Poet Wendy Cope OBE read from her latest collection, Anecdotal Evidence, published earlier this year. In the collection she uses a variety of forms including sonnets, villanelles and the Japanese tanka. She also read from Family Values and Two Cures for Love, and audience members requested a few of their favourite works too.
Cope joked throughout and her poems were received with laughs and applause. Humorous reflections were balanced with more poignant moments, and Cope included a trio of poems written in residence at Stratford-upon-Avon for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Answering audience questions, Cope said she can write a sonnet in a morning, and that she was in two minds about Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.
On the question of whether she considers spoken word poetry to be poetry in a more traditional sense, she said: “If it’s something that’s only written for live performance then I think it’s a different art form from literary poetry”. She continued, “To judge whether a spoken word poet’s any good or not I’d want to see their poems written down, to see if I really thought they were any good or not”.
If you missed this you might enjoy Event 437 Poetry on Film: To Provide all People, Owen Sheers and Pip Broughton on Sunday 3rd June at 4pm.