Sunday

BOOK ONLINE

When Martin Figura was 9 years old, his father killed his mother. Figura explores themes of identity, forgiveness, loss, family & adoption with insight and gentle humour, to tell a unique coming-of-age story.   Short-listed for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2010.

‘Profoundly honest and at the same time joyfully entertaining’ Independent on Sunday

www.martinfigura.co.uk/

There will be a movable feast of performances in the Edge Arts Centre Café in between scheduled events: watch the website/notice board for details

Watch out for the KUPs as they tour the streets of Much Wenlock bringing poetry to the places no other poets can reach.

The cart-wheeling, bingo-playing, edible-poem maker will be wowing the crowds today with her infectious energy, fun-filled and very PINK approach to poetry.  Bring the children but expect to be charmed yourself!

www.thepoetree.net

Last year we had the Poetry Takeaway, this year the world's first (and only) mobile poetic first-aid service for poetry will be at your disposal.  The vintage ambulance is equipped with the latest diagnostic techniques & first rate practitioners will be on board to assist you!  No experience of poetry is necessary, indeed the service was first established in order to overcome poetic allergies or phobias.  Be admitted to a private poetic health consultation and within 10 minutes you'll be prescribed the appropriate poem, verse or lyric!  A fun way to bring poetry to people.

Come and create a 2012 Poet-tree.

Mark Niel

BOOK ONLINE

Priory Hall becomes the focus for the world of Performance Poetry on Sunday as Festival favourite Mark Niel curates a day of events. This day of performances and programme of bite-sized workshops povides you with with the chance to put your newly-acquired skills into action. Mark has invited some of the leading lights of the Performance Poetry circuit to read, entertain and inspire.

10 – 11  Easy Like Sunday Morning:
A gentle, chilled welcome to Sunday. Some of our guest poets share classical or acoustic pieces of music, talk about why it is special to them, and then share a poem in response to or incorporating it into their poem

Heather Wastie

Emma Purshouse

11.15 -11.45  Bite Size Workshop 1: Writing for Performance

12pm to 1pm  Midlands Voices: Performances from Emma Purshouse, Heather Wastie and Matt Windle. Leading talents on the Poetry circuit based in the Midlands perform.

1.15 – 1.45  Bite Size Workshop 2: Preparing for Performance

2 – 3pm  Cabaret Acoustica 1 : Poetry as cabaret featuring Mark Niel, AF Harrold, Zena Edwards and the Antipoet

Matt Windle

AF Harrold

3.15 – 3.45  Bite Size Workshop 3: The Voice in Performance

4 – 5pm Cabaret Acoustica 2 : Poetry as cabaret featuring Mark Niel, AF Harrold, Zena Edwards and the Antipoet

5 - 6pm  Poetry Jukebox An exclusive premiere of Mark Niel’s new show. Poetry Jukebox which features  performances of ( up to) 30 Classic Poems everyone should know (according to the Times).

Finally Mark Niel will reveal his new show in a world premiere at Wenlock. "Poetry, Period!" imagines the
history of poetry crammed into a new periodic table of poetry.

The Antipoet

Zena Edwards

Poets modern and classic, explanations of poetry terms and different form and extracts of favourite classic poems are wrapped up with humour and brio in one interactive lecture. The audience decides which part of the new periodic table are explored so no two shows will ever be the same.

All of this is available for an All Day ticket of £10 so you can pick and mix which shows and workshops you'd like to attend.

BOOK ONLINE

Reading

Poet, essayist and critic, and with a deep interest in the relationship between poetry, silence and music, Fiona Sampson uses her voice to release the music of the lines of her poetry, and the charged spaces between them.   Sampson lifts her words from the page and allows them to live in our heads.  We are delighted to welcome Fiona Sampson to Much Wenlock for the first time..

BOOK ONLINE

Reading

Lachlan Mackinnon was born in 1956. His fourth collection, Small Hours (Faber, 2010), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2010 and in 2011 he was the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award. He is a regular  reviewer for the national press, and has also written two critical books and a biography. Lachlan is a poised lyricist with a taste for eccentric experiment.  His poetry is both an act of resistance, and a way of setting things down “so clearly that a thousand years may hear."

BOOK ONLINE

Talk – Poetry & Plays

In this session, playwright David Edgar will show how drama shares many of the elements and structures of poetry. Unlike the novel, but like poems, plays are written to be spoken, as well as being designed to be consumed at a single bite.

Illustrating his session by actors' readings from classical and modern plays as well as clips from films and television drama, David Edgar will show how plays communicate meaning by the technique - familiar to poets - of drawing unexpected connections between different elements. Plays as a whole have a common, underlying shape which owes more to the metaphorical character of the poem than the literalism of the novel. This is partly because the key events in so many plays take place in a metaphorical space.

So, as well as containing poetry (from the Greek chorus via Shakespearian blank verse to the bleak imagery of Samuel Beckett), great plays are poems in themselves.

David Edgar is one of Britain's leading playwrights, who has written extensively for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and many other theatres. His best known work includes Destiny, Pentecost and a multi-award-winning adaptation of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. His play about the making of the King James Bible - Written on the Heart - opened at Stratford last October. Founder of Britain's first full-time university playwriting course (at Birmingham in 1989) his session draws on his hugely successful book about playwriting, How Plays Work, published by Nick Hern Books in 2009.

