International Poetry ReIncarnation

Word made flesh 1965 / Flesh made word 2015

ReIncarnation Biographies #27: John Cooper Clarke

John Cooper Clarke

John Cooper Clarke

The twenty seventh and final person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the iconic punk poet John Cooper Clarke.

John Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original ‘people’s poet’. His ongoing career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents.

Today, JCC is as relevant and vibrant as ever, and his influence just as visible on today’s pop culture. Aside from his trademark ‘look’ continuing to resonate with fashionistas young and old, and his poetry included on national curriculum syllabus, his effect on modern music is huge.

His influence can be heard within the keen social observations of the Arctic Monkeys and Plan B. These collaborations mean that John has been involved in two global Number One albums in the last two years.

John has been a regular and dedicated contributor to New Departures and the Jazz Poetry SuperJam/Poetry Olympics bandwagons since 1980.

His latest show, touring across the UK and the USA this year, is a mix of classic verse, extraordinary new material, hilarious ponderings on modern life, honest-to-goodness gags, riffs and chat. Don’t miss this chance to witness a living legend at the very top of this game.

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

ReIncarnation Biographies #26: Patience Agbabi

pic by Lyndon Douglas

pic by Lyndon Douglas

The twenty sixth person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the poet Patience Agbabi.

Shortlisted for this year’s Ted Hughes Poetry Prize, Patience Agbabi is a sought-after poet who celebrates the written and spoken word. She read English at Oxford, has an MA in Creative Writing from Sussex, and has lectured in Creative Writing in several UK universities. Her fourth collection, Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), is an exhilarating, multicultural remix of The Canterbury Tales.

Mining the Middle-English masterwork for its performance as well as its poetry and pilgrims, her boisterous and lyrical collection gives one of Britain’s most significant works of poetry thrilling new life.

“A pilgrimage of punks, badasses, broken hearts, beat poets, silver-tongued fixers, town criers, beauties, sinners.” – Jeanette Winterson, on Telling Tales

“Agbabi is a fine poet, and her linguistic wit carries satirical fire” – Daily Telegraph

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

ReIncarnation Biographies #25: Steven Berkoff

Steven Berkoff

Steven Berkoff

The twenty fifth person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the actor, director and poet Steven Berkoff.

Steven Berkoff was born in Stepney, London. Among the many adaptations Berkoff has created for the stage, directed and toured are The Trial and Metamorphosis (Kafka), Agamemnon (after Aeschylus), and The Fall Of The House Of Usher (Poe). He has also directed and toured productions of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (also playing the title role), Richard II (for the New York Shakespeare Festival), Hamlet and Macbeth as well as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.

“I’ve been writing poetry for years and I’m putting together my collected poetry in one huge volume, called Poetry for the Working Class. Slightly ironic title to distance it from poetry about brooks, trees and flowers. I’ve written some dramatic poems, one on the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, called ‘Uprising’. One about the Blair Years, called ‘Albion’ and one about the horrific 9/11 tragedy called ‘Requiem for Ground Zero’, which I have also performed at the Edinburgh Festival. What I feel about my poetry is that it should be performed; I’m pleased to be able to read some of them for the current poetry festival.”

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

ReIncarnation Biographies #24: Cecilia Knapp

Cecilia Knapp

Cecilia Knapp

The twenty fourth person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the poet Cecilia Knapp.

Cecilia Knapp is a writer, poet and performer. She has been performing her words for the last four years around London and the UK, at festivals including Secret Garden Party and Bestival. She’s taken three shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, been published in several anthologies and made work for the BBC. Her debut Spoken Word play Finding Home will premier at the Roundhouse in May before it embarks on a festival tour. The show explores her relationship with her hometown of Brighton, her family, her relationships and how she positions herself in the world as a twenty-something.

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

ReIncarnation Biographies #23: Pete the Temp

Pete The Temp

Pete The Temp

The twenty third person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the poet, activist, and musician Pete the Temp.

