Remember, remember

… to join us on Monday 5th November!

Photo: Tim Lo

We look forward to verbal fireworks from Beth Calverley.

Beth Calverley is a poet, producer and facilitator who has been writing and performing for 17 years.

Through newly-ripened imagery, Beth finds words for the unspoken and unearths stories of togetherness and overcoming. This year, she became the inaugural Gloucester Regional Roundhouse Slam winner and a 2018 Roundhouse Finalist.

As Chief Operator of The Poetry Machine, Beth tours UK festivals and events speed-writing bespoke poetry. She hosts workshops that help people to put their own stories into words, and she has recently worked with Teenage Cancer Trust, This Mum Runs, Valley Festival and Arnos Vale Cemetery.

Beth is one quarter of Milk Poetry, a nurturing platform for established and emerging poets in Bristol.

We’ll be meeting upstairs at the Venue, 42 South Street, Wells BA5 1SL. Why not arrive early and have a pizza or a fish-supper? There is a car-park almost next-door, in Bell’s Close, and it is free in the evenings.

Just a month late for National Poetry Day, the optional theme for any poet in need of a prompt is “Change”. For the rest of you: write about whatever you please!

News of Fountain poets:

Congratulations to Michelle Diaz, winner of the recent poetry competition marking 70 years of the NHS. Michelle will be reading with Timothy Ades at the launch of Jane Lovell’s Metastatic at the Poetry Cafe in London on Tuesday of next week. She will be our featured poet at the meeting in May next year, reading from her debut pamphlet The Dancing Boy. You can read a poem of hers recently published on Algebra of Owls.

Congratulations also to Rachael Clyne, who read from her recently-published book Girl Golem at the Swindon Poetry Festival last weekend and will be reading at Torbay Poetry Festival next weekend. Her Wells launch will be in December this year.

And to Jinny Fisher, who has had two poems accepted by Algebra of Owls online poetry journal. Jinny will be our featured poet at the June meeting next year, with her pamphlet The Escapologist.

David Cloke was interviewed on Radio Somerset on National Poetry Day. Hear him 1.55.30 into the programme, grace under pressure personified, with his very appropriate poem Antenna. A triumph!

If you keep working on old ideas, new ones can’t show up.
– Judy Martin