“Can you tell me how you get invited to read at festivals please?”

A few days ago Helen Ivory posted this question on Facebook. There was a flurry of responses, none from a festival, nearly all saying they didn’t know the answer.

I wondered about replying as I am one of the three members on the Cheltenham Poetry Festival (CPF) management team, but I decided to write this blog post instead as I can give a longer and more considered reply.

The first thing to say is that this post is my personal take on the question and is limited to one poetry festival.

Considerations in booking poets

We book poets, who will be attractive to our audience or should I say audiences. We have a 10-day event this September in Cheltenham. The audience for this is different from that for the year-round online festival we run. We can be more adventurous with the online festival. But with both in-Cheltenham and online festivals we are looking for poets who can read their poetry in a way that reaches out and engages our audience.

There are other considerations when we book poets. The first is financial and of course is related to ticket sales. We don’t have a large budget and we have to make it balance at the end of the year/festival. It means we can’t book all the poets we would like. Sadly issues such as the size of the fee, costs of travel and accommodation, all play a part.

Does the poet’s work fit with the programme? We want our programme to be diverse, in all sorts of ways, in subject matter, poetry style and form, ethnicity, poet’s age etc. We usually have a minimum of two poets reading per event, do they complement each other, maybe they are dealing with the same theme but in different ways?

So how do we find poets?

Poets are constantly approaching us, far more poets than we have slots. A polite email is the best option, rather than messaging us. Do read any information we have on the website about when and how to apply.

We are also proactive in looking for poets. We read poetry books and magazines, go to poetry events especially online ones. If we find someone who excites us and fits what we are looking for, we may approach them or keep them in mind until we can.

The open mic slots at our online events are really important to us. Open mics is a way of performing at the Festival that is open to everyone, not just for newbies but also established published poets. We do sometimes offer a headline slot to someone, who has come to our attention via the open mc.

So what can you do to get a headline slot?

• Have a published poetry book (not self-published)
• Attend CPF events, it may not be possible to attend the in-Cheltenham Festival, but if you are interested in performing with CPF attend some of our online events
• Learn how to communicate your poetry to an audience (open mics are great for this)
• Take part in online events.
• Talk to your publisher – CPF sometimes has publisher showcases, where a number of poets from one publisher read together.
• By all means send us a polite enquiry email
• Remember we are three volunteers with limited time, running a festival because we love poetry. Poets who give us hassle and/or extra work aren’t likely to be booked, or if booked won’t be booked again.

In conclusion

I hope this post helps. As a fellow poet I know how hard finding readings can be. Good luck.  

UPDATE
Cheltenham Poetry Festival website now has a "Take Part" page and  a dedicated contact form for poets to join a special mailing list. The page is here https://cheltenhampoetryfestival.co.uk/take-part/

Update on My Forthcoming Collection

The idea that my poetry collection will be published is becoming more and more real. I have sent off the final copy to Indigo Dreams, together with an information sheet about me and the book, and a head and  shoulders shot (how I hate photos of myself). 

The launch date is set: 23rd October. It will be a zoom event hosted by Cheltenham Poetry Festival. I will miss the party feel of a physical launch, but as I said in my last post a zoom event has the advantage of allowing me to invite people, such as my friends overseas, who would never get to a physical event. A number of poet friends will be joining me in reading at the launch (details tba), so it won't be unadulterated Zoe!  If you fancy coming, do drop me an email or post a comment below. Or just look out for my posts on twitter, facebook or instagram. Alas you will have to bring your own wine. 

Zoom

In my last blog post I talked about the impact of COVID and mentioned that I had been attending a number of online poetry events, usually via Zoom. It looks as though my collection will have to be launched online. so I need to understand what works and doesn't. My diary is now full of online poetry events - on some evenings I have as many as three events to choose from and on weekends I could be all day on Zoom overdosing on poetry.

We all thought this would be a temporary phenomenon, but a lot of people have been enjoying poetry online and realising that the internet allow syou to go to poetry events all over the world. I suspect that even when the live events restart (which may be a long way off) the online poetry scene will continue.

