Poets Café welcomes Susie Campbell as it returns to South Street this Friday

Poets Café returns to South Street on Friday for an evening of verse

The Poets Café is returning to South Street Arts Centre on Friday for an evening of verse.

Organised and hosted by The Poetry Society’s Reading Stanza, the monthly event sees a guest poet perform alongside people taking part in an open mic environment.

The event is held on the second Friday evening of each month.

It has been running for 20 years, originally run by Susan Utting, and then AF Harrold.

The Reading Stanza team has a range of hosts including Susan Utting, Claire Dyer, Gill Learner and Jez Dyer.

Who is the special guest on Friday, December 13?

Susie Campbell will be sharing some of her poetry when she visits the Poets Café at South Street on Friday, December 13.

She is a practice-based poetry research student at Oxford Brookes University, and author of several compilations of her verse.

Her most recent, The Sleeping Place, was published last year by Guillemont Press.

Based around archaeological excavations of a ‘heritage’ Saxon burial ground, the poems invite the reader to e-assemble the past as creative event. Bones, beads, chalk burials and other material traces of an unstable past become moving pieces in an elaborate word-game in a bid to deconstruct the violent, nationalist myth of a white Anglo-Saxon ‘originary’.

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Ritual, nonsense and the unmooring of grammatical co-ordinates are brought to bear on the text’s use of conceptual constraint to regain disruptive energies dispelled by conventional language use, and to re-call, through their echoes and absences, those mysteries of mortality initially banished from the text by its procedural response to human burial.

The Sleeping Place has been illustrated by artist and archaeologist Rose Ferraby.

What time is Reading Poets Café taking place and how do I get tickets?

South Street’s doors open at 8pm on Friday, December 13, with the poetry starting at 8.30pm.

The event usually ends around 10.30pm.

Entry costs £5 per person, or £4 for those taking part in the open mic section, or concessions.

The Poets’ Café has its own website, which details more information about its events.

For more details, log on to: https://www.poetscafereading.co.uk/

To book tickets, call the Reading Arts box office on 0118 960 6060, or log on to: https://whatsonreading.com/venues/south-street/whats-on/poets-cafe-2024

I want to read a poem, what do I need to know?

The event’s organisers promise that the Poets Café will take place in a friendly environment, so people can read their works in progress in a comfortable environment.

And anyone worried that someone will read a poem called One Million which is nothing but reciting the numbers one to a million, as per a sketch on Dom Joly’s old show Trigger Happy TV, will be relieved to learn that the requirement is for a shorter poem.

Organisers ask poets to restrict their readings to a poem on a single sheet of paper.