The difficulty with so wide ranging an event as the Cheltenham Poetry Festival is always deciding what to go to - neither time nor finances will stretch to doing everything, much though I might like to. But I thoroughly enjoyed the two sessions I'd chosen over the weekend - a workshop with Ben Parker and a talk by Professor John Goodby of Swansea University on recent "finds" relating to Dylan Thomas. Ben ran an excellent afternoon looking at different forms of list poems by Don Paterson, Joe Brainard and several others, and setting an exercise using one of these forms to write about abstract nouns such as failure or ambition. We were only a small group but there were certainly some interesting results.
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| Ben Parker and some of the workshop participants |
Tonight sees the Festival Players presenting readings on the theme of "Time" at the Playhouse Theatre. I shall be performing alongside Robin Gilbert, Frances March and Peter Wyton, with a programme covering works by John Milton, Robert Browning, Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley and many more great poets. I have to admit that my two favourites are by U. A. Fanthorpe - "Now What?" and "Half Past Two". I only came across them when I was researching material for the evening and you may not be familiar with them, but they are well worth looking up!
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