On May 5th we got together again with our poet friends under the aegis of ‘The 1000 Monkeys’ to listen to and read their poems. The session confirmed, as it does every month, the injustice of the title of this group, that we set up more than ten years ago, This is no random collection of playful primates equipped with keyboards and charged with recreating all of Shakespeare’s works given an eternity in which to do it. As always I emerged from the hour of readings feeling refreshed and hopeful, buoyed by the creativity of our talented friends.
Each month we can only invite a small number of the hundred or so poets who have given us permission to send them emails about the events; each zoom is open for about an hour. This month we invited fourteen of them to share their work, of whom two had personal and technical reasons for not taking part (but we’ll invite them again next month.) Everyone on our database received the link and thirteen of them came as listeners.
We enjoyed readings by:
​Gary Day (3.07 on the video); Evanthe Blandy (6.21); Aaron Barschak (10.47); Ray Pool (16.05); Anne Symons (21.00); Ranald Barnicot (26.00); Simon Williams (30.30); Jim Conwell (34.33); Daphne Milne (38.36); David Bleiman (42.30); Barry Smith (49.40) and Jenny Brown (56.00)
Dónall was ill this month, having had a difficult chemo session on Monday and Tuesday, so for the first time I was in sole charge. I ended the evening feeling a lot better than when it began. Dónall has recovered from his low point now and is well enough to enjoy the video.
Some of the listeners will be invited to read on June 2nd, and there will be some ‘open mic’ invitations sent out in the week beforehand.
If you would like to join the group, just email your request to Janice at dempseyandwindle@gmail,com. Then you’ll receive the invitations and links to the Zoom events each month, in your inbox.

We hosted another session of poetry with our talented friends on 7th April with a great line-up of readers. Sadly we forgot to turn the video on at the beginning, so Dónall's meditation on Irish 'demon testicles', Christine Vial's memories of her musical family and Tony Watts' ode to trees and his ballad of 'The Bard of Babel' are missing from this video of the event. But you can hear the other nine poets at these locations on the timeline:

1:00 – Chrys Salt (poems about over-age love and a stalker)

5:47 -– Michael Farry (a topical 'April Fool' and an exploration of the sensual properties of fruits)

10:17 – Kathryn Southworth (3 poems from her pamphlet about the Pendle Witch trials in which an ancestor of hers was indicted.)

15:16 – Clive Donovan ('The Roundabout’, ‘The Love Market' and 'She Smiles')

20:30 – Judith Wozniak ('The Lacemaker'; 'The Foundling' and a poem about her Polish father-in law)

28:57 – Jenna Plewes (poems lamenting the loss of bird species and nature)

28:49 – Rosie Barrett ('Homage to a Dog'; 'Summer Comes to Milburn' evidenced by cars caught in tide waters; and observations of the dolphins playing offshore in Devon.

32:58 – Sheila Aldous (two love poems)

36.41 – Anne Alexander ('Up in the Gods'; 'Wassailing' and 'Three Trees')
As always, it was a great pleasure to see so many friends and hear such a variety of brilliant poems. We very much appreciated seeing the friends who joined us as listeners, too: Timothy Adès; Ranald Barnicot; Jan Levin; Jenny Brown Barnet; Ray Poole; Phil Lawder; Audrey Ardern-Jones; Avadne Blandy; Jim Conwell; Alison Edwards, Sue Rothstein and Jean Hall. We hope that some of these listeners will be zooming with us as readers next month, on May 2nd.

We had a high-quality meeting of the 1000 Monkeys group on September 2nd. We were sad that three of the readers on our list had problems and couldn't make it after all, but we'll include them another month, without doubt.
Only one reader asked not to be included in the recording — Mantz Yorke read three excellent poems, all so far unpublished, and decided to keep them that way for the moment. The sympathetic and imaginative poem he wrote when Dónall was undergoing his operation was very much appreciated. The recording includes poems from seven other poets. We enjoyed every one of the 45 minutes and we're looking forward to another zoom on Tuesday October 7th — the readers are to be announced soon.

It's always interesting to see themes emerging and sometimes coalescing among the poets who attend each meeting of the talented Monkeys. This month saw Holocaust Day directly inspiring poems from Christine Vial, Anne Alexander, Richard Carpenter and Aaron Barschak, and two translations by Timothy Adès of poems by Robert Desnos, who died a victim of the Nazi concentration camps. Richard had an account of a lady who escaped a similar fate in Auschwitz.  Aaron's poem was as much about Gaza as about the Holocaust — and about the redefinition of words in our century — genocide; gender, women, vaccines — all politically manipulated. Anne 's 'Peace Gardens' called for peace and justice regardless of race or religion. She and Christine had written their poems to be performed at the opening of a memorial garden in Enfield, as members of the Brondesbury Poetry group. Christine's 'Inked' referred to the forcible tattooing of serial numbers on concentration camp inmates.

Water featured in the poems of Jenna Plewes, who had two poems about fishermen and fish, and Ray Pool had three lyrical poems on river events: an account of the sinking of The Marquess of Granby on the Thames reminded us of that tragic event twenty-one years ago; his portrait of a musician friend who lived beside the same river was a happier memory. Mantz Yorke remembered the Morecambe Bay cocklers who were swept to their death in the rising tide, also 21 years ago, and told of precarious living in 'House of Cards'. 

The coming of Spring inspired some denial in Christine's 'Bulb' ('the price of growing is just too steep') ... but Tony Watts went for an entertaining rural walk with 'Five Poets on a Walk in the Country'. He also made us smile with 'The Anthropologist' as the subjects of an expert study turned the tables on their observer. Evanthe Blandy gave us a sonnet portrait of 'The Market Trader' and a sympathetic hearing of a monologue by a sufferer from dementia.

 Rod Whitworth's response to Max Ernst's 'The Petrified City' — the phrase 'eugenic hygenics' occurred to him with echoes of the Nazi era in which Ernst developed his paintings and collages. 'An Answer' was his articulate and poetic response to a Chinese poem, 'The Answer'.

Marek Urbanowicz read three of his previously published poems with very detailed explanations of their context. Unfortunately, my notes were not detailed enough to report accurately on these! But he has provided a comment (see below) to clarify my previously inaccurate account, for which I must apologise to him.