use of the building’s atmosphere and different performance spaces. If you like quality contemporary theatre and would like to experience another of Suffolk’s world-class cultural treasures, book now.

 

Farewell to Alice Beer

Sad news has reached us about one of Aldeburgh Poetry Festival’s most loyal supporters: the venerable Alice Beer has died at the age of 98. Alice was a Quaker, a potter and a poet – and always a popular audience member at Aldeburgh (we’re sure you’ll recognise her) with something to say at the annual Masterclass. We’re so glad to have been able to welcome and look after Alice at the Festival well into her nineties!

The picture below sums up both Alice and Aldeburgh. She’s pictured at a Paul Farley Close Reading at the Festival in 2003, surrounded by poets – Neil Rollinson, Adam Thorpe, Daljit Nagra and Henry Shukman. We’ll certainly miss her presence and her smile.

Full obituary in The Guardian

 

Other STUFF you might enjoy:

Poetry next the Sea
The 14th Poetry next the Sea at Wells in Norfolk – Clare Pollard, Robin Robertson, Owen Sheers and Anne Stevenson among the poets reading.

Poem for Life
Competition for East Anglian poets on the theme ‘Hope’ – all in aid of cancer research.

Tidelines – Creative Walk & Workshop, Orford, Suffolk
Wednesday 27th April
A day of walking, poetry and creativity inspired by floatsam and jetsum and Orford Ness. Led by visual artist Fran Crowe and our very own Dean Parkin, who will take a small group by boat (‘The Regardless’) to the Ness, followed by an afternoon of creating at Fran’s workshop. Open to all over 18s, £10 per person. For more information and to book, click here

The 58th Crabbe Poetry Competition 2011
Open to anyone either born, resident at any time or educated in Suffolk.
Judge: Elaine Feinstein, closing date: 31 May 2011
For more information, click here

 

New Podcasts on The Poetry Channel

If we were to have a prize for podcast poet of the month on The Poetry Channel (we don’t by the way), March’s would have to go to Imtiaz Dharker. This month you’ll be able to catch her in conversation with Robert Seatter, recorded at Aldeburgh last November, and also listen to her irresistible ‘Over the Moon’ poem in the next installment of our Poem Show series.

Aldeburgh Conversation 2010: Imtiaz Dharker
available now
Imtiaz Dharker in conversation with Robert Seatter, discussing her wide range of influences - everything from the lullabies sung by her grandmother, Glaswegian swear words and the importance of the image to her writing.

Aldeburgh’s Open Workshop
available from Friday 11 March
Originally scheduled to be uploaded last month (but we were unable to do so due to good old-fashioned ‘technical difficulties’), here’s the podcast/documentary - podcastumentary? - about Aldeburgh’s unique and ever-popular mass writing workshop, annually inspired and led by Michael Laskey and Jeni Smith. Nick Patrick investigates its collective writing energy and appeal…

Poem Show: Other Ways of Using the Universe
available from Friday 25 March
Another Aldeburgh Poetry Festival archive raid, to bring you a new Poem Show, playfully titled ‘Other Ways of Using the Universe’. First up, Imtiaz Dharker reading ‘Over the Moon’ - her riotous and poignant ode breathing life into that much over-used phrase; then an extract from Alice Oswald’s searchingly beautiful ballad-like ‘Autobiography of The Moon’; and closing with Paul Durcan’s tour de force ‘Centre of the Universe’ (you’ll want to give him a call in the middle of the night once you’ve heard this poem).

 

Countdown to the Advanced Poetry Seminar

Just a few days to go before eight lucky poets converge on Suffolk and fine surroundings of Bruisyard Hall for this year’s Advanced Poetry Seminar.

It’s the youngest line-up we’ve ever had (young in poetry terms anyhow!) - Liz Berry (30, London), Jamie Coward (38, Sheffield), Ramona Herdman (32, Norwich), Hannah Lowe (34, London), Alex McCrae (31, Washington DC), Fiona Moore (51, London), Jocelyn Page (44, London) and Luke Yates (27, Manchester). We’re greatly looking forward to meeting and working together next month and in the meantime, congratulations to them all for winning their places amidst stiff competition. More information about the eight poets here.

The Poetry Trust has been running this Suffolk ‘retreat/hot-house’ for poets either near, at or just beyond first collection stage at Bruisyard Hall in Suffolk (see picture below) for four years. And selecting this year’s eight has never been so difficult. Firstly we received 68 applications (previously it’s been around 45). Almost all met the demanding criteria for consideration and many offered impressive credentials. Co-tutors Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom read them all first and long-listed down to 30. Then Naomi Jaffa (Poetry Trust Director) joined the process and a not very short short-list of 16 was agreed. Getting down to the final eight poets took nearly three hours of energised and energising debate, the happy result being a group of poets whose existing and potential poems excite us all.

 

Andrew Motion’s First Stage Play

The Poetry Trust is delighted to announce an exciting new partnership with the HighTide Festival Theatre this year. We’re proud to be co-producing Andrew Motion’s first stage play - Incoming - which will be previewed at the 5th HighTide Festival in Halesworth (7/8 May) and then performed in the Theatre Tent at Latitude Festival in Suffolk (15-17 July) and at the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (4-6 November).

Andrew Motion has chosen to make his debut as a playwright with a controversial work about the war in Afghanistan. Incoming tells the story of Danny, a soldier killed in Afghanistan, his grieving widow Steph and their young son Jack. The play examines Britain’s place in the world, the sacrifices made for that place and the repercussions, both private and public, of those sacrifices. It promises to be a first play of true wisdom and sensitivity.

