Making Love and Poetry

Love, ain’t it grand! Or not as the case may be.  Whether you’re starry-eyed and spooning or fed up to the back teeth with all things February, The Picador Book of Love Poems (Picador 2011) has something for you.  From the first flush to the last gasp, there’s a poem about it in this anthology. Editor John Stammers couples a contemporary poet with an older counterpart throughout to allow the generations to talk across the centuries about love and loss.

Poems we will be looking at in particular are:

True Love by  Sharon Olds

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Arab Love-Song by Francis Thompson

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps by Galway Kinnell

Prayer by Hugo Williams

A Private Bottling by Don Paterson

Nevers by Colette Bryce

The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew

The Voice by Thomas Hardy

(Time allowing!)  See you from 6pm-8pm on Tuesday 7 February on the third floor of Newcastle’s City Library:  walk straight in front of you as you leave the lifts and keep going until you reach the back wall!  Looking forward to seeing you there, especially if you have never been before.

Black Cat Bone

Happy New Year to you all!  We have a particularly fine selection of poetry books to read this year in the Poetry Room and we’ll be starting with John Burnside’s 12th collection, Black Cat Bone, winner of the 2011 Forward Prize.  A book fascinated with winter, it ranges across inner and outer landscapes, considering the unsettling tension between hope and disappointment.  His references are wide and scholarly (The Bible, Kafka, Melville, Breughel et al) but he’s also not above Lucille Ball and the voodoo bone of the title, ‘conferring success, invisibility and sexual power on its owner’.  Burnside’s poems are haunting and persuasive, sinuous in their syntax, crystalline in their imagery ‘more sleight-of-hand/ than sorrow’.  Amongst others we’ll be looking at:

The Fair Chase
Disappointment
Loved and Lost
Notes Towards an Ending
Hurts Me Too
Oh No, Not My Baby
Down By the River
Bird Nest Bound
Hearsay
Amnesia
Pieter Breughel: Winter Landscape…
Late Show
From the Chinese

Looking forward to seeing you at Newcastle City Library to blow the Christmas cobwebs away on Tuesday 10th January, 6pm-8pm.

Snakes, Mothers and Desperate Men

We’re rounding off this year at the Poetry Room with the wonderful Martina Evans, whose poetry collection Facing the Public (Anvil, 2009) received the Ciampi International Poetry Prize and was named by Bernard O’Donoghue as his book of the year.

We will be focusing on the following poems:

Two Hostages
Omar Khadr
Royalty
Desperate Men
Facing The Public
The Australian Rug
Boa Constrictor
The King is Dead
Bloody Mary
Knock

For more information on Martina see www.martinaevans.com.

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday 13 December from 6pm-8pm at the usual place, Level 3 of Newcastle City Library.

And if you’re wondering why we’re a week later this month, it’s to allow you to attend the unmissable Bloodaxe Lectures given this year by Sean O’Brien: for more information see www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla/events/item/bloodaxe-poetry-lectures-by-sean-o-brien.

You’re especially welcome at the Poetry Room if you’ve never been before: make December the month!

101 Sonnets

A reminder that we’re meeting on the second Tuesday of the month in November (to fit in a trip to Northern Stage to see What are They Whispering?, a show about poetry, with readings by Imitiaz Dharker, Joe Dunthorne and John Stammers).

So, on 8 November, 6pm-8pm at City Library, we’ll be looking at Don Paterson’s 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney. Don is also appearing at Durham Book Festival where he is this year’s Festival Laureate, and one of the events he’ll be appearing at is dedicated to his interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

This anthology is both a survey and a celebration of the much-loved 14-line form. Do read the excellent introduction – all you wanted to know about sonnets but were afraid to ask… We won’t have time to look at all 101 but those we’ll be considering will include:

Robert Frost The Silken Tent
Jo Shapcott Muse
Wallace Stevens The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain
Robert Crawford Opera
Michael Donaghy The Brother
RS Thomas The Bright Field
DG Rossetti A Sonnet
Patrick Kavanagh Inniskeen Road
Michael Drayton Since There’s No Help…?
Ciaran Carson Finding the Ox
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Swineherd?
John Keats When I Have Fears…?
WH Auden Who’s Who
William Shakespeare That Time of Year…
George Herbert Prayer
Seamus Heaney The Skylight

Poetry with Body

Michael Symmons Roberts’ fourth collection Corpus embraces the body in all its mess and gloriousness. The book, which won the Whitbread Prize, includes poems that explore both the living body and the corpse in religion, art, science and myth.
We will be focusing on some of the following poems:

Ascension Day
Corpse
The Hands
Carnivorous I
Carnivorous II
Jairus
Choreography
The Razor
To John Donne
Last Things

So come with your hearts, heads, hands and other body-parts to Level 4 of the City Library, Newcastle between 6pm-8pm this Tuesday 4 October. All are very welcome: looking forward to seeing you in particular!

