This month Apples and Snakes broadcast the whole album, interspersed with reflective and contextual accounts of the poems, their origins, inspirations and intentions and some of the effects employed in their form and structure, as well as discussing poems by other poets and movements which have a bearing upon the work.

We decided to apply for the commission because we felt it provided an exciting new outlet for the experimental work produced during our collaboration and hope that it will reach a new audience through its broadcast and perhaps generate interest across the Apples and Snakes network of poets and promoters. Working on the show was useful in forcing us to reconsider the ordering of the tracks for our forthcoming CD – some slight changes were made especially in terms of movement of mood and the contrasts between pieces.

It was also very useful to be able to contextualise some of the poems relating to their inspiration and aims, and to reflect upon the different ways of collaborative working we have engaged in while producing the album. Initially we found it quite difficult to establish a tone of conversation and discussion between the tracks, and it felt somewhat unnatural and forced, though as we worked on it we felt that we tuned in to a more casual and conversational mode of introduction and discussion of the work. On the whole it was a very interesting and valuable challenge and both myself and S.J. Forth felt that we had learned a great deal from the process.

You can listen to Bob’s broadcast on Thursday 9 May at 1pm on basic.fm!

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From London Coordinator Russell
After a relatively quiet April, we’re back with a vengeance. Poetry, it seems, is bustin’ out all over. So what’s happening? Well, we’ll be back at the Canal Cafe in Little Venice again on the 16th, this time with that tartan toerag Elvis McGonagall. And over in Islington, the lovely Helen East will be pounding the pavements and propping up the bars, taking folk-stories back to where they belong (i.e: da people) – lots of dates for that, see below.

On the 22nd, Jawdance will be opening its arms to those members of society that local newspapers like to call ‘budding bards’. Form an orderly queue, please. Getting the month off to a disturbingly odd close, we’ll be presenting Rob Auton’s Yellow Show on the 28th – in which the surreal wordsmith sings the praises of his favourite xanthic pigment. Well, not literally sing. We hope. All this, plus a SPIN on the 25th (part of Southbank Centre‘s always excellent London Literature Festival) and a Writing Room on the 29th with Malika Booker. Gosh, what a varied month. Aren’t we fantastic?

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From West Midlands Coordinator Bohdan
Hello all! May! Things are growing. Things are blooming. Things are expanding. Oh, and nature is doing its thing too, or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know I’ve been busy marveling at all the poetry sprouting all around the region. A good place to take a look at West Mids talent will be the Artist Reveal Yourself Festival – if you want an overview of what’s been brewing in the region, the two free weekend sessions featuring up-and-coming and established poets are your answer. On Thursday 16th Hit the Ode continues its triumphant march, of course. You may or may not know that we have started filming the nights with an eye on editing a documentary. The short film will be as much about the audience as the guest artists. Show up if you want to be immortalized!

After a month-long break, Wordsmiths & Co. returns on Monday 20th with a wonderfully varied line-up. If you want to refresh your memories from previous editions, check out the series website – wordstmithsand.co. And finally – Poets’ Place is back, in the cozy and welcoming Yorks Bakery Café – that’s on the 4th and 18th.The sessions are going strong, and remain true to the night’s motto: write poetry. Share poetry. Eat biscuits! Join us live and/or online at facebook.com/placeforpoets. See you very soon!

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From North East Coordinator Kirsten
Hi everyone, here’s your exciting May right here… It’s Late Shows month of course, so we’re shifting Scratch Tyne to Saturday 18th and becoming part of Commercial Union House’s evening of wonderment. Expect roaming, floating and site specific poetics in amongst the theatre and visual art on every floor.

Then join us at Jibba Jabba on Thursday 23rd to see gorgeous Birmingham-based poet Jodiann Bickley, just one of the loveliest performers around. At 1pm on Thursday 9th you can hear the next of our radio commissions, the superb Bob Beagrie performing with bespoke music from his album Disendcha – listen online at basic.fm. Sound good to you?

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From South East Coordinator Pete
Hello, how much fun was April’s 451? An enthused audience heard, saw and experienced James Barnes, Megan Beech and Niall O’Sullivan following a top quality open mic. In the words of Megan: “Thanks for a great gig, best atmosphere I’ve seen in a long while.” And Niall said “I had a great time and the two other feature poets on the bill made me genuinely nervous at having to follow them.” And the audience said ‘Yay! and ‘Whoot!’ and clapped a lot.

To May: on Friday 10th there’ll be an Archimedes Screw Showcase in Southampton, featuring World Slam Champ Harry Baker and then in Margate we’ll be listening to Stewart Taylor and Ray Antrobus amongst other voices at Big Talk on Friday 31st. All event details are below. Also look out for a special youth version of the annual Brighton wordfest Poets v MCs called Bite! featuring Dizraeli on Wednesday 29th. And a final word of congratulations to young Oxford poet and member of the One Way Ticket team, Azfa Ali, who won the 2013 Christopher Tower Poetry Competition for young writers.

