DODO MODERN POETS

Dodo Modern Poets was founded in 1986 by Patric Cunnane with the intention of bringing new and established poets to as wide an audience as possible and especially to venues off the beaten track.

The name Dodo Modern Poets is an ironic tribute to Penguin Modern Poets, a now extinct series of anthologies featuring new poetry which were published in the sixties and seventies. Like the dodo, poetry is always in danger of extinction but somehow rises again to challenge the values of modern society.

The group hosts a regular evening at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden where it presents the most vibrant, entertaining and challenging poets writing today.

DMP has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, the St Ives Literature Festival, the Hastings Festival and many others including a number of Dylan Thomas inspired evenings in Laugharne, South Wales for which it received funding from the Welsh Arts Council. Other London shows include several appearances at the Wimbledon Studio Theatre and at the Croydon Clocktower arts centre. In October 2007 it hosted a gala evening in Wimbledon as the culminating event in the first Wimbledon Book Festival and it will be returning to Wimbledon on 5 October 2008 for the second Wimbledon Book Festival.

Its founder Patric Cunnane is involved in many other poetry activities, He ran a day school on performance poetry in the New Forest. He has created poetry with elderly people and disabled people in day care centres in the London Borough of Merton. He ran school workshops in the same borough as part of the Big Arts project for several years and a poetry workshop at Merton´s arts festival for adults with learning difficulties.

Patric Cunnane´s poems have appeared in many publications including The Guardian and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His latest collection Baltimore was published in 2006.

DODO MODERN POETS - letting fly with words

March 2008