News 30/05 – new HoV blog and other bits

Hi! How are you? Are you well? Comment and tell me if you’re well. That’d be nice. Then I’d know if you were well, and have some comment stats.

So! Stuff! My new blog for House of Verse is up. It’s a sort of basic overview about leftist politics and self-representation in art, which I hope will leave you feeling hopeful and wanting to come along to some stuff. If it does, please do both of those things! Hope, and come to stuff. It’s a good combination.

Some things you can come to would be June, September and October’s Find the Right Words, the latter of which will feature me taking on the challenge of the Speed Poet slot. It’s a brilliant gimmick where a poet is given three or four topic prompts by the audience at the start of the evening, then has the first half to write a poem featuring all of them, which they then perform to kick off the second half. Normally, they really struggle to get someone to agree to it, so I’d been building up my gumption for months before volunteering… only for relative spoken word newcomer Dan Wallbank to completely shame me by stepping up for June, which will be only his 3rd outing at FTRW. I asked if I could do July, before being reminded that Upstairs at the Western is closed over summer and that September was also already taken. Thus, I’ll have to hold my nerve all the way to October. Come along in June, where I’ll be giving Dan difficult prompts about obscure Japanese wrestling championships or something.

Moving away from poetry but not from Dan, he and I are in the midst of utterly, finally decimating his resolution to not take on any long-term projects in 2017. I won’t drop too many details til we’ve got things together a little more, but you can already get involved! So if you can think of a person from history, recent or distant, who suffered especially cruel and horrible luck, please email me with some details, and if I’m allowed by then, I’ll let you know a bit about what you’ve just contributed to (and make sure you get a credit on the final thing, natch).

Moving away from Dan very firmly by talking about sport, I’m delighted to confirm I’ll be part of ByTheMinute‘s team covering the British & Irish Lions tour! Although sadly not live from New Zealand unless I develop superhuman powers of persuasion very quickly. Anyway, it’ll be fun! If you’re not out there/near a TV when the games are on, or just want some tasty word seasoning to your Lions experience, myself, Rob Sutton and others will be happy to oblige.

That’s it! Please be nice to each other until I have more stuff to talk about. See you around at stuff.

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