Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats, uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops, organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of smaller places in between.

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that.” Mary Oliver

Rachel Curzon

Guest Poet: Rachel Curzon

Rachel Curzon was born in Leeds in 1978. She was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and in 2016 her pamphlet Faber New Poets 16 was published as part of the Faber New Poets scheme. She now lives and teaches in Hampshire.

Helen Evans

Guest Poet: Helen Evans

Helen Evans began her working life as a journalist, taking up gliding as a hobby. Between 1999 and 2008 she combined the two as the editor of the sport's national magazine, Sailplane & Gliding.
She started to write poems again a decade ago and went on to gain an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Her poem Night Crossing came third in the Manchester Cathedral prize in 2010 and her work has appeared in a wide range of print and online magazines.
Between 2011 and 2016 she worked each year as a tutor on the University of St Andrews' Creative Writing Summer Programme.
Her debut pamphlet, Only by Flying, was published by HappenStance Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the 2016 Callum Macdonald Memorial Award.
She lives in Devon and her share of the takings from this Words & Ears is being donated to the county's Force Cancer Charity.

31st August 2017, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN

Meanwhile, we were treated to exquisite readings by our two guest poets, Helen Evans and Rachel Curzon, at Words & Ears at the end of August. We were taken on some extraordinary journeys by Rachel's delicious, and often mischievous, imagination, keeping the company of gypsies, an unhinged school master, Maud Gonne and the spirit of the rowan tree. It was a great evening for learning the unusual - from Rachel, my favourite fact was that the glass harmonica was banned because it was thought to create hysteria in women. From glider pilot Helen, we learned much about what it is to fly, about yearning, and about the different kinds of fear. It is difficult, she said, to write about fear without being sentimental or melodramatic, but her poems, delivered from memory, with fascinating asides, achieve the balance with much grace. Many of us identified with her observation that 'sometimes I think my poems know more about me than I do' - a sentiment neatly echoed in Stephen Payne's open mic poem Some Regular Shapes - 'as with poems and lives, we make some things before we understand them.'