What’s on in York: Finding the Words with John Paul Burns, Emma Storr and Charlotte Wetto

York Explore Library :

Thu 25 Jan :

6.45pm – 8.00pm :

£3/£2 with a YorkCard

Jan _25Findingthe Words Finding the Words is a regular poetry evening every month at York Explore Library. Each evening brings together three poets and we aim to include both published writers and those working towards a collection. We’ll have a bar available and readings last around an hour. The evening is also a chance to share and chat, so please feel free to bring any news or information about poetry local, regional or national.

John-Paul Burns is a writer of poetry and essays currently on the Creative Writing MFA program at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Manchester. His work centres around images of the road, the coast and fruit–of music history and the cinema–Federico Fellini wandering the earth spreading madness like Dionysus, Foley-sound artist as Demiurge, a dream of following Thelonious Monk. He has appeared in journals such as The North, Poetry Salzburg Review and 3AM Magazine and is featured in the Smith|Doorstop anthology Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets.

Emma Storr lives in Leeds where she is a member of the Leeds Writers Circle. After working as a doctor and teacher for many years she is now giving more attention to poetry and writing. She is interested in where science and poetry intersect, particularly in relation to understanding the body. She has been published in The Hippocrates Prize Anthology 2016 and Strix 2 and her poem ’Spring Walk’ was highly commended in the Walter Swan Poetry competition in 2016. She recently completed an MPhil in Writing at the University of South Wales.

Charlotte Wetton is a poet based in West Yorkshire. Her first pamphlet, I Refuse to Turn into a Hat-Stand has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks award, following a spoken word album, Body Politic. She has published in Poetry Wales, Staple, Stand etc. She regularly performs across the North and will run workshops if the opportunity sounds fun.

@CharPoetry

www.charlottewettonpoetry.wordpress.com

Prices

£3 or £2 with YorkCard

Book at any library or online

What’s on in York: POETRY LAUNCH – Crow Flight across the Sun

Jan _18 Mike

York Explore Library :

Thu 18 Jan :

6.30pm – 8.00pm :

Free

Mike Di Placido has published two collections of poetry: Theatre of Dreams (Smith/Doorstop, 2009) and A Sixty Watt Las Vegas (Valley Press, 2013). His poetry has been translated into German and Romanian through the web magazine PoetryPf, and also broadcast on British and European radio.

Mike has read at numerous literary festivals, and his poems and reviews have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as The North, The Rialto, Pennine Platform and Poetry Saltzburg. He was recently the sole judge of The Poetry Space Competition, 2017.

Mike is a member of The Ted Hughes Society and The Elmet Trust.

Comments on Mike’s poetry:

I can’t remember when I enjoyed a book of poems so much; possibly ‘Season Songs’.
Keith Sagar (on Di Placido’s ‘Theatre of Dreams’)

Shrewdly, comically, with Blakean innocence, Mike Di Placido writes about enthusiasm and inspiration: how in practice we read poetry and fall in love with it.
Ed Reiss

In these poems Ted comes alive again, he lives and breathes. These poems are healing gifts.
Mark Hinchliffe

www.caldervalleypoetry.com

To book tickets please click here.

What’s on in York: DUSK – A Poetry Reading with Ian Taylor

York Explore Library :

Sat 13 Jan :

2.30pm – 4.00pm :

Free

The author will read poems from his recent collection DUSK

Ian Taylor has been writing about the lost landscapes of the North for over forty years – old earthworks, ruined churches, derelict mineworkings, Neolithic barrows and deserted villages. Bringing together the best of this work in a single volume, Dusk is a book about enclosure, famine and deforestation, about bleak moorlands, sunken roads, nettles and cobwebs. Exploring between the pages of history, superstition, myth and the ‘threadbare cloak of folk tradition’, Taylor listens to the drovers, peat-cutters, ironstone miners, seasonal labourers, landless farmers and tramps in whose ‘hollow voice of loss’ he hears a renegade and still undefeated Albion, like a fox running from the ‘cleanshaven faces and privileged profiles’ of the Hunt, the Green Man still dancing in the trees.

‘Taylor’s is an inventive, controlled, authoritative voice, unafraid of the rare but exact word… contemplative, intelligently and movingly eloquent on behalf of those silent people and places for which he invents voices.’

