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Image by Gerry Wardle

Our November meeting, welcoming Sean O’Brien, will take place on Zoom, on Tuesday 15th November, at 8pm.

Sean is a major poet on the contemporary poetry scene, as well as a critic, playwright, translator anthologist, broadcaster, novelist and editor. He has been winner of the TS Eliot prize,  the Eric Gregory award, the Somerset Maugham award, the Cholmondeley award, and, three times, the Forward Prize (1995, 2001 and 2007). He is Professor of creative writing at Newcastle University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He has published many collections of poetry, and his latest, Embark, is published next month by Picador. Copies can be pre-ordered here: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/sean-obrien/embark/9781529096859 

What better way to spend a dark November evening than in the company of this illustrious writer.

The evening will begin with an Open Mic, followed by Sean’s reading.

Our guest on October 18 is the writer Dai George, and this will be a live performance. A brief AGM will start off the evening and be followed by Dai’s reading. The meeting will begin at 8 o’clock.

Dai George was born in Cardiff in 1986 and has studied in Bristol, New York and London. His poems and criticism have appeared in The Guardian Online, The Boston Review, New Welsh Review, Poetry Review, The White Review, The Lonely Crowd, and many other magazines and anthologies. His first collection, The Claims Office, was published by Seren in October 2013, and was an Evening Standard Book of the Year. He works as Reviews Editor for Poetry London and teaches widely, in universities, schools and adult education. His first novel, The Counterplot, came out as an Audible Original in December 2019, narrated by Harry Myers. It is a work of historical fiction about the Gunpowder Plot, with the playwright Ben Jonson as the central character. Dai’s fiction is represented by Georgina Capel Associates.

What better way is there to spend an autumn evening than by enjoying some excellent poetry with this versatile and compelling poet.

Our annual Open Poetry Competition is now open to entries. All poems entered will be read by this year’s judge, the award-winning poet and editor Jonathan Edwards.

The deadline for entries is 31 January 2023. All entries are by email, at a cost of £5 each, or £4 each for entries of three or more poems.

As in previous years, we offer seven cash prizes:

1st Prize: £1000

2nd Prize: £300

3rd Prize: £100

4th Prizes: 4 x £50

Further details on the rules and how to enter are given here.

Good luck!

Yousif is our first reader for the autumn season of poetry in 2022 and will be with us on Zoom, as this was arranged before we went live again. And as the evenings close in, what better way to spend a Tuesday evening than in company with poets. And we are clearly in for a special evening this month.

YOUSIF M. QASMIYEH is a poet and translator. His collection, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), was The Poetry Book Society’s Recommendation for Spring 2021, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and was Highly Commended by the 2021 Forward Prizes.

“Writing The Camp is an exceptional, essential collection drawn from the poet’s experience of the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon. The poetry moves beyond the observational into a philosophical meditation on the existential nature of place. Qasmiyeh asks “Where is time?”, crossing footprints of Derrida, “To experience is to advance by navigating, to walk by traversing”. Writing The Camp is a brave and beautiful work, one which will surely be of historical importance.” (PBS)

We will start the meeting with Open Mic, followed by a reading by the acclaimed Yousif.

Next Tuesday, July 19July, is our July meeting with Matt Haigh.

Matthew Haigh is the author of Death Magazine (Salt, 2019) and Black Jam (Broken Sleep Books, 2019). He is the co-editor of Hit Points: an anthology of video game poetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2021). Death Magazine was longlisted for the Polari first book prize in 2020. His work has been highly commended in the Forward prizes, commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize, and published in journals including Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Magma, Fourteen Poems, The Guardian and Poetry London. Further work has featured in anthologies from The Emma Press, Bad Betty Press and Sidekick Books.

He has performed at a number of festivals including Cheltenham and Gloucester Poetry Festivals, Swansea Fringe, Poetry in Aldeburgh and the European Poetry Festival. In 2021 he was a judge for the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and interviewed for Edge Magazine on the relationship between poetry and video games. A new pamphlet, Vampires, is published with Bad Betty Press in 2021.His collection Death Magazine has been described as “a neutropian vision of our soundbite, snippet-obsessed, digital and print magazine culture. It employs the Dadaist technique of cut-up to produce poems that range from the blackly comic to the surreal, from the nonsensical to the prescient.” He experiments with modernist forms as well as producing a range of free verse poems more traditional in form. “This monster hybrid of styles, of fact and fiction, aims to replicate the untrustworthy, hyperbolic stream of media that absorbs our lives every day.”