HighTide Festival specialises in the discovery, development and performances of new plays by highly talented new dramatists. The range of plays is always stimulating, with individual productions often outstanding and clearly destined for great things. HighTide Festival happens at The Cut Arts Centre (home of The Poetry Trust) and makes imaginative and brilliant use of the building’s atmosphere and different performance spaces. If you like quality contemporary theatre and would like to experience another of Suffolk’s world-class cultural treasures, book now for this year’s programme. It’ll be brilliant!

And here’s a late reminder that Andrew Motion will be in Suffolk at the New Wolsey Theatre on Friday 4 March reading from Laurels and Donkeys, his stunning new collection of war poems from various conflicts of the 20th & 21st centuries (and containing the source material for his new play).
’Motion is a beautiful lyricist unpretentiously and precisely describing those things worth having even as he casts unsettling shadows across them’
Robert Potts in The Guardian

 

Alice Oswald at UEA Spring Literary Festival 2010

If you’ve bought your Poetry Passport for the UEA Spring Literary Festival, you’ll already have Tuesday 8 March in your diary - for the mesmerising Alice Oswald who’ll be reading - and discussing her work with George Szirtes - in Lecture Theatre 1 at UEA.

Alice Oswald
Tuesday 8 March 2011 7.00pm, Lecture Theatre 1, UEA
TS Eliot Prize winner Alice Oswald is one of the most assured and original writers of our time and an utterly compelling live reader of her own work. “The real thing”, as Jeanette Winterson says, “a true poet of great power and capacity.”

And as we already said (see story at the top!), you can savour Alice’s arresting oral brilliance in the next episode of The Poem Show on The Poetry Channel later this month.

 

Arvon’s First Poetry Course of 2011

The 2011 Arvon Creative Writing course programme kicks off on the April 11, with Poetry as the first course of the year - Making Words Work co-tutored by Michael Laskey & Patience Agbabi. Michael, as friends of The Poetry Trust will know, is one of the very finest poetry tutors on the planet (yes, we’re biased but no, this isn’t exaggerating - we’ve worked with a lot of a poet-tutors!). He was co-founder of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, he’s editor of Smiths Knoll and has published five collections, most recently The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems. Michael will be teaming up again with Patience Agbabi (following the success of their Arvon partnership last year), author of Bloodshot Monochrome and fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University and they’ll be aiming to help poets broaden their range and enrich their voice by focusing on the texture, vitality and precision of language.

With just 16 places available on the course, and one-to-one sessions with the tutors, this intensive week is guaranteed to help participants make huge developments in their poetry writing.

For further information visit: www.arvonfoundation.org or call 020 7324 2554.

 

 

Other STUFF you might enjoy

David Morley: A Reading with Birdsong
Part of the Conference of Birds programme - at 4.30pm on Saturday 12 March 2011.

Dean’s Dad’s Ducks
The Poetry Trust’s very own Dean Parkin will be reprising his successful Edinburgh Fringe one man show at Lound Village Hall in Suffolk on Saturday 12 March as part of the Home Grown LIVE! Festival. Tickets adult £4, children £2, booking: 01502 731605.
www.deanparkin.co.uk

Tidelines - Creative Walk & Workshop
A day of walking, poetry and creativity inspired by the plastics that wash up on the tide. Led by visual artist Fran Crowe and poet Dean Parkin, who will take a small group by boat (The Regardless) to walk towards the southern end of Orford Ness, collecting plastic debris to inspire poetry and art with a message, followed by an afternoon of creating at Fran’s studio. This workshop will be run twice: on Sunday 6 March and on Sunday 3 April, leaving Orford Quay at 10.30am each day and finishing around 3.30pm. Open to all over 18s, £10 per person. For more information and to book, click here

The 58^th Crabbe Poetry Competition 2011
Open to anyone either born, resident at any time or educated in Suffolk.
Judge: Elaine Feinstein, closing date: 31 May 2011
www.suffolkpoetrysociety.org.uk/crabbecompetition

Lorca Translation Competition
To mark the 75th anniversary of Lorca’s death, ‘Lorca in England’ are running a competition, inviting writers to submit an original translation of a Lorca poem of their own choice.The winner will receive £500 and the runner-up £200; a pamphlet will be published of short-listed entries. Based in Stroud, they are also organising a series of four poetry workshops focusing on translating Lorca and on the use of transliterations as part of the translation process. For more details, email or visit their website.

 

New Podcasts on The Poetry Channel

Two new podcasts to provide a warm poetry glow this February on The Poetry Channel, both gleaned from the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival last November.

Poem Show: New Blood
available from Friday 11 February
Three poems by three of the most richly talented young poets on the UK scene. Jack Underwood gives absence a surreal yet touching twist with ‘Your Horse’; there’s Caroline Bird’s wonderfully absurd lament for lost time, ‘I Miss My Tuesdays’;  and we close with Luke Kennard’s joyfully scornful and exhilaratingly spiteful ‘My Friend’.
generously supported by The Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation

Aldeburgh’s Open Workshop
available from Friday 25 February
What has 800 fingers, 160 feet and 80 heads sprouting fresh ideas and new poems? Why, it’s the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival’s unique and ever-popular mass writing workshop, annual inspired and led by Michael Laskey and Jeni Smith. Nick Patrick investigates its collective writing energy and appeal…
generously supported by The Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust

 

Poetry Channel Top Ten

The Poetry Channel audience has continued to grow throughout 2010 and if you’re new to our online poetry platform it’s well worth a click around the archive to discover lots of “best words best order” - podcast-style!

