Zooming on October 3rd 2023

Zooming in October 2023 with The 1000 Monkeys

 Back from our summer break, we had a wonderful evening with our poet friends on the first Tuesday of October, with ten five-minute readings and five one-poem readers, and an audience of appreciative listeners. 'Garden' emerged as a theme in several people's readings. Audrey Ardern-Jones began, however, with two poems from her 2019 collection, Doing the Rounds, followed by a moving poem on a childhood memory of Nazi abuse of a member of her family's household. Paul Surman introduced the garden theme which was then cultivated by several other contributors. Dennis Tomlinson had a poem of complaint about his neighbour's decision to keep ducks in their garden and some short illustrated poems from his recent pamphlet Ornaments. Anthony Watts had a delightful poem in Lewis Carroll vein and Daphne Milne read her 'Gardening Notes', a story of love and death in a garden, and a poem from Venice — 'Rialto Market'.

Dónall had started us off with a poem about his beloved brother, and Phil's first poem, 'Long Distance Call', was also to his brother, but told a different story. He took us for a walk in the country; his 'garden' poem was 'The Bee and Me' and finally an Amazon Prime ad for self-confidence cream with, of course, lots of small print and 'no reply'.

Rod Whitworth read poems from his book, My Family and Other Birds (published by Vole in January 2023) and Timothy Adès read his lipograms of Shakespeare's sonnets 27, 28, 29 and 30.

Jeremy Loynes read 'April Showers' — the Pathetic Fallacy in a supermarket — remembered with love his mother in the kitchen, and welcomed autumn's 'Cloak'. Timothy Adès read his lipogram versions of Shakespeare's sonnets from his book Loving by Will. Ray Pool read 'Period Piece', a slightly scary poem with a happy ending.. 

Liv Johannesson read a poem from her poetry novella What Good Could Grow Here?; Richard Carpenter read 'Horatio's Garden' about the garden founded at Salisbury Hospital by a patient in the spinal injuries unit there.

We were glad to see Greta Ross again, with a surreal sequence called 'Off the Ground'. Simon Williams told us about the plight of the Dartmoor ponies that are under threat of being moved from their centuries-old habitat by ecological activists who believe the animals have no right to feed on the plants there! 

It was a great start to another season of The 1000 Monkeys zoom meetings. In November we'll meet again, on the first Tuesday, 7th November at 7:30.