Peter Conradi

‘I.P. Taylor\’s vision of agricultural man shares with Hughes and Heaney a noble poetic ancestry running from Wordsworth to Hardy to Lawrence, but his poetry is all his own because he has lived through his subjects in mud, words and imagination.’

Cal Clothier

‘Ian Taylor was born in Shipley, West Yorkshire. He has been a forestry operative, a market gardener, a farm worker, a drystone waller and a millhand. Winner of the Stroud Festival international poetry competition and the Poetry Society’s Greenwood Prize, his publications include A Poetry Quintet, The Grip, The Passion, The Hollow Places and Killers. He lives in York.

To book tickets please click here.

What’s on in York: Finding the Words with poets Charlotte Eichler, Sally Goldsmith and John Whale

York Explore Library

Thu 16 Nov

6.45pm – 8.00pm

£3 (or £2 with a York Card)

Finding the Words is a regular poetry evening every month at York Explore Library. Each evening brings together three poets and we aim to include both published writers and those working towards a collection. We’ll have a bar available and readings last around an hour. The evening is also a chance to share and chat, so please feel free to bring any news or information about poetry local, regional or national.

Charlotte Eichler grew up in Hertfordshire and now lives near Leeds. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Agenda, The Interpreter’s House, The Rialto, and The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts. She was recently awarded a year’s mentoring with Vahni Capildeo by Poetry London magazine, and her first pamphlet will be published by Valley Press in 2018.

Sally Goldsmith As well as a poet Sally is a songwriter, historian, utopian, environmentalist and an amateur naturalist. She’s also written scripts in verse, had songs and poems inside dramas on Radio 4 and a musical feature – about the Izal medicated toilet roll. She’s won two Sony Radio awards. Her first publication was Singer which was one of the winners in the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition judged by Michael Longley. In 2013 Smith/Doorstop published her first full length collection, Are We There Yet? She lives on the edge of Sheffield near the Peak District.

Twitter: @salthepoet

Are We There Yet? poetry collection published by Smith/Doorstop and available from:

John Whale was born in Liverpool and is a co-editor of the international journal Stand. He has published two collections under the Northern House imprint with Carcanet, Waterloo Teeth (2010) and Frieze (2013). The former was shortlisted for the Forward Prize best first collection. He is currently working on a third volume which, once again, explores the connections between history, the body, and the natural world.

Booking

In person at any Explore York Library.

By phone: (01904) 552828

Email: york@exploreyork.org.uk

What’s on in York, Poetry Workshop with Anna Woodford

York Explore Library :

Thu 28 Sep :

2.30pm – 4.30pm :

Free

Anna Woodford – creator of the exhibition T(here) on display at York Explore – invites you to join her for this informal creative writing workshop exploring freedom. Beginners and experienced writers welcome.

We will be exploring freedom to travel with our bodies and our minds in this lively informal creative writing workshop We will also be looking at free writing and poems on freedom by writers from Jack Mapanje to Emily Dickinson. Please come along whether you are a beginner or an experienced writer. Bring a pen, paper and a sense of adventure!

Anna Woodford’s poetry collection Birdhouse (Salt,2010) was a winner of the Crashaw Prize. The Guardian included Birdhouse in a round-up of poetry books of the year and Grazia called it ‘quite quite wonderful’.

Her poems have appeared in many publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, the Rialto and Poetry London. She has also been anthologised in The Forward Book of Poems of the Year.

To book tickets click here.

What’s on in York: Grey Hen Press 10th Anniversary Celebration

York Explore Library

Sat 29 Apr

2.00pm – 4.00pm

Free

Carole Bromley, Helen Burke, Joy Howard, Pauline Kirk and Josie Walsh will read selected poems from Grey Hen anthologies.

Grey Hen Press was set up to showcase the work of older women poets by publishing themed anthologies. Over 140 poets have appeared in the ten publications to date.

Refreshments including tea, coffee, soft drinks and wine will be available, and the event is free.The event will take place in The Marriott Room

‘Nothing mimsy about these poems by older women. Fierce, funny, disturbing and fairly vicious. Lovely.’ Michele Hanson

‘Seriously good poetry…the fruit of long-life experience – brave writing, full of love and subversive wit and lyricism.’ R V Bailey

‘An A–Z of women poets whose formidable eye and instinct for pithy observation make this required reading for all ages’ Penelope Shuttle.

For more information about this event please pop in to York Explore Library, call us on (01904 552828) or email york@exploreyork.org.uk.