When: Monday evenings from 9.00pm
Where: Upstairs at The Long Valley, Winthrop Street, Cork.
The venue is now exclusive … [map]
What: Poetry Challenge, Guest Poets and Open-Mic
Original poetry, storytelling and unplugged ceol
Ó Bhéal – a poem by Anamaría Crowe Serrano
Comments & mp3s: What happened on Monday?
Wordshops: Creative Writing at Ó Bhéal and Beyond …
Interviews: … with Ó Bhéal guests by Jennifer Matthews
Five Words Vol VII: … submit your entries here
**NEW** Five Words Poetry Competition 2013-14 **NEW**
Click names for biographical details
Barney Sheehan – 1st April
Jessie Lendennie – 8th April
Five Words Vol VI and other poets’ poetry 6th Ó Bhéal Anniversary – 15th April
In association with Foras na Gaeilge Derry O’Sullivan – 22nd April
Deirdre Hines – 29th April
In association with Poetry Ireland Moya Cannon – 6th May
Kate O’Shea and CAH-44 – 13th May
Hugh McFadden – 20th May
With Wordshop from 7pm Diane Fahey and Ali Cobby-Eckermann – 27th May
Entrance is free. Full bar available.
The night begins with a Poetry Challenge starting around 9- 9.30pm. Guest poets begin about 10.00pm for between 30-45 minutes, after which there is the usual open-mic session. Be sure to come early to get good seats!
Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2013
in association with IndieCork, festival of independent cinema
16th-20th October 2013
Ó Bhéal is pleased to announce its association with the inaugural IndieCork festival of independent cinema (www.indiecork.com). This is Ó Bhéal’s fourth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems), and the first year featuring a competition.
For guidelines and submission details click here.
Each Tuesday around midday (GMT), from the 16th of April 2013, five words are posted at this link. Entrants have one week to compose and submit one (or more) poem(s): poems that must include all five words.
At noon next Tuesday, these words will no longer be eligible, and replaced with five new words. The competition will run for a total of forty weeks, until the last week of January 2014. One winner will win 500 euro and a reading.
For this week’s words, submissions and guidelines click here.
For those who missed our end of year reading with the national poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, we have 14 poems from the evening on video for you. Gillian delighted the Ó Bhéal audience with an exemplary reading, mainly from her latest collection Ice (Carcanet, 2012), which is shortlisted for the current T.S.Eliot prize. A special Thanks to Stephen O’Riordan for capturing this footage. The videos are here.
(Videos)
Winner: Seán Dennehy (Leinster)
The sixth All-Ireland Poetry Slam Champion is Leinster poet Seán Dennehy. Congratulations! Second place went to Fergus Costello (Munster) and in third place was Peter Francis Fahy (Ulster).
A fantastic night of poetry, with 150 enthusiasts in Cyprus Avenue, three nail-biting rounds of slam ending in a photo-finish between Fergus Costello’s 118 points (out of a possible 150) to Seán Dennehy’s 119. And all this followed by an excellent reading from Billy Ramsell and a vibrant open-mic run by Rab Urquhart.
For all the videos from the night (filmed by Stephen O’Riordan) click here.
[L-R] Janet Smith, Jayne Stanton, Conor McManus and Matthew Geden
Poetry Exchange
with photos and reviews from
Cork and Coventry poets
In 2012 the Twinning exchange was broadened yet again with four new participating poets, representing Coventry: Janet Smith and Jayne Stanton, and for Cork: Conor McManus and Matthew Geden. The Coventry poets visited for four days in August, giving readings at Ó Bhéal and the Whitehouse in Limerick, and were treated to excursions to Lough Gur, Cobh, Myrtleville and the English Market, while during a reciprocal four-day visit the Cork contingency gave readings at both Night Blue Fruit in Coventry and Tamworth, and appeared on HillzFM Radio. Both parties visited their respective host cities’ lord mayors.
For the full review from the participants, with photos, click here.
October saw another fantastic jazz-poetry night at Ó Bhéal, featuring poet Raven and the Dan Walsh Trio. Even though they’d only just met, many remarked on how they seemed to have been playing together for years. To view all the videos filmed by Stephen O’Riordan, including those from the open-mic, click here.
A mind-blowing 40 minute performance by multi-award winner Ilya Kaminsky at Ó Bhéal, filmed by Stephen O’Riordan. To view the videos click here.
‘An American fiction writer faces a crisis of self-doubt upon finding the poetry open mic of his literary-tourism dreams in Cork, Ireland’ – World Literature Today
Visiting writer Eric Bosse, Professor in the Expository Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma, came to Ireland to teach travel writing to students for a semester at UCC.
‘And, as I left the pub and raised my umbrella for the long walk to my apartment in the University College Cork dorms, I vowed to carry the spirit of Ó Bhéal home to Oklahoma’.
Enjoy the entire review at World Literature Today right here.
At Ó Bhéal’s 238th open-mic, after a magnificent reading by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and musical performance by John Sampson, all sixty-five minutes of which had to remain live for copyright reasons, we managed to video the poets from the open-mic, which you can enjoy right here.
