The next Plymouth Language Club event will take place on Friday 3rd November – please arrive by no later than 6.45pm for a prompt 7pm start. Once more, the venue will be Rockets & Rascals on the Barbican and, in fact, this will be the tenth such event we’ve held at Rockets & Rascals since resuming after the pandemic. We appreciate their support.
It’s also, indirectly, an anniversary event as an event, related to the magazine Terrible Work, took place in November 1993 at the much-missed Plymouth Arts Centre. This was the initial event involving readers from beyond the Plymouth area, and Plymouth Language Club has built on the earlier good work from February 2000 onwards. Discussions with contacts around the country suggest that this is an exceptional achievement, that has played a large part in connecting Plymouth with regional, national and international poetry networks.
RACHEL GIPPETTI’s first collection Birthright was published by Eyewear in 2016 and her second, When Everything was Red and Eaten, has just been published by Plymouth’s Shoals of Starlings Press. Rachel is a graduate of the Creative Writing programme at the University of Plymouth, where she currently works, and she is also employed by Plymouth Arts University.
ANDREW MARTIN runs Shoals of Starlings Press. His debut collection, Shoals of Starlings – a wonderful mix of minimalist lyric poetry with a psychological slant, aided by equally impressive abstract illustrations – was published by Waterhare Press and his subsequent collections, including most recently Desire Paths and A Dreaming, have been published by Shoals of Starlings. A Dreaming has been performed with projected images and a soundscape in both Plymouth and London and Andrew has also published collections by Plymouth-based poets Brian Herdman, Thom Boulton, Dan Hartigan, Matt Thomas and Rachel Gippetti.
DAVID CADDY is our main guest reader on this occasion. He is the organiser of the annual Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival and lives in Dorset. He also edits the magazine Tears in the Fence, a publication much admired by and admiring of the Plymouth poetry scene. He has published several collections, notably with Shearsman, including The Bunny Poems and most recently Interiors. He has also published collections with Penned in the Margins and Stride and is the author of a collection of essays on contemporary British poetry, also published by Shearsman, entitled So Here We Are.
JONAH CORREN is the manager of Plymouth Proprietary Library’s live events series and is close to being our first twenty-first century-born guest. His mainly performance-related programme is reaching a younger audience and also highlights poets and poetry new to the scene. A songwriter and performance poet who has appeared across the region, Jonah was a UniSlam champion in 2019 and is the current (2023) Exeter City Slam Champion. His folk E.P. Dreaming & Petty Crime came out in 2020.
CAITLIN BRAWN and JOHN FAZAL have already appeared at the Language Club, where their mix of songwriting skills and musical prowess has provided an appropriate counterpoint to the words. Caitlin’s ‘Seagull Song’ remains a classic and she also writes and performs her own poetry.
Plymouth Language Club continues to spurn external funding sources, so as to remain as independent as possible, and relies on donations. £5 is suggested, in cash only as cash is still cool (to us, at any rate) and we don’t want to spend scarce funds on a card machine.
