Poets & Players

Photographs

Our annual collaboration with the MLF at Hallé St Peter’s: Don Paterson & Rommi Smith:

We are pleased to announce our annual collaboration with Manchester Literature Festival featuring Don Paterson who will read his poems and provide the music for the event. He will be supported by poet Rommi Smith. The event begins at 2.30 and ends at 4.00. It will take place at Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 6BF.

Tickets are free but booking is advised
Book on:  0843 208 0500

“Paterson is simply one of the best living poets in the UK,” Jackie Kay wrote in 2009. David Harsent praised his collection Rain for its “enormous emotional depth” and Jan Schreiber singled out its “musical drive.” He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1993, and the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2009, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize twice. He is also a composer, player and librettist.

Rommi Smith is a poet and playwright. She has held numerous international residencies for organisations ranging from the British Council, to the BBC; this includes inaugural writing residencies for Keats House and Parliament.

Awarded a prestigious Hedgebrook Fellowship in the United States, Rommi is a recipient of the Elizabeth George Award. Just awarded The John Barnard Scholarship, in October 2015, she will begin her PhD study, in celebration of the lives the power and politics of Jazz music.

Rommi Smith and ‘Cole, Molloy and Smith’ performing for The Verb

As most of you probably know, Poets and Players is a voluntary organisation funded by the Arts Council. In February we found out that our Arts Council bid had not been successful. We were surprised as we felt we have been doing a good job in the two years since our last ACE grant was awarded. We are proud of what we have achieved in reaching new (and substantial) audiences and providing a platform for a wide range of poets and musicians.

The Arts Council have funded us for a number of years and we are grateful for their support and appreciate the work they do to assist poetry in the North West and beyond. We are concerned about our situation, but we are of course aware that times are hard and our situation is not unique. We are sympathetic to other North West organisations who are in a similar position to us.

The Poets and Players team want to continue our work because we believe it is important, not just for the quality of the performances, but also because our events are free and inclusive. We believe everyone should have access to the arts, regardless of cost, and in this spirit we will do our best to secure funding. Due to the popularity of our competition this year, we have enough funds to pay for our next three events: April at the Rylands, May at the Whitworth, and our annual collaboration with Manchester Literature Festival in October (with much appreciated support from Cathy Bolton and MLF).

We have put together a revised bid which has now been submitted to the Arts Council. In completing the application and compiling a supporting document, it became clear to us how successful Poets and Players actually is. In terms of the numbers we attract and the quality and variety of our performers.

We value our loyal audience who travel from all over Manchester, the North West and beyond, and welcome new audience members at every event. We also value all the poets and musicians who have performed on the Poets and Players stage over the last decade.

In the process of making our re-application we asked various friends, collaborators, and past performers to write testimonials on our behalf. We were moved at the generous comments and depth of support received. We would like to thank the following people for taking the time to help us with this aspect of our bid: Maria Balshaw (Whitworth Art Gallery), Cathy Bolton (Manchester Literature Festival), Carol Ann Duffy (Poet Laureate), John McAuliffe, (University of Manchester), Michael Symmons Roberts (Manchester Metropolitan University), Simon Armitage, Liz Berry, Michael Conley, David Constantine, Imtiaz Dharkar, Nabila Jameel, Li Lu, Andrew McMillan, Kim Moore, Corey Mwamba, Arian Sadr and Liz Venn.

Videos

Please click the links below to see the performances on our YouTube channel:

John McAuliffe

Melissa Lee-Houghton

In the Historic Reading Room of the John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, M3 3EH. This will be our last event in the library before our return to the Whitworth Art Gallery in May. We’re deeply grateful to the library and its staff for their support over the last year and a half.

This is a free event open to all. There’s no need to book.

John McAuliffe’s fourth book, The Way In, is due from The Gallery Press this summer. A Better Life (2007) was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize and Of All Places (2010) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is co-director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, where he teaches poetry, and he contributes a monthly column on new poetry to The Irish Times. He edits the Manchester Review and the online poetry digest thepage.name .

