Doors 8pm
Tickets £7 concessions £6, season tickets 30% off

What better time than the first day after the vernal equinox to celebrate Spring, Easter, March giving way to April, and the inexhaustible poetry of renewal.

Gerard Manley Hopkins thought "Nothing… so beautiful as spring" while Tennyson suggested that "In the spring a young man’s fancy/ lightly turns to thoughts of love", echoing Frank Wedekind's concerns in "Spring Awakening". Oscar Hammerstein wondered why he should have "spring fever… when it isn't even spring", though he admitted "It might as well be spring"! Johnny Mercer simply went for "Spring, Spring, Spring" relying on repetition to convey enthusiasm for the season.

If it was Chaucer who first wrote of "April showers", it was Al Jolson's cover-version that was the mega-hit. Browning wanted to be in England "now that April's here" but Yip Harburg opted for "April in Paris" while Eric Maschwitz preferred "the winds of March that make my heart a dancer"... Akhmatova has her "March Elegy" and Eliot thought April "the cruellest month".

And then again maybe guest readers will choose Eastertide poems, Clough's "Easter Day" or Yeats's "Easter 1916” or Paul Muldoon's "Good Friday, 1971, Driving Westward", John Donne having come up with a similar title 358 years earlier. "It is Easter over all our lives", Paul Durcan wrote, in "The Pieta's Over"...

Celebrate the first spring of the new decade by coming along to listen to the sudden flowering of a thousand (well, not quite) springtime odes from our invited guest readers, and join in the springly exuberance of our not-too-competitive not-too-literary prize quiz with suitably themed spring songs.
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classes - sundays 12-3.30 pm, £28 (concs. £24), advance booking only ___

- sun 24th jan, "form and freedom": new creative-writing workshop with jo shapcott

Form and freedom needn't be in an either/or relationship: a workshop on why and when we do and don't use form as an empowering constraint, how attention to scansion enhances our stanzas... And how the sonnet with all its formal patterning and conventional rules can liberate our poetic power.
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- sun 31st jan, "relishing difficulty": a c.l. dallat seminar on john ashbery, medbh mcguckian, jorie graham & others (repeated by request)

Is accessibility essential? Is difficulty — valued in many other arts, many other aspects of life — uniquely problematic in poetry? Or do we mistrust wilful difficulty as the opposite of candour, authenticity? Spend a Sunday afternoon discovering some notionally difficult poets, and find out if difficulty is or isn't part of the pleasure, is or isn't its own reward...

For info, booking, season ticket & mailing list enquiries contact Anne-Marie
t: 020-8354 0660, e: coffpoetry@aol.com w: www.coffeehousepoetry.org or write to Anne-Marie Fyfe, Coffee-House Poetry, PO Box 16210, LONDON, W4 1ZP

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