Poetry Reading Group 

with Kathryn Bevis
Friday 11 June
7.00 - 8.30pm

 

Join us for an exciting, new, online poetry gathering on the second Friday of each month where we’ll read and discuss some of the most brilliant voices in contemporary poetry, including poems written by Winchester Poetry Festival’s featured poets for 2021.

Each month will be themed and we’ll get to know a handful of brilliant poems related to that theme, making time to see how they might reflect, amplify, complicate, contradict, or bewilder each other when read together. These will be animated, inspiring evenings for us all to learn more from each other about the peculiar pleasures of reading poems. Readings will be shared in advance and all are welcome (either for one session or the whole series): poetry newbies, poetry fanatics, and poetry experts alike.

Writing for Wellbeing Workshop with
Jon Sayers
Saturday 12 June
10:30am - 12:30pm

 

In this friendly and supportive writing workshop, we will be looking at poems by some of the poets who will be reading in this year’s Winchester Poetry Festival, and using their words as springboards for our own expressive and exploratory writing.

During the workshop, we will try out a number of different journaling techniques and will be writing in prose unless, as sometimes happens, a poem happens to fall from the end of the pen. No previous writing experience is necessary.

Please bring a pen and paper, an open mind and be ready to take part in a shared journey of discovery.

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Joyelle McSweeney with Sasha Dugdale

Saturday 12 June
3:00pm - 4:00pm

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In this Keats bicentenary year American poet Joyelle McSweeney discusses the influence of Keats on her own remarkable poetry and reads from her most recent book Toxicon and Arachne (published in the UK in 2021 by Corsair Books).

 

McSweeney, whose work was called  'a biohazard, teeming with linguistic contagion’ (New Yorker), discusses reading (and writing) Keats in a pandemic year with poet and Festival Director, Sasha Dugdale. 

 

Lipstick Intellectuals

Saturday 12 June
6:30pm - 7:30pm

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Poet Jacqueline Saphra and artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer come together to chat about poetry as resistance, feminism (and lipstick!),  motherhood, creativity and the London they share as the children of a secular Jewish Bohemian scene. With readings from Saphra’s candid and revealing One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets (Nine Arches) and some online demonstrations of Sophie’s fabulous art, as well as her own poetry, this will be a nourishing and sustaining evening’s entertainment. 

 

Introduced by  Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press.

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