Zooming April 2022

Zooming in April with the 1000 Monkeys

We had a very strong open-mic line-up on 6th April 2022,
​with some new faces to welcome to the screen.

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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