Book Launch: Katie Longofono & Miriam Nash 
Wednesday 3 April, 7.30pm
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen St. New York, NY 10002
http://bluestockings.com/

An evening of transatlantic poetry by women. Poets Katie Longofono (USA) and Miriam Nash (UK) launch their debut chapbooks, Longofono’s The Angel of Sex from Dancing Girl Press and Nash’s Small Change from Flipped Eye Publishing, with guest readers Lisa Marie Basile and Nina Bahadur.

Author Bios

Katie Longofono lives and writes in Bronxville, NY, where she is an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in several fine journals, most recently Midwestern Gothic. Her collaborative chapbook with Mary Stone Dockery, Honey and Bandages, is forthcoming from Folded Word Press.

Nina Bahadur was born in London in 1990. Her first poetry pamphlet, “Every Single One,” was published by flipped eye in April 2011. She graduated from Princeton in 2012, and currently lives in Manhattan where she works as an assistant editor for the Huffington Post. She’s a fan of dogs, beer, and the Oxford comma.

Lisa Marie Basile holds an MFA from The New School and is the author of Triste, from Dancing Girl Press. The Poetry Society of New York released her chapbook, Andalucia (Brothel Books, 2011). A Decent Voodoo, a chapbook, will be released by Cervená Barva Press in 2013. She is the founding editor and publisher of Patasola Press, and is an assistant editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal.

… and yours truly.

As Nii Parkes of flipped eye publishing put it, London laid on a beautiful snow tribute:

Karen McCarthy Woolf took this Narnian picture

Anjan Saha opened the evening with a lovely poem invoking Keats, who I’m certain was listening from the back. Two of my favourite poets, Jacqueline Saphra and Kayo Chinonyi also read, and Jacob Sam-La Rose was the wonderful host he always is. So many family and friends ploughed through the snow to be there, that it was a full house and we sold out of books! Look how happy I am:

Jacqueline Saphra reads

Kayo Chingonyi reads

Animated question answering…

Book signing

My heartfelt thanks to Keats House, London Literature Lounge, Spread the Word and flipped eye publishing for such an auspicious beginning for Small Change.

Small Change can be ordered from flipped eye publishing at a special discount price. It will also soon be available from WH Smith and Amazon.

Doors will open at 6.30pm for tea, cake and wine, and readings will begin at 7.30pm. The wonderful poets Jacqueline Saphra and Kayo Chingonyi will be reading, as well as myself.

The launch is a London Literature Lounge event, and is supported by Keats House and Spread the Word and presented by flipped eye publishing.

I hope to see you there!

Keats House, Keats Grove, Hampstead, London NW3 2RR. Nearest stations: Belsize Park (Northern Line), Hampstead (Northern Line) or Hampstead Heath (Overground). Click here for map.

Urban Word’s Preemptive Education Conference

was a full weekend of workshops, performances and lectures for poets, teaching artists, school teachers, young people and academics, exploring ‘critical issues that affect today’s youth, while providing creative and practical resources to address them…using the power of spoken word poetry and hip-hop as the lens to explore language and privilege’ (UW).

Poet Darren Arthur opens the conference

The event I want to celebrate most was the opening evening, entitled ‘Poetry is Pedagogy’, in which acclaimed academics from the fields of education, social justice and the arts, responded to works written and performed by young poets. For me this embodied the power of the whole conference and its reason for being.

I’ve never seen this done before. What I mean is, I’ve never heard an academic scholar discuss, extol and explore the work of a young (17-21), ‘unpublished’ poet, with the attention, gravity and respect of one thinker/writer talking to (and about) another. What became clear was that the poets - Sabrina Ross, Danni Green and members of the 2012 Urban Word NYC slam team – were themselves engaging in the same active, intelligent criticism of the US education system (and the social system underpinning it) that the academics - Dr. Ernest Morrell, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz and Dr. Kersha Smith - grapple with in their own work. Sabrina Ross performed a impassioned and carefully wrought poem on the silencing of young people in classrooms; Danni Green’s beautifully crafted work spoke of her own struggle to get to university and her refusal to accept the future laid out for her by the sense of failure hanging over her community - a future personified as ‘a husband I don’t love’.

The message of the evening was clear. Young poets, thinkers and activists such as these deserve the same stage and critical attention as so called ‘experienced’, published writers (the word ‘young’ is actually misleading as it suggests inexperience, in both writing and life). This is true because of the importance of what they have to say, as well as the form and language in which they say it. But the message was also that their work needs to actively inform the education system; that this level dialogue of poet-young adult-professor is essential to education.

The Dodge Poetry Festival

Now I come back to the other stage, and to the incredible poets I saw this weekend. What was striking (though it should really be obvious) is how many of these giants of American poetry are engaged in the same struggle as the Urban Word poets – struggle against injustice through language (in both senses), struggle with language itself. To sit in a room with Amiri Baraka and historian Clement Price as they spoke about Baraka’s experience of the 1967 Newark Uprising and the founding of the Black Arts Movement was to recognise art as a truly transformative, social force.

