Ledbury poetry festival - live readings

29 JUNE - 8 JULY 2012

'A rare genuine joining of place, poetry and people'Carol Ann Duffy

home

live readings

performance

talks

family events

workshops

poetry competition

discover Ledbury

Live readings 2012

Hearing a poet read and talk about their work is often illuminating, can bring a poem to life and can open up new ways into poems. For anyone wishing to heighten their enjoyment of reading and writing poetry, these events are indispensable.

Friday 29 June

1.Owen Sheers 6pm – 7pm £8 Community Hall Recent works by award winning poet Owen Sheers include Resistance, made into a film in 2011, The Port Talbot Passion now a film with Michael Sheen and Pink Mist a long poem for Radio 4 about soldiers returning from Afghanistan. He is currently the 2012 Welsh Rugby Union Artist in Residence. Sponsored by Judy Lloyd and Butler and Sweatman

Saturday 30 June

4. 20 minutes with… Jane Hirshfield
10.30am - 10.50am
Free
Shell House Gallery
Jane Hirshfield on The Making Of A Poem.

6. C J Allen and Daniel Sluman hosted by blogger Wes Brown11am – 12pm Burgage Hall £8(Free to Friends) Nine Arches press discovered Daniel Sluman at a Ledbury Poetry Festival open mic! Absence has a weight of its own is his debut and comes with sparkling endorsements. C J Allen won the 2011 Ledbury Poetry Competition and his new collection is At the Oblivion Tea Rooms.

Sponsored by Friends of Ledbury Poetry Festival

7. 20 minutes with… Nichola Deane 12.15pm – 12.35pm Shell House Gallery Free Flarestack Poets Pamphlet Competition winner for My Moriarty.

9. 20 minutes with… Wes Brown 2pm – 2.20pm Shell House Gallery Free National Association of Writers in Education coordinator on getting started as a younger writer

Saturday 30 June

11. 20 minutes with… Adham Smart 3.40pm – 4pm Shell House Gallery Free Ledbury Poetry Festival’s young poet in residence and Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award winner 2006.

12. Jane Hirshfield and Esther Morgan 4.15pm – 5.15pm Burgage Hall £8 Visionary poetry, rooted in the living world. Jane Hirshfield travels from San Francisco to Ledbury to read poems from Come,Thief, that are born of rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind. T.S. Eliot shortlisted for Grace, poet Esther Morgan’s themes include “family and ancestry, the domestic space, the secrets of hidden lives."

Sponsored by Nigel and Alison Falls Embassy of the United States, London

14. Inspirations – Shandy Hall and John Clare
7.45pm - 8.45pm
Burgage Hall £8
Poet Paul Munden writes about novelist Laurence Sterne and novelist Judith Allnatt is inspired by poet John Clare. But what are the challenges involved in creating words of art inspired by the lives of real people? Shandy Hall, the home of the author of The Many Lives of Tristram Shandy, is the backdrop for the poems and photographs (by Marion Frith) in Asterisk by Paul Munden. In The Poet’s Wife by Judith Allnatt, the heroine and narrator, Patty Clare, tries to rescue her husband from the delusion that he has two wives.

Sunday 1 July

21. Being Human – Poetry in Performance 12.30pm – 1.50pm (with interval) Market Theatre £8 A dramatic performance by Barrett Robinson, Benedict Hastings and Elinor Middleton of extraordinary poetry from the best-selling Bloodaxe Books anthology. Charting the drama of our lives, these are thoughtful and passionate poems that will touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit.

24. 20 minutes with… Sandeep Parmar 2pm – 2.20pm Shell House Gallery Free Sandeep Parmar is author of The Marble Orchard, reviews editor of Wolf Magazine and editor of Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees for Carcanet.

25. 20 minutes with… Maitreyabandhu 3.40pm – 4pm Shell House Gallery Free An ordained member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and winner of the 2010 Ledbury Poetry Competition, he reads from The Bond, published by The Poetry Business.

27. Dark Spells with poet Damian Walford Davies and actor Elinor Middleton

6pm – 7pm Burgage Hall £8 Witch is a haunting portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of a witch hunt in the mid-seventeeth century. These poems are dark spells spoken in voices, from the priest to the accuser to the witch herself.

Wednesday 4 July

43. Thomas Wyatt

6.45pm – 7.45pm Burgage Hall £8 In her penetrating and hugely-acclaimed book Graven With Diamonds Nicola Shulman explores the life and work of Thomas Wyatt, court poet for Henry VIII; her dazzling reassessment argues for the value of Wyatt’s work as a veiled and fascinating account of the political danger and sexual intrigue of courtly life, from a genuine eye-witness.

Thursday 5 July

50. A Taste of Gloucestershire

5pm – 6pm Burgage Hall £8 R V Bailey reads from her new collection Credentials, as well as from Marking Time and The Losing Game. She supposes that she is best-known as the second voice (or, as some have put it, the back legs of the pantomime horse) in readings with the late U.A. Fanthorpe. Peter Wyton will perform the poetry he presents regularly on B.B.C. Radio Gloucestershire and which features monthly in Cotswold Life magazine.

52. Saints and Sinners of the Marches

8.30pm – 9.30pm Burgage Hall
£8
‘Saints and sinners are not always that far apart’ maintains the Dean of Hereford in this new anthology. Michael Tavinor introduces us to poetry and prose by men and women (many from the Ledbury area) who deserve to be better remembered.

Friday 6 July

57. World Laureates Reading: Bill Manhire and Kay Ryan

6pm – 7.10pm Burgage Hall £8 Kay Ryan has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize and was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. In 2011, Kay Ryan was awarded a $500,000 Fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation, in recognition of her exceptional poetry. Bill Manhire was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times.

Saturday 7 July

63. 20 minutes with… Chrissie Gittins

12.15pm – 12.35pm Shell House Gallery Free I’ll Dress One Night as You (Salt) is full of ‘shifty perspectives and disturbing juxtapositions. A triumph.’ (Peter Bennett)

64. Alvin Pang and Zeyar Lynn hosted by James Byrne

12.45pm – 1.45pm Burgage hall £8 We welcome Burmese poet Zeyar Lynn and Alvin Pang, poet from Singapore, in an event that will combine readings and discussion in the capable hands of James Byrne, Wolf Magazine editor, poet and compiler of the first anthology of Burmese poetry published outside of Burma.

67. The Marlowe Papers

2.30pm – 3.30pm Burgage Hall £8 Marlowe expert and poet, Ros Barber introduces The Marlowe Papers - hotly tipped to be the read of the summer. 'Immensely clever, capacious, ingenious and imaginative.’ (Hilary Mantel) ‘Not only a homage to Marlowe but a celebration of poetry – and of its power to allow the dead to speak.’ (Blake Morrison)

72. National Poetry Competition Winners Reading

6pm – 6.45pm Burgage Hall Free but ticketed This is the UK’s biggest open poetry competition. Come and hear the three winners Zaffar Kunial, Samantha Wynne-Rhyderrch and Allison McVety.

Sunday 8 July

78. 20 minutes with... Crystal Clear Creators

12.15pm – 12.35pm Shell House Gallery Free Jonathan Taylor, co-director of Crystal Clear Creators, with readings by two of the Crystal Pamphleteers: Andrew "Mulletproof" Graves and Aly Stoneman.

79. Simon Armitage Walking Home

12.45pm – 1.45pm Community Hall £8 In this often hilarious account of travelling as a ‘modern troubadour’ without a penny in his pocket, Simon Armitage walks the infamous and gruelling Pennine Way from Kirk Yetholm to the Yorkshire village where he was born, paying his way with poetry.