Melissa Lee-Houghton is a Next Generation Poet. Her second collection, Beautiful Girls, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her work has appeared in The Guardian Review, Poetry Wales, Magma, New Walk, The Quietus and The White Review, and many others. Her short fiction was commissioned and aired by BBC Radio Four. She is working on her third poetry collection and a novel, as well as an ongoing creative project investigating the prevalence of suicide in the UK.

Maria Isakova Bennett is an artist, poet and teacher from Liverpool who graduated with an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University in December 2012, and since then has had poetry and reviews published online and in print in the UK, US, and Ireland.  In 2014 Maria was highly commended in the Gregory O’ Donoghue Poetry Competition, shortlisted in the Munster Literature Chapbook Competition, and awarded first prize in the Ver Open Poetry Competition. Last month, Maria’s debut pamphlet was published by Poetry Bus Press in Ireland.

Musicians from Chetham’s School of Music : The Jones Quartet (James Jones, Tudor Trita, Daichi Yoshimura, Alexander Dakin).

In the Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Rd, Manchester M15 6ER.

Photographs

(David Wilson, Maeve Henry, Janine Pinion, M J Oliver, Paul Muldoon, Minute Taker, audience at the Whitworth)

This is a free event open to all and there’s no need to book.

Paul Muldoon has published eleven major collections of poetry along with numerous other works. The Annals of Chile won the T S Eliot Prize in 1995; Moy Sand and Gravel won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2003 His latest collection, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, was published in the UK by Faber and Faber and in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January 2015. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

© Malc Stone

Minute Taker is the artist name of Manchester-based folktronic singer-songwriter Ben McGarvey. His 2 albums Too Busy Framing (2008) and Last Things (2013) have gained critical acclaim from Clash, Notion, The 405, The Guardian, Manchester Evening News and Tom Robinson (BBC6 Music), prompting comparisons to Thom Yorke, James Blake and Kate Bush. When performing Minute Taker loops voice, synths, glockenspiel and electronic beats to create multi-layered soundscapes that form the backdrops for his piano songs. Minute Taker also composes for theatre, most recently dark stage musical HOAX My Lonely Heart which premiered at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in June 2014.  His new conceptual audio-visual show To Love Somebody Melancholy will premiere at Chorlton Arts Festival in May.

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Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s. Her major collections include Interregnum, Creation Books and Escafeld Hangings, West House Books. Salt Publishing issued her Selected Poems in 2003. In 2012 she edited Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition, Shearman Books and in 2013 she received a Northern Writers’ Awards towards her next book Forgiving Mirrors. Her next collection entitled, They Who Saw The Deep will be published in 2016. She lives in Sheffield and is a founding member of the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices. In 2014 she became an affiliated poet to The Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield.

Roy Marshall lives in Leicestershire. He has been employed as a gardener, electronics buyer and coronary care nurse. Roy is currently a househusband working part time in adult education while studying for a Masters in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam. Roy’s pamphlet Gopagilla was published in 2012, and a full collection, The Sun Bathers (2013) is available from Shoestring Press.

Les Malheureux is a unique collaboration between flash fiction writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon, combining live literature with original music and projections.
David Gaffney is the author of the critically acclaimed short-short story collections Sawn-off Tales, Aromabingo, The Half-life Of Songs and More Sawn-off Tales plus the novel Never Never. He has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect magazine, and is a judge for the 2015 Bridport Prize.
Described in Flash Magazine as “one of the most interesting and inspiring authors writing flashes today”, Sarah-Clare Conlon is a Salt Prize winner for her micro fiction and editor of The Manchester Anthologyand Quickies: Short Stories For Adults. A former journalist on Elle and Nova magazines, she now writes forThe Manchester Review, The Skinny and Creative Tourist.