We hope to see you on Thursday 1st September for more of the same (only different.)

Gillie Robic’s poems were full of wonderful imagery and included some poems from her pamphlet published in support of Ukraine charities (100% of the proceeds are donated.) You can buy the pamphlet from:
https://www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/open-skies-gillie-robic

Ranald Barnicot read his translation of  ‘Autopsychography’, a poem by Fernando Passoa, the well-known Portuguese poet, and a villanelle based on the same poem. 

​Simon Williams had short,  witty poems based on his recent attendance at Kendal Poetry Festival — a revisiting of ‘Rapunzel’as a mountain-climber; ‘A Tawny Owl’; ‘Faith is no Big Deal’ (with a killer last line!; and ‘We Get Old’.

We enjoyed poems from a total of 16 poets on 7th June 2022, including a new face: Alex Corrin-Tachibana, who read two poems, both on a Japanese theme, from her upcoming collection, Sing me down from the Dark (Salt, October 2022). 

Peter Taylor read a love poem to his 'Dearly Beloved' and then celebrated Gardeners.

Ray Pool revealed himself a fervent monarchist with his poem in praise of the Jubilee,  had an affectionate poem for his Grandma, and rewrote Brighton Rock, making Pinkie much more of a success than Greene did, and saving the life of Pinkie's fictional victim in the process.

David Punter took us for a tour of the sights of Central London and then had a touching poem called 'Early Onset'.

Pratibha Castle read two poems from her debut collection  A Triptych of Birds and a few Loose Feathers (Hedgehog).

Sue Johns read from her 2021 booklet, Track Record: poems about trains that ranged from the last train carrying Jewish prisoners from Holland to Auschwitz to itinerants riding the rails to the dustbowls of the USA in the 1920s.

Rod Whitworth had been inspired to write about particle, quantum and wave theory in poems about the building-blocks of matter and of poems (I couldn't describe his set any better than this so Ive included it among a bumper crop of clips from the event!)

Julia Duke took us round three churchyards.

Jeremy Loynes brought his nature poems — the Mendip Hills and 'Not everything in nature has a name'.

David Bleiman ruminated on the Fall of Icarus after W H Auden, springtime in Chicago, dinosaur socks and the frightful spectre of a return to using imperial weights and measures in the UK.

David Punter took us on a trip around the sights of Central London so that we could 'C. London, and gave us a sympathetic portrait of a sufferer from 'Early Onset'

Carla Scarano, Ranald Barnicot and Marilyn Daish completed an evening of excellent poetry with single poems at the end of the evening

The 1000 Monkeys line-up on May 3rd 2022 included familiar faces — Julia Duke, Ray Pool, Timothy Adès, Ranald Barnicot, Tony Watts, and we also welcomed poets whom we see less often — Sue Johns, Peter Wilkinson, Jenny McRobert, David Bleiman and Anne Symons. We were sorry not to see Sujatha Menon and Prathiba Castle, both of whom left places available at the last minute for other excellent readers, Sharron Greene, Jean Hall and Shirley Redpath, whom we hadn't seen for a while.

We heard some great poems from everyone.  We're posting clips of four performances with the readers' permission: Julia Duke with poems about spring; Ray Pool's celebration of a Meerschaum pipe and a life in the music world; Timothy Adès' translations of two poems by the German novelist and writer Joachim Ringelnatz and Ranald Barnicot's two poems about Lisbon, one his own and the other his translation of a poem by Antonio Gomes Leal (1848 - 1921), a Portuguese poet.

There were strong poems inspired by the situation in Ukraine, from Sue Johns, Jean Hall, Sharron Green and Shirley Redpath.

Jenny Roberts' poems remembered her grandmother who fled Odesa in the progroms of the 1920s and the lockdown in Spring 2020.

David Bleiman was in frisky mood and found innuendo and sensuality even in stapled pamphlets!

Anne Symons read poems in the voices of the women unnamed in the Biblical story of Moses.

