This month Newport poet Angela Platt sadly passed away. I knew Angela through the local Poetry Society Stanza group she ran. She welcomed a small group of poets into her home each month where we would enjoy conversation and discuss each other’s latest work in relaxed, homely atmosphere.
Angela always lived life to the full and her wealth of life experience came through in her poems. She remained active right to the end publishing her final collection Crossing the Bloodline with Cinnamon Press this year. She had hoped to record a podcast for Poetry Non-Stop but unfortunately this wasn’t possible.
It is however a pleasure to share this reading from an event I held in Cardiff back in 2016.
Alexander Rhodes found his way into the poetry scene through a combination of chance, hard work and raw talent. He has performed up and down the country and taken his award-winning verse play One Foot in the Rave to the Edinburgh Fringe and on tour. It tells the story of how he was thrown out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and became a rave DJ.
In this podcast he talks about how he became a poet and performer in a conversation rich in anecdotes and great poetry.
For a writing prompt Alexander responded with:
Transhumanism for dummies
“I like the subtle inferences of those words, and also we are accelerating towards Superintelligent AI with very little discussion among the artistic community – so now would be a good time as any.”
You can hear how Patrick and Alexander responded to this topic, and it’s an area Alexander is researching for a forthcoming novel. Do share your own responses to the prompt here or in the comments for possible inclusion on a future podcast or on the blog.
Alexander will be touring One Foot in the Rave again when lockdown is lifted and has a new show due to start touring in 2021.
Next podcast guest is former Jehovah’s Witness and rave DJ Alexander Rhodes talking about how he discovered poetry and the story behind his award-winning verse play One Foot in the Rave which he has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and around the country.
Katherine Stansfield talks about poetry and place and how language intersects the two. Her second collection, We Could Be Anywhere By Now, is inspired by her life in Wales after growing up in Cornwall. Katherine wrote the collection over seven years and it covers her experience of moving Wales, a country with its own official language, and memories of her childhood in Cornwall, an area with its own distinct history, geography and a language that is almost forgotten. From this starting point it moves to Italy and ends up in Vancouver.
For a writing exercise Katherine reads Klonjuze, a poem about a word her sister invented. She invites you to write about a family word, a word that has gained a new meaning or special significance or make up a word and write a poem to define it.
I’m putting together an ‘open mic’ episode featuring listeners’ poems and would particularly like to receive submissions inspired by this or any of the other writing prompts from previous episodes. Full details of how to submit here.
Katherine Stansfield grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. Her poems have appeared in The North, Magma, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter’s House, And Other Poems, Butcher’s Dog, and as ‘Poem of the Week’ in The Guardian. Her debut collection, Playing House (2014), a pamphlet, All That Was Wood (2019) and her second full-length collection, We Could Be Anywhere By Now(2020), are all published by Seren. She teaches for the Open University and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Katherine is also a novelist. Her latest title are The Mermaid’s Call, and Widow’s Welcome (co-written with her partner and published under the name DK Fields).
Cardiff-based poet and novelist Katherine Stansfield reads a poem from her second poetry collection We Could Be Anywhere By Now, recently published by Seren Books. You can hear her on the next podcast. She talks about how moving to Wales after growing up in Cornwall inspired the collection and her interest in poetry and place and how language intersects this.
Submissions are now open for a listeners’ edition of the podcast. Please submit your poems according to the guidelines below. I’d particularly like to feature poems inspired by the writing exercises on previous podcasts. You can find details of these here.
Please submit an audio recording up to five minutes long, including any introduction to poetrynonstop@gmail.com. Alternatively you can send up to two poems in a Word document and I’ll record them. Please also include a short self-introduction. You can include a website and any social media handles you’d like to share. Also let me know which exercise(s), if any, you were inspired by.
Tips for recording:
You can produce an adequate recording using any laptop, smartphone or tablet device. Try to avoid any background noise and make sure your voice is audible but not distorted. Adjust the distance between you and the microphone if necessary. Beyond that don’t worry too much about quality as long as you can hear the words clearly. If you prefer you can send the poems as text.
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