Tom Roper's Weblog

Poems from the Crypt

An evening of poetry at the Crypt Gallery on Wednesday 12 September, at 7:30 pm will take place as part of Seaford Live! 2012. Readers include:

• Peter Martin, reading from his collection, Ghost Music, poetry informed by the history of Seaford and the Cuckmere Valley
• Rachel Playforth, contributor to the Frogmore Papers. Rachel blogs at the spledidly named Toast in the Machine
  Robin Houghton,. Robin’s poems have been published in The Rialto, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, Iota, Agenda and others. Her poetry and musings blog is Poetgal.
• Ralph Taylor, reading from his late wife Pam Hughes's work, including her last collection, Shadows on the Downs

We also have Felicity Pogle, who has recently published a collection, and Patricia Adelman, who will read her own work and John Parry's. 

Other readers are welcome and there will be an open mic sessions as part of the evening. If you would like to read, contact me  [email protected] or 01323 873564.

Admission: £3, to include a glass of wine. 

The Crypt Gallery is at 23 Church Street, Seaford, BN25 1HE , just down the road from St Leonard’s Church. The building is less than three minutes walk from Seaford Railway Station and about five minutes walk from the sea front. Find it on Google Maps

 

Master of the Tweets

We learnt English in an unusual way at my school, the Perse. In a system devised by H. Caldwell Cook before the First World War, and described in his book, the Play Way, boys were divided into companies, such as the King's Men, for productions, at first of tableaux, for example, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and then of whole scenes from Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.

In these companies all boys had something to do. The director was the Master of the Revels. Those without Thespian skills or ambitions could be in charge of lights, or music or costumes, each being known as Master of the Lights, of the Music or of the Tiring House. I tended to be Master of the Music, searching the extensive library of 78 r.p.m records something fitting to the action on stage, and trying to drop the needle onto the spinning disk at just the right moment.

I mention all this as, for the first time since I was twelve years old, I am once more Master of something. I am delighted to say that I have been asked by the Frogmore Press, publishers of the Frogmore Papers and the online poetry magazine, Morphrog, to be the Master of the Tweets, with assistance from Rachel Playforth, aka @archelina. Do follow us: https://twitter.com/#!/FrogmorePress/ and read the blog at http://frogmore-jp.blogspot.com/