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Forked at Sea Change Festival – A Review by Seren Kiremitcioglu

This year Totnes held their very first Sea Change Festival. Hosted by Drift Record Store, it was the first of its kind to bring a host of artists and musicians to the small town of Totnes, and of course we at Apples and Snakes just had to be a part of the small revolution. We headed over to the Birdwood House on Saturday 27th August to present Forked with Mama Tokus, Rose Cook, Rob Barratt, Jackie Juno and Londoner headliner, Kayo Chingonyi!

Making my way on the train to …

Archive Excavation – Pit Dragon: how an alternative picket-line stopped the coal lorries

Strange thing, synchronicity. Within a few weeks of starting the Archive Coordinator role, I received an out-of-the-blue email from Jeff Howarth of TUC Library Collections: could I throw any light on Pit Dragon, an organisation behind various days of picket-line entertainment during the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5? Apples and Snakes had apparently been involved in one of their sessions, supplying poets for the wonderfully named Melt Thatcher Down picket at Neasden Power Station in February ’85. This was news to me. I’d already made a start on cataloguing our early …

Archive Excavation – Apples and Snakes’ 21st Anniversary

Time for another historical find from the depths of the Spoken Word Archive – here’s the latest in our #ArchiveExcavation blog series…

Here’s one for you. This is the official photo for our 21st anniversary, taken in the snowy landscape of Battersea Arts Centre’s main house on a sweltering day in July 2003. Poets were enlisted at short notice to fulfill the mother of all poetry commissions: to stand in the shape of a big 21. And look happy about it. It was hard finding enough poets …

Home Cooking: Knights, Monsters & Spiders

We continue to explore the theme of ‘Europe’ in our monthly poetry podcast, Home Cooking…

Henry Raby, Dave Jarman and Stu Freestone discuss poetry of national identity and the current feeling regarding Europe, migration and refugees.

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Archive Excavation – Ntozake Shange

We welcome guest blogger and one of our most hardworking Spoken Word Archive volunteers, bleue granada, for the latest post in our #ArchiveExcavation series. Here, bleue unveils the influential work of Ntozake Shange, whose progressive thinking pushed the theatrical conventions of the 1980s, building and elevating a platform for Black women writers…

The joy of archiving is that you excavate interesting finds. Returning to Apples and Snakes after ten years – when I’d first tentatively begun ordering the vast volume of ephemera – I find that the archive is again …

Building new bridges and exploring new cultural intersections

What part do artists and arts organisations have to play in repairing the fault-lines dividing communities? While current socio-political events continue to shake foundations, isolate, uproot and disperse people; designer, musician and producer Paul Burgess talks about East, a storytelling project which brought together some of the tangled, rich history of cultures based in East London today…

The project isn’t just an arbitrary miscellany. In choosing our material and deciding how to present it we were exploring several specific ideas. We looked at stories that had common currency across cultures; …

Home Cooking: Swimming Home by Megan Garrett-Jones

Performance artist and occasional poet Megan Garrett-Jones embarked to have people swim the shortest distance between the UK and mainland Europe in a continuous loop on a small stretch of the Kent coast. A mere 20.6 miles!

Here she shares her writing tracking the process of this project and her explorations of the waters of the English Channel through swimming.

www.meggj.com | facebook

This is the fourth season of Home Cooking podcasts commissioned by Apples and Snakes and shifts focus to Europe, hear from poets and collectives across England.…

Archive Excavation – Page Match

As well as printed ephemera and audio-visual material, an archive often includes what’s known as realia, i.e: three-dimensional objects that don’t necessarily fit into any particular category. For the latest #ArchiveExcavation, we focus on a couple of items that well and truly put the G into re(g)alia: two things resembling leftovers from a wrestling-themed carnival-float. Dan Simpson, our former Digital Marketing Officer, tells their story…

Bang Said The Gun‘s second bout of the word-flinging, fighting-writing event Page Match brought together some of London’s top poetry collectives to battle it …

HOME COOKING SEASON 4: THE EUROPEAN SPOKEN WORD FAMILY

The fourth season of Home Cooking podcasts commissioned by Apples and Snakes focuses on Europe, hear from poets and collectives across England…

This month, Berlin based spoken word artist Pete the Temp interviews poets and promoters in France, Germany and the Netherlands while touring there. He asks why British poets should visit mainland Europe and how they can do it.

www.petethetemp.co.uk | @PeteTheTemp | www.facebook.com/Petethetemp…

FORKED: A Review

Nestled in the cobbled streets of the Barbican, surrounded by velvet curtains and candle light, you will find the FORKED poets ready and waiting to entertain… FORKED first-timer, Seren Kiremitcioglu, reviews Plymouth’s favourite spoken word night…

On a rather drizzly and wet Thursday 19 May, I made my way over to The B-Bar in Plymouth with my good friend by my side; sitting down in the warm, inviting room with Thai food and beer in hand, I fully enjoyed a night of entertaining, insightful and thought-provoking performances of poetry …