Latitude 2011 & Good News!!

First the really cool news, today I signed up for abctales.com, where you can share your stories and poems online, and I uploaded two poems (unseen on this blog). Just found out that they have been cherrypicked by the editors and have had a warm reception from fellow abctales-ers! The poems are 'Plastic Lovespoon' and 'Blind Woman at Clapham Junction' and can be read here. Please take a look!

Latitude is a music festival with a difference, also featuring comedy, theatre and literature among much much more. I just got back from this year's festival and thought I'd write about the amazing wordsmithing I found there.

I spent a lot of time in the poetry tent and the poets that I saw read/perform include:

• Sophie Hannah


• Jo Shapcott


• Dizraeli and the Small Gods


• Amy Blakemore


• Hannah Jane Walker


• Kate Fox News


• Jack Dean


• Mab Jones


• Sam Riviere

Who shone? Dizraeli and the Small Gods - a beautiful, emotional mix of music, rap and poetry; Mab Jones - comic, honest poetry about life's minutiae, really loved it; Hannah Jane Walker for thought-provoking, lyrical poems; and Amy Blakemore for a young voice with surprising maturity and real originality. I urge you to check these guys out online, they were fantastic, and I am going to try and persuade a bookshop that I know in Wales to book a reading with Mab Jones!

Who disappointed me? Well, no one really, all the acts I saw were of a really high quality. However, Sophie Hannah's reading was more like a rant and although humourous at times I also left wondering if she was a psychopath..... Sam Riviere's work seemed, from what I caught of it, to be about the issues of identity and being an outsider, including a long poem about a trip to America. Interesting but not my personal cup of tea. Jo Shapcott read a series of poems about bees, and at that point I had to leave. But I was disappointed with her reading - it lacked audience connection, I felt, and although I love her poetry, the beekeeper in me (yes, I do actually keep bees, have done for 6 years now I think) was frustrated with her overly simplistic explanations to the audience about the science behind the poetry, the science of bees, and her mis-pronunciation of the word 'propolis'. But that's just me being nit-pickety.

What really fascinated me however was the different reading/performing styles of the poets. Some read from books or pieces of paper, e.g. Amy Blakemore, Sophie Hannah, Jo Shapcott - whereas others recited their work from memory, e.g. Mab Jones, Dizraeli, Jack Dean. Both methods worked well but undoubtedly those who had memorised their poems gave more energetic performances. So I picked up some interesting tips for when I am brave enough to finally enter an open mic! Who knows, maybe at next year's Latitude...?

Anyway, just a few musings on the world of the live spoken-word performance. For those who are into performance poetry like me, I can highly recommend Latitude festival; the poetry line-up was wide-reaching, varied and inspiring.