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excellent poetry at affordable prices
To receive the link to join The 1000 Monkeys each month, subscribe to our newsletter and email us with your request to go on our list of readers and listeners, and join in.
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July’s meeting of The 1000 Monkeys was on the 5th July, the evening when an exodus of Boris Johnson’s government was heralded by the sudden resignation of Savid Javed and Rishi Sunak, (followed the next day by several lesser ministers and parliamentary secretaries.) As Simon Williams remarked, if we’d only known in time we could have written and delivered some great poems on the subject! But those poems will have to wait until August’s Monkey gathering by which time anything might have happened! (Johnson's reluctant resignation followed within the week.) |
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’. | Jenna Plewes read her moving poem ‘On the Road from Mariupol’. |
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 And finally we include a clip of Timothy Adès reading his lipogram poem THE EXCELLENT WESSEX EVENT (WHEN SHE WEDDED ME) which was recently published in Long Poem Magazine. Timothy has helpfully provided us with a link to the text, with his notes and background explanation to this extraordinary piece -- https://www.timothyades.com/excellent-wessex-event-timothy-ades/ The next Zooming with the 1000 Monkeys is on Tuesday 5th July 2022. In future there will be 10 (not 12) five-minute slots and 3 two-minute late-booked readings, as we want to keep our events to no longer than one hour if possible. For a 5-minute slot, subscribe to our weekly newsletter and reply to one of them with your request, no more than three weeks before the event that you would like to attend, either as a reader or in the audience. You will then receive the event link each month. We welcome new as well as regular readers. |
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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 dempseyandwindle@gmail.com or reply to one of our newsletters . |
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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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Emily R-K’s “Paris Nocturne” is full of lovely sinister images and sea-sounds: the sound of the city ‘s underbelly at night, a tide of growls made of “the scratchings of night crabs” and the decomposition under the streets (I thought of the Paris catacombs). The poem sounded beautiful in French and in her own English translation. I’ll share it here if she allows it. | March 2016 — VENERUNT, VIDERUNT, VICTIS! (Paris Lit Up #3 LAUNCH AT THE KEYSTONE)Wednesday 23rd March 2016 – a date to remember alongside 1066 AD and 54 BC? They came, they saw, they conquered! But this was a peaceful invasion by poets and writers from the Paris-based group Paris Lit Up, and everybody was a winner. The Paris Lit Up team were on a tour to promote their excellent annual magazine, PLU#3 (2015’s edition), and Guildford was their third stop on a week-long series of readings and open mics. Being occasional readers at their Paris performance base, Culture Rapide (103 Rue Julien Lacroix, Paris), we (Dónall and Jan) were happy to help them. When we asked Neil Willis who hosts The Keystone’s Music Open Mic night on Wednesdays if he was up for an evening of combined poetry and music, he saw no problems. And so we all made it so, and what a grand night it was! Dónall began the first poetry section of the evening, reading from his own book “The Smell of Purple” and recent poems. (He has a poem in PLU#3 too.) By now we had a good audience, including ten open mic readers, and we moved on to the PLU team’s launch readings. Our five house-guests from Paris and Frank Dullaghan, another contributor who had flown over from Dubai, where he works, were as varied and entertaining as the book itself (for this is more than just a magazine). Helen Cusack O’Keefe (Bovent Bittern) had a blackly comic recipe for survival in prison: “How to Cook up a Storm in 6 x 8 Feet.” Her advice will probably come in useful; as she pointed out, it can happen to anyone. But banana skins and Marmite?
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| 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! |
| 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!’