BOOK ONLINE

Salon

What to Remember When Waking: Shaping a Resilient Self Through Poetry.
During times of stress or economic hardship, it is tempting to give up on previous hopes and ideals and withdraw into the basic anxieties of survival. One of the powers of poetry is to establish an inner imaginative discipline which allows us to live a fiercer, more courageous, simpler life at the centre of momentous events and besieging circumstances: to create a more beautiful mind, find a clearer focus and work from a surer internal foundation than the one the media tries to establish for us, while cultivating a sense of humour and celebration that binds our independent selves to a larger community.

This will be a day for David to work with a body of poetry, his own and others', which looks at the ability of the imagination to create a robust, independent self that is equal to or larger than the tenor or difficulty of the times.

www.davidwhyte.com.

BOOK ONLINE

Workshop

National Poet for Wales since 2008. Awarded Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2010, made a member of the Gorsedd y Beirdd at the National Eiteddfod, 2011.

BOOK ONLINE

We are looking forward to another ‘quarry performance’ from local poet, playwright, broadcaster and Guardian Nature Diary columnist, Paul Evans. Paul’s previous quarry works have been innovative and exciting, and his collaboration with a small choir of local voices from village school-children adds a whole new dimension to his work.  On the edge, in all senses of the phrase, Paul’s quarry recital will celebrate Wenlock’s relationship to its world famous landscape and literary and poetic heritage.

BOOK ONLINE

Music and Poetry

We are made of water, water is essential to life. Wells were once the source of water in Much Wenlock, the home of St Milburga. In this performance, water is celebrated in all its forms, its relevance to home and life, and some of the legends associated with St Milburga.   Gill will be reading some of her recent poems celebrating local wells and streams, and other water sources often associated with saints and Polly has set some of these to song for her community choir, Larks.

www.oak-barn.co.uk

BOOK ONLINE

Reading

Elaine Feinstein is a prize-winning poet, novelist and playwright.  Her first novel, The Circle, (1971) won the Betty Miller prize, and was long listed for the ‘lost’ Man Booker prize in 2010.  Her most recent is The Russian Jerusalem (2008)  for which she received a major Arts Council Award.  Her versions of the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva were first published in 1970, and have never been out of print.  She has travelled all over the world to read her poetry.  In her latest book of poems, Cities (2010), she explores the haunted landscape between past and present, history and memory.  Her most poignant book of poems, Talking to the Dead, is both an exploration of loss, and a witty acknowledgement of the strains felt in a marriage of nearly fifty years.  A Dangerous Pursuit, the title of her memoirs, on which she is currently working, is essentially the story of her writing life, illustrated by poems, especially from Talking to the Dead, Cities, and Bride of Ice. 

BOOK ONLINE

Reading

Prestigious prize winner Daljit Nagra - the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem with ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’, also the title of his first collection, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The South Bank Show Decibel Award, and was nominated for The Costa Prize, The Guardian First Book Prize, the Aldeburgh Prize and the Glen Dimplex Award. Daljit has performed at venues throughout the world, and is a regular contributor to BBC radio. He has also written articles for The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times of India.

Daljit was a very popular performer at our first festival and we are so pleased to welcome him back in 2012 with his second book, Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! - in which he is concerned  with linguistic identity, literary tradition and colonial history.  An exuberant and joyfully brilliant collection.

BOOK ONLINE

Workshop – Catching Poems

Poet and teacher Ross Donlon will run a three hour workshop drawing on his experience in teaching at writers' centres and universities in Australia. An award winning poet, both for work on the page and spoken word, he will provide the class with a hands on (or pens down!) experience, so that participants will leave with a number of useful drafts.  He will also provide tips regarding reading poetry, including microphone technique.  Participants should bring an object or photograph with them that is of emotional importance.

BOOK ONLINE

Reading

“Reminiscent of e.e. cummings at his best” (Envoi), “Mario Petrucci's poetry performances attract international recognition, embracing issues of searing social, linguistic and personal relevance through his hallmark combination of innovation and humanity."  Inspired by Black Mountain, Petrucci embraces contemporary issues of searing social and personal relevance, but always through musicality and a profound ability to move us.  From the intimacies of love and loss, via the tragedy of Chernobyl, to the recently-published the waltz in my blood, Petrucci promises no less than "Poetry on a geological scale… a new track for poets of witness” (Verse).

Mario has received many awards for his poetry: he is four times winner of the London Writers Competition and recipient of the 2002 Arvon/ Daily Telegraph International Poetry Prize.  We are delighted to welcome Mario back to Wenlock.

www.mariopetrucci.com/books.htm

BOOK ONLINE

Reading

Our finalé sees the Laureate of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; the Scottish Makar, and the National Poet of Wales on stage together in a celebration of the very best of contemporary poetry in the UK.  Expect not just fine poetry, but the sheer delight of these three poets revelling in their own and each other's work and company.
www.gillianclarke.co.uk/home.htm

We warmly invite all Friends of Wenlock Poetry Festival to celebrate with us as our third festival draws to a close.  If you’re not already a Friend you might like to consider signing up!

www.little-machine.com/