International Poetry ReIncarnation

Word made flesh 1965 / Flesh made word 2015

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ReIncarnation Biographies #9: Kei Miller

May 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Kei Miller

Kei Miller

The ninth 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 commanding poet Kei Miller.

Winner of the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He was educated at the University of the West Indies and Manchester Metropolitan University. His winning collection “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion” explores science, imagination, and clashing perspectives through the lens of an exchange between a teeth-kissing cartographer and a sceptical Rastaman with a PhD.

Shortlisted for both last year’s Costa Book Awards and the Dylan Thomas prize, Kei has published two previous collections: “There Is an Anger That Moves” (2007), and “A Light Song of Light” (2010, shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and selected for the 2014 PBS Next Generation Poets). He also edited Carcanet’s “New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology” (2007), and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. He is also an accomplished writer of fiction.

“Raise high the roofbeams, here comes a strong new presence in poetry… Kei Miller’s voice speaks and sings with rare confidence and authority” – Lorna Goodison

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

ReIncarnation Biographies #8: Elvis McGonagall

May 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Elvis McGonagall (pic by Anna McCarthy)

Elvis McGonagall (pic by Anna McCarthy)

The eighth 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 astonishing Elvis McGonagall.

Stand-up poet, armchair revolutionary and recumbent rocker, Elvis McGonagall is the sole resident of The Graceland Caravan Park where he scribbles verse whilst drinking Scotch, listening to Johnny Cash and throwing heavy objects at his portable telly.

The second series of Elvis’ sitcom “Elvis McGonagall Takes A Look On The Bright Side” is scheduled to be broadcast in August 2015 on BBC Radio 4 where he appears regularly (“Saturday Live”, the “Today Programme”, “Arthur Smith’s Balham Bash” and many others, as well as writing and presenting documentaries).

He’s also appeared on BBC1’s “The One Show” (his jacket clashed with the lime green sofa), BBC2’s “The Culture Show” and their coverage of the World Snooker Championships’ final of 2008, Channel 4’s “Random Acts”, BBC Radio 2’s breakfast show and “It’s Grimm Up North” and on the World Service.

Elvis is the 2006 World Slam Champion, the compere of the Blue Suede Sporran Club and performs and comperes at literary and music festivals, comedy clubs and dodgy dives up and down the country and abroad.

A live recording of his show One Man And His Doggerel is available on Laughing Stock Records and a short collection of his work Mostly Dreich is published by Nasty Little Press.

“….righteous ire, directed at very deserving targets….McGonagall’s verses are shot through with a moral umbrage and rhetorical power” (**** Brian Logan, The Guardian) – full review here:

“….funny, angry and tightly written….McGonagall combines anger, polish and carefully crafted verse in a way which recalls John Cooper Clarke….If the word ‘poetry’ is putting you off, get over it” (**** Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman) – full review here:

“….pin-pointed satires, dynamic performances and meticulous impressions….electrifying….bitingly funny and politically astute” (Michael Horovitz)

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

Here’s a video of Elvis in full swing at Book Slam

Liberty, Equality, Poetry

May 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

mhandginsbergAdam Horovitz reflects on the impact of the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965 and looks forward to the celebratory party for it.

I have spent most of my life aware of the International Poetry Incarnation, which took place in the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, very nearly 50 years ago. My father, Michael Horovitz, helped organise it, so of course I was going to be exposed of it. Growing up, I knew some of the poets. They were often about, in our house or at events, being genial and strange and merely a part of my metaphysical furniture.

For a long time, the 1965 Incarnation was a big poetry gig in the sky that people talked about and that I accepted as just another impressive thing that fathers do. As I have grown older, however, and become more interested in poetry in my own right, it has been hitting ever more forcefully home to me what a turning point this Incarnation, this 1965 happening, was.

Annie Whitehead

Annie Whitehead

Poetry in Britain was somewhat in the doldrums in the 1950s, as far as it being a public art went. It tended to sit in small rooms in universities and libraries and speak to and of itself. With my father’s generation – people like Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue, Pete Brown – poetry picked itself up and went running around the country talking to people who didn’t expect poetry to come leaping out of hedgerows at them. It went charging up to the Edinburgh Festival and touring through towns and cities with musicians and actors and playwrights in tow. Poetry began to listen, and to sing out in different rhythms. It offered up a party where only drier forms of symposia had appeared available before. Continue reading

ReIncarnation Biographies #7: Eleanor Bron

May 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Eleanor Bron (pic by Lesley Bruce)

Eleanor Bron (pic by Lesley Bruce)

The seventh 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 electrifying Eleanor Bron.

