INCLEMENT

Carol Ann Duffy Picks Out Her Ledbury Poetry Festival 2009 Highlights  

Ledbury Poetry Festival 3 - 12 July 2009

"This year's programme offers a truly fantastic array of poets in a feast of world-class events"-  Carol Ann Duffy, May 2009

Roger McGough, whom Poet Laureate and festival patron Carol Ann Duffy calls "the patron saint of poetry" launches this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival reading from a new collection of poems, That Awkward Age which see him wrestle with mortality, seek love in the launderette, perspire in the Foreign Legion, snap Henri Cartier Bresson in Liverpool and jive in Macca’s trousers. He shares the pain of Lord Godiva and Mr Nightingale, considers his Final Poem and shakes a fist at Alzheimers. Roger Mc Gough was awarded an O.B.E. for services to poetry in 1997 and more recently a C.B.E. 

Highlights of the festival include poet and novelist Ben Okri, O.B.E who won the Booker Prize for his brilliant novel A Famished Road. He will talk about his latest work Tales of Freedom, which brings together poetry and story. He says, “The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” His work does indeed face brutality and pain, written with intensity and beauty. 

Other high profile poets appearing include  Benjamin Zephaniah and prize-winning poet Ruth Padel who joins the festival to mark the bicentenary of the birth of her great-great grandfather, Charles Darwin, with a reading from her new book,Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Ruth Padel has reignited the debate about women in the world of poetry, in a tumultuous few months which has seen the first ever female Poet Laureate appointed, and more recently, the first woman ever to be elected Oxford professor of poetry, resign the post. To highlight the work of women poets and to celebrate the appointment of the new Poet Laureate Chloe Garner, Festival Director, who successfully campaigned for a female Poet Laureate has programmed Phillis Levin, who travels from the USA to join Eva Salzman in an event entitled Women’s Work which takes its title from Eva Salzman’s book Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English. A lively debate is expected.
 
Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy picked out Alice Oswald as one of her personal highlights, describing her as "an English lyric genius and arguably the most relevant poet of our times". Alice has won the Forward Prize for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Dart. She arrives in Ledbury with two acclaimed new collections A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wild Flowers. 

Interactive events range from poetry walks to writer and poet John Davies performing poems in a shed. In this work visitors bring poems, anecdotes, stories, drawings, memories, fantasies and photos to create and living installation and contribute to his book  Round Britain by Shed. There will also be a Poetry Pod kitted out like a 1950's diner, where you can 'order' poems and make your own poem on the giant chalk board.

The festival also launches exciting new commissions such as a first time collaboration between poet Zena Edwards and jazz band Polar Bear.  Zena Edwards is a powerful and rhythmic poet and performer who recently toured a new show, Security. She will be performing with Mercury Prize nominated and critically acclaimed Polar Bear, who take their cue from jazz, add elements of punk, rock and the creative soundscapes of dance and electronica. 

The Festival plays tribute to Radio 4 with 'Desert Island Poems' where castaway Joan Bakewell, will talk about the poems that have inspired her, entranced her and travelled with her through her life, with Francine Stock. Joan Bakewell has presented Late Night Line-up, Newsnight and Heart of the Matter. Her autobiography is called The Centre of the Bed and she has just published her first novel All the Nice Girls. Francine Stock presented Newsnight, Front Row and now presents The Film Programme. She has published two novels, A Foreign Countryand Man-Made Fibre. 
 
The festival features a fabulous international programme which sees poets invited from all corners of the world including Morocco, Poland and Jordan. This includes a rare visit to the UK by award-winning Irish poet Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, of whom Seamus Heaney said: “Her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greeting”.

The Ledbury Poetry Festival has rapidly grown into the largest festival of poetry in the UK and celebrates Ledbury as an increasingly important centre for poets and writers. The Festival is designed to be easily walked around with events in various venues across the town, including open mics in cafes and pubs.
 
The festival finale will be award winning American poet Frank Reeve accompanied by jazz duo John Lake and Phil Paton. As a young man Frank Reeve drove combine-harvesters in the Midwest wheat fields, and worked as a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks. He taught in Moscow and Leningrad and translated for Robert Frost when he met Khrushchev in 1962. His son is the actor Christopher Reeve. He will perform from The Blue Cat Walks the Earth. The Blue Cat was in New Orleans when the levees broke, in Baghdad when the killings started and he is worried about the state of the banking system. He is a courteous, outspoken, well-read somewhat randy anarchist ready to lay down one of his lives for what he believes.

Poets appearing at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2009 also include:

Patience Agbabi: Sinan Antoon:  Sara-Jane Arbury: Paul Batchelor: Jo Bell: Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Widad Benmoussa: Julie Boden: Siham Bouhlal: Alan Brownjohn: Alison Brumfitt: Brian Catling: John Clare: Fred D’Aguiar: John Davies: Izabela Filipiak: Adam Foulds: Agnieszka Graff: Jane Griffiths: Vona Groarke: Thony Handy: John Hartley Williams: Michael Horovitz: Christopher James: Aidan John Moffat: Ken Jones: Bożena Keff: Marie-Therese King and Sarah Jones: August Kleinzahler: Frances Leviston: Eddie Linden: Roger McGough: Geraldine Monk: Marcus Moore: Daljit Nagra: Hassan Najmi: Amjad Nasser: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Ben Okri: Peter Oswald: Ruth Padel: Anna Piwkowska: Homend Poets: Brenda Read-Brown, Sally Givertz and Sara-Jane Arbury: Frank Reeve: Penny Rimbaud: Stephen Romer: Steve Roud: Valérie Rouzeau: Eva Salzman and Phillis Levin: Kathryn Simmonds: Iain Sinclair: Kenneth Stevens: Dariusz Suska: Barry Taylor: Gez Walsh: Christine Watkins: Philip Wells: Philip Wells: Susan Wicks: Hugo Williams: Maciej Woźniak: Benjamin Zephaniah