Meet our Poetry Champions

8 August 2012 / 5 Comments

We are really excited to announce the launch of our Poetry Champions project. From Stoke Newington to Winchester - poetry reading groups will be celebrating the Olympics by reading, reviewing and blogging about the Winning Words anthology and sharing their favourite poems. We will be publishing their reviews and Olympic themed stories from now until October when the project finishes.

And if your reading group is reading poetry or Olympic themed books this summer, get in touch to tell us your stories. It would be great to see how different reading groups are approaching poetry and the Olympics.

Here we introduce our Poetry Champions reading groups.

Stoke Newington Poetry Reading Group

The Stoke Newington Poetry Reading Group began in Stoke Newington Library in January 2011, and has since been growing steadily. We're a very mixed group, and come to the poems from all sorts of different perspectives. A few members of the groups are poets, though most are just people who enjoy reading poetry, or want to find out more about it. It's a friendly and informal group where all views are welcome.

Three of our recommended poems would be:
Emily Dickinson Because I could not stop for Death
W.H. Auden If I Could Tell You
Henry Vaughan Regeneration

Please do get in contact if you'd like find out more about joining the group.

Winchester Poetry Readers' Group

The Winchester Poetry Readers' Group has come together for this Poetry Champions project. We were invited to take part by the county's Literature Officer who is also part of the group. It includes the 2012 Hampshire Poet, local published poets and poetry enthusiasts, some of whom have read their work at our regular Poetry Cafe, and readers who were involved in an earlier blogging project called Reading Detectives. We're delighted to be using our love of poetry in this Olympic linked initiative and look forward to sharing views with the other UK poetry groups involved.

Our three favourite poems are:
Louis MacNeice Snow
C.P. Cavafy Ithaka
Philip Larkin High Windows

The Not Scary Poetry Group

Our founder member set up the Not Scary Poetry Group almost three years ago. Among the poets we have read at the monthly meetings are T S Eliot, A J S Tessimond and Wendy Cope. Our founder also represented the group in poetry reading sessions at Southwell's Library's annual Poetry Festival.

Our three favourite poems are:
Owen Dulce et Decorum Est
Millay What Lips My Lips have Kissed
Eliot Little Gidding

Grays Library Friday Poetry Group

Our group of about 10 members has been meeting at Grays Library since January 2012 and is a read aloud book group. We find that every session is a unique experience because live reading very much depends on those there at the time. At meetings we read a short story and link in two poems which are always very varied - we read both modern and classic poetry. It is a fun, lively, interactive time spent bringing our own experiences to what we read and hear.

Some of our favourite poems are:
Grace Nichols Give Yourself a Hug
Maya Angelou Still I Rise
Robert Frost The Road Not Taken

The Derwent Delvers

The Derwent Delvers is an eclectic group of avid readers who live in William Wordsworth's homeland. We come from a variety of backgrounds and have a great playground here in the Lake District. For the past six years we have met every month to share a book and our thoughts about it. Our reading material is varied, from poetry to prose in pretty much every genre available.

Our top three favourite poems are:
W.H. Auden Stop all the Clocks
Nina Cassian Temptation
William Wordsworth The Daffodils

About the Winning Words anthology

Faster, higher, stronger - winning words that inspire you on to Olympian goals. From falling in love to overcoming adversity, celebrating a newborn or learning to live with dignity, here is a book to inspire and to thrill through life's most magical moments. From William Shakespeare to Carol Ann Duffy, our most popular and best-loved poets and poems are gathered in one essential collection, alongside many lesser known treasures that are waiting to be discovered. These are poems that help you to see the miraculous in the commonplace and turn the everyday into the exceptional - to discover, in Kipling's words, that yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.

Whether you are looking for inspiration or expression, reflection or recognition, Winning Words is a book for every occasion, to let the spirit soar. The anthology is published by Faber.

About Winning Words

Winning Words is a UK wide project of the Forward Arts Foundation to link poetry and sport using the occasion of the London's Olympic Games in 2012 to engage athletes the public and young people with the unique power of poetry.

The project is generously supported by Arts Council England, Bloomberg, Felix Dennis, Ronald Duncan Foundation and the Garfield Weston Foundation.