Eleanor Bron is a writer and actress. Her career started  in satire in the 1960’s, working  in Peter Cook’s Establishment  nightclub, alongside John Bird and John Fortune, and continued in both comedy and drama, in theatre, television and radio. Roles she has played include Hedda Gabler, Pegeen Mike, Hermione Hushabye, Jean Brodie, Mme Dubonnet and the Duchess of Malfi.  Her TV work has  ranged from Absolutely Fabulous to Play for Today, including A month in the Country and Jehane Markham’s Nina.

Among her films are Help; Bedazzled; Two for the Road, Women In Love,  the House of Mirth, The Heart of Me, &  A Little Princess. She has written two books of memoir, a novel, verses for Saint-Säens’ Carnival of the Animals, a song-cycle (with John Dankworth); and co-written several comedy series for television. She is currently working on a series of short plays in verse.

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

ReIncarnation Biographies #6: Gwyneth Herbert

May 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Gwyneth Herbert

Gwyneth Herbert

The 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 singer/songwriter Gwyneth Herbert.

Gwyneth Herbert is a strikingly original performer, award-winning composer and lyricist, and versatile musical adventurer who continues to redefine and challenge expectations. With one foot in the jazz world and the other somewhere in the future, she has released six albums to date on both major and independent labels, including the first Blue Note UK release for 30 years.

Since the huge success of 2013’s large-scale cross-artform project “The Sea Cabinet” (the result of an Aldeburgh Music residency), Herbert has seen her musical co-written with celebrated playwright Diane Samuels open at the Southwark Playhouse, and, with artist Mel Brimfield, has built a Fun Palace in Stratford Station, and a musical film installation about sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in Sheffield. She’s also spent a month in Kenya collecting lullabies, sharing songs in slum schools, and staging multi-tribe storytelling happenings under the Mombasa stars.

“If Hans Eisler had been a woman and written with Ray Davies, he might have come up with something like this” – Independent on Sunday

“Brilliantly original – full of space and isolated detail” – MOJO

“A remarkably gifted talent” – The Guardian

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

Here’s the video for Gwyneth’s single Perfect Fit.

ReIncarnation Biographies #5: Janaka Stucky

May 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Janaka Stucky

photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz

The fifth poet in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is Janaka Stucky.

Janaka Stucky is the publisher of Black Ocean as well as the annual poetry journal, Handsome. He is the author of two chapbooks: Your Name Is The Only Freedom and The World Will Deny It For You. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by The Huffington Post and The Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted “Boston’s Best Poet” in The Boston Phoenix. His first full-length book, the first single-author title from Third Man Books, is The Truth Is We Are Perfect.

“Stucky’s verse has the power of the best East European poets—some of his poems seem to be perfect, magnificent, and instantly anthologizable. He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker.”—Bill Knott

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

ReIncarnation Biographies #4: Adam Horovitz

May 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

adam horovitz publicity picThe fourth poet in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is Adam Horovitz.

Born in 1971, Horovitz has been active as a poet since the 1990s, treading a fine line between page and performance poetry. He released his first pamphlet, Next Year in Jerusalem, in 2004 and a second, The Great Unlearning, in 2009. He was the poet in residence for Glastonbury Festival’s official website in 2009 and was voted onto the Hospital Club 100 in 2010 as an ’emerging talent’. His debut collection, Turning, was released by Headland in 2011. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012. In 2014, he released A Thousand Laurie Lees, a verse-fuelled memoir from The History Press, and Only the Flame Remains (Yew Tree Press) and was one of five British poets selected by Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2015 to be part of the pan-European Versopolis project.

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

Here’s a poem by Adam Horovitz from his Soundcloud account.

ReIncarnation Biographies #1: Francesca Beard

May 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

PoeticaOpenBookFirst up in our series of introductions to performers taking part in International Poetry ReIncarnation at the Roundhouse in Camden on 30th May 2015 is the marvellous Francesca Beard.

Described as ‘witty and narcotic’, (Independent), ‘one of our finest cartographers of the human heart’, (London Metro) and ‘a quality guarantee’, Francesca Beard is a poet whose shows have toured nationally with Apples and Snakes and internationally with the British Council. She’s written for the Royal Court, Young Vic, BBC Radio 3 and 4 and has been writer in residence at the BBC, Barbican, Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Natural History Museum, Metropolitan Police and Clissold Leisure Centre. She runs workshops abroad and at home for all ages. She is currently writing a new one woman show  ‘A Lie’, and developing  ‘Storyverse’, a participatory experience for live audiences and on-line communities with B3 Media, supported by ACE and residencies at Banff Centre Canada and Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University.

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

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