Continue reading »]]> Yesterday, Joe Cannon and I were guests on the breakfast show at onfm here in London, extolling the virtues of our wonderful event, We Eat Poets!

The producer of the show attended the 1st edition back in May, and is responsible for profiling interesting events for their listeners across the capital. It was great to be able to tell a wider audience about what we are doing, and even better that someone who has actually been to it thought it was worth shouting about, instead of us blowing our own trumpets all the time!

I have a very soft spot in my heart for We Eat Poets!, as it is the first collaborative venture that we got off the ground, and it has been enormously fun to work with so many people to make it the great event that it has become. Only when I started writing down names did I realise just how many souls we depend on to make this work!

It has been a pleasure collaborating with the Cannon brothers, Joe and Sean, at Cannon & Cannon, Jackson Boxer and Nicholas Balfe at Brunswick House Café (as well as their staff, who ensure things run smoothly for our diners), all the poets, actors, musicians, designers, and general creative types (who I’ll name-drop more substantially in a subsequent blog post!), our editorial guys (Jon and Kirsten) who put together the programmes, and of course the two people on the Give a Poem side who keep me honest, Annabel and Hannah.

We are only a week away now from our 3rd edition, a somewhat macabre interpretation of Hallowe’en, which will be followed on the 14th of December by ‘Twisted Christmas’ on the 14th of December. The menu for Hallowe’en was announced today, and, as with most of the stuff they do at BHC, it just doesn’t sound like food to me. I mean, of course it is food, just not the kind of stuff I would whip up for myself of an evening. I guess that’s the point! That, and the fact that it actually tastes of food too. Daft as it may sound, but here an artichoke tastes like an artichoke, and cheese tastes of cheese. Come along and eat something to see what I mean – it’s brill.

If you don’t come to We Eat Poets!, I can forgive that, but if you never try the stuff these guys make, then I can’t. Not harsh, just fair.

What I think is keeping this project so interesting, at least for me, is that it is a constantly evolving entity. From the very beginning we wanted to make sure that we put on a night that we would want to go to ourselves, and really, from a creative standpoint, it has felt like a very organic process developing the idea, and working on content with which to inflict on our poet-munching audience. There will be some exciting new bits and pieces at next weeks event too, and I can’t wait to see how it all works out.

Tickets to both events are available at weeatpoets.com. There are still tickets available for next Wednesday, so do grab them quickly. The last two events sold out, and we had to turn people away on the door, as we can’t make any more room at the venue.

Hopefully see you all there next week.

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I have been spending quite a bit of time recently looking at establishing partnerships with some pretty interesting and unique organisations, and trying to figure out how we can work together to commission poetry that will communicate the passion people have for what they do. In each case, the aim is to end up with something beautiful that people will want to read, buy and talk about.

So it is quite fitting that an existing partnership, which I am very happy with, has yielded just such an interesting opportunity.

When Baz Productions, an exciting new theatre production company in London, announced that they were looking for a poet in residence to help publicise their inaugural production (Macbeth), one of their actors, Katherine Newman, thought of me, and got in touch. Those of you who attended the first edition of our We Eat Poets! event will recognise her as the first performer of the evening.

Baz ran a competition, which was judged by Wendy Cope and Lachlan Mackinnon, and received entries from all over the world. A winner was chosen at the end of September, and the winning poem will be recited by the author, and now poet in residence at Baz, Joan Stansbury, this Thursday (St Andrew’s Crpyt in Holborn, in Central London). If you don’t have tickets, then you still have time, but hurry, the show opens tomorrow, and ticket sales have been lively.

I should put a little disclaimer in here, by the way. I didn’t originate this competition, the credit for that has to go to the creative powerhouses at Baz, but it is very similar to something I am working on with someone else, so it came along at a great time for me, and I am extremely grateful to Baz for letting me tag along.

The range of work submitted was staggering, especially when you consider that the brief was so simple:

• Be no longer than 40 lines
• Incorporate Iambic Pentameter in some way
• Involve a character from Macbeth

So where does Give a Poem come in? Baz was looking for a way to ensure that they made the most of Joan’s involvement, so I offered to make some limited edition prints of the winning poem, as well as a 6ft x 2ft canvas to adorn the vestibule of the crypt.  They will go on display, and on sale, from Thursday. I hope that this is the forerunner to a number of similar partnerships to be announced on this blog in the coming weeks and months.

As I write this, an illustrator friend of mine is busy working away at the final draft, and we’ll be sending it off to the printer tonight. I’ll publish it on this blog as soon as I can, but in the meantime, check out the poem on Baz’s excellent blog, Bazthoughts (day 5).

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Continue reading »]]> We are pleased to announce that we are currently working on a collection of poems to accompany our event, We Eat Poets!

Featuring original work from a number of our poets, including poems they wrote and performed during the events, this anthology will go on sale on our website at the end of the year. It will be limited edition, and leather bound, just like our commissioned poetry journals, and will not be available for sale anywhere else. More details on how to pre-order will be released soon.

In the meantime, come along to We Eat Poets! to see our poets in action. Smaller pamphlets of their work will be on sale there, and these too will appear on the website in the near future.

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Continue reading »]]> Give a Poem and Cannon & Cannon will be joining forces twice more this year to bring you We Eat Poets!, a poetry and food fusion event in the fantastically quirky LASSCo.

The food is sourced by Cannon & Cannon, prepared by the ludicrously talented chefs at LASSCo, and enjoyed in great company at an intimate venue. As you eat and chat, you will be entertained by some of our performance poets, as well as musicians, games, and other interesting and wonderful bits and pieces.

Don’t take our word for it, we are very lucky to have had some excellent reviews from the first two events, and they can be found on our sister site, www.weeatpoets.com.

Our events at LASSCo always take place on a Wednesday, so we hope you can join us on the 26th of October and the 14th of December.

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