Mr The Temp is the former Hammer & Tongue National Poetry Slam Champion. He has been featured on BBC Newsnight, Radio 4 and World Service as a poet, musician, educator and activist.  In 2014 he did a national tour of his one man stage show Pete (the Temp) vs Climate Change in which he single handedly defeats climate change using only his mouth. He is the 2015 Glastonbury Festival official website poet in residence.

Pete the Temp will be discussing Radical Poetics and whether words can ever really change the world with Pete Brown and Cecilia Knapp at the first afternoon ReIncarnation panel. To book tickets, click here.

ReIncarnation Biographies #22: Peter Whitehead

image001The twenty second person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the novelist and filmmaker Peter Whitehead.

Peter Whitehead was born to a working-class family in Liverpool, gaining a private-school scholarship and a degree from Cambridge university. He later studied at the Slade, moving quickly into film-making. In 1965 he was at Ginsberg’s Better Books reading, where the Royal Albert Hall reading was planned, and, quickly borrowing a camera, he nominated himself official cameraman for the event. The resulting film, Wholly Communion, gives a fascinating glimpse of this remarkable meeting of British, European and American beat poets, and documents the very beginnings of the British counterculture movement.

1967’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, named for a line in Ginsberg’s ‘Who Be Kind To’, encapsulates the essence of a swinging London populated by now-legendary film stars, models, artists and and musicians. Whitehead also documented the popular music scene, making some of the first televised pop promos for artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Nico, The Dubliners and The Rolling Stones, documenting the young Stones’ 1965 Irish tour in Charlie is my Darling.

In the early 1970s, Whitehead abandoned film-making, and, travelling north Africa and the Middle East, developed an interest in falconry. In 1981 he began working for the Royal family of Saudi Arabia, building and running a private breeding centre. With the start of the first Gulf War in 1989, Whitehead left the Middle East and returned to the UK, where he began a third career as a writer. Novels include Nora and… (1990), The Risen (1994), and Pulp Election, published in 1996 under the pseudonym Carmen St Keeldare. His 1999 novel Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London is, in part, a fictionalised account of his experience as a film-maker in the 1960s.

Peter will be speaking about the impact of the first International Poetry Incarnation after the afternoon screening of his film Wholly Communion. To book tickets, click here.

ReIncarnation Biographies #21: Michael Horovitz

Michael Horovitz

Michael Horovitz

The twenty first person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the poet, activist, visual artist and Poetry Olympics torchbearer Michael Horovitz.

Michael Horovitz founded New Departures publications & Live New Departures bandwagons in 1959 when still an Oxford undergrad. ND#1 published the first excerpts from Burroughs’s then still uncompleted Naked Lunch to appear in Europe. From hanging out with Beckett, Stevie Smith, the Beats et al in the ’50s to his last three years’ collaborations on song-poems & music with Vanessa Vie, he has been practising & preaching poetry worldwide all these years.

Dedicated shit-stirrer & Poetry Olympics torchbearer, Horovitz has published over forty books, the most recent of which, A New Waste Land, was welcomed in The Independent by D.J. Taylor as “A deeply felt clarion-call from the radical underground”, & “A true scrapbook and songbook of the grave new world” by Tom Stoppard. He recently recorded with Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Paul Weller for Gearbox Records, & is about to bring out recordings of his William Blake Klezmatrix band & a double disc DVD of the joyous POEM 2012 marathon in the QEH which featured many of tonight’s performers at the top of their games.

Allen Ginsberg pronounced him a “Popular, experienced, experimental, New Jerusalem, Jazz Generation, Sensitive Bard”, whilst Vogue dubbed him “The worst-dressed poet in Britain”.

Michael will be speaking about the impact of the first International Poetry Incarnation after the afternoon screening of Wholly Communion. To book tickets, click here.

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

ReIncarnation Biographies #20: Barry Miles

Barry Miles

Barry Miles

The twentieth person in our series of introductions to speakers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the journalist, archivist and biographer Barry Miles.

