29 JUNE - 8 JULY 2012

Ledbury Poetry Festival 2012

NEXT YEAR'S DATES: 29th JUNE - 8th JULY.

The festival is over for 2011 - and we are already thinking about next year's programme and who to invite and how to make it better than ever.

But first a big thank you to all our volunteers - the many people who stewarded, created mountains of sandwiches and endless cups of tea and coffee and even opened their homes to provide a visiting poet with a bed for the night. We couldn't do it without you.

If interested in getting involved next year email: manager@poetry-festival.com to find out about the opportunities available. 

Victoria Patch                                                                    Festival Manager

 

Shakespeare at Hellens Manor         Sunday 4th December 4pm £15

Many thanks to Roger Lloyd Pack, Hannah Watkins and   Morgan Szymamski who all gave great performances. And also to Jo Kingham, Mary Constable and everyone at Hellens who helped with the organisation and programme. You can see the performance for yourself if you click on the link below. We think it went rather well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfTClrnUNQ0

 

Ledbury Poetry Festival Poetry Competition 2012

Details of Ledbury Poetry Festival's 2012 competition will be up on this website soon. 

Poet-In-Residence

Our poet-in-residence in 2011 was Ian Duhig. Twice winner of the National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Forward Best Collection prizes, Ian says: ’I do mock literature and take it seriously at the same time, but anyone who is passionately attached to a football team will have similar mixed feelings.’ Ian wrote a sequence of three sonnets for the festival: here is one.

III Skew Bridge

Ian Duhig

 I felt quite at home,

As if it were mine,

Sleeping lazily

In this house of fresh air.

-Sora, in Bashō's The Narrow Road to the Deep North

 

I knew I was lost passing the Ross Maze Museum

a third time, late for connections at Skew Bridge.

Missing the Orient Express, the Troy quinquireme,

the last magic carpet and Pharoah's golden barge,

I settled with ghosts from its old navvies' shanty

to drink in that night the spirit of the navigator,

whose camp might mean a song, or build upon ty,

the Welsh word for house, our house of fresh air.

I turned in and dreamed of a nearby skew bridge,

built yearly from fresh words which only connect,

though turning like pages, a verse-end or sonnet,

or any of the coats worn by the English language.

I slept soundly. When I woke and rose next day,

I found a thousand years had passed away.

 

2011 below.

 

The Festival campaigns:

Three of the internationally renowned poets due to appear at the 2009 Festival were denied entry to the UK because of harsh new home office rules. The poets were Dorothea Rosa Herliany from Indonesia, Hassan Najmi and Widad Benmoussa from Morocco. We did not cancel these events and instead used them as a platform to launch a protest and encourage our audiences to join the growing campaign against these new regulations. Ledbury Poetry Festival has always welcomed poets from all over the world and is extremely proud that it has an international reputation. This is the first time that poets coming from outside the EU have had any difficulty in appearing at the Festival. The consequences of these new restrictions are that we in the UK are being denied the opportunity to see and hear these poets.
For further information on the campaign against the new regulations visit the Manifesto Club website.