It’s also interesting to discover which have been our most popular podcasts to date - a real mixture of international poets (from South Africa, America and Italy) alongside top UK names.

1. Seamus Heaney in conversation with Michael Laskey

2. Discussion: The Female Poem - Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud, Pascale Petit, Jo Shapcott

3. Wimbledon Championships Poet 2010

4. Antjie Krog’s Craft Talk on Afrikaans Poetry

5. Seamus Heaney reading from the Poetry Prom

6. Sharon Olds Interview, with Michael Laskey

7. Aldeburgh Backchat: Albert Goldbarth

8. Poem Show - American Special: Mark Halliday, Jane Hirshfield, Thomas Lux

9. Poem Show - Summer Special: Adrian Mitchell, Matt Harvey, Helena Nelson

10. Aldeburgh Conversation: Jamie McKendrick & Valerio Magrelli, with Robert Seatter

So, what’s been your favourite Poetry Channel podcast and why? Do let us know…

 

David Harsent at UEA Spring Literary Festival 2010

Don’t forget your Poetry Passport at the UEA Spring Literary Festival on Tuesday 8 February. That’s when David Harsent will be reading in Lecture Theatre 1 at UEA. David will also discuss his work as well as take questions from the audience at the end of the session. “Poems that move you and make you think” - according to William Boyd (Guardian ‘Books of the Year’).

The Poetry Passport is a terrific deal we’ve brokered with UEA - it’s a ticket that enables you to attend three poetry evenings for just £12 (with Alice Oswald and Costa-winning Jo Shapcott to follow between now and May). To buy a ‘Poetry Passport’ or tickets for individual readings (£6 each), telephone 01603 508050. For full programme you can visit their website.

To read ‘Moppet’, a typically arresting new David Harsent poem - in the recent Poetry magazine (Chicago) - click here

 

Aldeburgh Poets at the National Portrait Gallery

Since 2003, Peter Everard Smith has been capturing spontaneous and definitive images of world-class poets at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and Poetry Prom. So we’re delighted that two of his iconic photographs will be celebrated at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2011. A portrait of Carol Ann Duffy taken at Snape Maltings (prior to her 2005 Poetry Prom reading) will be going on display in the gallery from 15th February as part of the ‘New Acquisitions’ selection.
http://bit.ly/poetrypromduffypic

And this will be followed later this year by a Geoffrey Hill portrait, taken after his extraordinary Aldeburgh Poetry Festival reading in 2009.

To enjoy more ‘Aldeburgh Poets’, visit Peter’s online gallery

 

Good News: The Garfield Weston Foundation says Yes!

Everyone knows these are extraordinarily stressful and challenging times for the arts - and especially for small organisations specialising in contemporary poetry. But 2011 is off to a really good start with the excellent recent news of a significant award towards The Poetry Trust’s core costs over the next two years from The Garfield Weston Foundation. This fantastic and timely investment in our future ought to boost our recently-submitted National Portfolio Organisation application to the Arts Council…

 

 

Costa Award for Jo Shapcott

Many congratulations to Jo Shapcott for winning the 2011 Costa Book of The Year. We’re thrilled that Jo scooped the £30,000 prize for Of Mutability (Faber), her first collection in 12 years and containing all the poems we so enjoyed at her pre-publication 2009 Aldeburgh reading. Jo becomes the second poet in a row to win the Costa, after last year’s award for Christopher Reid. It’s great to see poetry taking centre stage - especially when it’s by one of the fantastic co-judges of our 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize!
You can hear Jo read her unsettling yet affectionate ‘Somewhat Unravelled’ from her award-winning collection on The Poetry Channel as part of our ‘Wonderful & Strange’ Poem Show. And while you’re there, check out her characteristically articulate insights at The Female Poem discussion (with Maureen Duffy, Pascale Petit and Annie Freud).

 

Other STUFF you might enjoy:

Dean’s Dad’s Ducks
The Poetry Trust’s very own Dean Parkin will be reprising his successful Edinburgh Fringe one man show at Dereham Library in Norfolk on Saturday 19 February as part of the Breckland Winter Arts Festival.
http://bit.ly/derehamduckshow

Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2011
Judge: Carole Satyamurti, closing date: 30 April 2011
http://bit.ly/warepoetrycomp2011

The 58th Crabbe Poetry Competition 2011
Open to anyone either born, resident at any time or educated in Suffolk.
Judge: Elaine Feinstein, closing date: 31 May 2011
http://www.suffolkpoetrysociety.org.uk/crabbecompetition/index.php

 

New Podcasts on The Poetry Channel

Happy 2011 to all STUFF readers and here’s some real Poetry Channel treats to start the New Year. Three podcasts from three contrasting poets at the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival - great conversations with Elaine Feinstein, JO Morgan and John Glenday.

If you’ve not yet got around to downloading Poetry Channel podcasts, maybe you’ll be keener if you think of them as short radio programmes (very BBC Radio 4 in flavour) available whenever you fancy a quality poetry listen. They are not live performances simply thrown up online; we work with Nick Patrick, a top-class independent producer, to make interesting programmes with unique ‘Aldeburgh’ content. We’d love to know what you think.

Aldeburgh Conversation 2010: Elaine Feinstein
available Friday 14 January
Elaine Feinstein in conversation with Robert Seatter, discussing poetry and memoir and the transitions of her enduring and wide-ranging writing life.

Aldeburgh Backchat: JO Morgan
available Friday 14 January
JO Morgan talks about the strangeness of winning the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the ‘deep mulling’ involved in writing his prize-winning collection, Natural Mechnical and his subsequent protected writing time on the Suffolk coast.

