NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin.
With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s begin with:
Part 1: Events! | Part 2: Reviews & Critical Writing! | Part 3: New Work!
I’ve never considered events-organising to be my strong suit — let alone drumming up an audience, generating anticipation, compering an evening’s entertainment. But I have ideas, access to rooms, equipment and noticeboards, students who need opportunities to perform, and now a number of friends and colleagues who are as eager as I am to build a busy poetry scene in Cambridge. So this year, I’ve been involved (in some capacity) with an almost overwhelming number of live readings and gatherings, while managing a growing mailing list of interested parties.
Thanks for reading Stray Bulletin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
(The mailing list is driving me up the wall, by the way — it keeps dropping people I know I’ve added!)
Spread the jam
To start, there have been three more Future Karaoke lit jams: Memories and Dreams (that is, poems and stories inspired by time travel tales); Mixology (poems and stories inspired by classic cocktails) and Brew It Up! (poems and stories inspired by Milton Brewery Beers, which themselves happen to be named after mythological figures). The latter two were held in, respectively, a restaurant and a pub, so gave rise to a rowdier, sort of ‘round-the-campfire’ atmosphere as we entered the late spring/summer months.
We’re returning to the ARU Recital Hall for the next one (Major Arcana) in early October, while the Future Karaoke brand/event format is also spreading to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, under the stewardship of my former student, Lisa Sargeant, which is very exciting.
“Feather — Stone”
We’ve also had readings from poets with brand new books to promote, kicking off with Yang Lian and Yo-Yo in March. I hadn’t seen Yang Lian perform since Poetry Parnassus, a huge global poetry event at the Southbank Centre that was occasioned by the 2012 London Olympic. Not to repeat the publicity all over again, but he currently lives in exile after rising to prominence in China in the late 1970s. Yo-Yo, his partner, is a writer of short fiction, as a painter.
The event was multilingual; the writers read in their native language, and we were joined by their translators, Brian Holton and Callisto Searle (Brian via Teams link — he serenaded us with guitar during the set-up). We booked the big lecture hall for this one, and all books were sold!
Not long after, we hosted Rebecca Watts, Claudine Toutoungi and Matt Howard, who performed individual sets before coming together on stage for a ‘poetry Q&A’, where I asked three carefully crafted questions, and each responded with a current or back-catalogue poem. I then had to dash to the bookstall with my new card machine, since the audience were, again, very keen.
I know Rebecca and Claudine well — Matt I met more recently. All are lovely — they’re very different writers and readers, but in a way that mixed extremely well.
The Winding Road
2025 happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Cambridge Poetry Festival, and I’ve joined a committee dedicated to bringing it back, headed up by Angus Allman, the host of the monthly CB1 Poetry night. Sadly, we couldn’t put our ducks in a row in time to bring back the full festival this year. Instead, we rolled together a number of chronologically and spatially dispersed events under the CPF banner and promoted them with a hastily whipped-together brochure.
These included: a reading from Theophilus Kwek at Magdalene College — which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend — and a one-off anniversary reading at the new refurbished Pembroke Auditorium, uniting contemporary poets with some of those who read at the original 1975 and 1977 festivals and celebrating the work of these older poets in particular, including those — like John Ashbery, Ted Hughes, Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Roy Fisher — who’re no longer with us. This attracted about 100 attendees — a good sign for the future of the festival.
The final event listed in the brochure was Summer in the Square: actually a broader, month-long event organised by Cambridge Bid which we were invited to take part in. That involved coming up with poetry games that would be of interest to passers-by, since we were set up under a marquee outside the station and left to our own devices for a few hours. No need to overdo it, of course; I made a simple racing game, with counters and dice, using quotes from various poems, and brought along a mix-and-match-the-couplet exercise — to which another former student Freya Sacksen (also a trustee of the Festival, and an endlessly inventive poet in her own right) ably contributed.
“I need ya, Deck.”
Finally for now I’ll mention the Transmedia Reading Club, which is reaching all the way back into April again. I came up with this as a way to generate some kind of active exchange between the different arts-related departments of the university, so that this image of excitable cross-medial conversation might then be promoted image to the wider public. The idea is simple: meet to discuss three different artefacts, each in a different medium, united by a theme. The first theme was Retro/Future Noir and we’re following this up with Gothic Americana in October.
Happily, it required only minimal organisation — a room, a flyer, a mailout — and was designed to work with a small number of attendees. I’m not sure how the format should change if it grows in popularity — so far, we’ve simply sat in a large circle working through some very general questions and opinions.
I briefly covered the two spring Sidekick launches in the last Stray Bulletin; I haven’t included here the cross-university open mic or any of the events where I was reading/giving a talk myself, but this seems a good point to draw a line under Part 1.