Category: Poems

Pete Bearder – Don't Watch the News – Be the News

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This week musician and performance poet Pete Bearder joins me on the podcast to discuss his book on spoken word and performance poetry Stage Invasion.

Described by Ian McMillan as “a manifesto, party invitation, learned tome, history of ideas and soundtrack for exciting and scary times” and “the book we’ve all been waiting for”, Stage Invasion draws on academic scholarship, interviews with key figures in UK spoken word, and Bearder’s own decades of experience, to take us on a tour of our long ‘oral tradition’ from Homer to hip hop and the global poetic movements that have shaped history, exploring the artistry and unexpected science at work in the communal dynamics of live literature, and examining the role performance poetry can play in politics and protest.

You can order the book here.

Rob Auton – Gravel Travel

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Performance poet and comedian Rob Auton finds poetry in the small, the mundane and the everyday things we take for granted. He will be talking about his writing and performances and the shows he has been performing at the Edinburgh Fringe and nationwide for the last eight years. You can also hear his daily musings on the aptly named Rob Auton Daily Podcast.

Fay Roberts – Blissful Chance

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This week I welcome poet, storyteller, musician and registered logophile Fay Roberts to the podcast. Fay is at the heart of the poetry and spoken word scene in Cambridge, endlessly creating opportunities for poets to perform and publish their work. They are also a prolific writer and performer with strong reputation on the national scene having performed at Edinburgh Fringe, Glastonbury Festival and Hammer and Tongue National Finals to name a few.

Enjoy this performance blending words and music before tuning into the podcast to hear Fay talk about their latest projects and read some new poems.

Catching Shadows x Anna SchuSchu – Fuse

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This week poet and artist Wesley Freeman-Smith talks about recent projects and the works he has created and curated through collaboration with artists working across a variety of discipline. His latest project Catching Shadows sees him sharing his poetry for the first time on a series of spoken word tracks accompanied by music from Leipzig-based experimental pop artist Anna SchuSchu with production from fellow Leipzig-based musician Theresa Elflein. The three artists shared recordings back and forth across the border ‘like pass the parcel’. You can listen to the results on debut EP Fuse now.

Luke Wright – Ron’s Knock-Off Shop

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Coming up this week Luke Wright looks back on 20 years in the poetry business from discovering spoken word through a love of Blur and seeing Ross Sutherland and John Cooper Clarke perform to taking his own shows to Edinburgh and around the world. Here’s Luke in action showing his lyrical skills with a univocalism – a poem written using only one vowel, in this case O.

www.lukewright.co.uk

Luke Wright Picture: Andrew Florides 

Michael Brown – 200 Buttons

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Michael Brown by Thom Atkinson

Coming up this week Michael Brown talks about ekphrastic poetry and reads from his upcoming collection Meet Me at the Harbour.

Here is a poem inspired by an exhibit in the Queer British Art at Tate Britain exhibition.

200 buttons
for Richard Chopping and Denis Worth Miller
Queer British Art at Tate Britain

Local legend has it
that every time a soldier pays a ‘visit’
they collect from him a button
stored in an old Christmas biscuit tin.

Bohemia round here is like
a fat man with eyebrows like furry caterpillars and an oily voice
so Richard said on the phone to Francis Bacon.

Denis was a cute little button
he’d spend his days painting boys down at the cruising ground.

They invited me to their house in Cornwall
and I spent summer writing poems in the harbour
and undoing many buttons.

Michael Brown

Sally Festing – A Poetry of Release

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On this week’s podcast Sally Festing discusses her latest collection My Darling Derry. It’s a sequence of poems based on an archive of Sally’s father’s letters and diaries which she inherited 20 years after he died. It explores the impact of mental illness on her family which led her father, the neuroscientist Derek Richter, to establish the Mental Health Foundation.

Here is a poem from the collection.

A Poetry of Release
with a debt to WS Graham 

My father’s efforts ran unhindered as the rain.
Those dearest to him from childhood

gone, he thought grief a gift he should earn.
There’s relatively little words can do for grief

but what else did he have?
There were, he knew, huge worlds to share. Explore.

                                *

Let this poem be a still thing, a mountain
constructed from glass. I begin with

the ghost of an intension which blasts itself
to nurture a  new collision.

Perhaps the shape of us – the wreckage,
the shame and the dance – is in our language.