Wham Bam Slam

This spring and early summer I've been involved in Shake the Dust - a poetry slam  project run by spoken word organisation Apples & Snakes.

My role in the project was to assist magnificent poetry coach Michael James Parker and together we worked with a team of eight young people from a school in Farnborough.

Shake the Dust is a national project and is part of the Cultural Olympics in London. This Monday it was time for the regional poetry slam final in Southampton where our team was competing against four other schools in the South East of England.

Watching the youngsters on stage was much more nervwracking than being on stage myself ... And when the winners were announed I was in tears. I couldn't believe it ... our team aka The Awkward Squad won! I couldn't believe it, not because they weren't good, but because ALL the teams were good. So much power, so many feelings. Next week we're going up to the national final in London to represent the whole of the South East.

I'm also the Digital Champion for my region which means I represent the South East by blogging. You can read about the final and some more of my blog posts here.

Funnily enough my title during the Shake the Dust project has been "shadow poetry coach" which suits me as I'm a shadow in other people's everyday life through my Swenglish project.  The idea of Swenglish was to give up my room, my job and my usual activities in order to take part in someone else's life, but Shake the Dust has been good for me, to go away about once a week to do poetry workshops has been a chance to "be myself" for a day. 

You can read what I'm up to with Swenglish here.

Shake the Dust

This spring I'm happy to be involved in a project called Shake the Dust run by spoken word organisation Apples & Snakes.

Shake the Dust is a celebration of the spoken word and will get young people into writing and performing their own poetry. My role is to assist another poet (the brilliant Mike Parker) delivering workshops in schools. Well, funnily enough my job description is "Shadow Poetry Coach", so for me this year is all about being a shadow (because shadowing is also what I'm going to do for my Swenglish project)

Last week I went to the first training session with poet Jacob Sam-La Rose. He insists on trying all the writing exercises himself before he tries them on his students. A very sound idea! The Poetry Coaches and their Shadows had to use their heads and pens and come up with a group piece.

Jacob calls this method "row writing": you write for a couple of minutes on a given theme and then pass the paper on to the next person. Our group came up with a very funny piece on the theme of truce called "It's easy to forgive a pet". We then performed this poem, standing on a line, looking angry at first and then moving closer together. I'm now looking forward to see what the teenagers make of this exercise ...

Winning the Bang Said the Gun Poetry Slam!

I've come second and third several times. But this was the first time I actually won a poetry slam! And not any poetry slam ... Bang Said the Gun is a poetry collective that runs a weekly poetry night in south London. They took their show to Edinburgh Fringe Festival and were awarded with 5 stars. I can only but agree!

I happened to be a London for two reasons:

1. Taking part in Jacob Sam-La Rose's excellent masterclass on running poetry workshops for young people (organised by Apples & Snakes)
2. The yearly YLG (Youth Library Group) Conference

I had no idea that the third reason for my London stay would be Bang Said the Gun. I only found out about it a few hours before the show kicked off, and decided on a whim to perform Making Over My Landlord, so maybe the spontaneity contributed to winning: I was quite relaxed, and did it for fun. And fun it was. On the tables were empty plastic milk containers filled with little stones (???) for the audience to rattle. It felt like being part of a massive maraca orchestra.
Here is special guest Will Stopha performing a very topical piece about robots. Note his matching top!
I was also very impressed by Richard Marsch's and Katy Bonna's poet duet. They performed a piece about stag and hen nights ...
Me with my trophy: a golden welly boot gun! And best of all I got invited back to perform at the next event which is Thursday this week! 8pm at the Roebuck Pub in Great Dover Street, London (nearest tube is Borough) Join the Bang!