Coffee House Poetry

readings - spring 2012

mondays 8-10 pm, £7 (concs. £6)

• mon 23 jan: troubadours of spring, voices new & re-discovered, with jonathan davidson, liz berry, jennie christian, karen mccarthy woolf, edward mckay, tamar yoseloff, dante micheaux & katy evans-bush
• mon 6 feb: oversteps books, with alwyn marriage (ed.), michael swan, ann kelley, robert stein, ann segrave, christopher north, joan mcgavin & graham high
• mon 20 feb: what we should have said, an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig, with stuart silver, ellen cranitch, robert minhinnick, samantha wynne-rhydderch & pianist, huw warren
• mon 5 mar: magma #52 launch, with guests, inua ellams & greta stoddart
• mon 19 mar: tipping the night porter, a hotel-themed end-of-season poetry-party with guest readers, music & prize-quiz

programme details

mon 23 jan: troubadours of spring, voices new & re-discovered with jonathan davidson, liz berry, jennie christian, karen mccarthy woolf, edward mckay, tamar yoseloff, dante micheaux & katy evans-bush

Our seasonal ‘new & established’ round-up brings together a kaleidoscopic collection of poetic voices of the moment…

• Jonathan Davidson (b. ’64, lives in Coventry, 2nd collection, Early Train, Smith/Doorstop, 2011) has had four radio plays and two poetry features broadcast;
• Liz Berry (tall-lighthouse pamphlet, The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, 2010) is Kingston University Emerging Poet-in-Residence;
• Jennie Christian has a degree in Astrophysics, has lived in Australia, and now co-organises the Crouch End Poetry Group;
• Karen McCarthy Woolf has edited two critically-acclaimed anthologies Bittersweet: Black Women’s Contemporary Poetry (The Women’s Press) and Kin (Serpent’s Tail); a selection of her work appears in Bloodaxe’s 2010 Ten New Poets;
• Edward McKay lives and works in London, is working on a poem-series, Postcards from Doggerland and has a pamphlet due from Salt in 2012;
• Tamar Yoseloff is a former Poetry London reviews editor and Poetry School co-ordinator; her 4th collection (The City with Horns, Salt, 2011) features a sequence inspired by Jackson Pollock’s abstract art;
• Dante Micheaux (Amorous Shepherd, Sheep Meadow Press, 2010) lives in NYC and has received the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award;
• Katy Evans-Bush, b. NYC, latest collection, Egg Printing Explained (Salt, 2011), edits Salt’s Horizon Review and writes the literary blog Baroque in Hackney.

mon 6 feb: oversteps books, with alwyn marriage (ed.), michael swan, ann kelley, robert stein, ann segrave, christopher north, joan mcgavin & graham high

First Coffee-House Poetry visit from a South Devon press who have been publishing quality poetry for almost 20 years, with a roster of poets many of whose names will be familiar to Troubadour regulars, and to anyone au fait with the world of contemporary poetry publishing, magazines, venues and events, led by Alwyn Marriage (latest collection, Touching Earth, 2007), former Chief Exec of two literature aid agencies and now Oversteps Managing Editor, who’ll read, and will introduce Oversteps poets:

• Michael Swan (2nd collection, The Shapes of Things, 2011) works in English language teaching and applied linguistics;
• Ann Kelley (Because We Have Reached That Place, 2006) wrote The Burying Beetle (shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award) and The Bower Bird (Winner of the Costa Children’s Book of the Year Award);
• Robert Stein (1st collection, The Very End of Air, 2011) reviews contemporary classical music for Tempo and International Record Review;
• Ann Segrave lives in Lewes and is deeply influenced by the Sussex Downs landscape as well as Crete and Provence; her Aviatrix was published in 2009;
• Christopher North (Explaining the Circumstances, 2010) founded Metroland Poets and now runs a centre for writers in the mountains north of Alicante;
• Joan McGavin (Flannelgraphs, 2011) is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester;
• Graham High (The Range-Finder’s Glasses, 2011) edits Blithe Spirit, journal of the British Haiku society, and has appeared in over 40 different haiku and haibun journals world-wide.

mon 20 feb: what we should have said, an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig, with stuart silver, ellen cranitch, robert minhinnick, samantha wynne-rhydderch and pianist, huw warren

Edinburgh/Perrier-Award-winner Stuart Silver (You Look Like Ants, Soho Theatre) leads off Cegin Productions’ randomised spoken-word sequence with improvisations and interpolations from jazz pianist Huw Warren (Infinite Riches in a Little Room, CD, Babel, 2001) sparking off unscripted poetic interventions from:

• former Granada script-editor & Times arts-journalist Ellen Cranitch (Oxford Poets 2010);
• novelist, essayist & environmental campaigner, Robert Minhinnick (b. Neath), King Driftwood (Carcanet, 2008) is his 10th poetry collection; and
• Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch who has studied at Cambridge and Cardiff and now lives in West Wales, third collection, Banjo, due from Picador in June 2012.
• plus open-mic in the first half, one poem max. 25 lines on first-come basis, register when doors open @ 7.40 pm

mon 5 mar: magma #52 launch, with guests, inua ellams & greta stoddart

Astonishing London audiences for most of Coffee-House Poetry’s fifteen years with their dazzle and diversity, seasonal magma launches are the essential get-together event for Troubadour-fans and Magma-followers alike with a chance to handle the latest ‘hot’ issue of the metropolis’ mag-of-the-moment, hear what’s upcoming in magmas-of-the-future, listen to some of the poets who made it into #52 from the mega-magma-mailbag, and hear two oustanding guest poets featured in the current issue:

• Greta Stoddart (second collection, Salvation Jane, Anvil, 2008) who lives in Devon and works as a poetry tutor for (among others) Poetry School & Bath Spa University; and
• Inua Ellams, award-winning poet & performer who fuses borderlines between hip-hop & 18c romanticism; his plays have toured nationally including Soho Theatre & Cottesloe.

mon 19 mar: tipping the night porter: a hotel-themed end-of-season poetry-party with guest readers, music & prize-quiz

The quotidian equivalent of all those wayside-inns and mountain castles where weary pilgrims, travellers, troubadours and mysterious strangers shared tall tales around a log fire, today’s hotels remain nontheless freighted with the possibilities both of chance (if brief, or strange, or surreal) encounters and of extreme isolation; of contingency and banality; of luxury and loneliness…

From Gene Pitney’s 24 Hours from Tulsa through Elvis’ Heartbreak Hotel to the Eagles’ Hotel California and Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels, songwriters have revelled in the lure of hotels and in the impossibility of ever checking-out from those anonymous accommodations that provide the locations for films as different as The Holiday Inn, Weekend at the Waldorf, The Hotel New Hampshire, Hotel Splendide, Hotel Berlin, Lost in Translation and Psycho!

With so many of us continually checking into and out-of yet another hostel, auberge, pension or airport hotel, do come and join us for what promises to be an eclectic evening of readings (guests’ own poems or favourite poets’ reports from rented rooms) on an eternal and inexhaustible theme… and take part, as ever, in our not-too-literary prize quiz!