Aldeburgh Conversation 2010: John Glenday
available Friday 28 January
John Glenday in conversation with Robert Seatter about the fourteen year incubation period for his acclaimed collection, Grain, the influence of his parents on his poetry, and the urgent necessity of writing a poem.

 

Advanced Poetry Seminar, 14–18 March 2011

Last chance to apply!

Deadline: 17 January 2011

Wanted! We’re still looking for poets - either nearing first collection publication or between first and second collections - to take part in an intensive, five-day seminar led by excellent poet-tutors Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom.
The course will include new writing exercises, workshopping poems, one-to-one surgeries, close readings and a session in a theatre to offer practical help on how to deliver good live readings.

I feel privileged to have taken part in this seminar and consider it to have been one of the best poetry experiences of my life. The tuition was excellent, the atmosphere supportive and I leave with a greater understanding of my work. Rebecca Farmer, participant 2010

Tuition, accommodation and all meals are included in the highly subsidised fee of £295 per participant. Full application details at:
http://www.thepoetrytrust.org/events/the-advanced-poetry-seminar/

 

The T S Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings

On Sunday 23 January 2011 at 7.00pm the T S Eliot Prize Readings will be staged at the Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall (after last year’s complete sell-out in the Queen Elizabeth Hall). This bigger, grander venue will make for an even better atmosphere as all ten shortlisted poets are invited to read from their collections on the eve of the judges’ decision. The judging panel this year, chaired by Anne Stevenson with Michael Symmons Roberts and Bernardine Evaristo, have an outstanding field to choose from - Simon Armitage, Annie Freud, John Haynes, Seamus Heaney, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson, Fiona Sampson, Brian Turner, Derek Walcott and Sam Willetts.

Tickets are on sale now from the Southbank Centre box office on 0844 875 0073 or go to http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk.

(The Poetry Trust team will certainly be there and if you haven’t got the latest edition of The Poetry Paper, free copies will be available on the night).

 

Michael Laskey at The Poetry Archive

Michael Laskey - co-founder and director of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival for its first ten years - has now been added to The Poetry Archive. You’re just one click away from four of his terrific poems - Rain, Nobody, Home Movies and The Page-turner - but we’d recommend you buy the full CD which features him reading 34 of his finest. As American poet Mark Halliday commented: “The Laskey effect is of suddenly sensing that more meaning is inherent in ‘ordinary’ moments that we were expecting.”
http://bit.ly/poetryarchivelaskey

 

Brilliant poetry at UEA Spring Literary Festival 2010

Poetry is a highlight of the UEA Spring Literary Festival, with three outstanding internationally acclaimed poets coming to the University of East Anglia. The Poetry Trust is partnering the festival and would like to draw your attention to the amazingly good value Poetry Passport - a ticket that enables you to attend all three poetry evenings for just £12. Each poet will read and discuss their work and there is dedicated time for questions from the audience. This is a fantastic opportunity to hear world-class poetry in the East of England.

David Harsent
Tuesday 8 February 2011 7.00pm, Lecture Theatre 1, UEA
Forward Prize winning poet David Harsent creates a novel’s worth of drama in just a few lines and the range, ambition and achievement of his work continues to advance. “Poems that move you and make you think”, according to William Boyd (Guardian ‘Books of the Year’).

Alice Oswald
Tuesday 8 March 2011 7.00pm, Lecture Theatre 1, UEA
TS Eliot Prize winner Alice Oswald is one of the most assured and original writers of our time and an utterly compelling live reader of her own work. “The real thing”, as Jeanette Winterson says, “a true poet of great power and capacity.”

Jo Shapcott
Tuesday 24 May 2011 7.00pm, Lecture Theatre 1, UEA
Twice winner of the National Poetry Competition - and now the recent Costa - Jo Shapcott takes intellectual and sensuous risks in her memorable engaging poems. Fiona Sampson accurately describes her “a pioneer among contemporary British writers.”

To buy a ‘Poetry Passport’ or tickets for individual readings (£6), telephone 01603 508050. For full programme information visit:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/litfest

 

Short Cuts Cabaret and Open Mic Night

The Cut, Halesworth, Friday 28 January

Dean Parkin hosts another of Suffolk’s cult-status cabaret nights. With this winter’s ‘Slightly Strange’ theme, he’ll welcome special guest Rachel Pantechnicon, one of the UK’s most charmingly peculiar poets. It’s always a heady mix of comedy, music, spoken word, live poetry and audience participation. Plus, of course, plenty of weird and wonderful Open Mic talent.
To apply for a performance slot (3 minutes), contact Dean on 01986 835950 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Tickets cost £6, Call The Cut Box office on 0845 6732123

 

Poetry School

Why not brighten up this gloomy winter with one of The Poetry School online courses? Online poetry classes are brilliant for those who don’t live close to an urban centre, or find it more convenient to learn from home. You get the same exercises, discussion and feedback as in a face-to-face course, but you don’t need to leave the house. All you need is a broadband connection and you can (and students do) enroll from anywhere in the world.

The Poetry School’s online classes take place in a virtual classroom. The tutor posts a writing task, students post up their poetic responses then discuss their work in a forum and in live-typed chat session. There have been courses with Polly Clark, Julia Copus, Helen Mort, Andrew Philip and many others. The Spring term sees new courses from Paul Batchelor and Dorothea Smartt, and plans are being finalised for the Summer term with Tamar Yoseloff who will run a poetry & art course.

