Stanza Meetings

The Bristol Stanza Group is now meeting twice monthly in a face-to-face workshop setting and twice monthly on Zoom. We welcome new poets on the basis of submission of three recent poems. If you want to know more, please contact martin.rieser@gmail.com

The Bristol Stanza Poetry Group plans to showcase poems specifically written for a series of mobile phone poetry walks and for a book, centered on current and prior festival locations. Our project intends to extend the Lyra Festival’s City of Words theme in linked poems (like beads on a necklace) which automatically play to the user on their walk via gps location. If you would like to write for the project and to request a poetry guide pack email martin.rieser@gmail.com

Launch of Calyx- the Bristol Stanza Poetry collection at Boston Tea Party Park Street
All welcome to this free event with readings and music and books on sale at discount price.

Thursday 10th October at 7.00pm until 9.00pm

Poetry on the Paragon 

with Rachael Boast in Bath

Thursday 24th November

• VenueThe Bookshop, The Paragon, Bath, BA1 5LS
• Doors open7.45pm
• Start time8pm

Void Studies, Rachel Boast’s extraordinary new poetry collection,
realises a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had
proposed, but never written. Études néantes was to consist of poems
written as musical études; these would not convey any direct message –
but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject.

This ‘impossible project’ has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing
way. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music – but despite their
esoteric nature are by no means ‘difficult’ in the usual sense: instead
they conjure the recognisable states, emotions, moods, ambiences and
strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a
kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book –
one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most
profound questions poetry can frame.

Festival of the Future City

Festival of the Future City  

Poets and writers write about the city

Thu 19 November 2015

18:00-19:15

Watershed  Bristol

Price: £8/ £7

Festival of Ideas commissioned some leading poets and writers to write about the city. In this special session: 

Liz Berry, Rachael Boast, Edson Burton, Ciaran Carson, Rana Dasgupta, Melissa Harrison, WN Herbert, Eimear McBride, Helen Mort, Peter Robinson and Lemn Sissay. Lemn Sissay will be reading his poem live from Adis Ababa.

£5,000 Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2015

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

judged by jean sprackland & john mcauliffe with both judges reading all poems

prizes: 1st £5,000, 2nd £1,000, 3rd £500
plus 20 prizes of £25 each
plus a spring 2016 coffee-house-poetry season-ticket
plus a prize-winners’ coffee-house poetry reading
with jean sprackland & john mcauliffe
on mon 30th nov 2015
…for all prize-winning poets

submissions, via e-mail or post, by mon 19th oct 2015

judges 

• John McAuliffe (b. Listowel, Co. Kerry, 1973) has published four books with The Gallery Press: A Better Life (2002), Next Door (2007), Of All Places (PBS Recommendation, 2011) and The Way In (2015). He lives in Manchester where he teaches at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and writes a monthly poetry column for the Irish Times.

• Jean Sprackland (b. 1962) is author of four collections of poetry, Tattoos for Mothers Day (Spike, 1997), Hard Water(Cape, 2003), Tilt (Cape, 2007) & Sleeping Keys (Random House, 2013), & Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach(Cape, 2012). Originally from Burton upon Trent, she studied English & Philosophy at the University of Kent & is a Trustee of the Poetry Archive.

September Update

• Bristol Poetry Festival  See:http://www.poetrycan.co.uk/2-general/1014-bpf15-frontpage.html-Don't miss Les Murray Australian poet Laureate- Tickets are free
• The Emma Press is looking for poems about space and aliens for an anthology aimed at children aged 9+. The deadline is 27th September 2015 and full details can be found here: http://theemmapress.com/about/submissions/
• Clare Pollard's one-woman poetry show based on her translations of Ovid's Heroines, Exeter Poetry Festival, 10 October; 
• What's natural and what's unnatural? A poetry competition to decide, deadline 1 November
• The People's Republic Of Poetry is a 20 date National Poetry Tour offering a night out with a difference and a chance for emerging poets to perform with 'A Firm Of Poets.' Details here.
• Troubadour Poetry Prize, deadline 19 October
• National Poetry Competition, deadline 31 October