Before his reading there will be our usual Open Mic, starting at 8.00 p.m.. One poem per reader, max 40 lines. Then Matt promises to entertain and stimulate with the variety of mood and style in his unique brand of poetry.

Once again it will be on Zoom – as many but not all of our meetings will be for the rest of this year, as they were set up well ahead, when we were still in lock-down.

the poet

Maria Taylor is of British Cypriot origin. She was born in Nottinghamshire, raised in London and now lives in Leicestershire. Her debut collection, Melanchrini, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. More recently, she published her pamphlet Instructions for Making Me with HappenStance. Maria’s writing has featured in a range of magazines, and she is Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. Her new collection, Dressing for the Afterlife, came out from Nine Arches Press in September 2020.

This month’s meeting will take place on 28 June, to enable our first “in person” meeting for a long time and hopefully the first of many. It will also be broadcast through Zoom for those who can’t be there in person.

the venue

Royal Wells Hotel, upstairs room.

Get yourself a drink at the downstairs bar, if you like, before the meeting which starts at 8.00 pm.

Hooray for a real live poet in the room! Enjoy it!

Amal Garnham, winner of this year’s members’ competition for her poem Wake, receiving the Keith Francis Bowl, which she will keep until next year, from Society Chair David Hensley.

An exciting collaboration with the Tunbridge Wells Oxfam Bookshop and the Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival.

During the Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival in June, we’ve teamed up with the Oxfam Bookshop in Chapel Place, Tunbridge Wells, to display and sell signed copies of poetry collections by Kent & Sussex Poetry Society members.

20 members of the Society have kindly donated signed copies of their published collections for sale by Oxfam during the festival period. It’s first come, first served, so although we’ve managed to rustle up around 60 books in the collection, don’t hesitate!

Even if you don’t want to buy one of our members’ books, the Oxfam shop is a veritable treasure trove of poetry, old and new, throughout the year. If you’re in Tunbridge Wells, go down and take a look!

And while you’re about it, how about signing up for one of the Festival events on the Eventbrite site.

3rd prize in this year’s Members’ Competition was won by Clive Eastwood, once of Kent and now of Suffolk, for his poem Doppelgänger.

Doppelgänger

The ghost wears blue trousers.

Pale blue. And a red pullover;
not scarlet or burgundy
but a considered mid-red.
Her hair is white and she leans
a little to the right
as she scans the shelves
in our small supermarket.

As if there were a pebble in her shoe.

Or as she sailor-walks to the checkout,
handbag slung diagonally
from her sloping shoulder.
Yet she’s only a ghost from behind,
head-on she’s someone else.

And only when
she takes you by surprise
as you’re hurrying to find
something almost forgotten.

I once rushed outside to meet her
as planned in the market
but of course she wasn’t there.
Nor is she ever in the garden
dead-heading roses
as we drive towards the house.

Or clattering pots in the kitchen.
Or sitting by the light and at last
handing over the crossword
with only two solutions left to be found.

Second prize in our Members’ Competition this year was awarded to Kent-based poet Jess Mookherjee for Snow Monkey Goes to Heaven.

Snow Monkey Goes to Heaven

On the bullet train to Kurukawa
Onsen, we take a bag, a map of the lines

on your hand, an axe, a shrunken head.
I follow you, frost- bitten, try to hold you,

Don’t touch, it hurts all over, you say
and the chill’s unwritten on my fingers,

I keep them moving and our plans on ice.
I try to read your face, it’s a tangled hell

in stone cold kanji. I lose you round
the corner of my eye. You chant it’s summer

and we’re just sitting, spending time
with each-other. You mumble It’s OK,

we’ll change together, when we catch
our connection at Minami. My skin’s off-peak,

out of season and you stop shivering.
I take an ice pick, break you open,

say don’t fall asleep, we’re going to make it.
My teeth glass-chatter as I kneel, watch you

burst, the cracks are lotus shaped.
Scents will take us as we melt in Kurukawa.

It’s too cold to talk any more and our journey
widens in a shatter of heated springs.

You turn blue as we stop at Minami,
and whisper This Heaven is such a simple thing.