Visit http://www.poetryschool.com to browse for online courses.

 

Other STUFF you might enjoy

Other STUFF you might enjoy:

The 11th Christopher Tower Poetry Competition
http://www.towerpoetry.org.uk/prize

The 58th Crabbe Poetry Competition 2011
Open to anyone either born, resident at any time or educated in Suffolk. Judge: Elaine Feinstein.
http://www.suffolkpoetrysociety.org.uk/crabbecompetition/index.php

Mendham Writers - ‘The Poet in the Landscape’ residential weekend in Suffolk with Tamar Yoseloff.
To book and for more information contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or visit http://mendham-writers.com/

Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2011
Judge: Carole Satyamurti, closing date: 30 April 2011
http://bit.ly/warepoetrycomp2011

 

An exhilarating weekend of words - highlights from the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

According to Mandy Coe: “The three days of the festival are but the visible part of this event. The team’s accumulated years of experience shine, not just through their professionalism and excellent planning but in enabling something much more rare to happen: everyone - performers, audience, children and seniors alike - are valued and equal participants… creators! All my writing life I have heard the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival spoken of with awe; now I know why.”

Here’s your chance to explore or re-visit some of the pleasures of the weekend.

The Guardian Books blog announces Christian Campbell as the winner of the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree), with judge Jo Shapcott praising his “bravura performance”. Whilst last year’s winner JO Morgan read in the Jubilee Hall (and copies of his Natural Mechanical sold out immediately) alongside Matthew Caley and Don Paterson in an exceptional three-handed reading that sets the standard for the weekend.

Acclaimed travel-writer Hugh Thomson, blogs the Festival weekend with thoughts on everything - from Stanley Kunitz’s principle that “poetry should exploit the lyric tension of the fact that we are both living and dying at the same time” to which Aldeburgh poet boasts the best hair. And catch some ‘fringe’ blogs from young artist Rosie Kirton and poetry publisher Charles Christian at Ink, Sweat & Tears

Following his talk on The Poetry Archive, Andrew Motion buys our Poetry Channel producer Nick Patrick a pint and shares his thoughts on “not wanting to live in a country of dark theatres & closed libraries with no literature festivals.” Eavesdrop on their open and engaging conversation live from The Mill Inn, Aldeburgh, now on The Poetry Channel.

Swedish writer and Nobel Prize nominee Lars Gustafsson describes Aldeburgh as “one of the finest quality festivals of Europe” before making a swift exit from his conversation with Bernard Kops about ‘The Subversive Poet’ – following ‘lively exchanges’ – and heads straight to London to discuss this hot Festival topic on Radio 4’s Start the Week. Listen again

Finally, enjoy the Festival photo gallery and listen to our Aldeburgh Takeaway podcast in which Imtiaz Dharker, Inua Ellams, Mandy Coe and others share their thoughts on what they’ll ‘take away’ from their first Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

 

How was it for you?

If you were at the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, while it’s fresh in your mind (and if you’ve not already done so), we’d be enormously grateful if you’d make time to complete our online Festival survey.
Please do share your thoughts - it’s the best way for us to understand the Festival from the audience perspective and go on developing the programme and the quality of the experience.

To complete the survey please click here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QG9P88T

All survey respondents will be entered into a prize draw with a chance to win a signed copy of Carol Ann Duffy‘s new pamphlet - The Twelve Poems of Christmas (Volume Two) - from the small and stylish independent publisher Candlestick Press.

 

Advanced Poetry Seminar, 14 - 18 March 2011             Now open for nominations / applications

Deadline: 17 January 2011

Stretched, challenged and propelled and Undoubtedly one of the best weeks of my life - this is how two previous participants described their experience of the Aldeburgh Seminar, an outstanding professional and creative development opportunity for poets early in their publishing careers.
The Poetry Trust is looking for a maximum of eight UK poets either at first collection or between first and second collection stage to participate in this residential course. Led by Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom - two exceptional poets/tutors with strong editorial experience - the course will include new writing exercises, workshopping poems, one-to-one surgeries, close readings and a session in a theatre to offer practical help on how to deliver good live readings.
Over five-days participants will stay and learn together at Bruisyard Hall, a 14th century atmospheric and spacious retreat in rural Suffolk.
Tuition, accommodation and all meals are included in the highly subsidised cost of £295 per participant.
Further details
or call 01986 835950
or email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

 

Poetry Foundation features our Poetry Channel’s Seamus Heaney podcast

The Poetry Trust has teamed up with Poetry Foundation (Chicago). Throughout November the leading US organisation for poetry is featuring our Seamus Heaney podcast (recorded at this summer’s Poetry Prom) as their monthly Poetry Lecture. They’ve created a great new programme - with Christian Wiman (editor of Poetry) talking about Heaney’s poetry and incoporating the Poetry Prom’s unique conversation between Heaney and Michael Laskey - co-founder of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.
Listen here.

 

Issue seven of The Poetry Paper – order your free copy

Launched at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and featuring exclusive interviews with Seamus Heaney and Don Paterson and new poems from several Aldeburgh poets, you can now order your free copy of this year’s Poetry Paper. UK delivery only, and only while stocks last.
Or for the first time, enjoy the Poetry Paper online through our interactive flipbook which will allow you to ‘Forward to a Friend’, search for a particular poet, print out a PDF, upload it to Facebook - or even, amazingly, just read it!

We’re committed to keeping The Poetry Paper as a free publication but if you enjoy it and like the work of The Poetry Trust, do consider becoming a ‘Friend’. For just £15 a year you can enjoy a warm philanthropic glow plus the tangible benefit of exclusive priority booking for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Friends’ subscriptions make a real difference so do please join if you can.

