The First Zoom of 2024 with The 1000 Monkeys

6/1/2024

, The first meeting of The 1000 Monkeys in 2024 was on Tuesday 2nd January and we had a brilliant hour and a quarter of poetry from 15 readers. We're presenting clips of the readings by Dónall and 12 others — Rosie Barrett had new poems that couldn't be recorded, and Peter T had trouble with his sound system. Rod Whitworth read from his new collection, My Family and Other Birds, published this month,Timothy Adès read 'Advice to Lovers'; 'June 1871 (End of the Paris Commune)'; and 'I'm pleasantly lunatic...' from his translations of Victor Hugo, How to be a Grandfather (Hearing Eye); and Claire Booker from her Pocket Full of Chalk. We heard some lovely Christmas and post-Christmas poems and a wail about rain — do dip in and listen.

We get together again on Tuesday 6th February, with a mix of regular and new voices. You can request a slot in the program by emailing us in the week beginning 29th January.

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THE 1000 MONKEYS
is the poetry performance series of events, hosted by Janice and Donall Dempsey at 7:30pm (GMT) on the first Tuesday of each month — nowadays it's on Zoom, and poets from all over Britain (and sometimes beyond) share their poems in friendly informal meetings online. (The videos are optional, of course.)

Mature Gay London link

17/10/2024 03:21:27

This was lovely too read

Janice Dempsey

17/10/2024 10:12:49

Thank you for your comment, Gay.

The face-to-face days of The 1000 Monkeys were the glory days, and we loved hosting the events in Guildford, first at the Bar Des Arts, then at the Keystone and the Keep. After those nine years or so, Covid changed everything and when that receded, inflation and rising cost of living prevented us from going back to the venues where we'd held free events. And we'd built a large group of Zooming 'Monkey' poets from all over the country.

So we've continued on Zoom, with a lovely core of readers and friends, on the first Tuesday of every month. We're keeping the events free, though nowadays zoom.us charges an annual fee to use the platform — and of course its also useful for online launches, meetings etc. How our personal worlds have both expanded and retracted in the past 5 years!