Arcadia England

Back for their third Talk of the Town, last week we were joined by spoken-word artists, Paula Varjack and Keith Jarrett who performed slam poetry for our students. 

About the artists

Paula is a writer, filmmaker and performance maker who explores "identity, the unsaid, and making the invisible visible." She is trained in stage management, film-making and performance, and enjoys working across and combining the disciplines of theatre, documentary and spoken word. She has also recently published a new book called Letters I Never Sent You.

Keith is a London and UK poetry slam champion and his poems have been featured in The Times, The Guardian and on BBC Radio. His new book of poems, Selah, is due to be published this summer. 

His poetry is influenced by Jazz and Hip-Hop, and often has London as its subject: buses, tubes (especially the Circle Line), and the tall buildings that hug the edges of the Thames. His poems are about navigating the broken tracks of city life, about growing up black and queer in East London, about technology and language. Above all, Keith’s poems celebrate what it means to live in London in the 21st century. 

It was a night of creativity and expression that made an impression on many of our students, who took time to speak to the artists afterwards!