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Marsden Write Out Loud Poetry Night
December – 14th – a week early to accomodate seasonal festivities, 19.30 – 21.30.
All are welcome to bring along their own or a favourite poem to read, or just listen and enjoy.
£2 donation to Write Out Loud funds requested.
Write Out Loud is an international poetry organisation run from Marsden: www.writeoutloud.net
“Oh, that I were a hat upon that head” Shakespeare’s Romeo famously sighed (…or something like that), which brings us to this month’s theme. MWOL regular Sue Salmon has kindly suggested two options: ‘Hats and Gloves’ and ‘Season’s Greetings’. Does your cat wear a hat? Is it as wide as the Quangle Wangle’s? Can your millinery help you to see in the dark (Goya’s could!)?
Perhaps you’d prefer to bring something in a festive vein, like this cheery couplet from Hilaire Belloc:
May all my enemies go to hell,
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel.
(Lines For A Christmas Card, Hilaire Belloc)
…or something lovelier, to bring this bewildering year to a close:
Not only for the way the whisky
flames in the glass and thaws the blood;
not only for the rattle of hailstones
down the chimney and doused by fire;
not just for the way the brand-new ring,
slipped cool on a finger, flushes with life;
or the warmth of the bed, and the warmth of another,
when streetlamps are spinning snow outside.
But also for the good, true cold,
shocking us back to all our senses:
the broken-off star of ice in the hand,
the sting of the wind and the quickening heart.
For the splintering light, and the frost in our voices,
striking, and making the strung air ring;
December cold with its wilder gifts –
for when are we more alive than now?
(‘Grace at Christmas’, Jean Sprackland)
As ever, the theme is entirely optional and we welcome every ‘Bah, humbug!’.
From our Correspondent: Julian Jordan reviews an evening of poetry in Washington:
A week after the shock of America’s supposed liberal values being trumped by bigly bigotry, the country’s apparently ingrained red neck having been thus exposed, I had the privilege of attending an extraordinarily apposite evening at Washington’s The Phillips Collection, with poets Robin Coste Lewis and Tyehimba Jess responding to the gallery’s exhibition: People on The Move: Beauty And Struggle in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Read the full article…
