Spoken Word this November at the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer Festival
November brings the 9th annual Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer weekend, a multilingual poetry festival held in Cork City since 2013. Widely recognized as one of the highlights of Cork’s literary calendar, this unique festival is set to host 30 renowned poets and performers from eight different countries taking place the weekend of the 25th and 28th, November.
This year marks the first hybrid version of this festival presenting almost half of featured guests in-person at Nano Nagle Place, with the others appearing in virtual shows.
It is also the first year in which Ó Bhéal has partnered with POEPOLIT II, a contemporary poetry and political discourse based in the University of Vigo presenting a round table discussion ‘Nurturing Poetries: Organizing and the creation of Poetry Scenes in Port Cities’, including three event organisers from Liverpool, A Coruña and Cork. The discussion is chaired by Cornelia Gräbner, who will also introduce eight poets who represent these port city venues.
The 2021 programme also comprises two poetry workshops hosted by MK Chavez and Molly Twomey, The Sacrificial Wind, a filmed spoken word poetry play, and a ‘Many Tongues of Cork / An Earth Song' session.
The festival also features poetry collaborations with dance and theatre; poetry accompanied by music, and a closed-mic set for regular performers of Ó Bhéal’s online open-mic sessions, as well as films from the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition. The shortlist of which and prize-giving for Ó Bhéal’s International Poetry-Film Competition will be screened and simulcast, as will an additional, special selection of poetry-films made in Ireland.
All events are free to access on the Festival Stage and via social media channels. In-person audiences for all events will be limited to 60 and will run on a first-come first-serve basis.
Director Paul Casey: “This year’s festival marks both another departure from traditional modes of delivery, as well as return to presentation in a physical setting. This year that setting is Nano Nagle Place, with whom we are delighted to partner in order to deliver what is to be our first hybrid festival…
“Now with the world looking towards hybrid modes of delivery, Ó Bhéal has again moved its featured guests and competitions into new territory, in an effort to combine and expand both our physical and digital audiences. We have taken care to invest enough time and effort to ensure a quality outcome for everyone and hope very much that you can enjoy our hybrid events either in-person, or from behind a screen of your choice”
Upcoming Events:
Hybridity: Poems That Cross the Line with MK Chavez | November 25th, 7.00pm
Presented by MK Chavez, this workshop explores poems that live in a liminal space exploring the nature of hybrid poetics which blur the lines between poetry and other literary genres. The benefits of hybrid writing provides writers with opportunities to explore and expand writing practices, especially for those who are writing to make the invisible visible. Participants will survey a sampling of hybrid poems and have an opportunity to take liberties with a variety of genres, styles, and techniques and leave class with a literary chimera of their own.
MK Chavez is an Afro-Latinx writer, educator, editor and coach. She is the author of Mothermorphosis, Dear Animal, and several chapbooks including, A Brief History of the Selfie. She curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and is co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. She is a recipient of the Alameda County Arts Leadership Award, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the 2021 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary award.
Rewilding Poems with Molly Twomey | November 26th, 12.30pm
Presented by Molly Twomey, this in-person workshop experiments with introducing animals into poems to approach the poet’s preoccupations in new and exciting ways. Prior to the workshop participants will be given a selection of poetry to be read that makes effective use of faunae to explore themes such as love and grief. Participants will also be provided with a prompt to write their own poem (no longer than 40 lines) that will be sent to other participants at least a week before the event. Poets will be required to read their fellow participants’ work in advance of the workshop and to provide feedback during the session.
Molly Twomey holds an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork where she received the title of College Scholar. She has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, the Irish Times, Crannóg, Mslexia, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. In 2019, she won the Padraic Colum Poetry Prize.
The Sacrificial Wind | November 26th, 3.00pm
A spoken word play adapted from the monologues on the story of Iphigenia will be shown on video followed by a live Q&A at Nano Nagle Place in Cork City.
Written by Lorna Shaughnessy and directed by Max Hafler, The Sacrificial Wind demonstrates Shaughnessy’s poetic examination of the characters around the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon asking big questions about war, patriarchy, and society.
The Sacrificial Wind has been performed in the O’Donoghue Theatre in Galway as well as the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in 2018 and subsequently in the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Derry.
The piece has been re-imagined for an online performance, allowing both the epic nature of the Trojan War and the personal stories of those involved to resonate with the audience equally. Accompanied by an evocative soundscape by Barra Convery, music by Max Bromberg and a skilful edit by John Margetts, The Sacrificial Wind filmed in lockdown with the actors’ phones only, achieves an extraordinarily broad sweep.
