Skip to main content

Oxfam Summer Poetry Reading Tonight


Tuesday, May 29

7 Poets in ‘07 Summer Poetry Reading

Oxfam Poetry series

featuring seven poets:


Edward Barker

Siobhan Campbell

John Haynes

Frances Leviston

Valeria Melchioretto

Bernard O’Donoghue

Maurice Riordan

Edward Barker Born Rome, Italy. Moved UK uni degree mod history mod languages Magdalen College Oxford. Worked in film as actor, writer, directed short films, cinema manager, bulk carrier ship broker. Married, one child. Currently runs a small homeless organisation. and http://www.thepoem.co.uk/ website. Book of First Poems published in 2000. Also published in 2002 Forward anthology and The Like of It (2006). New pamphlet being prepared for Turtle Chaos press.

Valeria Melchioretto is an artist and writer who has lived in London since 1992. In 2004 her pamphlet Podding Peas was published by Hearing Eye. She won the New Writing Ventures Award 2005 for Poetry and her first full collection, The End of Limbo, will appear from Salt Publishing in 2007.

Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982, and moved to Sheffield in 1991. She read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and received an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. A pamphlet of her work, Lighter, was published by Mews Press in 2004, and was the PBS's Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2005. Her poems have also appeared in New Writing 14, Ten Hallam Poets and the TLS. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2006. Her first collection will be published by Picador.

Maurice Riordan was born in Lisgoold, Co. Cork, Ireland. His most recent book of poems is The Holy Land, which was published by Faber this spring. His previous books have been nominated for both the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread awards. In 2004 he was selected as one of the UK’s ‘Next’ Generation Poets. He has co-edited with scientist Jon Turney A Quark for Mister Mark (Faber, 2000); and, with John Burnside, the ecological anthology Wild Reckoning, a tribute to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. He teaches at Goldsmiths College and at Imperial College.

Siobhan Campbell’s poems have appeared in Verse Magazine, The Independent, Poetry Ireland, The Sunday Tribune and elsewhere. Her collections, from Blackstaff Press, are The Permanent Wave and The Cold That Burns. She was a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University.

John Haynes is this year's winner of the Costa Poetry Prize (formerly known as the Whitbread Prize) for his collection, Letter to Patience, Seren. Haynes spent 1970 to 1988 as a lecturer in English at Ahmadu Bello University. Now in the UK, he has continued teaching, writing and publishing and is the author of a number of books: on teaching, style and language theory, as well as African poetry and two other volumes of verse. He has a PhD in applied linguistics.

Bernard O'Donoghue Born Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. Came to England in 1962, and has lived since1965 in Oxford where he teaches Medieval English at Wadham College. 5 books of poetry: Poaching Rights (Gallery Press 1987), and 4 with Chatto - The Weakness 1991; Gunpowder 1995, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize; Here Nor There 1999; Outliving 2003. His Selected Poems are out from Faber in 2008. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Penguin Classics in 2006.

Oxfam Books & Music Shop

7pm ,Tuesday 29 May

91 Marylebone High Street, W1

near Baker Street tube station.


Admission is free – however a donation of £10 would be most appreciated.

All proceeds will go to Oxfam.


Seating is limited to 75.

To RSVP and reserve a place, please contact Martin Penny by Friday, May 25

telephone: 020 7487 3570

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".