Next Buzzwords Sunday June 8th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday June 8th

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop lead by Angela France

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Robin Gilbert

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

 Robin Gilbert has lived for over fifty years in the “Wide Valley”, which stretches beneath the Cotswold escarpment from Cooper’s Hill in the south to Shurdington Hill in the north.  In 1971, he moved to Gloucestershire on joining GCHQ, where he worked for 35 years, the last fifteen of them in international relations.  He had written poems, on and off, for most of his life, and, soon after retirement in 2006, he started to attend meetings of the Cheltenham Poetry Society, Holub and Buzzwords. He has two previous (self-published) collections, My Own Dragon (2006) and DaDa & the Dark Lady (2012), and has enjoyed modest success in the Buzzwords and Cannon’s Mouth Sonnet or Not competitions. From 2013 to 2019, he was co-Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Next Buzzwords Sunday, May 11th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday May 11th

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop lead by Christina Thatcher

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Christina Thatcher

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher's Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more. She has two previous poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Romania. christinathatcher.com / @writetoempower.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday April 13th

 

 Next Buzzwords Sunday April 13th

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop lead by Kate Potts

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Kate Potts

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

 Kate Potts is a poet, teacher, mentor and editor. Her second collection Feral (Bloodaxe Books 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Telegraph poetry book of the month. Her debut pamphlet Whichever Music (tall lighthouse, 2008) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. 

In her new book Pretenders (Bloodaxe Books 2025) Kate weaves together poetry and interview material with essay fragments to create a multi-voice exploration of imposter feelings. Pretenders shines a light on our value systems and hierarchies, inrerogating notions of realness, self-assurance and the self. 

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday March 9th

 Next Buzzwords Sunday March 9th

 The first Buzzwords was in March 2005, so this is our 20th anniverary. There will be cake!

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm Workshop lead by Adam Horovitz

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Adam Horovitz

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

Adam Horovitz is a poet, performer and editor. He has published three collections of poetry, the most recent being Love and Other Fairy Tales, a memoir, A Thousand Laurie Lees, and an album of poetry and music with Josef Reeve, Little Metropolis. He co-presented The Thunder Mutters, a podcast celebrating John Clare, with fiddle player Becky Dellow during lockdown. He appeared on Cerys Matthews and Hidden Orchestra’s album We Come From the Sunin 2021. His next book, Slow Migrations, is due out from Indigo Dreams in September 2025.

 

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday 9th February

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday February 9th

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm Workshop lead by Angela France

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet John Greening

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

John Greening is a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner, author of over twenty collections, notably The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor UP, ed. Gardner) and From the East (Renard Press, 2024). He has edited Matthew Arnold, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, Iain Crichton Smith and most recently U.A.Fanthorpe. As well as several critical studies and translations, there have been anthologies such as Contraflow: Lines of Englishness co-edited with Kevin Gardner (a Guardian and Sunday Times Book of the Year in 2023). A book of linked essays, photographs and poems, A High Calling, appears from Renard in 2025 when his versions of Rilke's complete New Poems are also due from Baylor UP. 

John will be reading from his new U.A.Fanthorpe Selected, Not My Best Side, and from his own 2023 Selected Poems.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday January 12th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday January 12th

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm Workshop lead by Duncan Forbes

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Duncan Forbes

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

Duncan Forbes’s poems have been published by Faber, Secker and Enitharmon, who produced a Selected Poems in 2009, drawn from five previous collections. He has won a Gregory Award, Stephen Spender Prizes, Hawthorden Fellowship and TLS/Blackwells prize. His most recent collection of poems is Under the Sun (2024).

He read English and has taught for many years, including a stint as an RLF fellow at Worcester University. Now retired, he lives in Cheltenham and is married with two grown-up children.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday December 8th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday December 8th

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm Workshop lead by Michael Bartholomew Biggs and Nancy Mattson

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poets Michael Bartholomew Biggs and Nancy Mattson

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

As always for the December meeting, if you would like to read somone else's work at the open mic, please do. It has been suggested that some may like to read Ann Drysdale's poems as she died in August and was such a good friend to Buzzwords.

 

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip.  He began writing poetry, rather unexpectedly, about half-way through a career as a professional mathematician; he has now retired from the latter but not from the former.  He has published six full collections, the most recent of which are Fred & Blossom (2013, a narrative sequence set in the 1930s), Poems in the Case (2018, a hybrid of poetry collection and murder mystery) and Identified Flying Objects (2024, contemporary responses to the prophet Ezekiel).  For over twenty years he and Nancy Mattson have organised poetry readings at St Mary’s church in Islington – originally under the title Poetry in the Crypt but now elevated to Poetry above the Crypt.

Nancy Mattson is a Finnish-Canadian writer who moved from the Canadian prairies to London in 1990. Her four poetry collections cross borders of time, place and language from North America to Europe and Russia. Vision on Platform 2 (2018) and Writing with Mercury (2006) have mainly contemporary themes but draw on memory, myth, art, faith and family stories. Other books dig into history. Finns and Amazons (2012) brings together Russian women avant-garde artists and a Finnish great-aunt who moved to Soviet Karelia in 1932 but disappeared in 1939. Maria Breaks Her Silence (1989), a possible poetic biography of a 19^th century Finnish woman immigrant to Canada, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. Nancy was awarded a Hawthornden fellowship in 2007. She co-organises Poetry Above the Crypt in Islington, London