Read Regional (and a little further afield)

This month at the Poetry Room, we’ll be looking at poems from writers involved in this year’s Read Regional campaign (some very close to home) and more far-flung voices who have provided inspiration for local poets.

Photocopies of the poems will be available on the night but, for a taster, do look at the following:

I Go Back To May 1937 by Sharon Olds

www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/olds/poems.html

The Linen Industry by Michael Longley

In a White Town by Daljit Nagra

(both of the above poems should come up on a google search)

For information on the Read Regional Campaign see www.readregional.com

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday 6 September between 6pm-8pm on the third floor of Newcastle’s, City Library. All are very welcome whether you’re a first-timer or an old-hand. See you there!

Around the World in Seven Poems

We had a wonderful readaround at last night’s Poetry Room. The selection of current favourites that people brought were fascinating and very varied but we were able to trace connections between them all. Form was a particular concern, as was place. Three American poets, two Indian, one from Scotland and another from the north of England – a great way to sign off before our summer break. Looking forward to seeing you all again in September.

The poems we looked at were:

The Present – Michael Donaghy
The Peace of Wild Things – Wendell Berry
Glose – Marilyn Hacker
Ghazal – Darshan Singh
The Worker – Rabindrath Tagore
Late Night Walk Down Terry Street – Douglas Dunn
Grace Darling Learns to Count – Christy Ducker

This month at the Poetry Room, you decide…!

 What are you in the mood for this month:   Keats or Cope, Shelley or Sylvia?  It’s your choice at this month’s Poetry Room where we’re asking you to bring along a poem of your choice (plus ten copies). 

Old or new, rhyming or non-rhyming, ballad or – you get the picture.  The only rules are that you should love it, and it should not be written by you.

 So come along, even if you’ve never been before, to Level 3, Newcastle City Library between 6pm-8pm on Tuesday 5 July.  It’s our final Poetry Room of the season and it’s going to be a good night!

And in case anyone missed the recent radio adaptation of Christopher Reid’s wonderful collection The Scattering (a Poetry Room favourite when we looked at it last year) do check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011vg99

Bees, Bobolinks and Daisies at the Poetry Room

 The secluded life of American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) has been much mythologized.  At this month’s Poetry Room we are – as ever – going to be focusing on the work of this enigmatic figure:  Ted Hughes characterizes her poetry as follows: 

‘the slow, small metre, a device for bringing up each syllable into close-up, as under a microscope;…there is the mosaic pictogram concentration of ideas into which she codes a volcanic elemental imagination…the riddling, oblique artistic strategies…solid with metaphors, saturated with the homeliest imagery and experience, the freakish blood-and-nerve paradoxical vitality of the latinisms’. 

 Wow!  Come and enjoy a heady Poetry Room with us on Tuesday 7 June at Newcastle City Library from 6pm-8pm).  The poems we’ll be looking at in particular include:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
The Soul selects her own Society –
These are the days when Birds come back –
I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –
I taste a liquor never brewed –
A Bird came down the Walk –
This World is not Conclusion.
I dwell in Possibility –
I heard a Fly buzz  – when I died –
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
Remorse – is Memory – awake –
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Because I could not stop for Death –
Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
There’s a certain Slant of light,
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
Rehearsal to Ourselves
Going –to–her !

See you on Level 3, at the back among the Fiction!  Do come along, and if you’ve never been before make this your first time…

Faking It Up With the Truth

Readers and critics are deeply divided about the poetry of Anne Sexton. Although she won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, some regard her work as too confessional and lacking in artistic control. We’ll have a chance to add our own voices to the debate at the next Poetry Room session on Tuesday 3 May, 6pm-8pm, in Newcastle City Library.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1928, Sexton began writing at the age of 28, encouraged by her psychotherapist, and within four years she’d had her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, published to great acclaim by Houghton Mifflin. She went on to write eight more collections, win many more prizes and honours as well as tour with her band, ‘Her Kind’, giving immensely popular readings of her work, and become sought after as a teacher of creative writing, despite ongoing struggles with serious mental health problems.

At a time of profound questioning with regard to state, world, race and gender politics, Sexton broke taboos, daring to raise issues of identity, mental illness, abuse, adultery, the minutiae of a woman’s physical experience previously hidden from view. Influenced by WD Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, James Wright and Maxine Kumin, her work, clustering around the themes of family, love, the unravelling psyche, death and religion, is forthright, playful, rich in metaphor and allusion, immediate and compelling. Anne Sexton committed suicide in October 1974.

Erica Jong has said of her: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems… But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies… There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere… They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”

The poems we will be reading together will include:

Her Kind
In the Deep Museum
I Remember
The Truth the Dead Know
The Double Image
Consorting with Angels
Wanting to Die
Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman
For My Lover, Returning to His Wife
Just Once
Us
Briar Rose
Jesus Suckles

Let Anne Sexton blow your Bank Holiday cobwebs away! Look forward to seeing you on 3 May in our new home at City Library.