Me and Leonard Cohen Get It Together at the Bristol Poetry Festival

The Bristol Spring Poetry Festival is over for another year. Thank goodness there's an autumn one also.

Highlights for me included a sparkling set apiece from Jo Bell and Bohdan Piasecki at Bristol Acoustic Night, getting to do a filmed interview the engaging and hilarious Ian McMillan, watching my friend Pat Simmons take her place alongside Deryn Rees-Jones, Kapka Kassabova and Penelope Shuttle and hold her own, seeing the uplifting film We Are Poets and the thought-provoking and moving spoken word performance that is Three Men Talking About Things They Kind Of Know About, Polly Moyer's workshop at Maitreya Social in Easton ...erm ... and that's just about all of it really.

Lowlights - well, only that without my amulet of poetry, my cold has turned to bronchitis and overrun my defences. Off to the doctor tomorrow, cough cough cough.

But so as not to end on a downer, my poetry festival joy was complete on purchasing from the Arnolfini bookshop my copy of Heart Shoots, the latest anthology published by Indigo Dreams in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, only to discover that the lovely Ronnie Goodyer was true to his word and my poem, Plainsong, appears on the very next page after Leonard Cohen. Only a sheet of paper separating us ... plus a ton of talent, in Leonard's case, of course, but who cares, in this small place in the Universe we're all but cheek-to-cheek between the covers ... 

Cover photo by Dru Marland

Poems for an Imperfect Pearl

This morning, after an appointment with my lovely orthotist, Qureishi, whose mum back home in Kenya writes poetry, I headed to St George's Church in town to see the exhibition 'Poems for an Imperfect Pearl' which is part of the Bristol Baroque Festival.  Most of the poems were written by members of the writing group I attend run by Colin Brown of Poetry Can, with two additional pieces by Kapka Kassabova and Deryn Rees-Jones, who are appearing at the Bristol Spring Poetry Festival next month.  

And most impressive they looked too.

After a while I could hear a soprano rehearsing - a-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha - and, resolute in my conviction that Baroque is not for me, I decided it was time I left.   After a quick visit to the ₤2 bookstore - where, ridiculously, I bought four books despite being in the process of downsizing my collection - I returned to the car, put Lucinda Williams on full blast and drove to Sainsburys, pretending all the while that it was summer and I was driving around the ring road pretending I was in Louisiana.  Thank God for an imagination.