Arcadia England
Talk of the Town - Slam Poetry!
Date
March 26, 2018
Our popular guests, Paula Varjack and Keith Jarrett, joined us to perform spoken-word poetry for our final Talk of the Town event for our students.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Keith is a London and UK poetry slam champion whose poems have been featured in The Times, The Guardian, and on BBC Radio. In 2017, his monologue Safest Spot in Town was shown on BBC4’s well-received Queers series. He is the author of three books of poems, the most recent is Selah which came out this year.
His poetry is influenced by jazz and hip-hop with London often as its subject. His poems are about navigating the broken tracks of city life, growing up black and queer in East London, and about technology and language. Above all, Keith’s poems celebrate what it means to live in London in the 21st century.
Paula is a performance and video artist, coming to us from performing her critically acclaimed show Show me the Money at the Edinburgh Fringe in the summer. She is about to take her new show, The Cult of Kenzo, on the road. It is about the alienating cost of high fashion. She is the creator of The Anti-Slam, which is a competition in which poets win prizes not for the best poems, but for the worst.
Her monologues explore sexuality and the city, the search for relationships, and the way out of relationships. Some of her monologues are collected in her book Letters I Never Sent You and she was recently shortlisted for the Diva Literary Award for poetry.
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!