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