Virtual Read To Write Programme 2020-2021

Virtual Read To Write

 

In 2020 and 2021 we were in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unable to meet in person, the Read To Write group ran sessions over Zoom. Here is a list of the sessions we ran in 2021. We had some fantastic guest readers from around the country who we would be unlikely to see in our Doncaster sessions. Things started to open up in September 2021 and we mixed online sessions with the return of Well Spoken on Thursdays.

I didn't keep a list for 2020 but I am doing detective work to try to piece the list of sessions together. Watch this space!

Completed Sessions

January 12th - Workshop session on holiday season poems
January 19th - Laura Potts Reading / Q+A plus "Room Remembered" writing exercise
January 26th - Sand House Postcard Poems launch

February 2nd - The Poetry of Alun Lewis (Tim & Matt Smith)
February 9th - Helen Mort Reading / Q+A / Workshop
February 16th - Valentine's Day Love Poem readround
February 23rd - Shane McGowan - The Great Hunger (Tim)

March 2nd - Lawrence Ferlinghetti & John Keats readround
March 9th - International Womens Day Lips&Gobs
March 16th - Sarah Wimbush Last Dinosaur in Doncaster Reading / Q+A
March 18th (one-off special) - Wilfred Owen's "Poems - 1920 edition" (Tim)
March 23rd - Andrew Oldham reading / Q+A
March 30th - One Year of Virtual Read To Write - our favourite poems

April 6th - Bob Horne reading / Q+A
April 13th - Jimmy Andrex Reading / Q+A / workshop
April 20th - Charlotte Wetton reading / Q+A
April 27th - The Life and Poems of Oscar Wilde (Tim)

May 4th - Sonnet read round
May 11th - Paul Brookes Reading / Q+A / Workshop
May 18th - Mayflower Sessions part 1 - Ian Parks  (Persona poems)
May 25th - Mayflower Sessions part 2 - Ian Parks  (Persona poem workshop)

June 1st - Guest poet - Penelope Shuttle
June 8th - Les Murray's Nature Poetry (Paul)
June 15th - The Beat Poets (Mick)
June 22nd - Guest poet - Fiona Perry, Q+A plus workshop
June 29th - no session

July 6th - The Poetry of James Wright (Tim)
July 13th - Harold Massingham, Selected Poems (Ian)
July 20th - Guest - John Foggin Reading / Q+A / Workshop
July 27th - Glass Head Poets Reading

August 19th - Nature/Summer readround and workshop
August 26th - Becky Deans reading / Q+A

September 2nd - no session
September 9th - Well Spoken @Doncaster Brewery
September 16th - Stuart Pickford reading / Q+A
September 23rd - Paul Dyson reading / Q+A
September 30th - no session (available if needed)

October 7th - no session
October 14th - Well Spoken @Doncaster Brewery
October 21st - Matthew Hedley Stoppard reading / Q+A
October 28th - no session

November 2nd - The Poetry of Miguel Hernandez - Tim Fellows
November 11th - Well Spoken @Doncaster Brewery
November 16th - Mick Pettinger reading / Q+A / workshop
November 23rd - Val Bowen, Tracy Day Dawson, Amanda Samm readings

December 2nd - no session
December 9th - Well Spoken @Doncaster Brewery
December 16th - Sally Jenkinson reading / Q+A / workshop

 

In Sepia

Photo is of the Glaswegian soldier John Gardner White, age of death listed as 20. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

Lieutenant John Gardner White © IWM (HU 127373)

 

A war poem written as a half-rhyme exercise at Read 2 Write and inspired by Wilfred Owen (of course) and by the wonderful WW2 anti-war song Bomber's Moon by Mike Harding.  

In Sepia

As grey light filters through the misty dawn
we rise from mud where we had hunkered down
and make that climb to face the greedy shells,
the bullets that await the whistle's shrill.
Where men face sorrow lost in cooling blood;
on wire, in holes where other men have bled.
Oh mother, father, let your hearts be broken
and then with grief for me you may be stricken.
For grief you will not find a remedy
a long held portrait is your memory.
You filled with pride the day that I was called
and in that frame my face will not grow old.

An Old Actor's Lament (Erasure Challenge)

This poem was created from the words in a section of James Joyce's Ulysses (see below) as a challenge set by Paul Brookes.  

An Old Actor's Lament

Bloom, grey spouting beard! Thrill her!

Here, the same women still kiss young Romeo,
pleasure tantalising, gnawing, desire growing.

Over there, every man - well preserved -
would of course live forever.

Those pretty little ladies, hot, strong, and sweet
laugh; joke about your life.

How many have you asked? Two, ten, eleven?
The papers ceased to care.

Tim Fellows February 2021

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Mr Bloom admired the caretaker’s prosperous bulk. All want to be on good terms with him. Decent fellow, John O’Connell, real good sort. Keys: like Keyes’s ad: no fear of anyone getting out. No passout checks. Habeas corpus. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me writing to Martha? Hope it’s not chucked in the dead letter office. Be the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That’s the first sign when the hairs come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It might thrill her first. Courting death. Shades of night hovering here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when churchyards yawn and Daniel O’Connell must be a descendant I suppose who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the same like a big giant in the dark. Will o’ the wisp. Gas of graves. Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so touchy. Tell her a ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever seen a ghost? Well, I have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on the stroke of twelve. Still they’d kiss all right if properly keyed up. Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to the starving. Gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.

He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing. Sitting or kneeling you couldn’t. Standing? His head might come up some day above ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed the ground must be: oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too: trim grass and edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well, so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It’s the blood sinking in the earth gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every man his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of William Wilkinson, auditor and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six. With thanks.

I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.

But they must breed a devil of a lot of maggots. Soil must be simply swirling with them. Your head it simply swurls. Those pretty little seaside gurls. He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense of power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he looks at life. Cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of his heart. The one about the bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven 4 a.m. this morning. 11 p.m. (closing time). Not arrived yet. Peter. The dead themselves the men anyhow would like to hear an odd joke or the women to know what’s in fashion. A juicy pear or ladies’ punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep out the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way. Gravediggers in Hamlet. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart. Daren’t joke about the dead for two years at least. De mortuis nil nisi prius. Go out of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral. Seems a sort of a joke. Read your own obituary notice they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

—How many have you for tomorrow? the caretaker asked.

—Two, Corny Kelleher said. Half ten and eleven.

The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.

Season's Greetings

It's that time of year; when I publish my cheery Christmas poem. 

Season's Greetings

Hark, the postman's at the door!
Cards fall on the hallway floor
Sent by people we don't see
from January to January.

Wise old Magi, magic star,
red breasted birds - sent from far
and wide - and now the date
has passed to send one back! Too late.

We forgot our Joan and Bill, but still
we were never going in their will.

Tim Fellows December 2020

Image by Jenny Nguyen from Pixabay

Unknown Soldier

 

Written at a Poetry Business workshop in 2019. Re-worked several times. With thanks to John Foggin for some excellent advice to tighten it up.

 
Unknown Soldier

He lies in the sun, a map
in his outstretched hand.
Music, a song in unfamiliar tongue
drifts from a nearby house
and flows through a haze of heat.
It washes over him, entering
deafened ears. The sun-baked
sand shows no noon shadow.
Static from his radio scatters
the languid flies that buzz
around the blood-black pools
around and beneath him.
The crosses on his map
mean nothing now.
He is blind and cannot feel the insect
crawling on his reddening face.
Even in this blazing heat,
he is cooling.
The music stops, the radio cuts out
and the insect is still.
Everything is dead.
Everything.

Tim Fellows 2020

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay