By Christo
I suspect too many people reading this will not have encountered poetry since school, and attending a poetry reading will not be their first choice of social activity.
Blackpool Dead Good Poets (BDGP) are different.
Being in existence for several years, the Dead Good Poets have a strong connection with Blackpool & The Fylde College where several BDGP organisers teach or study. The group has matured enough to have won last year’s Radio Wave ‘Website of the Year’ award, and if you’d like a sense of who we are and what interests us, the blog (with a different theme each week and guest writers on Sunday) is a good place to begin.
The September 2012 get-together was in the usual venue (Cedar Square’s spotlessly clean and reasonably priced No. 5 Café) on Friday 14th from 6.00pm to roughly 9.00 pm. The Committee had pre-warned that the night’s topic would be “Sickliness, illness, ailments and phobias”, or set up what, if it was a folk club, would have predicted a good-old wrist-slashing night as so many folk songs recall disasters and death.
In fact, for me, the stand-outs were rather off-theme which is so often the case. No member is expected to stick rigidly to the selected topic, or even to read, for that matter. Several members played parts in Ashley Lister’s witty re-writing of Hamlet in Facebook update form (Steve Stroud being especially lively as Horatio).
Kevin Baskin and Steve Stroud declaimed Kevin’s duologue, Tourette’s & Dyslexia Language Mangle which was skilfully spelt out. Also worth mentioning was Adele Robinson’s on-topic stutter “F-f-f-f- phobia”. Although the first half of the evening was family friendly, the second half was certainly not and mocking prose was provided by Ian.
The group meets every 6 weeks. Do check out their Facebook page for news of future get-togethers and to arrange purchase of their excellent poetry collection, A Poet’s Guide to Blackpool.
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