 

Hambling for Poetry!

As reported in the last edition of STUFF, the internationally-acclaimed Suffolk-based artist Maggi Hambling - famous for her Scallop sculpture on Aldeburgh Beach - has come up with an inspiringly generous way to support Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and the work of The Poetry Trust. Hambling has donated a jewel of an oil painting - ‘Wave Curling’ - to be sold through online auction, this side of Christmas (it’d make a stunning present for anyone feeling very generous!).
The painting was on display throughout the Festival weekend and has generated a great deal of interest. Plans for the auction are underway and if you’d like to receive details, please contact Katie Burroughs. Or call 01986 835950.

 

And finally…..

The shortlist for the T S Eliot Prize 2010 has recently been announced and we’d like to express particular congratulations to Annie Freud and Pascale Petit on their nominations, both of whom gave terrific readings at the 2009 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Full shortlist. As did Jo Shapcott who we’re delighted to see shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards (Poetry)

 

Other STUFF you might like…..

The Eastern Angles Christmas Show - specially for Suffolk locals

This year Eastern Angles are delighted to welcome back Julian Harries & Pat Whymark with a classically bonkers production entitled Gills Around the Green. The show will open at the Sir John Mills Theatre in Ipswich on December 1st. From January 11th - 22nd, Gills Around the Green will transfer to the beautifully equipped Seckford Theatre at Woodbridge School with its licensed bar and free parking! Eastern Angles always provide a refreshing alternative to the traditional Christmas panto. This year is no exception. Gills Around the Green is a fantastically funny and incredibly ingenious piece of theatre with lashings of witty wordplay, toe-tapping tunes and top-notch comedy performances. “Eastern Angles…always purveyors of a fine Christmas Show” The Guardian. Last year Eastern Angles sold 98% of all Christmas tickets! Book now by ringing 01473 211498 or Book Online visit www.easternangles.co.uk

‘YES’ - THE ADRIAN MITCHELL SHOW

On 10 December Wonderful Beast will be performing ‘YES’ in London at St Giles In The Fields, in aid of Stop The War Coalition. ‘YES’, originally commissioned by The Poetry Trust, is a celebration of the life and work one of our best-loved funny, passionate, political and popular poets - Adrian Mitchell. Devised and presented by Wonderful Beast Theatre Company, of which Adrian was a founding member, this specially-created performance of his poems and songs premiered to a sell-out audience at the 2009 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and was subsequently snapped up by Cambridge Wordfest for another sell-out event. A glittering, moving, and highly entertaining show is performed by a cast of seven including Adrian’s widow, actor Celia Hewitt, his actor/singer daughter, Sasha Mitchell and well-known actor, Roger Lloyd Pack. Two brilliantly versatile musicians help create a triumphant and anarchic synthesis of poetry, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.
Tickets £12/10 concessions
Box office: 0207 801 2768 or www.stopwar.org.uk

Tolerance International UK - call for poets for 10 minute slots for an Interfaith Arts Festival on 26th Nov. For more details contact: Jenny Craven at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call 020 7603 0062

2010 Cafe Writers Open Poetry competition Closing date 30 November

The 2010 Book & Pamphlet Competition - The Poetry Business invites submissions for the 2010 competition. Judge Simon Armitage. Deadline 1 December

 

Join us this weekend at the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

The finest national and international poets from eight countries and across the UK are currently making their way to Aldeburgh for the ultimate poetry weekend. Join us for an inspirational and sustaining three days. Highlighted as a pick of week in The Guardian, The Independent & The Times, Aldeburgh is the only place to be this weekend. Immerse yourself in the full-on poetry experience or dip a toe into whatever takes your fancy. Certain events are sold out of course, but here’s a snapshot of some fabulous readings & performances you wouldn’t want to miss…

Festival launch
It all kicks off with the Festival launch reception at the Peter Pears Gallery, Aldeburgh at 6pm. Informal readings from several international writers & a chance to enjoy an exhibition preview of the work of Suffolk landscape artist Moss Fuller. Wine. Canapés. Poetry. All welcome.

Friday highlight
Family Reading: Mandy Coe
6 - 7pm, Friday 5 November, Jubilee Hall
Reading at Aldeburgh from her first book of poetry for children - the infectiously engaging Mandy Coe, with poems to excite the imaginations of poetry fans of all ages. And before Mandy takes the stage, the winners of the Suffolk Young Poets competition read their outstanding poems. Always a heart-warming Festival treat.
£6 / £4 (concessions)
Box Office: 01728 687110

Saturday night in Aldeburgh (better than Strictly & X-Factor!)
Two high-energy performances make for a great evening out (plus plenty of time for Aldeburgh’s famously fantastic fish and chips, a pint of Adnams and maybe even a starlight walk on the shingle beach, weather permitting!)

