poetry | applesandsnakesblog.org

Archive Excavation – Man Booker Prize Winner Paul Beatty in the Apples and Snakes Archive

As the clocks turn back so do the pages in history of the Apples archive. As you know we’re digging around and discovering gems: gems that you will all be able to access, in the not so distant future.

But for now, we’ve decided to post little bite-size treats during your tea, coffee or gin break …! Well, we don’t know exactly what time you’ll be reading this – do we? Not that we’re advocating reckless drinking. We drink only Apple juice here, freshly pressed, of course.

So, let’s get …

Home Cooking: Octavia, poetry collective for women of colour, on Europe

Octavia is a poetry collective for women of colour, led by Rachel Long, housed at Southbank Centre, and supported by Apples and Snakes.

In this Home Cooking podcast, we talk about Europe – without using the B-word, we discuss the label ‘Black-British’, as well as ‘two-home syndrome’ and how our identities affect our poetry. Featuring readings by Octavia members, Tania Nwachukwu, Theresa Lola and Rachel Long.

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Jasmine Gardosi – Bodies, taboos, and what poetry can do

September’s Poet of the Month, Jasmine Gardosi, talks to Apples and Snakes about writing, taboos, and dance classes…

I have an obsession with taboo. At least, poking holes in it to see what comes out. For those who aren’t 100% sure on what taboos are, these are the subjects, words or phrases that we avoid or find difficult to talk about due to social customs, codes or for silly reasons that have somehow stuck. Menstruation is one example. Mental health can be another.

When we’re asked why we find …

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.…