Meetings

Our Meeting Dates for 2023

A belated start to posting our dates for the year, as meetings for January and February have already been held. These will be posted for the record, with apologies, and as a commitment that from now on, we will be keeping up with the clock!

9th January – We spent the meeting in a poetry workshop and there were nine poems! It might have been a marathon, but the time just flew by.

6th February – Another poetry workshop to remember, again with 9 poems, including one from new member Ewan Miller. Some remarkable poems, with subjects ranging from antiphony and the service of Compline, to a reflection on the poet Ivor Gurney.

6th March – We are delighted to be welcoming Ilse Pedler as our Guest Poet!

April – date to be decided

8th May – We are delighted to be welcoming Stephen Yeo as our Guest Poet!

5th June

3rd July

7th August

Happy New Year! Monthly Meeting Dates for 2022

Our monthly meetings will continue on Zoom until further notice, on Mondays, beginning at 7pm Oxford/20.00 Hrs Bonn time, on the following dates:

10th January – A sparkling evening with Helen Reid as our guest poet, reading from her new pamphlet – A Field Guide to Wedding Guests – ” a little box of delights” indeed – followed by a stimulating poetry workshop.

7th February – Janet Davey will be our guest poet and Synaesthesia a major theme.

7th March – Steve Xerri will be our guest poet. Steve is a member of the Cambridge Stanza! He will be reading from his pamphlet Mutterland and leading us in a Q&A.

7th April – Judi Sutherland was our guest poet this meeting, with her new collection Following Teisa. A very warm meeting, both rolling back the years and looking forward, flowing onwards like the Tees!

9th May – Bill Jenkinson read his current draft Rowing to America, inspired by photographs and other records of his grandfather’s visit to remote islands in 1902.

6th June – Very sadly Kate Behrens is temporarily unable to take part as our guest poet for health reasons: we wish her all the best for a speedy recovery! We will be making final preparations for the arrival of Eva Wal to launch her book Poems In The Hourglass on Wednesday 15th June as part of this year’s Bonn Week

4th July – Gill Learner will be guest poet at our concluding monthly meeting before this year’s summer break.

Summer Break

5th September

3rd October

7th November

5th December

Hope to see you there!

At our final monthly meeting of this year, on Monday 6th December at 7PM, our guest poet will be David Burridge. He will be reading from his new collection Streetwise and leading a Q&A. We will also hold a poetry workshop.

At our November monthly meeting on Monday 15th November at 7PM, we welcomed Pratibha Castle as our guest poet. She selected poems from her entire career and led a fascinating Q & A on finding her voice and the themes of her poetry.

We are back after our summer break!

Our September monthly online meeting will be on Monday 6th September at 7PM. Kathleen McPhilemy will be our guest poet. She will be reading from her cycle of poems inspired by W S Graham, Days in April, followed by a Q & A. There couldn’t be a better guest reading to celebrate our return from the summer break!

We will also have a poetry workshop. If you would like to workshop a poem, please e-mail Bill Jenkinson.

Monthly online meetings for the rest of 2021:

Monday 4th October at 7PM

Monday 15th November at 7PM

Monday 6th December at 7PM

Guest poets to be announced.

Our February monthly meeting on Zoom will be at 7PM on Monday 8th February, when our guest poet will be Yvette Siegert. Yvette is a very busy member of Stanza and

a Latinx poet and CantoMundo Poetry Fellow currently reading for a D. Phil in Spanish American literature at Merton College, Oxford. She received the Lord Alfred Douglas Prize, and her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972, won the Best Translated Book Award Downloaded from the Rebecca Swift Foundation, at Women Poets’ Prize 2020: Shortlist | Rebecca Swift Foundation

Our next monthly Zoom meeting and the first of 2021 is at 7PM on Monday 11th January 2021. We are delighted our guest poet will be Pey Oh, a poet from Malaysia, who resides in the UK. Flarestack Poetry has published her pamphlet Pictograph. Her writing has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Harana, Asian Cha, Long Poem Magazine, Bare Fiction Magazine and Magma.

On the following day, Tuesday 12th January, our Poetry for Children Group, led by Pat Winslow, and our Young Stanza, with guest poet Meg Barton will also meet on Zoom.

Our meeting dates for the first half of 2021 are now out! We expect to continue on Zoom for our meetings until September 2021, but if it becomes safe to return to real meetings, that might change. Let’s hope things are going to get far better in 2021!

At our last meeting of 2020, we welcomed Margot Myers as our guest poet. Margot read from her new pamphlet, I Meant To Say… The next day, Tuesday 15th December, our Poetry for Children and Young Stanza Groups also met on Zoom.

At our October Zoom meeting, at 7pm on Monday 12th October, we welcomed Catherine Faulds as our guest poet. Catherine is bringing out a new pamphlet, Decoding the Dark. On the following day, Tuesday 13th October, our Poetry for Children and Young Stanza Groups also met on Zoom.

Our September meeting, held at 7PM on Monday 14th on Zoom, was memorable for the reading from her new pamphlet The Tyring House by our guest poet Lyn Thornton followed by an illuminating Q & A session. It was followed on the next day, Tuesday 15th September, by zoom meetings of our Poetry for Children and Young Stanza groups.

At our next zoom meeting at 7pm on Monday 6th July, we will be having readings from Sarah Watkinson and Romola Parish from their new book The Woods of Hazel, Woodland Words Volume I: A Collaboration with Wytham Woods,

This anthology of poetry.. is one outcome from the newly-established Writers’ Residency at Wytham Woods.. This sequence of poems uses the Renga-style writing, a Japanese scholarly poetic form enabling poets with different backgrounds to explore a creative common ground.

It is available from Oxford University here

We will also be having readings from Gael Bell and her friend Sarah Stretton from their collaborative fiction, Postcard Cantos from Our First Days of Self-Isolation, which was published a few weeks ago in MIR Online. You can find it here . What a feast!

We are currently holding our monthly meetings online!

We will be resuming face-to-face meetings as soon as it is safe to do so. Initially we postponed April’s meeting, but we decided to hold it online, using Zoom. There were doubts about this application, but other local poetry groups – Back Room Poets and Reading Poets’ Café Online, to name but two, are using it, so we decided to give it a go.

Giles Goodland was our first virtual meeting guest and gave a wonderful reading, followed by a very successful poetry workshop. It seemed everyone had been workshopping online for years. Since when we have held our May and June meetings online, with growing interest and participation. Especially from our members in Germany – it is rather easier to get here by Zoom than by any other means! Our international links are flourishing.

Monthly Stanza virtual meetings have moved to 7pm on Mondays on Zoom. We aim to finish at 9pm.

Dates of Stanza Virtual Meetings to September 2021

Monday 11th January

Monday 8th February

Monday 1st March

Monday 12th April

Monday 3rd May

Monday 7th June

Monday 5th July

Traditionally we hold a summer break in August, but if, in our current circumstances, we feel we would like to meet virtually in August, we might try it! Whatever happens, we will definitely be back in September.

We welcome members’ talks at meetings – on any subject of (Poetic) interest, whether a published poem, some aspect of poetry or a personal experience – and any new ideas for creative writing prompts or games. If you would like to give a talk or lead a creative session, please contact Bill or Dorothy.