Poetry Reading Group 

with Kathryn Bevis
Friday 9 July
7.00 - 8.30pm

 

Join us for the second of the new online poetry gathering.  We will read and discuss some of the most brilliant voices in contemporary poetry, including poems written by Winchester Poetry Festival’s featured poets for 2021.

Each month is themed and we’ll get to know a handful of brilliant poems related to that theme, making time to see how they might reflect, amplify, complicate, contradict, or bewilder each other when read together. These will be animated, inspiring evenings for us all to learn more from each other about the peculiar pleasures of reading poems. Readings will be shared in advance and all are welcome: poetry newbies, poetry fanatics, and poetry experts alike.

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The theme this month is 'Trees'.

Writing the Poems of Fields & Trees – a Poetry Workshop with Jonathan Davidson
Saturday 10 July
10:00am - 12:30pm

 

The recent restrictions have given us all a renewed appetite for fields and trees. Our observations of the natural world are now more intense and powerful. This workshop will look at ways of responding to the turning of the years in poetry, and in particular how the environment can inspire the shape and contents of our poems. Although we may be meeting on Zoom our hearts will be elsewhere! Be prepared to look closely and think carefully about what is often overlooked and to get some good writing done during this brisk morning’s workshop.

 

Kathryn Bevis introduces
Words for the Wild

Saturday 10 July
5:00 - 6:00pm

Kathryn Bevis (Hampshire Poet 2020-21) invites local poetry organisations to showcase and celebrate the best of their work.

Words for the Wild is an online poetry magazine, passionate in its focus on the natural world. Run by writers, Amanda Oosthuizen and Louise Taylor, and initially set up to save local ancient woodland, Words for the Wild has quickly become a treasured and highly-respected international platform for poems inspired by an engagement with the living world.

Readers for this event will include: Robyn Bolam, Alison Brackenbury, Sarah Doyle, Kate Firth, Raine Geoghegan, Chrissie Gittins, Suzanne Iuppa, Sarah James/Leavesley, Lisa Kelly, Jane Lovell, Patrick Osada, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough

 

Jen Hadfield & Jason Allen Paisant

Saturday 10 July
6:30pm

(Running time 1 hr 15 mins)

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A reading and discussion with Jen Hadfield and Jason Allen-Paisant, two poets whose recent works are driven by an engagement with the natural world, and are characterised by distinctive personal interaction with nature.

 

Allen-Paisant has written movingly about landscape, race and belonging: 'Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems’ (Lorna Goodison).

 

T. S. Eliot winner Jen Hadfield’s The Stone Age recreates the wilderness of the Shetland Isles in wordplay, experiment and vital lyric, creating a world in which ‘everything…has a living consciousness’. ‘The work of a singular artist at the height of her powers.’ (Books form Scotland)

 

Stephen Boyce, former chair of Winchester Poetry Festival, will lead a discussion with both poets on the abiding attraction of nature writing and how it is changing.