Barry Miles was managing the paperback section in Better Books on Charing Cross Road when Allen Ginsberg walked in and offered to read anywhere for free. Following a packed reading in the shop, Miles became a key conspirator in the ‘Poets’ Collective’, organising what would become The First International Poetry Incarnation. It was his counter telephone that Barbara Rubin picked up to book the Albert Hall – because it was “the biggest joint in town”.

Barry Miles & Friends, pic by Graham Keen

Barry Miles & Friends, pic by Graham Keen

A co-founder of International Times, Oz contributor, Lovebooks publisher, co-founder of the legendary Indica gallery, and label manager for The Beatles, Miles has also produced a dizzying bibliography of titles giving the inside line on the counterculture, beats and musicians. A long-time music journalist (he was the first to interview the Clash for the NME), he has also become the trusted chronicler of such greats as Burroughs, Bukowski, McCartney, The Beatles, Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa. His ‘first proper book’ was a mighty 585-page – and definitive – Ginsberg biography, first published in 1989.

Miles will be speaking about the impact of the first International Poetry Incarnation after the afternoon screening of Wholly Communion. To book tickets, click here.

 

ReIncarnation Biographies #19: Salena Godden

salena - window 5.4MB copyThe nineteenth person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the irrepressible Salena Godden.

Salena Godden has been described as ‘The doyenne of the spoken word scene’ (Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3’s The Verb);  ‘The Mae West madam of the salon’ (The Sunday Times) and as ‘everything the Daily Mail is terrified of’ (Kerrang! Magazine). Her pamphlet of poems, Under the Pier, was published by Nasty Little Press in 2011. An anthology of poetry Fishing In The Aftermath, Poems 1994  – 2014 was published in July 2014 with Burning Eye Books.  Her literary childhood memoir Springfield Road was successfully crowdfunded and published in October 2014 by Unbound Books.

She’s known as The General of The Book Club Boutique, London’s louchest literary salon. The Book Club Boutique currently resides at Vout O’Reenee’s in East London. Salena is the lead singer and lyricist of SaltPeter, alongside composer Peter Coyte.  She appears on BBC radio as a guest on various shows including Woman’s Hour, Click, From Fact To Fiction, The Verb, Saturday Live and Loose Ends. She recently featured on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ in the US.  Salena Godden works with award winning radio producer Rebecca Maxted, writing and presenting BBC radio documentaries. Try A Little Tenderness – The Lost Legacy of Little Miss Cornshucks was made in Chicago and aired on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service throughout 2014. This followed the success of Stir it Up! – 50 Years of Writing Jamaica which was also for BBC Radio 4.

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

ReIncarnation Biographies #18: Duke Garwood

Duke Garwood

Duke Garwood

The eighteenth person in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the musician Duke Garwood.

You should know Duke Garwood. Born in 1969, this London-based multi-instrumentalist has been around a fair while. He has contributed to records by The Orb and worked with Mark Lanegan, amongst many others. His soulful, stripped-bare sound has been under your nose this entire time. Until now, he’s been the mysterious figure in tales where Mexican gangs forced tequila down his throat, a ghost-like presence at gatherings of some the world’s biggest rock stars-turned-his closest friends, and an unassuming continent-hopper trying to find his way in the world. But the release of his new album Heavy Love earlier this year should change that.

Navigating from the mouth of the Medway to Thailand’s bar scene where he played harp alongside Georgie Fame’s son Tristan and Yngwie Malmsteen’s keyboard-player before focusing on the guitar, Garwood’s travels extend to the mean streets of Paris and back to Hackney’s squatlands in which he soothed “drunken misery” and grappling with newfound fatherhood by playing his own “mad kind of blues”.

At the International Poetry ReIncarnation, he will be blending his music with the poetry of Janaka Stucky and Chet Weise. This is not to be missed!

My brother Duke is the most soulacious soul man I know. He’s always cut his own groove and it’s been my honour to play with him so many times.” Seasick Steve

“As close to Heaven as you can get with a guitar.” Josh T. Pearson

Get your tickets for the evening’s star-laden performance here: The International Poetry ReIncarnation

Here’s the video for the title song from Duke’s latest album, Heavy Love

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