Okay there are downsides, but online poetry events do allow you to go round the world, to hear poets you would never hear otherwise and even to read at open mics there. Importantly online poetry allows people who cannot access in-the-flesh events because of where they live or because of disability to access a world they would be excluded from. Somewhere out there is a poet or poetry event organizer who sees the potential of this brave new digital world, who sees a new path for poetry.

I thought I might share with you some of the online poetry event organisers whose work I have enjoyed. I know there are some I have missed out and there are loads more I don't know about.  Please add any you know of in the comments or email them to me and I will add them to this post. 

Book Publishers:
Book launches by Carcanet Press: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/events.shtml
Launches and other readings organised by Seren Books: https://www.serenbooks.com/events
Book launches by Nine Arches Press: https://www.facebook.com/NineArchesPress/

Poetry Festivals
Cheltenham Poetry Festival is offering an amazing programme of readings and workshops: https://cheltenhampoetryfest.co.uk/
Ledbury Poetry Festival has a 2-day online festival on 4th and 5th July https://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/festival-online-programme-register-for-events/
Gloucester Poetry Festival is also offering some great readings:   https://www.facebook.com/GloucesterPoetryFestival/

Poetry Groups
Gloucestershire Poetry Society's Crafty Crows events offer invited readers and open mics: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thegloucesterpoetrysociety/
Poetry Norwich has a monthly event https://www.facebook.com/VoltaPoetryNorwich/
Swindon's spoken word event Ooh Beehive is also now online: https://www.facebook.com/OoohBeehive/
Dear Listener - in Worcester is also now Digilistener:
 https://www.facebook.com/DearListenerOpenMic/
Cafe Writers in Norwich - invited readers and open mic http://www.cafewriters.co.uk/
Poets Cafe in Reading - nvited readers and open mic: https://www.facebook.com/ReadingStanzaPoetsCafe
York Spoken Word - open mic https://www.facebook.com/YorkSpokenWord

Poetry Magazines
A number of poetry magazines are having online launches including Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, Butcher's Dog, Poetry Review, and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.

Other
The Poetry Book Society has events on its Instagram account: @poetrybooksociety
Helen Ivory and Martin Figura have launched Live from the Butchery:  https://www.facebook.com/Live-from-The-Butchery-100380041704407

Writing In the Time Of Covid 19

There is a Czech saying that my friend Hannah regularly quoted at me: "How to make God laugh - tell him your plans". My plans for this year were considerable. With my collection Owl Unbound due out this year, I had plans to build up my reputation at poetry readings, to network, to continue sending out to magazines, and of course to launch the book. God must have found them very amusing.

Even the sending out to magazines is becoming less easy as some print magazines are having problems with their printers. My publishers are having problems with their distributors. However online there is a surge in Zoom, Hangout and similar forms of internet events. I have enjoyed being a member of the audience at some of these. The Cheltenham Poetry Festival is organising a series of online workshops this summer and I am helping out with these.

And yet, online poetry for all its attactions, is not the same as being in a room with people. Technology (especially mine) has a habit of failing at the worst time. The connection falters and sometimes fails altogether, words are mangled, images of poets freeze. Nor is it possible to get the non-verbal feedback one gets when reading.

There has been a flurry of covid poems (some of them brilliant and some awful) and several covid anthologies are calling for poems, including one being produced by the Gloucestershire Poet Laureate, Z.D Dicks. Write Where We Are Now is an initiative by the Manchester Writing School and fronted by Carol Ann Duffy, creating online a living record of the crisis.

Pandemics have been a subject I have been interested in for decades. The threat and reality of the plague appears in my Healer's Shadow trilogy. And in my files I have an unfinished poem cycle about the impact of illness and environmental depredation on the collapse of the Roman Empire.

In the last month I have written two poems that might be termed covid poems. But as is usually the way with what I write they aren't a direct take on the subject. I am cautious about writing about covid now. Everything I write comes from somewhere in my brain where it has been brewing for a while. It is linked to my mental wellbeing.

Never has it been more the case that we write about what we must. For some people that is about virus, for others they need to write about anything but. The current anthologies can only capture a snapshot, and a valid one, but the best work on the subject may well be written in hindsight.

Doors Close, Doors Open

At Piranha Poetry

I was chatting to an old school friend of mine last week and we both commented on how sometimes your life can suddenly change: doors close and new ones open. They certainly have for me over the past year.

