Hello!
This is a post to let everybody know that I will be performing at The Purple Turtle which is at 9 Gun St, Reading RG1 2JR
The gig starts at 8pm – there’s an open mic section before me. If you want to pop along, that would be amazing. I will be travelling out from London if anyone wants to take the trip with me.
Okay, so it seems that several poets were booked for the night in anticipation of one of us not being able to make it but since we all can, I’ve been bumped back to JUNE 18th
I got to share a stage with some of my favourite people/poets and chat about Billy Wagger Dagger! I can’t take the credit for that nickname, I stole it from someone who performed at Hammer & Tongue a while ago. And then I got to do a poem about my relationship with the Bard and his works.
Aside: Did you know that I once spent a day in a window display with nothing but the complete works of Shakespeare as part of an art exhibit?
My poem was about when the weight of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy really hit me. To help me express that vulnerability, I sat on the edge of the stage and delivered the poem to the audience who were all sat on the floor, rather than talk over their heads. I held eye contact with people for uncomfortably long periods while I talked about suicide ideation. The feedback was pretty great and I know I need to push on with this sort of thing.
is a new poetry night in Reading and I put myself forward to be considered for a feature slot (sent Youtube vids and pages of poems) and I have been offered a (PAID) gig on May 21st!
More news as I get it!
A lovely little email today confirming the date of the Barbican Young Poets showcase. This is like the highlight of my poetry calendar and now it can be yours as well! You can buy your tickets here. Hurry though, as they have been selling out fast these days!
It really is a great event, full of some of the best young poets on the scene at the moment and it’s been great at pulling more people into the programme. Several of the poets this year were people who came last year and wanted to get involved (which led to a little bit of artist recognition at the first session when I did plenty of blushing at people reciting lines back to me).
I’ve given you almost a month’s notice so no excuses!
Dialogue was a tremendous experience and (dare I say it) I great success!
It was so enriching to see people from lots of different backgrounds responding to the same theme across a number of art forms. We had young people and children with special educational needs using music to show us how they experience the world on a day to day basis, immersing us in their reality of sensory overload.
The Messengers are a group of musicians made up of Guildhall students and people who have experienced homelessness – it’s done in collaboration with the charity St. Mungo’s Broadway (soon to be changed back to being called St. Mungo’s) as part of their recovery college. Again, for a festival themed around Outside/In, it was wonderful to see Barbican providing so many people who are made to feel like outsiders with the opportunity to have their voices heard.
Against that backdrop, I was quite nervous about performing, not to mention the fact that as I mentioned in my last post – I have a small fear of heights. It was a great place to be seated though as I was nestled in with the audience, much to the bemusement of the people sitting on either side of me when the spotlight was suddenly trained upon them and I started reciting from my seat. My poem was about going home to Manchester and feeling very much like a stranger in a city I thought I knew and tracing the history of the city back to Roman times.
Going forward, I want to try and do more odd placements of myself during performances as I felt it disrupted people’s expectations to not have their attention focused on a stage. I intend to chat to Jacob about this at a BYP session.
Cameron Holleran 