Friday, January 08, 2010

Raw Poetry night: pictures


These are from the Raw Poetry Night on Monday: Jazzman John, a singer/songwriter (I'll have to tell you his name later) whose songs sounded like a young Bob Dylan, and documenting the night, CT Ringell and an unidentified cameraperson.
The hit of the night was the poet Indigo http://www.myspace.com/indigowilliams, who hailed from Brixton. Her poetry was funny, perceptive and direct, half entertainment and half skilful politics. I can imagine her going far; she far outshone one of the other poets who tried to get us all to chant along to some audience-participation obscenity that you could see coming a mile off. When people do that I feel that they are sidling dangerously close to the power of Hitler, who sailed crowds of people into frighteningly mindless territory that they were too afraid (or sheep-like) to jump ship to get away from.
I don't care how loud a person's voice is or how persuasive their stage persona, comparing people's faces to c*nts (even the word is horrible) is, well, horrible.
All in all, though, it was a refreshingly interesting night with people performing that I've never seen before and a very welcoming vibe from CT and her partner in the band Us!, who unfortunately I missed, but will make sure I catch next time, when I get there early to do the poetry workshop that kicks the whole evening off- what a brilliant idea!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really don't like being dragooned into audience participation - especially at 'Welcome Meetings' on package holidays when some pimply youth of a rep tries to get you to shout stupid slogans!!