I have had a triptych of Christmas sonnets accepted for December issue of Lucid Rhythms. This will be their first 'official' publication though I read them a couple of times at local Christmas events last year. They also featured last Friday night as part of a dozen of my 'character monologue' sonnets that I acted in a words and music entertainment as a pre-prandial to a fund-raising dinner at Leicester Cathedral ('acted' in the sense of delivered 'in character' with some props). Audience of 47, but more importantly, as the event featured professional musicians (OK, I'm married to one, which helps), I got paid - handsomely for the 45 minutes of the whole entertainment, but much less so when rehearsal and prop-making time is accounted for, though that could be considered an investment for similar events in the future.
It certainly made the delivery of poetry to an audience that would not normally go to a reading feel both worthwhile and great fun to do. The combination of poetry and music seemed to work very well and I've posted a pdf of the programme at
http://www.openpoetry.org.uk/pandora.pdf for anyone who would like to see it. A sonnet takes about 2 minutes to 'act' and apart from the first Paganini movement, most musical items were 1.5 to 3 minutes' duration. This is definitely a method of reaching audiences that I will pursue, not least because it's so enjoyable, removes the potential 'dryness' from pure reading events and reaches audiences who are not necessarily lovers of poetry (you will notice that there is no reference to poetry in the programme except in the biog at the end and I think the audience was rather taken aback when I told them at the end that all the little monologues were in fact sonnets).
[This message has been edited by Christopher Whitby (edited November 24, 2008).]
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