Performance: Untitled by Inua Ellams
5.45 - 7pm, Saturday 6 November, Jubilee Hall
Presented by Fuel and SOHO Theatre
Described by The Times as ‘London’s hottest new spoken word talent’, Inua Ellams brings his new one-man show to Aldeburgh. The magical realist story - set in Nigeria and England - tells of two identical twin boys separated at infancy and what happens when one child is left unnamed. Watch the trailer.
£8 / £6 (concessions)
BOX OFFICE: 01728 687110

Performance: Elvis McGonagall
10.00 - 10.45pm, Saturday 6 November, Jubilee Hall
The ideal late-night shindig performer, top stand-up poet - Elvis McGonagall - brings his armchair revolution to Aldeburgh. The BBC Radio 4 Saturday Live regular is described as the love-child of Elvis Presley and a star-struck airport baggage handler. Laugh out loud funny.
£8 / £6 (concessions)
BOX OFFICE: 01728 687110

Sunday highlights

Exchange: The Subversive Poet
11.00 - 11.45am, Sunday 7 November, James Cable Room
One of Sweden’s finest writers and a Nobel Prize nominee, Lars Gustafsson, joins London’s Bernard Kops to address the ‘writer’s responsibility to call the establishment to account’. As two poets with impeccable ‘awkward squad’ credentials, they should have plenty to say on the subject. And don’t miss Lars Gustafsson on Radio 4’s Start the Week at 9am the following morning when he discusses this timely topic with Andrew Marr and fellow guests.

There are still tickets for two events featuring former Poetry Laureate and all-round Poetry Advocate Andrew Motion:

Discussion: Other Writing
9-10am, Sunday 7 November, Jubilee Hall
A one-off and stimulating conversation between four exceptional writers. Inua Ellams, Elaine Feinstein, Bernard Kops and Andrew Motion discuss the demands of other genres - plays, novels, short stories, memoirs, biographies - and how these affect their poetry.
£8 / £6 (concessions)
BOX OFFICE: 01728 687110

Talk: The Poetry Archive
2.15-3.00pm, Sunday 7 November, Jubilee Hall
Offering a personal website tour and unique selection of audio clips, Andrew Motion tells the story of The Poetry Archive, launched five years ago to re-affirm the value of sound in poetry and to conserve today’s voices for future generations. Already the UK’s leading connection with poetry audiences worldwide, how will it develop?
£8 / £6 (concessions)
BOX OFFICE: 01728 687110

Late programme change

Selima Hill has gone down with gastric flu and has very sadly had to withdraw from this year’s Festival. Imtiaz Dharker has happily agreed to read in her place at the Saturday morning reading 10.45am - 12.30pm (PF6) and will also deliver the final Short Take on Sunday at 1.30pm.

Poet & founder of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Michael Laskey will take Selima Hill’s place for the Exchange with Bill Manhire about ‘Happiness Writes White’, on Saturday at 1.45pm (PF10). Michael will interview Manhire on the subject and feed into the conversation some of what Selima had been planning to say.

We are hugely grateful to Imtiaz for stepping in at such short notice, and rather amazed at the extraordinary felicity of it all - given that Imtiaz herself had so sadly to withdraw from last year’s APF due to the untimely death of her husband Simon. We are all thrilled that she will, at last, get to enjoy the Aldeburgh experience.

The Poetry Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of all sponsors and funders - without whom the Festival would not be possible. Full list.

 

Hugh Thomson blogs the Festival weekend

We’re delighted that the award-winning travel writer and contemporary poetry enthusiast Hugh Thomson will be our blogger in residence throughout the Festival weekend, in partnership with Writers’ Centre Norwich. According to the New York Times ‘Everywhere Thomson goes, he finds good stories to tell.’ So don’t miss his reflections on Aldeburgh and share your own thoughts and Festival reviews on his blog (anyone can comment and you don’t need to register). Blog site: www.thewhiterock.co.uk

Photo: Hugh’s electric blue Oldsmobile 98 - will he bring it to Aldeburgh?

 

Hot off the press – Issue 7 of The Poetry Paper

Featuring exclusive interviews with Seamus Heaney & Don Paterson, Bill Manhire on how to keep writing, an introduction to Marie Howe - plus new poems from Jack Underwood, Caroline Bird, Toon Tellegen and more. The Poetry Paper is back and it’s the best yet. Aldeburgh Poetry Festival audience members will be the first to get their hands on this perfectly packaged triumph of content and style. And if you can’t make it to the Festival, for the first time you can enjoy The Poetry Paper online through an interactive flipbook. The not-for-profit Poetry Paper is made possible because of advertising revenue generated from the literature/arts sector. The Poetry Trust would like to thank these organisations for their support.

 

I must go down to the seas again…

Throughout the weekend, many Festival poets will spend a solo reflective hour in our specially-commandeered Look-out Tower. With stunning views across the shingle and out to the North Sea, this will be a rare chance to retreat from the street-level buzz of the Festival to think and possibly even write.

Poets will then share their non-ivory tower experience with BBC producer Nick Patrick to create a series of podcasts for our Poetry Channel.

 

Finally….  Hambling for Poetry!

Acclaimed Suffolk artist Maggi Hambling - famous for Scallop on Aldeburgh Beach - has come up with an inspiringly generous way to support Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and the work of The Poetry Trust. Hambling has donated a stunning jewel of an oil painting - ‘Wave Curling’ - to be sold through online auction, either later this year or in early 2011. To receive auction details, please contact Katie Burroughs at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with ‘Maggi Hambling auction’ in the subject heading, or call 01986 835950.

 

22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival – just four weeks to go!

5 - 7 November 2010

Next month 23 writers from eight countries will descend on the inspirational seaside town of Aldeburgh for the ultimate poetry weekend. Several events have sold out and many more are booking up fast - so please do book asap to avoid disappointment. It would be lovely to see you in Aldeburgh for an unforgettable weekend promising the very best in international contemporary poetry. Alongside top UK poets (including Don Paterson and Andrew Motion) Aldeburgh is renowned for welcoming celebrated international talent and exceptional newcomers:

Rising star Inua Ellmans
5.45 - 7.00pm, Untitled, Sat 6 November, Jubilee Hall
Described by The Times as ‘London’s hottest new spoken word talent’, Inua Ellams brings his new one-man show to Aldeburgh. The magical realist story - set in Nigeria and England - tells of two identical twin boys separated at infancy and what happens when one child is left unnamed. Following a sell-out performance last week at the Bristol Old Vic, one reviewer wrote: ‘Ellams restored my faith in the power of theatre, this is high-drama and dramatic dialogue, that transports the audience.’ Ellams debut show The 14th Tale won a 2009 Edinburgh Fringe First Award.

