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On 11th April at 8 pm, Jonathan Edwards will announce the prize winners in our 2023 Open Poetry Competition in an event at the Royal Wells Hotel in Tunbridge Wells. The seven prize winners will read their winning poems either on zoom or live. Following that, Jonathan will treat us to a reading from his own poetry.

Jonathan is a very well-known poet and editor. His first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and in 2019 his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He has read his poems on BBC radio and television, recorded them for the Poetry Archive, and led workshops in schools, universities and prisons. He has been a judge for the National Poetry Competition and the Wales Book of the Year, a Literature Wales mentor of emerging writers, and a Gladstone’s Library writer-in-residence. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales.

The event is open to non-members of the Society for a mere £3 on the door. Do come along!

Our next event is an evening of poetry with Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana at the Royal Wells Hotel in Tunbridge Wells: 8 pm on 21st March.

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University and an MA in Japanese Language from Sheffield University. She teaches creative writing and is module leader for the International Foundation programme in Humanities, at Newcastle University. Her most recent work appeared in PN Review, The Moth, Poetry Wales, Fenland Poetry Journal, Tears in the Fence and The Alchemy Spoon. Online her poems can be read in Anthropocene, The High Window and London Grip.

She came third in the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry competition, has been shortlisted for the Winchester and Troubadour prizes, and had two poems shortlisted by Billy Collins, for the 2022 Fish Prize. She read at the 2021 Aldeburgh festival, alongside Wendy Cope and at the 2022 Oxford Think Human festival, with Mary Jean Chan. She was also a featured poet at the 2022 Tears in the Fence festival, and has performed internationally, in Portland, Oregon, at the American Writer’s Program conference. Her debut collection, Sing me down from the dark, is published by SALT.

Alexandra will read her poetry after our usual Open Mic spot, when members (and visitors who wish to join us for a £3 entry fee) can volunteer to read or recite one of their own poems (max 40 lines, please).

We look forward to welcoming Julia Webb to read her poems at our next meeting, Tuesday 21st Feb at 8 pm.

Julia is a poet, editor and teacher from Norfolk who has published three collections, most recently The Telling (Nine Arches) in May 2022.

Julia lives in Norwich where she is a poetry editor for Lighthouse, teaches online and real world poetry courses, mentors writers, runs Norwich Stanza and works for Cafe Writers. In 2012 she was awarded a TLC free read, which you can read about here. In 2011 she won the Poetry Society’s Stanza competition and in 2018 she won the Battered Moons poetry competition. Her poem “Sisters” was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prize. In 2016 she spent a month as writer in residence on Norwich Market.

This will be a face-to-face event at The Royal Wells Hotel in Tunbridge Wells.

Non-members are always welcome, for £3 payable at the door.

As usual, our January meeting this year features three members of the Society reading their own work.

This year we will be treated to Siân Thomas, Kevin Scully and Fred Ball, each reading two sets of their highly accomplished poetry.

Starts at 8 pm.

Venue: Royal Wells Hotel in Tunbridge Wells.

The even will also be zoomed for members who can’t make it in person.

• SiânThomas is Poet in Residence for Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Her pamphlet Ovid’s Echo and collection Ashdown are published by Paekakariki Press. She is a founder-member of The Muse Agency and presents The Poetry Bath on Wildhart Radio. 
• Fred Bell from Rusthall works as an English teacher in Bromley, though has also lived and worked in France, Italy and Russia. Inspired to write poetry by David Morley and Stephen Knight, Fred is considering doing an MA in creative writing. He also enjoys playing jazz and funk with his band, Lateral Flow.
• Kevin Scully’s poetry has appeared in Theology, Saccharine Poetry, Poems In Praise of Libraries, Second Chance Lit and some small journals. He is Poet in Residence for the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path in Sussex. www.kevin-scully.com

Our guest for the 20th. December meeting is Amy Key. The meeting is on Zoom and starts at 8.00 pm with an Open mic (one poem each, maximum 40 lines, ideally less) – seasonal themes particularly welcome, but not mandatory.

Amy grew up in Kent and the North East, and now works in London. She writes poetry, essays and non-fiction. Her debut poetry collection Luxe was published by Salt in November 2013. Her second collection Isn’t Forever was published by Bloodaxe in June 2018 and was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card choice. Her debut non-fiction book Arrangements in Blue will be published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in Spring 2023, alongside publication in the US (Liveright) and Italy (Rizzoli).

A strong influence on Amy has been Joni Mitchell, especially the album Blue: “I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it. Now I think it’s more that Joni taught me about longing. About the gap between what you want and what you have, and what you have and what you had wanted.”

Some reviews praising Amy’s poetry:

‘As for poetry, I fell hard for Amy Key’s Isn’t Forever, a gorgeous, sad box of delights about intimacy, bad bodies, sorrow… Key is adept at linguistic surprises, charting women’s lives with a savage delicacy.’ – Olivia Laing, The Guardian (Best Books of 2018).

Isn’t Forever, is playful, surreal and enchanting but also rooted in brutal emotional honesty. She is writer of a rare and strange magic.’ – Sarah Perry, The Guardian (Best Summer Books 2018)

‘Amy Key does for verse what Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer of Fleabag, is doing for television, wrenching laughter of shock and recognition from line after line.’ – Susannah Herbert, The Observer

Amy’s poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Best British Poetry 2015, Love Poems (Faber & Faber) and The Poetry of Sex (Penguin).

She co-edited the online journal Poems in Which and an anthology of poems on friendship between women, Best Friends Forever, published by The Emma Press in 2014. In 2016 a pamphlet, History, was published by If A Leaf Falls Press.

We hope you can join us, with Amy, to celebrate the magic of poetry at our December meeting.

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.