Subscribe by Email

Derry-Londonderry Clipper Festival

As part of the Poetry Parnassus UK Tour, which sees some of the poets who participated in Poetry Parnassus take part in events at different locations around the UK, I'll be at the Derry-Londonderry Clipper Festival this coming Thursday and Friday (5-6 July).

Yachts and crew competing in the Clipper 11-12 International Yacht Race started arriving in Derry-Londonderry on 29 June at the end of the transatlantic leg of the race, and the city welcomes them with a 10-day festival. Part of the festival programme is the 'Songs of the Sea' event, hosted by the Verbal Arts Centre, which features sessions with thirteen Poetry Parnassus poets (Imruh Bakari, Maureen Roberts, Andra Simons, Dhabiya Khamis, Selina Marsh, Saradha Soobrayen, Kate Kilalea, Gerður Kristny, Soleiman Adel Guemar, Zahir Al-Ghafri, Adbullahi Botan Hassan, Rocío Cerón and myself) who represent nations with close links to the sea.

For this I'll be doing a 1-hour workshop on 5 July, right beside where the boats are moored on Queens Quay, during which participants will compose a collaborative poem around the event title and festival theme - and will then take part in a 'Literary Deathmatch' reading at the Verbal Arts Centre (complete with a Eurovision Song Contest-style voting system and heats and semi-finals and finals...) the following evening, 6 July.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ISLA Festival 2014

Organised and presented by Instituto Cervantes in Dublin, ISLA is a festival of literature now in its third year that focuses on writers from or with links to Ireland, Spain and Latin America. This year the programme of events runs over three days, between 17 and 19 October, and features 21 authors (including John Banville, Claire Keegan and Hugo Hamilton) engaging in a range of discussions and readings. There are also screenings of documentaries on Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz. I'm participating in a reading & discussion with title 'Building Identities' taking place on the fist day of the festival, Friday 17 October - also featuring Donal Ryan and Anamaría Crowe Serrano and chaired by Philip Johnston of University College Dublin (UCD). We start at 6.15pm. The venue for all events is the Institute's Café Literario at Lincoln House, Lincoln Place, Dublin 2. Admission is free - but due to limited capacity the Institute encourages those interested to book
Read more

Herbarium

Herbarium is an anthology of poems, edited by James Wilkes , celebrating and exploring the contemporary resonances of medicinal plants and herbs. It features contributions from over 50 poets and is published in celebration of the Urban Physic Garden , a pop-up community-built garden of medicinal plants installed in Southwark this summer by Wayward Plants - a collective of architects, designers, artists and urban growers - with the aim of blooming a slice of neglected London land for a short period. The garden is open to visitors Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6pm, until 15 August 2011. For the anthology, each species in the garden was selected by a participating poet, who then produced a poem around it. My contribution ('Sincerely') relates to the herb gravelroot. Gravelroot is a "white- and purple-flowered plant up to 3m/10ft; North American Indian red dye plant" ( The Complete Book of Herbs , Clevely and Richmond, Lorenz Books, 1994). Its roots and seedheads
Read more

Stone and Sea - Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture

On Monday 9 October I'll be reading at the opening of the poetry & photography exhibition  Stone and Sea  in Pafos Municipal Gallery. Part of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture programme, Stone and Sea is "a poetic meeting and a photographic exhibition by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot photographers, that have the stone and the sea as their points of reference; elements that are inextricably linked with the fate of Cypriot people and of crucial importance for the shaping of their temperament. The project combines a walk through rocks deeply rooted in the soil, statues and pebbles of the coastline, with the reflective gazing of the sea, which is anticipated as an uncorrupted cultural value, a place of eutopia open to diversity." Readings by several invited poets with links to Cyprus will be accompanied by a trilingual presentation of the poems - in Greek, Turkish and English. I'm delighted that as part of this my poem 'Full Circle' from The A
Read more