2014 saw the continuation of Sounds New Poetry, an international poetry festival formed in association with the Sounds New contemporary music festival.
Taking place annually in Canterbury, Sounds New Poetry invites leading poets to work alongside prominent composers and musicians, and showcases the best in experimental writing. Readings, residencies, screenings, performances and talks explore the intersections between language and music and introduce audiences to compelling new work.
Sounds New Poetry 2014 took place from 2nd-9th May and investigated the fabric of a city through the ideas of proximity, space, occupation and distance. Visiting and resident poets worked in response to the sites and histories of our shared environment. Collectively they explored Canterbury’s commons.
Click here for more information about the poets that were part of Sounds New 2014
Day 1
Friday saw the start of the Sounds New Festival 2014. The poetry events were launched by an evening at Mrs Jones’ Kitchen with a mixture of poetry and contemporary music. The poetry took the form of a fantastic reading of Ted Berrigan’s ‘The Sonnets’ by a selection of poets that would be reading over the course of the festival: Ben Hickman, Patricia Debney, David Herd, Kat Peddie, Laurie Duggan, Nancy Gaffield and Simon Smith. Simon Smith started the reading off and the group took it in turns to read a different sonnet each from the collection. The reading continued despite a short disruption by a delicious looking seafood platter making its way across the room. Once each had read, the reading continued and with each new sonnet another voice came in, until you had all but a few of the poets reading creating a dramatic ensemble of voices, eventually leading to its crescendo which then faded out as one by one stopped reading and Ben Hickman was left reading on his own. Click here to view a short film of the performance.
The poetry performance was followed by two contemporary music performances by Slapdash and TransMap and there was a great turn out for what was a very enjoyable and interesting evening, kicking off the festival in style.
Day 2
Situated in the 12th century building, Eastbridge Hospital, David and Nancy read a selection of poems they had written in the weeks leading up to the festival in response to the space, entitled ‘The Eastbridge Variation’. Reading from the booklet put together especially, they alternated between their poems, a page dedicated to each. David’s took on the form of the prose poem and Nancy’s played around with the shape of the poem, using the words to form the shape of arches, representing those within the pilgrim’s hospital. Both the history of the space and Canterbury intermingled with more recent references to create an appropriate and thought provoking series of poems, complimenting the fascinating medieval space well.
3pm in the Beaney Library, Kat Peddie
A strong contrast to the medieval Eastbridge Hospital, the second event of the day took place in the very recently refurbished Beaney Library. The session began with Kat Peddie reading from a selection of her collage poems to introduce her workshop on collage poetry. It soon became apparent why we were in a library as Kat asked participants of the workshop to select a book at random from the large selection of books around them, and from that book to choose a sentence. Kat then proceeded to ‘conduct’ a live collage poem, selecting people at random to read their sentences. Participants were then allocated numbers as she then conducted a sestina, again getting people to read all or part of their sentences when instructed, at times creating humorous results. She then rounded off the event with a reading from a selection of poems called ‘The Sonnet of Sonnets’: a selection of collage poems made up of selected lines and words from Ted Berrigan’s ‘The Sonnets’ (the collection read the previous evening).
Day 3
12.30pm at St Thomas’ Church, Ben Hickman
On Sunday the sun shone as Ben Hickman took his place on the stairs outside St Thomas’ Church to read his poetry about protest in Kent and Kent in protest. Starting with the Peasants’ Revolt (with the location being where the Kentish peasants set out from), Ben’s poetry covered the Battle of Bossenden Wood, Thomas Beccon, the General Strike and the 2012 riots. Reading loud and clear in the warm sun, several people passing by stopped to listen in addition to those who were there specifically for Ben’s poetry.
4pm at the Roman Museum, Nell Perry
Later in the afternoon, Nell Perry took to the Roman Museum (another fascinating area for a poetry reading) to read a sequence of 20 poems she had written in reaction to the space around us and Roman Canterbury, called ‘Strata’. The Roman Museum houses some of the Roman remains discovered when the buildings above the area were destroyed during the Blitz and a wide selection of findings from the area of Canterbury over the years. Visual representations of the poems, created by Nell, were projected onto a screen to her right as she read the corresponding poems.
More information about ‘Strata’, including a few of the images projected during the reading, can be viewed here.
Days 4-6
Monday 2.30pm at the Old Synagogue, Patricia Debney and Juha Virtanen
Juha and Patricia read a selection of poems focussing on the topic of mental health in the Old Synagogue. Alternating between their poems, Juha and Patricia had two very different approaches to the topic. With Juha’s poems pasted onto a piece of cardboard he worked his way around the room and audience, his approach manic and disjointed (in a good way), at one point even climbing up on a radiator. Strongly contrasted by Patricia whose poetry was calm and structured, the performance was a very powerful one, with the alternating tone seeming to reflect the two sides of certain mental health disorders such as bipolar or schizophrenia.
That evening at Mrs Jones’ Kitchen was Zone at Sounds New Poetry featuring readings from Dorothy Lehane, Laurie Duggan, Áine Belton and Ian Brinton and the rest of the week saw Free Range readings every evening in the restaurant with readings from Carol Watts, Harriet Tarlo and Jeff Hilson. These three poets also took part in a 2 hour residency during the daytime at the Beaney Museum.
Day 7
At the last of the Free Range evening events, Juha Virtanen and Sam Bailey presented and performed ‘What is Free Range?’, a multi-layered collage of people’s thoughts and opinions of Free Range since it started a year or so ago using various mediums. This performance, along with Jeff Hilson’s poetry reading that evening, concluded the week’s events perfectly. Having been such an exciting and fascinating week of such varying work I think everyone was a little sad that it was finally over but discussions have already started for next year’s festival. I was very lucky to be able to make it along to the majority of the poetry events and really enjoyed the festival. If you were unable to make it this year, or even if you were, the next Sounds New Poetry festival is definitely one not to be missed, promising to be bigger and even better.