Monthly Archives: February 2014

The competition has now closed. A big ‘thank you’ to all who entered. The results will be announced in April, and the winning poems posted on the website and published in our annual Folio. Watch this space!

We were delighted to welcome Jon Stone to Tunbridge Wells Camden Centre this month. Born in Derby, Jon studied in Norwich and now lives in Whitechapel.  He gave us a lively reading, with wit and humour, as well as intensely personal and vivid, sensuous writing. His poetry covers a wide range of wonderfully inventive imagery – “a ganglion of utterance” – and he concerns himself with the structure and architecture of poetry, as well as showing breadth of imagination.  Jon also explored the in-between elements of mud, dust, steam and ash, and read to us some very blue poetry, inspired by digging into the medieval Welsh tradition.

Jon’s collection “School of Forgery”  in which 10 different personae come together in a wide variety of voices, including a night watchman and a female honorologist, is published by Salt.

What a pity there was such a small audience for such an excellent young poet.

On Tuesday 18^th February we host a reading from the prolific and highly acclaimed Jon Stone. Jon has been twice commended in the National Poetry Competition. He had three pamphlets published in the same year (2010) before Salt brought out his well deserved first full collection School of Forgery in 2011.  For a preview of Jon Stone check out Poets for Pussy Riot on Youtube.

 The reading will be preceded by our short AGM which begins 8pm at the Camden Centre in Tunbridge Wells.