Fawley Festival of Poetry 2011

Saturday 21st May

is the date for this year's Festival of Poetry.

Building on the success of last year we're now looking at more people, more poetry, more themes, more workshops and even more languages.

Poetry is an art form with infinite flexibility - from rivetting performance to quiet meditation it's a way of communicating, sharing and celebrating life. The Fawley Festival of poetry is a great way of celebrating local life and local lives so come along and contribute or enjoy the contributions of others.

In brief - last year's festival
There were 27 submissions last year with around half a dozen more poems written in the workshop and 18 performed in the evening after excellent refreshments around tea time.

Submitted works were displayed in All Saints Church, Fawley for a week and four were picked for special mention (and book tokens!) last year -

• 'Eternity's parade' by Geoff Eastway,
  
• 'Life's land' by Anna Lawes,
  
• 'Last Orders' by Lexley George
• 'The Underworld' by Isabel Lawes.

So get the date in the diary and start creating!

Festival of Poetry!

Poetry is a great way of exploring what it means to be human and a poetry festival is a great way of bringing together a community to enjoy language and performance. Fawley Festival of poetry aims to touch the hidden poet in ordinary people. We hope it will inspire, move, challenge and nurture a love for language and expression.

The Festival of poetry has been planned to tie in with Easter and borrows the great themes of dying and / or living. These can be interpreted very widely, for example loss, disappointment, surprise, growth, dreams fulfilled or dreams frustrated, scenes in nature etc.

The style can be formal or informal, rhyming or free, serious or light-hearted.
All poems submitted will be exhibited in all Saints Church, Fawley on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st of March. This combines with a poetry workshop and poetry performance evening from 4pm - 7.30pm on Saturday 20th.

A panel of judges will select poems for the evening performance. Those chosen will be notified in advance. You could be invited to perform your poem (although somebody else can perform it if the poet prefers). There will also be a prize for the poem judged best in each category. There is also a poetry workshop on the Saturday afternoon.

Dying and Living? Give me ideas...

Words conjure up feelings and feelings conjure up words and memories...

Dying and Living may be the great themes of Easter and Spring but they are also the themes of everyday experience. ... and not necessarily without rich emotions - including humour.

So what could you write about?

If you are not sure where to start, writing about living is easy - life is amazing, inspiring, weird and wonderful stuff. It's in our emotions, in some of our most tingling childhood memories. Life takes more shapes than imagination can invent.

But there's much to write about dying too - whether light hearted or much deeper. What about the life and death of a bubble? Letters to your snowman as he melts away? Or tackle the big themes - the hole left when someone leaves, or a friend or relation is never seen again.

The great thing about poetry is that it takes a few lines, a handful of images and creates a world vivid enough that someone else might say 'I know EXACTLY what they mean'. It's like communicating in pictures but the pictures are made of words. It is one of the deepest and briefest ways we can communicate.