Geoff Pimlott read in sombre mood, remembering atrocities in Paris and meditating on man’s inhumanity to man. James Holbrook had some highly imaginative new poems (pity the mermaid was probably a fake), and Andy V Frost took us to a memorable small charity concert in a summer garden by the river. Eddie Chauncy captured the hearts of Paris Lit Up with his lovely song “It’s not my World” and a meditation upon the tides and the moon. It was good to see Martin Jones back on form after his illness last year, reading poems with a London flavour which are to be published soon by Southbank Poetry Magazine. Owen Osler was like, basically, what’s, like, the state of the actual colloquial English language, at the end of the day? (actually)
We finished with music: all the musicians joined in for a great jamming session. I wish the battery in my camera had lasted out – I’d have loved to have recorded part of it.
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ZOOMING WITH THE 1000 MONKEYS — 1ST MARCH 2022On this cold wet March evening we were glad to be virtual — it was not a night for travelling to a physical venue for poetry. We had 15 readers, three of whom had risen to the challenge of joining us between 7.20 and 7.30 to volunteer for an ‘open mic’ spot after the pre-booked readers. Stephen Claughton, our first reader, reminded us that this was St David’s Day and marked the occasion with one of the bitter-sweet poems from his pamphlet The 3D Clock, in which his mother, suffering from vascular dementia, began to speak in Welsh, her original tongue, and was able to be more rational in the language than in English. ‘Mount Anon’ was a memory of visiting an unnamed mountain, its identity the stronger on maps as ‘Unnamed Mountain’ than its titled neighbours. His poem to the self portraits of Egon Schiele — that ‘poor forked. creature’ — saw the artist exposed even when fully clothed.
David Bleiman sympathised in Scots with immigrants, read ‘February Flashback’ from his new pamphlet Gathering Light and retold the recent story of ‘Sunflower Seeds’ in which a Russian soldier cries to his mother that he doesn’t want to become the fertilizer for the sunflowers that an angry Ukrainian woman tells him to keep in his pockets so that the Ukrainian national flower will bloom from them when he’s dead. Ranald Barnicott had two sonnets translated from the French poet Mallarmé and a third dedicated to the poet himself: Stefane up all night writing in ‘erudite passion’. Tony Watts read from his very first collection, Strange Gold: ‘School Photographs’ and past girlfriends resurfaced ‘afloat in smashed light’. Then there was a memory of a romantic relationship in which Thomas Hardy’s books acted as a go-between when the lovers were apart. Reading separate copies of the same book, ‘a landscape held them in its palm like chaff’. And then ‘Watchtower People’ — in which ‘Mrs Niceperson’ and other recipients of visits from Jehovah’s Witnesses’ emerged with less grace than the admittedly irritating cold callers. Liz Kon’s poem ‘Rain at Night’ struck a comfortable chord on this drab evening and, hopeful of the approach of Spring, ‘March’ looked forward to crisp cold summer wine. Jeremy Loynes hates it ‘When Things Break’, and his poem about it had a great twist in the tail. ‘The place where I feel most alien’, his rhyming, witty homage to Robert Service, had us trapped on the M25 with doom looming up at the end (his accent had morphed from Surrey to Saskatchewan by that stage.)
Our next Zooming with The 1000 Monkeys is on Tuesday 5th April at 7:30 pm. Book a five-minute slot through our newsletters. Meanwhile we'll be adding 5 years'-worth of memories of The 1000 Monkeys Guildford events, 2015 – 2020, on this blog.
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