Reading on Play (2): 'The Human Comedy' (E9), Saturday 14th November 2020, 7-8pm
Our host for this event is Dr Helen Eastman, Founder and director of Live Canon
Embracing the surreal, the bewildering and nonsensical, four poets jostle and jest with modern life, poking fun at power structures, taking us on ‘text adventure games’, and seducing us with bewildering snapshots, including a pair of scissors that can cut anything. Anything. Katherine Stansfield has made a name for herself both as a wryly witty poet of the everyday seen ‘aslant’ and as a popular novelist of crime and fantasy. Her second poetry collection, We Could Be Anywhere by Now, is pointedly full of poems about placement and displacement - after a childhood on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, she moved to mid Wales. In The Story of No Emma Hammond delivers an experimental lyric that is wild, weird and full of the errata of modern life. Her poems reappropriate the language of brands, pornography and instant messaging, and argue for Carry On films and Wotsits as the true subjects of poetry. Lorraine Mariner has established herself as an idiosyncratic poet, with novel takes on contemporary life and personal relationships, as in her latest collection There Will Be No More Nonsense. ‘Droll, melancholic, locating the surreal in the ordinary, her plain-style speak and lack of pyrotechnics are no barrier to producing engaging and emotionally complex poems’ (Kathryn Gray, Poetry Review). Luke Samuel Yates’ The Flemish Primitives was a winner in the 2014/15 Poetry Business Competition, judged by Billy Collins. ‘This is a poetry of exquisite timing, with some of the most satisfying last lines I’ve ever read. Yates can take an everyday domestic detail and make it sparkle with the mystery of a Raedecker painting’ (Luke Kennard)
