Coffee–House Poetry Newsletter
spring 2012 newsletter
Date: 29th December 2011
Dear Poetry Fans
Another amazing year in terms of Coffee-House Poetry’s continuity & development—with no visible means of Arts Council support for a number of years now—great readings, launches, party-nights & magazine events, wonderful new work coming out of every one of our regular workshops, and the increasing, overwhelming sense, not just of belonging to a live-literature audience meeting in a much-loved Bohemian cellar (or sunlit upstairs gallery) but of a wider poetry movement, receiving & responding to our regular e-mails (each with their featured fortnightly poem) or hitting our website — to catch up on the venue’s history, get up to speed on next year’s prizes/judges/deadlines, check-out upcoming readings, seminars, classes, or read five years’ worth of outstanding Troubadour International Poetry Prize-winning poems.
Susan Wicks, who judged this year’s prize with David Harsent, pointed out, at the winners’ celebration last month, that the regular website/newsletter community has moved on to include the thousands who submit from around the world to the annual International Poetry Prize, a strand of our activities generously supported by Cegin Productions who’ve not only enhanced the prize’s standing but who have, alongside developing other jazz-&-poetry ventures around the world, created the new What We Should Have Said music-&-spoken-word event which many of you enjoyed in October and which re-appears in new formats in this and future seasons.
But the big new venture this year is that I’m editing an anthology, our first publication under the Coffee-House Poetry imprint!
Our audience has always responded to our themed workshops and the famous (and fun!) themed poetry-party-evenings where they’ve happily either shared their own poems on a specific topic or revealed their own imaginative & appropriate finds from the contemporary canon. So our first Troubadour anthology will build on that spirit of eclecticism by featuring both poems by the best 20c/21c poets from Britain, Ireland, US & beyond (in translation as appropriate) alongside poems produced by our own community of poets through our workshops.
As you’ll see from the Spring 2012 programme, the theme for the end-of-season poetry celebration (and for one of the workshops) is ‘hotels’, an intriguing aspect of contemporary existence I’ve been writing on and researching for some time (as well as collecting, as ever, images, literary references and some exciting poetic instances). Poems produced at the ‘hotels’ workshop will be considered for publication alongside the best poems on that transient, unsettling, mysterious theme from published poetry collections, current and from the past half-century or so, a number of which I’ve already had the go-ahead on, from well-known poets. (Not that I’m inviting you all to dash-off hotel-themed poetic contributions: the brief is strictly either hotel poems already published or poems created at Troubadour hotel-themed workshops here and around the country in 2012.)
More news via letter/e-mail/website as the project progresses though we’re already scheduling launches & publicity (in London and throughout the UK, plus Paris, New York and beyond) around a 2013 publication date. Meantime, not just ‘hotels’, but the enlivening buzz of a great Spring Coffee-House readings-&-workshops programme coming up (see flyer & website) and a chance to welcome you all back to the liveliest, longest-running & fastest-growing/diversifying literary community in London and, virtually, around the world…
All still incomparable value with workshop fees and admission unchanged: still only £7 for all our readings, (concessions £6), season tickets 30% off, so only £24.50 for the whole season (concs. £21). To book, simply send cheque payable to Coffee-House Poetry (no credit cards) to above address, stating event, date, tickets required: booked tickets are held at the door and you should arrive no later than 7.45pm. Any changes to mailing/e-mailing details, do please write, visit the website or e-mail…
Yours sincerely
Anne-Marie Fyfe (Organiser)