ZOOMING WITH THE 1000 MONKEYS MARCH 1ST 2022

ZOOMING WITH THE 1000 MONKEYS — 1ST MARCH 2022

On this cold wet March evening we were glad to be virtual — it was not a night for travelling to a physical venue for poetry. We had 15 readers, three of whom had risen to the challenge of joining us between 7.20 and 7.30 to volunteer for an ‘open mic’ spot after the pre-booked readers.
 
Stephen Claughton, our first reader, reminded us that this was St David’s Day and marked the occasion with one of the bitter-sweet poems from his pamphlet The 3D Clock, in which his mother, suffering from vascular dementia, began to speak in Welsh, her original tongue, and was able to be more rational in the language than in English. ‘Mount Anon’ was a memory of visiting an unnamed mountain, its identity the stronger on maps as ‘Unnamed Mountain’ than its titled neighbours. His poem to the self portraits of Egon Schiele — that ‘poor forked. creature’ — saw the artist exposed even when fully clothed.

Timothy Adès lightened the mood with some of his translations of Robert Desnos’ delightful poems for children: these were maths lessons with a difference — watch the video to be charmed by them. They and others of Timothy’s translations can be read on the High Window website. 

Ray Pool followed up with memories of long cycle-tours with his brother, six decades ago, then in his new poem 'Fair Farnham' he gave us a guided tour of ‘the town where he lives in Surrey.

Julia Duke had looked for inspiration to an oyster shell and admitted that in that guise she was rather ‘crusty’ and ‘flaky’. And in poems in which fairy tales were revisited in contemporary terms, recounted how Robin Hood was ‘turned down’ as a do-gooder, and the wolf turned up his snout at Little Red Riding Hood — he had become a vegetarian!

David Bleiman sympathised in Scots with immigrants, read ‘February Flashback’ from his new pamphlet Gathering Light and retold the recent story of ‘Sunflower Seeds’ in which a Russian soldier cries to his mother that he doesn’t want to become the fertilizer for the sunflowers that an angry Ukrainian woman tells him to keep in his pockets so that the Ukrainian national flower will bloom from them when he’s dead.

Ranald Barnicott had two sonnets translated from the French poet Mallarmé and a third dedicated to the poet himself: Stefane up all night writing in ‘erudite passion’.
 
Tony Watts read from his very first collection, Strange Gold: ‘School Photographs’ and past girlfriends resurfaced ‘afloat in smashed light’. Then there was a memory of a romantic relationship in which Thomas Hardy’s books acted as a go-between when the lovers were apart. Reading separate copies of the same book, ‘a landscape held them in its palm like chaff’. And then ‘Watchtower People’ — in which ‘Mrs Niceperson’ and other recipients of visits from Jehovah’s Witnesses’ emerged with less grace than the admittedly irritating cold callers. 

Liz Kon’s poem ‘Rain at Night’ struck a comfortable chord on this drab evening and, hopeful of the approach of Spring, ‘March’ looked forward to crisp cold summer wine. 
 
Jeremy Loynes hates it ‘When Things Break’, and his poem about it had a great twist in the tail. ‘The place where I feel most alien’, his rhyming, witty homage to Robert Service, had us trapped on the M25 with doom looming up at the end (his accent had morphed from Surrey to Saskatchewan by that stage.)

​Greg Freeman introduced his new pamphlet, The Fall of Singaphore with three poems from it that were eerily relevant to today’s war in the Ukraine. The full launch is on Thursday 30th March.
 
Phil Lawder bucked the evening’s trend by NOT reading anything from his recent collection, but flashing it anyway! The poems he did read were topical in a more meteorological domain — overwhelming storms setting the trees ‘dirty dancing’. And ‘as today was St David’s Day’, a wickedly funny poem about Ireland’s community, divided in their graves in neighbouring burial grounds with the streets they came for ‘Glowering at each other across the muddy streets’ nearby. I loved the Protestants who had’heavenly expectations as modest as a Travelodge!’

Pratibha Castle was in celebratory mode as her pamphlet, Three Birds and a Few Loose Feathers is finally published after a delay of almost two years, and she read three poems from it.

Peter Taylor meditated on a young love from forty years ago who is still a friend.

​Rosie Barratt wondered why, though she had seen so much wonderful sea life when she visited Shetland, she had still not seen an orc.

Finally, Belinda Singleton reminded us of the tragic story of the Hungarian Poet whose poems, written on forced marches from camp to camp in WWII, had been discovered sewn into the lining of his coat, only when his body was exhumed from the mass grave where it had been thrown by his captors after he was shot.

Our next Zooming with The 1000 Monkeys is on Tuesday 5th April at 7:30 pm. Book a five-minute slot through our newsletters. Meanwhile we'll be adding 5 years'-worth of memories of The 1000 Monkeys Guildford events, 2015 – 2020, on this blog.