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This month, The Abyss Theatre Company present The Roving Theatre Poetry Festival and a new production Lucifer Saved! It’s an exciting 3 week Theatre and Poetry residency in Exeter, involving tons of Poetry performances, workshops and discussions, all with regional poets and supported by Apples and Snakes, details can be found here. Cheerio!

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These are extracts from April’s Snakebaskets. Apples and Snakes’ Snakebaskets are monthly newsletters tailored for each region we work in. Here you will find lots of exciting spoken word stuff and more about what we are up to in your area. Why not join our mailing list? Click here for more.

“just wanted to say thanks for one of the best poetry-info emails I’ve ever received. Hope to attend at least a couple of the events – brilliant!” London Snakebasket reader.

Azfa Ali spoke movingly and beautifully about her own life experiences as a refugee from war; Jenn Hart from the touching point of view of a young asylum seeker in a children’s centre in this country; Katrina Quinn explored her teen years in Zambia in a fascinating piece of autobiography (complete with national anthem); Sophie Rose wrote about the British Child Migrants from the perspective of a child now, trying to make sense of it all, in a piece with humour and pathos; Joshua Seigal wittily explored his own family history through the eyes of a dreadful schoolmate; Deborah (Debris) Stevenson also wrote about the Child Migrants’ scandal, with a strong, striking performance; Lorianne Tika-Lemba explored identity through a lyrical approach to mixed heritage; and Michael (Gulliver) Vidon devised enchanting ways of placing himself on his family tree.

Given eight artists with ten minutes each, the show was a big ask for the children in the audience, and much longer than the average performance for the age group. However, in an informal feedback session afterwards with Nicky from Apples and Snakes, the children attending generally gave the show a 7-and-upwards out of 10, which is a fantastic result, especially considering most of the artists hadn’t written for children before.

It was a great beginning to the project. This much is clear from the feedback so far – opportunities of this nature are few and far between for young artists. Having the chance to observe at first hand the creation of work from scratch, watching and learning from each other, made it a unique experience for critical engagement and supportive co-learning. Creatively, it opened up a wide range of responses that people are keen to take forward – indeed, some have already done so, trying the work out in school assemblies and other contexts.

Big thanks to all involved – especially the artists and the partner organizations – because it’s been a brilliant first stage. As I write this, we have already kicked off on the second stage – but that’s for next time. Meantime, I have a ship to go look at, as a possible performance venue for the tour.
Rosemary Harris

On Saturday 2^nd March, the One Way Ticket poets – Azfa Ali, Deborah Stephenson, Michael Vidon, Katerina Quinn, Joshua Seigal, Sophie Rose, Lorianne Tika-Lemba and Jenn Hart, plus the project leader Rosemary Harris – had been in Southampton at the Nuffield Theatre for workshops and to share the half-formed pieces they were intending to present at the showcase the following week. These proto-poems were given their first airing for peer review. Everyone had managed to approach the theme of child migration from a different angle, making for varied, layered, colourful and moving pieces. Some called on personal or family experiences, whilst others put themselves into the minds and families of those who experienced the deportations.  It’s a testament to Rosie’s experience at structuring workshops and to the openness of the poets, that feedback was given and taken in good faith and good heart.

On the 9^th March, the group gathered in Brighton in order to share their work with the public, but first there were more exercises, tweaks and feedback. Rosie put everyone through their paces and Chris Ewell from Half Moon children’s Theatre offered his expert feedback on the run-through whilst I filmed each poet talking about the project for feedback. What struck me during the afternoon, as well as the raise in quality of the work, was the closeness of the group. The past 4 workshops had really drawn everyone together and they all cared about each other’s poems and shared personal experiences and tips and tricks for performance. As time drew closer for the showcase itself in front of … gasp! … a real audience, nerves were beginning to show and words of reassurance were shared, as, to be honest,  no-one needed to be concerned about how they would perform.

Each poet had raised their game since the previous week’s workshop. The poems had been chopped and changed and honed and polished and wrestled into shape and then memorised as much as possible so that each poet could gave as good an account of themselves as possible. There were a few youngsters in the audience, who initially bore the focus of the audience participation sections of the poems  until the rest of the audience were drawn in and became involved.

The ways of approaching the difficult subject of the project, child migration, were very inventive – Michaël introduced us to his family tree via the letter ë in his name, which transformed into a roving snail; Azfa shared an allegorical tale of a tortoise rebuilding its shell after it had been blown apart; Katerina became her younger self in a family who relocated to Zambia when she was a child; Sophie created a family expecting the return of a long-lost uncle who was deported in the 50’s; Lorianne explored the idea of not fitting in and how she shared her insecurities with her childhood friend – a doll; Joshua used a piece of string to help him begin to explore a family history he didn’t know he had; Jenn imagined herself being a child in a Centre For Asylum seekers , waiting for someone to claim her and Deborah introduced us to some of the harsh conditions the deported children experienced once they were in Australia.