Patricia Smith performed a sequence from Blood Dazzler, her collection of poems in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, accompanied by The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra String Quartet. Smith’s work embodies the hurricane through so many voices, including Katrina’s own, with such compassion towards the people she is imagining and reporting on, that there is no presumption in her personas.

As Smith read, the vast, Prudential Hall audience included pockets of students who had been visited by the poets the previous day. The Dodge Festival was remarkable not just for calibre of poets it assembled, but for the way it put them to work, in full recognition of the role poetry needs to play in contemporary education.

I am reading If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson and two books by Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck and a book of essays, On Lies, Secrets and Silence. It is a kind of heaven to live in a world of books again, like breathing out after a long holding of breath. This is more like a letter I might write Karen McCarthy Woolf than a post in which I tell you anything. There’s lots I could say about what I’ve been doing, or the small and bigger differences. But the thing I am hit by when I wake up in the morning is that this is my new work. In some ways this is the biggest transition I have ever made, from thinking about work as out in the world, to locating it here, in the garden or on the kitchen table. Writing it out like that makes me feel I should be feeling a great responsibility towards it, but luckily I don’t yet. I can’t show you a photo as I need to buy a converter to charge my camera. So just imagine a picture of me in conversation with a black squirrel.

This week has been a flurry of finding tutors’ offices, talking, reading, thinking and designing a programme for myself. It’s four years since I left Goldsmiths and I never expected to go back to school; was impatient to enter what my little sister now calls ‘actual life’. In that time, I discovered another education – that of knowing poets and artists, working with them; balancing jobs, headspace and finances with my own (at first tentative) writing and creative practice.

Both educations have brought me here; the formal and the one given for the love by the London page-performer-teacher poets, the City Limits artists in Singapore and Peter Kahn’s spoken word programme in Chicago (also the one given unknowingly, by the young people I’ve worked with). This education has been so rich that for a long time I saw no reason at all to study for a masters. In fact I was sceptical of the idea altogether. But arriving at Sarah Lawrence feels like the coming together of both ways of learning.

Next week I will take a poetry workshop with Marie Howe; a class in movement for performance with David Neumann. I’ll begin a course in ‘Collaborative Contemporary Performance’ with theatre graduates and have my first go at Alexander Technique. Yes, this is a degree in poetry, but I’m allowed to make it look any way I want. I can play, work solidly on the page and see where I might want performance and collaboration to take me. I’ll also be taking courses of my own devising – sneaking about in New York poetry, meeting Urban Word, going to the real live Moth and dancing in Harlem, to name a few. This is my actual life and my thanks to Fulbright, Bunac and all those who got me here will have to be shown, not told.

Perhaps it’s becoming obvious that I’m typing this while listening to the Democratic convention speeches. Just for a moment I’m going to give way to the optimism and the song of achievement and celebrate my being here.

Now, to work.

But that’s one of the beautiful things about being here. I felt both at home and entirely foreign. Next to us in the crowd, we met people from Brixton and Goldsmiths. But then there was also the brilliant moment when Mos Def came on stage, unannounced, and we were the only people who didn’t immediately realise who he was. There was the impassioned speech by a local councillor, “this isn’t about race, this isn’t about age, this is about Afropunk”. Something I cannot imagine a Lewisham councillor pulling off unscathed, right before the headliner. All this was part of the beauty of the evening. Rolling Stone has written a good article here which takes in Afropunk’s reason for being and how this has changed over the festival’s eight years.

It’s definitely interesting being a foreigner in the audience. On Sunday I went to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre for a free comedy improv show. It was a bit like being invited to someone else’s family dinner, where you can enter only partially into the jokes, some of which were universal (meerkats), some local and some totally baffling to me. One sketch involved somebody’s English cousin arriving in New York, and the disappointment and confusion from both sides about un-met (and met) stereotypes. We’ll see whether that turns out to be the case.

Me (groggy from the plane, irrationally tearful): Sorry, we’re new. We don’t have any money.

Man: You gonna live here?

Me: Yes

Man: You’ve come to the best place in the world.

I think I might have. Over the past few months, whenever I’ve told anyone I’ve been given a scholarship to study poetry in New York, it’s sounded to me like I was speaking about someone else. Here I am. I have that beautiful feeling of being lost and free at the same time. I haven’t written much in my notebook yet, I’ve mainly been looking. Whatever I might have seen on TV or in films or read in novels, somehow I’ve managed to be totally unprepared for this. Which is the way I like it, now I think about it. Woody Allen’s mother might well appear in the sky and I’d believe it. Once my eyes have adjusted I might have something to tell you. For now, I’m enjoying the brink of this new, unexpected life that’s been held out to me…

Poetry Loves Company 01/12 from Danielle Shaw on Vimeo.

For more work by Danielle Shaw visit: http://danielleshaw.co.uk/