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1000 Monkeys Memory No 4: February 2018 in the The Keep, GuildfordWe were very glad to welcome as featured guests at the February 2018 edition of The 1000 Monkeys two experienced poets, Eamonn Lynskey from Dublin and Belinda Singleton, from Guildford itself. The evening was crowded with audience and readers from the floor and we did have to close the list of open mic spots at 7.15, as by then we’d reached the maximum of 15 poets that were all that we could fit into our time. |
| Dónall, starting off the evening, paid tribute to his childhood friend, Gerry Sweeney, and Gerry’s mother, whose name is the title of Dónall’s recent collection. Eamonn Lynskey read from his new collection, It’s Time, published by Salmon Poetry last year. The book reflects his interest in Irish history and in archaeology, with a gentle reminiscent tone. The landscape of Ireland, and its specific places, are a source of lyrical description and of metaphor and scientific and theological musings, as in “Concerning the Concept of the Universe as an Accident Waiting to Happen.” In “This Photograph” the picture has “trapped a blur / of revellers at a New Year’s party” and time is a fluid element in which to drift “towards /the ocean of what might have been.” Eamonn is very conscious of the separate identities of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and the Troubles that are a part of the history of both countries as a result. In his poems “Deposition” and “This is my Body” he makes explicit the history of sectarian murder that haunts the island of Ireland. He also speaks and writes of the abuses of human rights in other countries torn by internal conflict and war, for example in “Civilian Executions in Minsk, 1941”. His grief over the loss of young lives in war is a frequent theme, for example in “Two Soldiers”. Belinda Singleton also muses on time and history. She began with a poem to “Edward Thomas Past and Present”, inspired by the installation of ceramic poppies at the Tower of London last year, and told a little about Thomas’s life and his death in 1917 at Arras. Belinda read beautifully crafted, thoughtful poems on a variety of subjects from her collection, Foxes Don’t Wear Watches (Lapwing, 2017) and also a number of new poems. In a new poem on the future of our automated society she playfully speculates, whether the work of poets will be taken on by robots in an automated future. Belinda isn’t sure it’s desirable! Belinda’s humour, literary skill and rich imagery make her work a delight. Her topics ranged from the scientific (not all as fanciful as the robotic poet!), astronomy (“The Moon is Leaving us”) to the nature of time, and personal memories of her mother, a painter in St Ives. We very much enjoyed her imaginative “Open Days of the Mind” and her thoughtful poem “Water”, about the burdens, physical and otherwise, carried by women in many parts of the world. Belinda also edits an anthology of the work of the Wey poets, the Guildford group of which she’s the organiser, this year entitled Ripples. In the open mic, Ray Pool gave us a foretaste of Jeremy Loynes – not quite a lookalike but a fair pastiche of Jeremy’s lyric style. Jeremy himself described a hot afternoon in the 60’s, a personal memory, and gave an account of that urge to write down a poem when it comes “thumping” in your head. Here is Ray being himself... A new reader, whom we hope to see again next time he visits Guildford, was Martin Grey. He had poems about friendship and a rather long list of what we might be and why – my favourite line was “If you were a 4B pencil”. (I don’t recall his follow-up reason – did he want someone soft and dark and creative?) Bob Milton, after missing out on chances to read for the last two months, described aurora borealis and “After the Storm” and with Valentine’s Day coming up soon, had a love poem too. Gareth Toms read a sad “Scarecrows in Chairs” and had two different takes on love – here is his wistful “Wish You Were Here”, written two weeks before he met the girl who became his wife. Billy Jo read “Soulmates”, a bitter-sweet love poem and Alex de Suys read a rant about a number of things that were bothering him. Joanna Dez was another new face at the Keep. She delivered a long and impassioned poem on the subject of sexual harassment, a very live topic right now. Michael Cutchey read The Duck Poem, to great effect – his funniest rendering to date! Kyle McHale read his reflective poems: “Night on a Train Window”, a sad observation; “To Be” and “Playful”, both encouragements to be creative and unafraid to be oneself. Here is his childhood memory of "The Red Cedar" Owen Osler and Martin Jones, both members of the Wey Poets and occasional readers with The 1000 Monkeys, are both observers of people and moments. Owen can always raise a smile – going to collect his false teeth was the subject that did it this time. Martin read from his book of ekphrastic poems, illustrated with his own drawings. “Sunflowers” was an interpretation of Vincent Van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo about the painting. |
February 2017: The last Keystone Event | It was the final spoken word event we would ever host at The Keystone in Guildford. Richard, the owner of the pub, who initially invited us to hold our events there, had been a kind and supportive friend while we built up our audiences on the first Monday of each month to respectable numbers. When we began, in 2014, the pub was normally empty on Monday nights, giving us the right environment for spoken word. But this final evening, with a heavy drinking party of young people shouting in decibels above our microphone, had all the qualities of a train wreck, as Ray Pool said. Good news for the pub, but the noise all but ruined the evening for our readers and listeners. |
Karen’s second set included another sequence of four poems about places. ‘Revelation’ is a meditation on the via Francigena in Tuscany, a Pilgrims Way leading to Rome, which connects to our own Pilgrims Way via Canterbury. Her sense of place and love of the countryside and its past, and the exquisite crafting of her technique, give these poems their timeless appeal. In the Open Mic, Kyle McHale read poems by Robert Frost, including Birches, giving us a glimpse of the beauty of ice storms in the forests of North America. Brendan offered us £4000 to be his friend, but strangely, no-one took him up on that! Joanna Wilson, a newcomer to The 1000 Monkeys, read bravely through some embarrassingly raucous conversation from the revellers at the back of the room. Ciaran Ward waited patiently for the deafening noise from the bar to quieten a little but in the end told us how he went walking in a dismal E-scape where time blew up in his face, and cycling on Blue Monday (but this was the blue of the Mediterranean, a long way from Black Friday)