My life in the Czech Republic has ended. Out of the blue a buyer came forward with an offer for my house there and I could not refuse. Last month I spent a fortnight in the country getting rid of most of my things and storing a few others, handing in my Czech residency papers, and handing over the keys. The door to my Czech home literally closed.

I am near to closing another literal door. As I said in the a previous post my mother died at the end of June and my life as a carer came to an end. Of course there has been work to do for her since her death. Over the last month I have been clearing one room a week in her house. It will take me another four weeks before the house is in a state ready to be put on the market.

The door that has opened is of course poetry. With my collection with Indigo Dreams (now called Owl Unbound) due out later in the year I have work to do. Firstly there is the editting of the collection prior to sending the finished version to Indigo Dreams, this I think is pretty well done. Then there is the need to get some readings sorted. The best place to sell books is at readings and that means getting my name around ahead of the book launch.

In the last two months I have given readings in Gloucester and Bristol, as well as at the launch of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal (I had three poems in the magazine) and at open mic's in Stroud, Gloucester and Cheltenham. I must confess I loved performing my poetry. It gives me such as buzz.

The other poetry work I have been busy with is helping Anna Saunders with her Cheltenham Poetry Festival. As I may have said elsewhere in this blog I have a background in organising community events, so it isn't hard to get back into the swing of working on an event. It is great to be able just to help out, rather than be the director.

There will be more about the Festival in another post, but for now here is the link to the amazing programme Anna has put together: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cheltenhampoetryfestival
With performers as diverse as hip-hop legend JPDL and former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, there really is something for everyone.

Speaking Poetry

A young Zoe reading poetry at the Young Arts Centre

I have always believed that poetry is primarily a spoken art. It certainly is for me and has always been. My mother told me that I composed poetry before I knew how to write it down and the same is true of poetry historically or should I say prehistorically. 

I still like to see the poem on the page and indeed usually buy a book if I have enjoyed a reading, but listening to a good reader of poetry can be an awesome and illuminating experience. Alas not all poets know how to read well. A good reader will reveal the poem's structure and music, giving it another dimension.

Now that I am back on the poetry scene, I have started reading to audiences again. The other day at Buzzwords, Anna Saunders complemented me on how I read and I replied that I learned young. Last Friday I went to Alison Brackenbury's party to launch her new book Gallop*, where we met up with an old friend, Christine Whittemore. Both Christine and I read in the open mic and frankly you could tell that we both had been trained in reading. When I say "trained", I don't mean taught in the conventional way. We both went to Cheltenham's Young Arts Centre, where we were active members of the EOS poetry group. Every year the group would put on at least two public poetry readings. Those readings would include our own poems and those of famous poets. I don't recall being taught how to read or project my voice, but then the Centre's director, Elizabeth Webster, was a teacher with such skill you weren't aware that you were learning from her. 

When I moved to London, I started reading with Michael Horovitz's Grandchildren of Albion crowd, which included some amazing poet readers. And now here I am again reading and loving it. Anna has asked me to read at next year's Cheltenham Poetry Festival. I am so looking forward to it. You can hear me reading four poems here.

*Alison is an excellent reader and Gallop, a selection of some of the best poems over her long career, should be on everyone's Christmas list. There is currently a discount on it on Carcanet's website: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784106959

Buzzwords Poetry & Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Buzzwords happens every month, usually on the first Sunday, at the Exmouth Arms in Cheltenham. The website is here: http://buzzwordspoetry.blogspot.com/  The meetings consist of a workshop led by a guest poet, readings by the guest poet and an open mic session. The guest poets have all been excellent. The group have been really welcoming and full of lovely people. I go to all the meetings I can. I always read as part of the open mic.


This weekend saw the opening of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, which will go on until the 4th May. I have plans to go to at least five events and would like to go to more, but my care responsibilities make going to day-time and early evening events impossible.

Last night I went to a reading by students on the University of Gloucestershire Creative Writing Course. The course director is Angela France, who is also responsible for Buzzwords. Angela introduced her students to a sparse but appreciative audience. There were some good and accomplished poets in the group, as well as those who are just learning their craft.