Mixing readings with workshops and poets discussing individual poems, as well as a translation 'duel', Winchester Poetry Festival has fixed itself into this glorious time of year with a full weekend programme from Friday to Sunday - 5, 6 & 7 October.
Readers include some of poetry's big names such as Gillian Clarke, Vahni Capildeo, Pascale Petit and Ian McMillan but mostly poets who contribute to the enormously various landscape of poetry, like Rebecca Goss, Nick Makoha, Karen McCarthy Wood, Stephen Watts and Maura Dooley, poets writing from as many different perspectives as there are names. And this is what marks a good festival, programmed with thought, sensitivity and awareness as well as an international perspective, thanks programmer-poets Sasha Dugdale and Sarah Hesketh.
Some of these poets I've seen before, one or two I've read with in the past. I know the work of many of them. But while a festival is a chance to celebrate the work you love, as a reader and a writer, it's also a chance to fill up, to open up, to wonder about work you might not have been drawn to otherwise. Poetry belongs to, and thrives in these moments of change - personal, seasonal, political, social.
http://www.winchesterpoetryfestival.org/
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