Lars Gustafsson - one of Sweden’s most critically acclaimed writers appearing at Aldeburgh with his translator John Irons
Discussion, 9am Sat 6th Nov
Exchange, 11am, Sun 7th Nov
Reading, 3.15pm, Sun 7th Nov
According to The New York Times the poet, philosopher and best-selling author Lars Gustafsson has ‘an uncompromising vision of the utter complexity of modern life’. His novel The Death of a Beekeeper won international acclaim for its lyrical beauty and profundity. Expect nothing less from his poetry, which effortlessly navigates between the dream world of the unconscious and the very fabric of reality. Don’t miss this rare UK appearance from one of the finest Scandinavian writers of our time.

Toon Tellegen
Reading, 4pm, Sat 6th Nov
Considered one of Holland’s greatest poets, Tellegen is also an internationally famous children’s author and a practicing GP in Amsterdam. According to The Manhattan Review his poems move with ‘fairytale speed’ and cover great distances as ‘entire novels are encompassed in a single poem’. In his books for children, anthropomorphic grasshoppers pay a fortune for a speck of dust and lonely moles write letters to themselves. Likewise his poetry, with a characteristic lightness of touch, questions how best to live.

 

Workshops - world-class writers offer a creative burst
Places are being snapped up for our programme of Pre-Festival workshops with some already sold-out. There are still a few places left for:

Harry Clifton‘s Writing in Context - join the recently appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry 2010 for a masterclass based around your own poems. An extraordinarily good opportunity for creative development.

Matthew Caley‘s Adventures with Text - offering fresh perspectives for experienced writers looking to try something new and beginners looking for innovative ways to move forward.

 

New on The Poetry Channel – ‘American Special’ Poem Show

Another Festival highlight is always the introduction of outstanding American poets. To celebrate this ‘special relationship’ we’ve produced a new Poem Show for The Poetry Channel looking back at three of the most memorable Aldeburgh readings from American writers. Enjoy:

Philip Levine reading ‘The Two’ - a powerful and evocative poem from his 2009 Aldeburgh reading which won him a standing ovation
Louis Jenkins reading ‘The Afterlife’ - an unexpected way of looking back at the sum of a life
Anne Stevenson - who is justly celebrated both sides of the Atlantic reading ‘Leaving’.

 

And looking forward to this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival where we welcome the outstanding American poets - Marie Howe and Dorianne Laux - both highly acclaimed in the USA and making their UK debuts on the East Suffolk coast.

Dorianne Laux, main reading - Saturday 6 November
Marie Howe, main reading - Sunday 7 November

In the run up to the Festival weekend we’ll be adding new shows to The Poetry Channel every week so check in again next Monday for a Poem Show on the theme of ‘Modern life’.

 

Festival launch invitation

Poetry. Wine. Canapés. Friends. What more could you ask for? Join us to raise the curtain (and a glass!) on the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Thursday 4 November at the Festival reception. This is also a chance to enjoy an exhibition preview of the work of Suffolk landscape artist Moss Fuller. All welcome. Let us know if you’d like to come, by emailing Katie by 22 October at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

 

Shortlist announced for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2010

From a record 95 entries, the shortlist for the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize highlights six distinctive new voices as the ‘ones-to-watch’ amongst the next generation of UK poets.

The shortlist:

Christian Campbell, Running the Dusk, Peepal Tree Press
Robert Dickinson, Micrographia, Waterloo Press
Sheila Hillier, A Quechua Confession Manual, Cinnamon Press
Katharine Towers¸ The Floating Man, Picador Poetry
Same Willetts¸ New Light for the Old Dark, Cape Poetry
Tony Williams, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, Salt Publishing

The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize is valuable not just for its cash prize of £3,000, but also for the emphasis on identifying and developing talent. The winner receives a week of ‘protected’ writing time on the inspirational Suffolk coast and - most crucially - a fee-paying invitation to read at the 2011 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. This year’s winner will be announced at the first Main Reading of the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Friday 5 November 2010, where last year’s winner JO Morgan will read, alongside Don Paterson and Matthew Caley

 

Winners of the Suffolk Young Poets competition announced

Fourteen gifted young writers have been selected from over 500 school children taking part in the Suffolk Young Poets competition this summer. The young poets, aged from just five up to 17, will read their winning poems at the opening Family Reading event at the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Friday 5 November. They’ll be joined by the warm-hearted and acclaimed poet Mandy Coe, launching her first collection of children’s poems at the Festival. Over 21,000 young Suffolk poets have taken part in the competition since it began in 1989.

 

National Poetry Day 2010

We didn’t want to join the inbox deluge on National Poetry Day last week, hence our cool and calm e-bulletin now (nothing to do with manic Festival preparations!) However if you get a moment, do have a read of TPT director Naomi Jaffa’s blog on the National Poetry Day website on the theme of ‘home’. The complex concept of ‘home’ is also a theme for one of our Festival discussions, when Ireland Professor of Poetry Harry Clifton and acclaimed travel writer Hugh Thompson reflect on their compulsion to travel and their vocation as writers.