Monthly Archives: June 2012

One of the beautiful Victorian cemeteries in Tunbridge Wells, Woodbury Park, held a Jubilee celebration of local arts and crafts societies today, and it was a pleasure to be involved. At our stand, we offered a chocolate for every haiku written, and encouraged a real mixture of people to take part – many of whom it was their first ever poem written since school! But it was great fun, and a big thank you to everyone who took part.

What a wonderful evening of poems, fascinating facts, wild images and flowers last night at the Camden Centre. Thanks to our readers, John McCoullough and Anna Robinson, and to the gardeners at Sissinghurst for their donation of a beautiful bouquet of peonies and other seasonal blooms from the garden of our first President, Vita Sackville-West.

Our next meeting will be on July 17th at the Trinity Arts Centre, Tunbridge Wells – 8-9pm when there will be a reading from members. Do come along, member or not. It’s free and unticketed.

We hope to see you then.

Vita Sackville-West was of course our first patron. Here’s an amazing original recording of her voice…

Forget the rain – the next meeting of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society looks like warming us up. We will be joined at the Camden Centre on June 19th, 8pm by two young poetry stars, John McCullough and Anna Robinson.

Described as Brighton’s brightest young poet, John’s first collection, The Frost Fairs has been gaining many great reviews including ones in the Guardian – “His musical work offers up an array of voices – speaking statues, spoons in a drawer, men sent to bed for a year “trialling pills for weightless conditions” – sometimes playing for laughs, but always thoughtful and touching.” – and the Observer, who called it ‘a first collection of great range and confidence’. His poems explore love in many forms, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay and cross-gendered lives from the past.

As part of Poetry International and the South Bank Centre’s Trading Places project, Anna was Poet in Residence in Lower Marsh in 2006. A former tutor in prisons, she is a regular poetry judge for the Koestler Competition and is a founding editor for Not Shut Up! and the newly established Long Poem Magazine. Her collection,The Finders of London was shortlisted for the inaugural Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre Prize for Poetry in 2011.

And we will also be marking the 50th anniversary of the death of our first patron, Vita Sackville-West, with the generous donation of a bouquet of flowers from her famous garden at Sissinghurst, and also a recorded original reading.

We do hope you will join us.