Word Kitchen Performance Poetry Brook Kitchen

Event Information

Our first poetry open mic of the autumn season has a theme: borders or poems across borders. Interpret this as you wish. Think about landscapes, identity, cultural diversity,memory and the things that disrupt borders or disconnect or reconnect us to a place.
We are hugely disappointed that Mohammed Moussa - journalist, poet and founder of The Gaza Poets Society who we hoped to feature on this night has been denied a visa. We will share some of his work and maintain our theme of "Borders' in tribute to his work.
Happily we are able to welcome Roger Philip Dennis and Steve Day as our featured poets. Both have published together and separately and have a wide range of new material being published and staged this year including Roger's Between Next Year and Old and Steve's The Temperature In The Room. You can read more about their work and performances here:
http://www.wyldepublications.com

We would encourage people reading at the open mic part of the evening to write new pieces although we also welcome poems that are already part of a writer's portfolio or anthology ( both published and unpublished) Think about the poetry of place, places where you were formed and where you may now feel a sense of absence. It can be a place of your ancestors or a landscape of exile. We are encouraging a broad approach, one that fits your particular experience. Here's a personal favourite of one of the Word Kitchen crew by the Welsh poet Gillian Clark:
Border (1989)

It crumbles
where the land forgets its name
and I’m foreign in my own country.
Fallow, pasture, ploughland
ripped from the hill
beside a broken farm.

The word’s exactness
slips from children’s tongues.
Saints fade in the parishes.
Fields blur between the scar
of hedgerow and new road.
History forgets itself.

At the garage they’re polite.
‘Sorry love, no Welsh.’
At the shop I am slapped
by her hard ‘What!’
They came for beauty
but could not hear it speak.