Preparations are well in hand for the dovegreyreader scribbles trip to the Wenlock Poetry Festival at Much Wenlock from 9th -11th April being organised by Anna Dreda and her team at Much Wenlock Books. I hope you're all ready for the off.
Threatened train strikes and a nightmare rail journey home (even without strikes) on the Sunday see me travelling by coach, which will be different, but once I arrive I will be around and blogging live from the Festival.
The programme is full of interesting and new events for me so I'm really looking forward to hearing some new names (to me) in amongst the more familiar figures of Roger McGough and Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
I've been brushing up too, so as well as reading Carol Ann Duffy's Selected Poems I dusted off my original copy of Roger McGough's first collection Watchwords which I bought for 50p back in 1972, and probably out of one of my first £12 a week student nurse pay packets. It's travelled through every move I have ever made since then, so packed and unpacked ten times but always put on the shelf wherever I've lived.
Browsing through I was very amused to find this from Roger McGough... If I Were Poet Laureate
If I were Poet Laureate
purveyor of words to the Queen
I'd make some welcome changes
and liven up the scene
I'd wear silver lame trousers
and velvet jacket of black
with 'By Royal Appointment'
in gold letters on my back...
I do hope someone somewhere is appliqueing those words on a jacket for Carol Ann Duffy who meanwhile has written a special poem for the Festival which, in what is now becoming a wonderful and traditional fusion of craft and words, is to be knitted throughout the Festival and afterwards. If anyone wants to contribute to this knitted Laureateal offering have a look here for more information; being an expert on the letter 'O' after the Poetry Society knit-a-poem last year I'm hoping there might be a few left.
If anyone is likely to be at the Festival please do find me and say hello, it's always lovely to meet you and I'll be in and out of the bookshop for the WiFi.
Now having barely concealed my disappointment at no offering from the Laureate for the dovegreyreader scribbles 4th birthday a few weeks ago, and you may recall Bookhound valiantly stepped up to the plate, here by special permission is the Poet Laureate's poem to celebrate the Wenlock Poetry Festival.
Here are my bees,
besotted; buzzwords dancing
their flawless airy maps.
Been deep, my poet bees,
in the parts of flowers,
in daffodil, thistle, rose, even
the golden lotus; so glide,
gilded with talent, thuswise-
and know of us:
how your scent pervades
my shadowed, busy heart,
and honey is art.
Carol Ann Duffy
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