Tomorrow, Saturday 17th October, we should have been indulging in a day of poetry at The Globe. Like every other Fountain Poets meeting since March, it has been cancelled. I hope, of course, to re-book all the cancelled poets some time in a future that seems to be drawing further and further into a distant and unguessable future.
CLIVE BIRNIE of Burning Eye Books (“Never knowingly mainstream”) would have read to us and run a Q&A on the process of achieving publication. He has sent me a link to the Clevedon Festival website, where you can hear him read from Palimpsest, his narrative sequence of poems recently published by Verve Press. It has been described as “Sci-fi poetry noir.” Clive has three times been short-listed in the Wells Festival Poetry Competition, and he won the Wyvern Prize in 2013.
Here you will find, among others, a reading by Deborah Harvey, who was due to read for us in June, one by Dominic Fisher who would have been our guest poet for July, one by Ben Banyard our April 2019 guest, and one by Melanie Branton who was our guest reader in July 2018.
Claire Trevien made a stop-motion animation of the final poem from Clive’s book. It can be seen here. Clive’s writing is very much my cup of tea, and the animation is a delight. Do try it!
I’m sad to miss Rosie Jackson and Graham Burchell reading from their wonderful collaboration Two Girls and a Beehive; however I have found some readings from the book on-line here.
I hope you’ll find time to watch/ listen to some of these over the weekend.
Trust the poem. It will survive on surprisingly little. A poem doesn’t need much content to survive; its bones are hollow, like a bird’s. That’s what allows them to fly. You don’t need to haul the carcass of a great idea or story into the poem and dissect it there. Poems aren’t built of ideas; they’re built from words. Just enough words, no more, no less. – John Glenday
ways with words in the city of Wells 