Postcard Poets: Home-made, Home-grown
Twenty poets were commissioned to write poems on the theme Home-made, home-grown. Six have been chosen to appear on specially-designed postcards, with thousands of copies in libraries throughout the West Midlands.
This year’s chosen poets, Fergus McGonigal, Roz Goddard, Emma Purshouse, Spoz (Giovanni Esposito), Jane Seabourne and Brenda Read-Brown will be appearing at the launch of the Poetry on Loan postcards – and they’ll all be performing their work for you.
© Birmingham Literature Festival 2013
Having absorbed the Benjamin Zephaniah screening and filled myself with some food, I returned to the Library of Birmingham for Postcard Poets event. Sadly I took no pictures, it was a small room and other audience members were being well behaved!
I was also enjoying the performances too much to peel my eyes from the stage, it was a great night, exceptionally entertaining!
Postcard Poets was a great event. 20 Poets were commissioned to write poems around the theme of homemade and home-grown. 6 of these poets had come to perform a selection of poetry and their postcard poems. The postcards are free and available at all public libraries in the region.
I really enjoyed this event and wished I wasn’t as tired as I was, I could barely stay awake and by the time I was home I was too tired to even talk!
The performing poets were;
Fergus McGonigal, Roz Goddard, Emma Purshouse, Spoz (Giovanni Esposito), Jane Seabourne and Brenda Read-Brown
Some of whom I’ve met. Roz was on the picture writing course I took earlier in the summer, Fergus popped into the Sarah James book launch and has also been chosen as the MC for an open night event (that I will also write about) that I attended last week, WLF’s SpeakEasy.
Spoz is regionally very famous, he lost his job (with many others) when the Rover car plant shut down (a major employer for generations in the region) he used his redundancy money to relaunch himself as a poet – a great slam poet who now works with lots of community based projects and has celebrated lots of success. I have seen tickets for his shows, but never managed to catch him. I was impressed by his energy.
I loved discovering all the other performance poets.
It was a fabulous evening and one of the best factors of this Literature Festival, is that many events were free, including this one – and it really was superb.
awritersfountain 