UPDATE...

...coming in a few hours.

In the meantime, a couple of touristy pics from DC (btw was a fantastic trip!)

Spoken Word Showcase @ Holy Family School

All the hard work of the fellow Spoken Word Educators and our students will be put on stage for all to hear THIS EVENING! There are still some tickets on the door for those who didn't receive an e-vite. See details below and come along...

Spoken Word Club Spring Showcase

This event is on 19 June 2013 6:00pm 

Holy Family Catholic School, 1 Shernhill Street, London, E17 3EA
With Malika Booker and Deb ‘Debris’ StevensonDoors 18.00

Building on the success of the Spoken Word Club Winter Showcase we are thrilled to announce Holy Family Catholic School will again be hosting a Spoken Word Educators Event. Young poets will be performing original work in new collaborative performances, guaranteed to be an inspirational and moving evening of poetry.
Young poets have been working extensively with spoken word educators Peter Kahn (Chicago), Raymond Antrobus, Dean Atta, Pete Bearder, Catherine Brogan, Keith Jarrett and Indigo Williams. Don’t miss this opportunity to see the emerging poets of tomorrow today!

Service Information

5 things for June...

1. WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO

i - Popping over to the canal to make phone calls (bad signal at home) and look at ducks swans (yes, I realised my mistake). 

 ii - getting people to take pictures of me by the canal (keithmoody.jpg)

iii - presenting some of my fiction projects to live audiences

I was really pleased to win Story:Slam live the other day at the Southbank Centre (my story will go up on their site shortly). The theme of the night was "Estates of Mind", which chimed in nicely with a book I'm reading, Owen Jones's Chavs, and the first chapter which talks about the way in which people who live in council housing are demonized by politicians and the media.

I also took part in "Pen Factor" during a conference yesterday on digital publishing. I pitched my novel and read out the first chapter to the audience in front of a panel of judges - experts in their fields - and got some overwhelmingly positive feedback, including ideas on how to incorporate audio elements into the project (it was a digital conference, after all)

The rest of the day included talks on e-publishing online presence and exactly what algorithms are and why they're important. The highlight of the day was a writer who gave a short talk which more or less ended with: ok, now forget twitter, your blog, your washing up... just write! 

iv Researching and writing an essay for Goldsmiths, which I handed in last week. 

Length: 5,000 words (wrote 10,000 initially and had to cut it down by nearly half!)

Title: Is spoken word education too subversive for the classroom?

Answer: ... (I'll let you know when I get a grade back!)

I'll post a bibliography later, but especially inspired by Chris Searle's None But Our Words. Poetry education can be controversial sometimes (if you don't agree with letting young people have a voice) but it can also transform a lot of lives for the better.  

v. Working through The Wire (currently nearing the end of Series 4). Why didn't I watch this before? Very addictive

2. SPOKEN WORD SHOWCASE @ Holy Family School, June 19th

Not long to go and it's been great working with pupils at the after-school club. Poems for this summer's showcase were developed from "Britishness" and "Where I'm from" workshops and, so far, they're looking good. Over the next week or so, the pupils will be working on their performances and making sure they all remember what they've written!

Once again, the Educator teams need to represent too! This time, I'm working with Indigo and Dean and we're mashing-up existing poems to create a super-poem that answers the question "where are you from?" in a way that also tackles the Britishness issue.

This is the first part of what I've written so far:

I have three or four tongues in my mouth
and they work out several times a week
lifting heavyweight words through this Smoke city
which tries time and time again
to tie them down and tire them out. 

My mouth harbours mixed messages and broken languages.
My cheeks hide my mother tongue
and it is out of sync with the rhythm of the streets I know
where soul, jazz, reggae, reggaeton and merengue battle for volume control.

Together, the entire thing needs to come out at around three mins (i.e. one minute per person), so my section will probably be another two stanzas. Once we've got all our bits together, we need to work on performing and memorising them too.

3. Capturing Fire

Sophia Walker and I are representing the UK at Capturing Fire slam in Washington, DC later on this week! Either side of my trip, I have school commitments, so I'll only be there a few days, unfortunately. I've just been told it's hot out there so I'll be packing my shorts and, hopefully, some of my best poetry. Given the short visit, I won't have much time to explore but I'll definitely take a few snaps of the White House. Questions to Obama on a postcard, please.

