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

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday November 10th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday November 10th

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm Workshop lead by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poets Helen Ivory and Martin Figura

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

 

Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show.  Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016.  In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His latest collection The Remaining Men  has just been published by Cinnamon Press. 

 
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist who makes shadowboxes and collage. She was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2024. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches for the National Centre for Writing Academy. Her surrealist chapbook  Maps of the Abandoned City was published by  SurVision in 2019 and the poem The Square of the Clockmaker is riding the rails as one of the Poems on the Underground.  She  has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish and Greek as part of the Versopolis European poetry platform.  Her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US last year. Constructing a Witch (October 2024) her sixth collection with Bloodaxe Books, is a PBS Winter Recommendation. 

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday October 6th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday October 6th

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Workshop lead by Paul Maddern 7pm

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Paul Maddern

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

 

Paul Maddern was born in Bermuda and lives in Ireland. He has four publications with Templar Poetry (Derbyshire) and is editor of Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, Belfast). He has taught at the University of Leeds and the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, and in November 2023 he was Writing Fellow at the James Merrill House, Stonington CT. He is the first three-time winner of the Bermuda Government Literary Award for Poetry, most recently in 2024, for The Tipping Line.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday September 8th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday September 8th

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Workshop lead by Frank McMahon 7pm

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Frank McMahon

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

 

Frank McMahon lives in Cirencester and is a member of Somewhere Else Writers Group and Wordbrew.

His third book of poems, The Light Will Always Return, was published in April 2024.He has also been published in various journals in print and on-line. Last year he read at the Cheltenham Poetry and Literature Festivals.

He won the GWN prize in 2022 and is a runner up in this year’s competition.. In June 2023, with others he set up Writers in the Library in Cirencester and it is going strong. Later that year he worked with two Primary Schools who took part in the national Poetry Together Initiative. Both schools were shortlisted out of 400 and each won £250 for their school library.

He worked as a volunteer to support the 2024 Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday July 21st

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday July 21st

 

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Workshop lead by Olga Dermott-Bond 7pm

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Olga Dermott-Bond

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

 

 

Olga Dermott-Bond is originally from Northern Ireland, and lives in Warwickshire. She has published two pamphlets: apple, fallen (Against the Grain Press, 2020) and A Sky full of strange specimens (Nine Pens Press, 2021). Her first full collection Frieze, published by Nine Arches Press, was recently featured in The Guardian. She has won competitions including the BBC Proms poetry competition, Welshpool and Poetry on Loan poetry competitions. She is currently a managing editor for Irish poetry journal Dodging the Rain. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and poet in residence for the Coffin Works Museum in Birmingham. @olgadermott