Turquoise Monster

Performance of my poem Star Stuff at the Gloucester Poetry Societies Villenelles Night.

Busy poetic time are coming up 🙂

Thursday 27th of April Villanells Gloucester Fountain Inn from 7-11 pm – I am running a workshop at the beginning of the evening followed by recording performances and interviews organised by The Gloucester Poetry Society

Saturday 29th of April ReneGade Festival 2017 3 -1:30 pm which is opening with Food For Thoughts Poetry performance

May 4th – 15th Cheltenham Poetry Festival, I’ll be in the Slam Friday 12th May 8:30 but will be generally about the place 🙂

Saturday 20th of May A Pint of Prose organised by the Gloucester Poetry Festival

Plus as many regular nights as I can get too 🙂 Feeling very excited!!! (there might be another slam as well but it just depends on fitting things in!)

Regular Poetry events in Gloucester and Cheltenham are:

Buzzwords 1st Sunday of every month in Cheltenham

Speakeasy 1st Tuesday of every month in Gloucester

Waterstones Poetry Night Monday evenings in Cheltenham

Poetry Cafe 2nd Wednesday of the month in Cheltenham

Food For Thoughts variable but during the afternoon once a month at the weekend in Gloucester

Villanelles last Thursday of every Month in Gloucester

Cheltenham Poetry Societies Kickstart Workshops 1st Tuesday of the month in Cheltenham

Jam Back at the Tav every Wednesday evening primarily music but accepts spoken word in Cheltenham

Exciting poetry things are a foot in Gloucester (UK) at the moment – one such thing is the night Villanelles at the Fountain Inn. The night includes recording poetry for the Gloucester Poetry Societies Youtube channel, an open mic and… starting with this coming event… workshops 🙂

Which a few of us will be running – I am running the next one on the 27th April 2017, the whole event is 7-11 with the workshop being at the beginning.

For those of you who can not make it to the physical event I will be making a digital archive of workshops, will much over lap with the WoPoWriMo site.

A few years ago I came across a rather novel publishing company – at the time crowd sourcing was still a relatively new thing. I was working at a music festival running workshops when my little girl spotted something of interest elsewhere on the festival grounds.

It turned out to be the QI Elves, we had seen them the year previously at the festival but as a small little aside in one of the bars with basically quiz machine games. This was different.

We all beat the QI elves with our questions/answers and won ourselves badged and I got an autographed photo. I can’t remember if it was that year or the next that they were sharing a tent with Unbound?

There were a series of author talks as well as the QI elves and lots of fun optical illusion stuff etc… to be honest I can’t remember which year was which nor which festival it was!

But we signed up to the crowd-sourced and funded publisher Unbound and got lots of badges.

Subsequent years we bought books, and saw Robert Llewellyn who does many things including writing books though obviously most people know his TV career. They have brought me poets and writers and the QI elves and I have watched the various projected get funding… or not. My husband has help celebs (ok well Alan Davis) find the right bit of the festival for their talks and I’ve asked lots of questions I would not have had the oppurtunity to do other wise.

Basically you vote by making a money pledge which gets refunded to you if the project you are backing fails. There are different reward tiers and it works really well for books that would never be considered by traditional publishers but need that little bit extra than most self publishers could manage.

So yeah we love this project and I thought I would just bring it to peoples attention 🙂

Unbound.

For the initial launch of Love: A Stranger Dream I made these little figurines out of polymer clay and beads. They are 3D colour representations of the little Shadowing Souls that appear through out the visual poem.

I created some bookmarks to go with A Stranger Dream, using the art work and the laminator – I really like how they have come out 🙂

When I ordered the promotional stickers for my non-linear visual poem colouring in book on identity Love: A Stranger Dream these lovely blue stickers turned up, I think they were a mistake there was only like three of them and the rest were all the black and white as requested. But actually I really love the effect and kind of want to get the stickers done in green, magenta and so on.

I really love how the post cards for my visual poem Love: A Stranger Dream came out 🙂

The cataclysmic boom, sliced the gloom
Of turgid twilight, that consumed
Endeavors that never left the brain’s loom
People cowered at self-made doom
The nihilistic bloom
Swallowing decaying rooms whilst housewives bake macaroons
There is no escape, we took the bait
Couldn’t wait but left all too late
A heart sealed, mouldering tomb
The despised coon – there was no boon to life
Just strife, rife, gushing with glittering knife
No husband, no wife, no kids, no fight
Just the catacombs of extinction looming
The dream consuming, consumers mourning
Dreading the dawning of an age not to be
This is the future, for you and for me
It didn’t start with the honey bee
But it didn’t stop either
With the corporate media weavers
And political divas, the age old money levers
That sunk an economy
Shockingly
They blamed and shamed – the poor
Locked and bolted all the doors
Stood knackered with their trafficked whores
Bemoaning their lot
Announcing all deviants should be shot
Defiance of their own rot
Faces smeared in snot, grot of a new stage
Withered in the womb, shrivelled cocoon
Of golden times gone by
When you were promised cars that could fly
Same as the old, the same old, same old, old
Dreams turn to ashes, as poets receive lashes
For speaking the truth, or a thought
Caught
For a belief, too afraid to speak
So no one spoke, none of us
We all choked
In effluent and bile
The end was a whimper, what could be simpler
Poisoned air, the nine yard stare
Mercury in the fish, no rice in the dish
The bread bowl is dust, even the shiny cars rust
Desert of thinking
Sinking
Mind
Crippled society
turned cannibal
It’s feast time

New Leaf writers asked me if I would like to join their closed group – I said yes and I have not regretted it! I love my writer communities weather they are on line or in real life. New Leaf has a local aspect to it for me and ties in with some physical go out to groups I know in my area.

Prompts, feedback and info posted by members on events coming up have all been very helpful. I was worried that I’d joined too many but actually when I am being productive it is not quiet enough and it doesn’t matter if I miss a few weeks etc… as everybody else is used to people with busy hectic and distracted lives.