Gemini poets
16 06 2011 | by Eleanor Nesbitt | Read 651 times
Eleanor Nesbitt shares the story of a group still writing after forty years
Cambridge, where the Gemini poets began | hashmil/flickr CC
It must have been during 1971 that I noticed that, like myself, four of my fellow students at Cambridge (all of them engaged, as it happened, in theological studies) wrote poetry and had birthdays in June. Together in 1972 we published The Gemini Poets and then, in 1974, Gemini Twin. The editor of these two collections was Rowan Williams and the proceeds went to the Christian Movement for Peace. I recall my embarrassment at venturing to sell copies to much older Friends at Jesus Lane Meeting.
A number of other ‘Gemini poets’, including Ian Florance, also featured in these two slim volumes. Ian’s path and mine had converged in a pensione in Florence in 1971, when he was about to start an English and History of Art course at Leeds. Perhaps it was the fact that he carried writing materials everywhere (so as not to lose any poems that might catch him unawares) that led to my asking when his birthday was and enlisting him.
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