Leicester Shindig: May 21st

Always a diary highlight, my abiding favourite regular poetry night out.

Amongst the open mics:

Caroline Cook’s ‘Weekly Workout’ was a wry take on poetry workshops (ah, those inevitable games of Guess the Poet…).  Not afraid to experiment with styles and voices, I always look forward to hearing/reading her poems.  Richard Byrt’s ‘Coming Out’: wonderful example of ‘less is more.’  I loved the assonance.  Jonathan Taylor’s ‘Mozart’s Clarinet Sextet’: hilarious – I want to hear it again!  Gary Longden’s ‘Majorca’: a tribute to John Cooper Clarke – rhythm, rhyme and humour.  Roy Marshall’s ‘Relic’: an animal bone found on a woodland walk gives rise to contemplating our skeleton and ‘temporary skin’ – haunting last line.  Kathy Bell’s ‘Prayers Requested of an Anchorite’ from a sequence of poems, ‘Balance Sheets for Medieval Spinsters.’  Lindsay Waller-Wilkinson’s ‘Seaham’ – I loved this reworking from the original prose for its soundplay and internal rhymes.

Feature Poets:

C J Allen writes the poems many of us wish we’d written and his reading most certainly did not disappoint.  I purchased his newly-launched collection, At the Oblivion Tea-Rooms (Nine Arches Press) and it’s queue-jumped everything on my reading pile.

Alistair Noon’s Earth Records (Nine Arches), also launched this week, is the poet’s debut collection after publishing nine pamphlets.  Read more here.  Also a Longbarrow poet, listen to soundcloud tracks here.

Ira Lightman, reading in place of Julie Boden, gave a hugely entertaining rendition of poems across several collections as well as new work, amongst which ‘Air on a G String’ was my favourite.  (And the poet’s vivid image of his gents’ loo view: t-shirt print John Lennon sporting a urinating appendage from his Adam’s apple, a lasting impression…).

Robert Richardson, Imagist poet and visual artist, closed the evening.  I especially enjoyed ‘Prose and Poetry’: the former, justified; the latter, troublesome words that, on release, murder you in your sleep.

Next Leicester Shindig: Monday 16th July 2012.