Another poetry festival, are you mad?
So, why would you want to launch a new poetry festival now? Arts circles are full of gloom about funding cuts; the economy isn’t exactly rosy and there’s plenty of evidence that the downturn has hit commercial sponsorship. Should we, perhaps, have attempted something easier, like – ooh, I don’t know – time travel?
Well, we’ll know soon how good an idea it was. The First Cheltenham Poetry Festival – a new national poetry festival – will run from 31 March to 3 April this year at venues across Cheltenham. Of course, Cheltenham has a well-known literary and festival culture, and the long-running Lit Fest has staged many excellent poetry events over the years. This, though, is a totally new venture, with no connection to any existing festival.
The festival is the brainchild of Anna Saunders, a fine poet whose first collection is due out next year, and one of the greatest natural enthusiasts for poetry I have ever met. Anna has deferred her creative writing MA, quit jobs and, as far as I can see, lived on air to make it a success, raising funds, generating PR, booking acts, and cajoling people into giving us things for free.
She’s had the support of a small committee – Carolyn Finlay, another fine poet with two collections to her name and considerable event organisation experience – has been helping with financial and editing issues and running our friends scheme, among other things. I am technically ‘Creative Director’, which in practice seems to mean ‘nerd’, since my main areas of responsibility have been strategic business advice and running the website. All of us are volunteers.
This small organisation is a deliberate choice. In the current, unpredictable environment it makes sense to keep overheads to a minimum. Any opportunity to barter, beg, blag or bully, to get the most bang for our sponsorship buck, has been taken. We’ve also taken a leaf out of the leading publishers’ books. A really good label, like Faber, will have a mixture of bestselling and more obscure titles; the bestsellers support that punts, which may in turn become the bestsellers of the future. So, we have some big, exciting headline acts like John Cooper Clarke, John Hegley and AF Harrold, and wonderful, established poets like George Szirtes, Philip Gross and Pascale Petit, together with names that I guarantee you won’t have heard of.
If running a poetry festival was all about careful financial management and sensible business models, though, we might as well pack it in and retrain as accountants. There is a theme running through everything we are doing – the joy of making connections. We want to make connections between poetry and other disciplines – music of different types, for example, and the visual arts. So you’ll notice lots of multidisciplinary events from Philip Gross performing with an accordion player, and George Szirtes supported by the Kviria Georgian singers, to a poetic celebration of the music of Edith Piaf, innovative ‘poetry and visual arts’ events and a last night party featuring music, poetry, film, DJs and live ironing.
On which note, I’d like you lovely people to help us make connections. I’d love it if you could link to our site from your blogs, facebook pages and so on. The address is above. If you put the search term ‘poetry festival’ into Google it currently appears only on page six – not bad considering the site’s only been up for two months, but not nearly nerdy – sorry creative – enough. More links would help it up the rankings.
Most importantly, though, consider a weekend in Cheltenham at the end of March – it’s a wonderful place to spend a few days, the Cotswolds are beautiful at that time of year, and I understand the poetry is brilliant.
*Find out more about the first Cheltenham Poetry Festival here.