Tony Watts took us to Steart Point, the point in the Bristol Channel where after the muddiest of walks he found unexpected colour; he also reminded us of what poems are made of.

We'll zoom with The 1000 Monkeys on June 7th — we'll do it all again, but different — we welcome new readers as well as regulars and of course poets need an audience, so we hope you'll join us to listen, even if you don't read any poems. We change the event URL every month, so if you would like a monthly email with next month's link to be sent to you a day or two before each event, just email Janice at [email protected] or reply to one of our newsletters .

Joan Michelson, a London poet whose website is here, was the first reader. Her poems about the people she encounters near her london home were a great start to the evening, sharp, observant vignettes that had me smiling in recognition of the ways of children. 'Tomcat' was about funeral rites for a run-over pet, and the callousness of an urban fox. Joan often writes about the callousness of armies, and man's inhumanity to man.

Sue Johns followed, with poems she had read at a recent event broadcast on Zoom to raise money for Ukrainian refugee aid.  They were very powerful. The event raised about £27,000.
Sue's website is here.

Peter Taylor read ‘She Sleeps’, a beautiful poem full of loving detail.
We’ve posted the first part of it on here.

Ranald Barnicott continued with more of his translations of Stephane Mallarmé’s sonnets, and ‘Sound or Silence’, a poem of his own, begun when he was only sixteen, and completed last November.

Julia Duke spoke of 'Rue and other well-known herbs" and reminded herself and us that "if Fate had snapped its fingers" we could be suffering the collapse of everything we know and love, just as is happening in Kyiv right now.

Tony Watts warned us that he would not be cheering us up, and delivered a powerful set of poems about war, which you can hear on the video we've posted.
 
Greta Ross was ‘Speaking of Weather’ and had collected lines from many poems about ‘A Womans’ Place’ in a centro. Her third poem was ‘not a poem’ in the way that Magritte’s painting “n’est pas une pipe”. She offered it kindly as one “pilgrim on the road to eternal recognition” to another!
 
Rod Whittaker recalled a weekend of climbing over glass-topped walls and listening to John Coltrane’s music for the first time, in a friend’s house, and read us a poem composed entirely of Thelonius Monk compositions’ titles. He also gave us ‘In Time of War’, his gentle poem In response to a poem by Rifat Abas, a Pakistani poet.
 
Mary Baker Muir began with a John Donne poem, ‘Break of Day’ (in which lovers are warned not to mix business with pleasure!) and two poems of her own: ‘147’ and ‘The Change’, a short, powerful poem of which climate change is the target.
 
Paul Surman had been thinking again (he says he thinks about thinking too much.) He had also been reading about quantum mechanics and this had resulted in a ‘Spooky Entanglement’ (actually a mathematical term). Then existential questions led to the creation of ‘Approximate Horses’ and his declaration that most of what we experience actually consists of fictions we’ve made up — and in ‘Story’ Paul presented a narrative composed of random images, the most realistic verion of reality that we can hope for. All this in six and a half minutes! A bit over the usual time-slot but we forgave Paul this time!
 
Kathryn Southworth read her tribute to Walter de la Mare and to Spring, riffing on his lines with “There is a shoot where bare ground was…“ ‘Time’s Arrow’ contained the memorable line “our place on the bow of bending time”. Her villanelle about children planting saplings was wistful and haunting.
 
Jeremy Loynes read his poems about Spring — you can listen to his set on the video.
 
And finally Phil Lawder’s Ukraine poem about an old woman giving sunflower seeds to a soldier was full of hope, for a child who might play among the flowers after his death. His tribute to ‘The Storyteller’ also had a colourful, positive ring. The last poem, ‘Home and Away’, left us smiling at the situation “When you went to live with your mother”.
 
Next month’s Zoom with the 1000 Monkeys is on May 3rd at 7.30 and on May 1st we’ll send out the link to everyone who has ever read with us Monkeys. Let us know by email if you would like a 5 minute reading slot. In the interim, we’ll post occasional reports on here of the Monkeys’ past face-to-face glories, from other years’ Aprils.

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