After the show there was a great deal of chatting and hugging and congratulating amongst the poets and the buzzy atmosphere continued as we made our way to a café/bar for a winding-down drink and something to eat. Gradually everyone reluctantly drifted off, still chattering about poetry, performance and politics. There may even have been a couple of tears!

However, everyone has already been back in touch by email – sharing their plans and wishing Sophie luck as she goes forward to work with Rosie on the second stage of the project; and everybody has further plans for the work they developed on One Way Ticket.

I’m more interested in how this work continues for the rest of the year and its clear that youth poetry in Chicago is thriving. Half way through the rounds there’s a chance to see work from artists Milo & Otis, Lamar Jorden and the premiere of the Chicago Anthem, a collaboration between the Oh My’s and Chicago’s children’s choir… throughout this interlude everyone is out of their seats dancing, the atmosphere is amazing, and shows the true spirit of what is going on here, a community coming together to celebrate.

During the show we also hear audio from a project run in a Juvenile Detention Centre and from young people from an elementary school who have won the Chuck D Lyrical Activist Award for a piece about not wanting their school to close. Young Chicago Authors should be very proud of what they have achieved with Louder than a Bomb, and as it starts to spread across the country, I’m looking forward to seeing how we can continue to connect and give the young people we work with a platform to be heard.

Check out this short video about LTAB13

Apples and Snakes

“Thank you very much for our recent poetry workshop. We all enjoyed it very much and now we are busy organising our own Slam Poetry competition.”
Caister High School ‘Slam in the Box’ Poetry Group.

We hear from Jeff Cass, an inspirational high school teacher and poet who runs what Coval describes ‘as the best community for young writers that he has ever come across’ – high praise. Jeff talks about the education system and its focus on testing, this resonates strongly with me, he talks about the need for us to give young people the chance to ask questions, to dig deeper and to fully understand who they are and how they fit into the world, he talks about how poetry is the perfect vehicle to do this. He talks about a culture of poetry in your school, as a culture of questioning – I like this idea, I think its a good way to think about how to get people to understand why poetry matters.

The evening is a Grudge Match… Louder Than A Bomb teams from across the country compete against each other in a 4 bout (round) match, both individuals and team pieces go up against each other. The room at Young Chicago Authors is packed with young people, its standing room only and they are totally engaged in what’s going on….if they don’t like the score they shout ‘Listen to the poem’. The young poets bare their souls, tackling difficult issues – they speak their minds, this is a safe space but even so its takes a lot of courage to be that honest on stage and its impressive.  Jet lag gets the better of me and I head back before I hear whose won…but then as we know in slam the point is not the points, the point is the poetry!

Later, we head off to the Young Chicago Authors space – a gorgeous loft style space which houses their offices as well as space for their regular workshop programmes. I sit and wonder how we could make a space like this for Apples and Snakes back in the UK, it would be revolutionary to have a space where we could have a focus for our ongoing young people’s work, and a space that artists would be able to use. A graffiti artist, Ruben, paints in the background throughout tonight’s event, Kevin introduces us to Adam Mansbuch who  reads from his new novel Rage is Back, he is probably best known in the UK for his spoof children’s book Go the F*** to sleep. Adam is clever, funny and engaging – the book which is rooted in the graffiti writer culture in NYC is sparky and intriguing, he is easy to listen to, stopping just at a point in the story when you want to know more.  Kevin has introduced him as one of the top hip-hop writers of the moment, and I think he has a point!

We bump into Kevin Coval, exceptional poet in his own right and dynamic co-founder of Louder than a Bomb, he tells us about the programme. The city has already seen three weeks of slam activity, and as we enter the final week, I’m looking forward to seeing 12 young poets performing tonight for the Indy (Individual) finals, whittled down from an initial intake of over 800. Kevin takes the mic to begin proceedings, and then we’re gifted with a special treat – Lamar Jorden is our host for the slam component of the evening. If you don’t recognise the name, see Louder Than A Bomb’s documentary feature – he features heavily as lead figure in the journey the Steinmenauts slam team undertakes.

Back to the Indy final, and students aged between 15 and 18 take the stage with the characteristic verve and passion we’ve come to expect of the American slam circuit, with poems from the perspective of unborn children, poems for the vertically challenged, poems challenging issues around body image and claiming pride in the sense of an individual self…there are some excellent young people and it’s won by the amazing Emma Coleman from Northside College Preparatory High School, the other two high scorers are Camara Brown and Tanya Smith, also ones to watch.

More tomorrow…..