Here's Sophia, during a previous trip to the US, showing just why she won't take any nonsense from guys:

4. Likely to be one of my final performances before my Edinburgh show, I'll be doing an extended set and a talk at the new Wembley Library on June 22nd. The whole afternoon is dedicated to the men and women - around 70 people, I believe - who have completed the Six Book Challenge. 

The Mayor of Brent will be giving out awards to the adults involved, many of whom are now preparing for English GCSEs. It goes to show that it's never too late to get into reading and I'm happy to be part of the celebration.

5. EDINBURGH!!!! 

So, I've got the title

So, I've got the concept

So, I've got some of the marketing materials out the way....

Now comes the hard bit: putting together some of what I've already written into a captivating 50-minutes that will change the audience's lives. Sometime before I head off to DC on Thursday, I shall fill you in a little more... For now, it's back off to the library!

Logging off x

Identity Mix-Up in Edinburgh #1: Countdown begins!

Yipee-ay-yee-yay, we're going to Edinburgh!

So my show's about "identity" and what that all means in a post-post-colonialist/feminist/queer/political/vegan [insert more here as you see fit] world. Basically, how are identities changing and what happens to the ignorant fools (i.e. me) who think they can transcend it all and just "be themselves"?

Before I fully got to grips with the concept - if, indeed, I have now - I had to submit a blurb, and this is what I came up with:

Keith Jarrett explores the obsessions of our label-driven society, going on an interactive tragi-comic tour of mistaken identity, beginning with the birth of his name and ending with the death of his gay poem.

I have no idea what I meant by tragi-comic, except to say that it'll be serious in places and (hopefully) funny in others. I also know that I'll be exploring some personal stuff, and I'll have more details on that. Meanwhile, here's a blurry photo of my listing in the just-published Fringe Festival Programme which arrived in the post yesterday.

Any ideas you can throw in, just drop me an email or comment... I'll also be filling you in on James, Kirsten and Lee's shows - the other Utter! Poets who I'm sharing the experience with. (Links to be added later)

**Coming soon... more info about the show and why it will save wo/mankind!**

NTS Radio, School of Spoken Word, Mix-Ups

If you missed me talking on the Re:Versed show @ NTS radio on Monday (and "scratching my brains" live on air), follow the link below for a chance to listen again!

Really great to be there alongside Rob Auton (with the vegetarian who's never seen a cow), Michelle Madsen (with crappy espadrilles), James Massiah (with "post-theistic" chill) and, of course, Angry Sam (grrr!). What you can't hear of course, is the guy outside the window sticking his fingers up at us while I'm reading my poem. Yeah, I kind of love Dalston (and I always did, way before it became so hipster-fied that Vice magazine had to go in search of a new one!)

 CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

While I'm plugging things... School of Spoken Word INSET for teachers (daytime) and showcase (evening) taking place June 4th at the Southbank Centre. The INSET is for anyone working in secondary schools, whilst the performance is going to be a bit of a celebration of what the programme's achieved so far.

I'm also far behind on talking about Identity Mix-Up, the show I'm doing for Edinburgh. Keep a look out for more info over the next few days.

Peace

COMING UP... Let's Talk About Mental Health, on Monday

It's the last day of Mental Health Awareness Week today! But it doesn't all have to end there. On Monday next week, I'm happy to be performing as part of a project organised by Time to Change and A Band of Brothers. Both organisations are campaigning hard to end the stigma around mental health.

The statistics are all out there: 1 in 4 people in the UK, in any given year, will experience some sort of mental health problem; depression is one of the most misunderstood illnesses in the world etc. We know this.

But when we look at gender, and race, there are still a lot of questions. Women are diagnosed and treated at a much higher rate than men. People from an African or Caribbean background are less-frequently diagnosed and treated for common mental disorders than any other ethnic background, yet we are 3 to 5 times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act. Compared to other ethnic groups, we are also more likely to be offered medication than talking therapy, and more likely to be diagnosed with severe illnesses.

A panel will be discussing some of the taboos of mental health and there'll be workshops and personal accounts from people on different ends of the mental health system. It should be a serious but engaging evening and I'm working on a new poem for it now!