5 Comments

Stephen Boyce 11:10, 31 August 2012

Overall I confess to being disappointed by the Winning Words anthology. It’s not just that the collection contains so many familiar, much anthologised poems, but that it strikes me as a missed opportunity to embrace the truly international spirit that is at the heart of the Olympic movement. Where are the poems from Africa, South America or the Indian sub-continent? A bit more than a mere nod in this direction would seem de rigueur in a book “inspired by the arrival of the Olympic games in London in 2012.” Having said that – and whether or not these poems all “resonate with Olympic values” – there are, as in any good anthology, new discoveries and interesting correspondences and juxtapositions. So, for instance, I enjoyed finding Derek Walcott’s Earth a thumb’s flick from Patrick Kavanagh’s Inniskeen Road: July Evening; discovering Michael Donaghy’s beautifully wrought The Present and exquisitely apt Machines, and Derek Mahon’s Everything is Going to Be All Right – a poignant reminder of his importance among the great Northern Ireland poets. Among sporting metaphors The Catch by Simon Armitage is deceptively simple and every bit as inspirational as more familiar or rousing verses. Stephen Boyce – Winchester Poetry Readers Group
Hugh Greasley 09:43, 2 September 2012

Winning Words is a very accessible book. In anthology terms it is like an island with plenty of well-lit runways on which to land and start exploring. Friends cautiously examined the book and could always find a favourite poem – which was shared. One dark night in a large tipee on the banks of a flooded river, the group was in suitably boy scout mode, to enjoy a rendition of “If” by Rudyard Kipling. After a hard days canoeing and an incident with a fallen tree, the lines “If you can keep your head, when all about you are loosing theirs and blaming it all on you” had resonance. The Tawny Owls called in the background and the tent flapped in the night breeze…. The Island has some interesting caves to explore and I liked those inhabited by Plath and Armitage. Next time as I head in a small boat towards slippery rock of an inaccessible anthology I will think fondly of the runways….
Angela Hicken 02:16, 6 September 2012

The Winchester group have been reading their way through the Winning Words antholgy and our first point of discussion was how we navigated the poems; from start to finish, or by dipping and diving? Do you read anthologies in the order they have been arranged? Some felt that yes, they liked to see if there's a story in how the poems are grouped or understand the way they've been purposely ordered. Others dipped, some finding a more systematic approach further down the line. These readers said they approached short story collections in the same way. Are you a poetry diver?
Madelaine Smith 12:37, 21 September 2012

I am a dipper and diver when reading a poetry anthology and this was how I approached Winning Words (it seemed particularly apposite considering the cover treatment given to this book). Flicking through initially I admit to reading those poems familiar to me before swimming out a bit further into unknown waters. Eventually I went back and re-read the collection in order. This highlighted for me that I had indeed missed some poems completely, but I still think I would approach another collection as a dipper. My overall impression of the collection is that for a book called Winning Words, which are said to spur us on to Olympian goals, there are a lot of poems about death, over which of course none of us can ever be triumphant. Sean O'Brien's 'Dignified' sums up the reason for this: 'Those who win take liberties with time...deny what all the gods insist on, that we die.' One poem in particular hit me - perhaps physically, certainly emotionally. I even brioke the habit of a lifetime and turned down the corner of the page so that I could return easily to this poem to read it again and again. 'Envying Owen Beattie' is about the discovery of the frozen crew members of Franklin's doomed 1845 Northwest Passage expedition. There is nothing triumphant in the poem at all. In the tragic story that inspired the poem no-one wins. The poem however is perfectly formed and is triumphant in its simplicity and beauty. I will be searching out more of the Sheenagh Pugh's work, and that is after all what a poetry anthology is for; to give a reader a taste of the work of different poets so that they can go on to explore and discover more. Winning Words indeed!
sheelagh gallagher 09:09, 23 September 2012

I have to agree with Stephen Boyce's comment that Winning Words could and should have represented the countries who competed if it was to be truly Olympic but I must also say that I was not at all disappointed by the presentation and content of the book. I've got loads of anthologies and what I always enjoy is the juxtaposition of old and new and the way an old poem can suddenly seem new in a new setting. I'm normally a dipper but this time I really did start at the beginning and find myself at the middle. Maybe because the book is light and accessible it was easy to get carried away. I'm back to dipping now and still enjoying it. New finds? Roethke's 'The Waking' which I can't believe I haven't seen before and Ann Sansom's 'Voice' which made me smile.