An Earth Song | November 27th, 1.00pm
An Earth Song is a multilingual poetry collaboration produced by Good Day Cork, creators of the multilingual prose and poetry gatherings Many Tongues of Cork. Tina Pisco, the first Writer-in-Residence at Cork City Libraries, facilitated a multilingual writing group of six people who worked together for several months to create An Earth Song.
Good Day Cork is a positive news and event space committed to change the narrative. Many Tongues of Cork was launched by Good Day Cork in 2019 to be a space filled with prose & poetry in different languages.
This popular Cork event, produced by Joanna Dukkupati, takes place throughout each year, reaching further on each occasion into new corners and immigrant populations of the wider Cork community. All are welcome to enjoy the flavourful sounds of just a few of the many languages spoken in our diverse city. Poems will be presented simultaneously in sign language (ISL), by Cork sign-language interpreter Ray Greene.
Ó Bhéal’s Annual Closed Mic Session | November 27th, 2.30pm
Ó Bhéal’s annual Closed Mic session will showcase new voices – poets who have contributed to Ó Bhéal’s open-mic sessions on Monday nights, over the past year. Contributors include Catherine Ronan, Margaret O’Regan, Mary O’Connell, Brendan Mulcahy, Matt Mooney, Cathal Holden, Mags Creedon, Jim Crickard, Lucy Holme, Cédric Bikond and Pamela Campbell.
Nurturing Poetries: Organizing and the Creation of Poetry Scenes in Port Cities | November 28th, 3.00pm
A round table discussion event chaired by Cornelia Gräbner and sponsored by University de Vigo featuring speakers Dave Ward, Yolanda Castaño, and Paul Casey. In this event, three poetry organisers from different port cities – Cork, Liverpool and A Coruña – speak about what it takes to create a nurturing environment and a ‘social infrastructure’ for poetry with a view to the medium and long term.
“Poetry needs nurture. It needs a social context, spaces for learning, listening and response, and interaction with social environments. The poetry performance and the poetry recital in particular are credited with promoting the communitarian and social aspect of poetry, including a respectful and critical culture of listening and response. But who creates, runs, maintains, initiates, re-invents the events, the recitals, the slams, the festivals, the workshops, residencies, magazines, competitions, prizes and training opportunities for socially and culturally embedded poetries?”
“Contemporary Poetry and Politics: Social Conflicts and Poetic Dialogisms (POEPOLIT II)” is a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities at the University of Vigo (Galicia/Spain) with the support of the Internacional José Saramago Chair.
Nurturing Poetries: Eight Poets from Port Cities – Liverpool, A Coruña and Cork | 29th November, 5.00pm
A round table discussion event chaired by Cornelia Gräbner and sponsored by Universia de Vigo featuring speakers Bene Sebuyange, a Congolese-British spoken word artist, author, designer, performance coach and creative writing facilitator; from A Coruña, Lucía Aldao, a writer, musician, script writer and member of Aldaolado, an irreverent poetic duo which mixes poetry, comedy and music;
Julie Goo, an established bilingual Spoken Word poet from Cork City. She was crowned Munster Slam Champion in 2012, and won the Heart of Gort Slam in 2019. Julie is a fresh voice in Irish Language Poetry, and was runner up in Ireland’s Irish Language Slam Filíochta 2021;
Natalie Linh Bolderston, a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet who in 2020 received an Eric Gregory Award and co-won the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, and is currently on the inaugural VânThanh Productions Development Programme;
Cork poet George Harding published in numerous journals, in Ireland and internationally, and has appeared in various festivals around the country. He has now completed his third collection, which will draw on themes that have proven characteristic of his writing to date, namely the environment, ecology, ornithology, politics, and the human experience; Eleanor Rees whose visionary poetry immerses you in another world from which you leave transformed. A hypnotic reader, her poems beguile you with sound patterns and vivid imagery, folklore, myth and metamorphoses are recurrent themes;
Emma Pedreira, also from A Coruña is a Galician writer. She is the author of ten collections of poetry and the novels Besta do seu sangue (Blood Beast, translated by Kathleen March), which won the 2018 Xerais and Arzebispo San Clemente awards and Bibliópatas E Fobólogos, which won the 2017 Premio da Crítica Española en Lingua Galega (also translated by Kathleen March);
Molly Twomey whose chapbook Spoken Worlds, Southern Syllables, co-authored by Jim Crickard was published in 2020 by Ó Bhéal. The same year, she won the Waterford Poetry Prize and was featured on RTÉ’s Arena. In 2021, she won the Eavan Boland Mentorship Award and was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. Recently awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary, she is working on her debut collection.
MELISSA RIDGE
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