| | Dónall’s introductory set introduced Simon Sad of Diss, in Norfolk, whom Dónall got to know when he worked in the care home where Simon lived at the end of fhis life. Simon’s Norfolk dialect fascinated Dónall and many years later led to a poem about a song that Simon’s mother would recite (the tune is lost.) Dew in Aprille is the title of Dónall’s poem, and you can hear it here. With some relief, we've said ‘Goodbye’ to the Keystone as a venue for spoken word: we wish the new owners well but we’re looking forward to the quieter atmosphere of the Castle Lounge, beginning on March 6th 2017. |
| Monkey Memory no 2: February 2016Caught between Burns Night and St Valentine’s Day, we advertised our event on 1st February as UnBurns Night. We thought love poems and Rabbie Burns poems would go together well. Dónall wore his kilt (Irish as it happens, but who knew? – so sue me, said Dónall ... ) and we inserted the famous lover and lyricist’s epigrams and best-known poems wherever we could squeeze them in. It was great to see Greg Freeman of WriteOutLoud.net, who took a lot of excellent photos, which with his permission I’m using in this review. You can see Dónall’s rendition of “The Curragh of Kildare” in the video. Not bad singing, for one who was to lose his voice altogether next morning. (It wasn’t man-flu, it was real!) We had a lovely audience, including family and friends of our featured poet, Kyle McHale, whose Scottish name couldn’t disguise his true nationality as an American from Maryland. Kyle’s half-hour set was a total pleasure to listen to. In his mellow, gentle but passionate tones he delivered several new poems as well as favourites we’d heard before. He filled the room with feelings of warmth and wisdom. We regretted the occasional noise from the Keystone's new pool table, but lovely manageress Claire has promised to cover it next month, to give the poets the quiet they need. |
Alex Twyman mercilessly delivered a Song of Self-pity, and he followed it up with a poetic snapshot of himself as film director in his own living room. Both poems are on the video. | Kyle's set | Mike had some dark and Gothic words for us – just what kind of harvest were those scarecrows gathering in? Who or what is The Rust God? |
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| Monkey Memory No 1 ... 17th March 2015 in the Bar des Arts March 2015's event at the Bar Des Arts turned out to have a couple of themes: "Bloodlines", the presentation by our guests, was one of them, hats was another (here's Liddy looking very sultry in Dónall's rajah hat) and as it happened to be St Patrick's Day, we had to give Dónall the run of the place even more than usual. He treated us to the story of his birth, his name and other Irish things, which he published in his little book “Sifting Sound into Shape” (Dempsey & Windle). He had to represent St Paddy’s Day single handed, because our guests were American and Japanese by parentage, and read from their books “Anything in Turquoise” by Wendy Klein and “Landscape with a Hundred Bridges” by Dorothy Yamamoto about their own mixed bloodlines. Stephen Davids led off the first session of open mic readers, shocking us all over again with his memories of making love with (someone else’s) granny. Liddy, recovered from flu but not from her dissertation, had treats from that delicious collection of poems about all kinds of goodies from chocolate to oysters (with a few lines about digestive tragedy along the way.) Eddie had taken time off from eating and writing in his local petrol station to bring us dreams pressed into the fossil fuels of memory. And Alex brought a very new poem to the mic, “Epiphany”, which we've asked him to allow us to publish in the Keystone Anthology this year. |
To bring us up to the break, Dorothy Yamamoto took the mic and read us a fairy story, backwards in Japanese style, and we saw how Little Red Riding Hood becomes much less disturbing, and more kind to all the characters, if it ends with the wolf accompanying the little girl in the hood back to where he would have met her, and melting back into his natural habitat! Dorothy told us how rice should be cooked, according to her family's recipe, and confessed she had been brave enough to comment on her son’s new tattoo (and had been rebuked soundly.) Dorothy recalled her father, cutting Dorothy’s fringe in an inexorably straight line, so that she wondered why everything was always the same. Wendy remembered “five years of growth” through the medium of the hair she grew so long that she could sit on it. Each brought to life the characteristic of their families, so embedded, occasionally so irritating, and so loved.. After the break, Wendy read more poems, including one of Dónall’s favourites, “Red Toenails in April”, which was published in last year’s Pop Up Anthology. This so inspired Dónall’s imagination that Kyle, next up to the open mic, found himself asked about the colour he was wearing on his toenails tonight. (As it was St Patrick’s, Kyle kindly let this go without flooring our host.) The title of Kyle’s tribute to Ireland was a little ambivalent (“Could be Ireland, Could be Anywhere”) but the landscape in it, that “cries often by itself “ was beautiful and recognisable as the wild wet cliffs of the Atlantic coast in the far west. In “Lost Verse” he wondered that so much poetry appears and vanishes away (“written minutes of lives lived”). Geoff Pimlott had a poem from a friend in Thailand, Venetia Walkey, about an artificial tree in an artificial world which brought to mind the expensively designed shopping malls in big Asian cities like Bangkok. Geoff revealed that though he is not Irish, he is in fact one of the Tribe of Little People! Geoff’s own poems “Morphine”, the “velvet round my pain”, and “The Congo has Healed” showed that however small the stature, the spirit is enormous. Lorri had breaking news about the Old Testament and the goings-on in Sodom and Gomorrah, and Dónall insisted on hearing her Dirty Poem again. (blame St Paddy – tears before bedtime, I thought.) Next month's guests (April 21st 2015): Chrys Salt & Bernard Kops |
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.)
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