For International Women’s Day the Gloucester Poetry Society are putting on Raised Voices – with headline poets Tanya Feasey and Chloe Jacquet. Two very different but powerful poets ranging from humour to the deeply profound and sometimes both mixed together!
I will be hosting and Ada Lovelace The Puppet will also be there along with some… er…. poetry surprises 🙂
There is also an open mic at the end.
Info you need:
Where – The Fountain Inn Gloucester
When – Thurs 8th March doors open at 7
How Much? – free entry
This is one of the felt back drops I made for the film of Love: A Stranger Dream. I really like working with felt as a craft material and have been pondering creating some stuffed Shadowing Souls.
Shadowing Souls are the little ghost things that lurk in the pictures within my visual poem. I made little polymer clay ones for the launch and have some events coming up over Halloween and Christmas so was thinking of making some little cuddly ones 🙂
A petulant sky
Dark as a spoiled child told no
Boiling water heavy
Marring the summer sky
Building a prickly heat
Hurting the ears and eyes
Sledge hammer pressure
Blanketing populations
In sleeping aggression
Thunder head shifts
And POW
The clouds melt down
Sheets of water
Drowning the land
Choking the air
Lightening rents
Thunder booms
The storm has broken
In hunger
What will it consume?
Just a reminder that I am running a poem a day writing challenge over on the WoPoWriMo site, there is a Facebook Page and various other things to help and there are lots of new writing exercises and new guest poets appearing on the blog to help inspire you 🙂
I’ve been writing away – mainly using the beautiful origami papers I was given at Christmas as inspiration – the challenge is more than completed and I am very happy with some of the work I have produced. Now the tough bit begins – I have to type it all up and edit it all!
Once again this highlights for me how many notebooks with unedited or typed up poems I have lying around so I shall be attempting to do something about that over the coming year 🙂
The last Saturday of Jan I will be at Overtown Farm in their lovely barn with all the poetry zines, visual poetry colouring books and the Gloucester Poetry Society’s first anthology Poetry Without Pretension.
Well to start off with I do like my writing challenges and do 3 different poem a day challenges during the year – the first Month of Poetry is in January, the second is World Poetry Writing Month in February and is one that I run so is lots of fun and hard work! And finally there is April with National Poetry Writing Month. For each of these I actually try and spend 30 hrs working on poetry rather than just focusing on producing drafts – this has worked very well for me in the past 🙂
I am also trying to submit work this year because I suck at actually getting my work out there – so I plan to try and submit to at least ten things a month and see where that goes 🙂
I have decided to stop participating in Slams for the time being – the last year they have not been fun anymore and have just been a source of stress and abusive messages, the messages are not stopping me but they are a factor in moving away from that particular performance avenue. I will still be doing performance poetry and hope to branch out into combining it into shows and things instead.
I am hoping to resurrect a few projects such as some of my visual poetry and to continue with my own version of the classic epics which I started as a teenager.
And apart from that – hopefully I’ll remember to actually tell people where and when I am performing but as so much stuff comes in last minute that can be kind of hard!
The star flittered into her mouth
Sticking fast
No sustenance could pass
An asterial blockage
She tried to cough it out
And then…
The star had run down her throat
Ripping the stomaches lining
Passing through in bloody disgorge
She lay dying in the star birth
It flew into the sky
