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excellent poetry at affordable prices
To receive the link to join The 1000 Monkeys each month, subscribe to our newsletter and email us with your request to go on our list of readers and listeners, and join in.
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The last 1000 Monkeys of 2023
These video clips will give you a taste of the poems we heard on Tuesday 5th December. As far as their subject matter's concerned, among them you'll find a dog of complex ancestry verging on the monstrous, a selection of trees, hopscotch in Canterbury, a declaration of love, noises in the night, mermaid socks, a letter to Santa pleading for the stars, age(ing) concern, a dream of Thumbelina children, a demobbed soldier father, a request to London to slow down a bit, a beautiful night landscape and a lane whose hedges have little to say for themselves....
And there's more to come next year, beginning on January 2nd, 2024. November 7th 2023
We had a great time on the first Tuesday of October 2023, after our summer break. It was a quality evening of excellent poetry from 15 readers, including 'regulars' and some new or infrequent readers. I wrote a detailed report of the evening on here this week, then pressed 'Publish' and the whole thing disappeared, so this replacement is shortened to the videos of the readers (to whom 'thanks' for your wonderful readings) and a heartfelt 'thank you' to the non-readers who also came to listen and applaud, including Belinda and Jean. The readers speak for themselves in the video clips we publish below. Only one poem couldn't be published here — Simon Williams' new poem about the problem of ecological activists objecting to the Dartmoor ponies (who have roamed the moor for centuries) depleting the moor's plant life. ZOOMING IN NOVEMBER WITH THE 1000 MONKEYS is at 7:30 on November 7th. We'll begin compiling the list of readers through replies to our newsletters in the last two weeks of October.
Dònall started the ball rolling, and was followed by Peter Taylor, Ray Pool, Daphne Milne, Dennis Tomlinson and Rod Whitworth. We were very pleased to see Maria O'Brien, who read with us for the first time, on a theme of 'in-between-ness' and Tony Watts read us half a sequence about 'Ainsel Noone' and promised us the other half next month. Ray Pool had been watching old films and also remembering railway journeys. Daphne read a poem that had won a competition 'Instructions for Bottling a ship' and two about cricket, which made us smile. Rod read about a 'Boy with Green Hair'. July 4th is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Desnos, the French poet who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and murdered by ill treatment and neglect. Timothy Adès, who is the author of Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, a translation of Desnos' collected poems, read his translation of one of Desnos' most powerful resistant poems. Jo Mariner had poems about change and choice. We had three single-poem readers: Rosie Barrett read us a poem published in Dartmoor Unearthed, the catalogue of an exhibition by the Moor Poets and Contemporary Markmakers — as it happened we had seen the exhibition and bought the book in the National Park Visitor Centre the weekend before. Jean Hall and Simon Williams also read poems of very high quality. It was, as always, an evening of good poetry and good company. Next month we meet on August 1st. If you would like to join us, subscribe free to our newsletter and write to us in reply to one of our weekly emails.
We had a heatwave in June and things in the Monkey house slowed down somewhat to allow for sunbathing and gardening so this blog is posted rather late. We had an unusual number of five-minute readers: 15 in all, owing to Janice's inefficient record of who had asked and been accepted. So it was a packed evening, The heat continued to distract us from the computer for another two weeks, but we have extracts from the readings of four of the readers to show you here: David Punter, Konstandinos Mahoney, Sue Johns and Pauline Sewards. The other readers were: Daphne Milne; Rod Whitworth,; Timothy Adès; Julia Duke,; Ray Pool; Roger Noons; Ranald Barnicot; Anthony Watts; Jeremy Loynes; and Peter Taylor. It was great to welcome Daphne for the first time to the Monkeys, and Pauline who isn't usually free on a Tuesday. In our 'in person' days at the Bar des Arts and the Keep in Guildford, she used to train it down from London and Bristol to read her work as a featured poet.
Our April zoom was on the day after Easter Monday, but we had a good turn-out of readers and listeners, including Sue Rothstein, a new voice to The 1000 Monkeys. Sue read a poem to her mother, whose birthday was on the 4th of April but who died in the 1990s and is still missed. Dónall led us off with some poems from his new book, The Fox, the Whale and the Wardrobe and one from The Smell of Purple, which was reprinted in 2020. Peter Taylor, Julia Duke, Timothy Adès, Anne Symons, Richard Carpenter, Roger Noons, Tony Watts, Ranald Barnicot, Sue Rothstein and Rod Whitworth followed with a great range of poems. You can see and hear a poem from each of them, below. May's meeting of The 1000 Monkeys will be at 7:30pm on Tuesday 2nd May 2023. Contact us by subscribing to our free newsletter if you would like to join us and maybe read one of your poems.
.Our meeting on March 7th 2023 was hosted in rather croaky fashion by Janice, who was recovering from an unfashionably late dose of Covid 19 — she's getting over it now, almost a week later, and still managed to enjoy the poems read by the 'Monkeys'. There was a very high standard again and we're sharing samples from several of them here. The readers were Peter Taylor; Phil Lawder; Timothy Adès; Gerald Killingworth; Jeremy Loynes; Rod Whitworth; Dino Mahoney; Ray Pool; Ranald Barnicot; Heather Moulson; Jean Hall; Joan Michelson; Claudia Court, and Carla Scarano D'Antonio.
We were very distressed to hear a few days after this meeting that Carla had passed away suddenly at home. She read one of her poems, and we had no idea that she was unwell. Carla was an influential member of the poetic community. She had just completed a PhD, had had two collections of her poems published and was a supportive reviewer. She was the Artist in Residence at The High Window and co-host of WriteOut Loud Woking, a face-to-face reading event in Surrey. Our thoughts go out to her family at this sad time.
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