There were other things about my appearance that were starting to bother me, too. By that age I was wearing a spinal brace, a sort of hospital corset made of white plastic that covered my torso, designed to try and steady my ever curving spine. Scoliosis is a condition where the spine curves and in some cases, like mine, twists, rotating the ribcage around so that a ‘hunched back’ appearance can develop. I also have a nerve condition that slowly progresses, primarily affecting my feet, lower legs and hands. This can cause, amongst other things, legs that look, as the NHS website describes, like ‘upside down champagne bottles’ as the muscles become weak and waste, being particularly thin in the lower legs. With all of that going on, thirteen-year-old me just really thought she deserved a cracking pair of knockers.

I look down at my skinny hands […] and think: someone, somewhere, could be describing these hands as the start of their horror story

There are lots of things I didn’t like about The Ring, but what stayed with me long after the fear of television static was a scene that flashed back to Samara (the evil TV ghost girl) when she was still alive. She sits in a hospital gown, in a clinical, cold, white room, her arms and legs are thin, her long hair is loose, her eyes are planted firmly at the floor. And all I could think was: she looks like me. She looks like me when I sit in hospital appointments, hiding behind my hair, and all I can do is stare at the floor. Her arms and legs look like my arms and legs. Her skin is pale like my skin. Later, zoomed sections focus on her hands that look angular in their form. Just like mine. And it’s all designed to scare you. That really hits home when you’re thirteen. Never mind not finding my body type in magazines, I only recognised myself in horror films. Even as I type this now, I look down at my skinny hands, with all their beautiful, slowly forming weakness and think: someone, somewhere, could be describing these hands as the start of their horror story.

why do we so easily, so lazily, use signs of some sort of illness or disability as a metaphor for evil?

It was sometime later I went to see The Woman in Black at the theatre. I tried watching the film, years afterwards, but couldn’t get past the first five minutes. My thirteen-year-old self still can’t quite get to sleep sometimes, and she scrambles for the light in a way that wakes me. Reading the book by Susan Hill, we find that the woman has, ‘a wasted face’ and sunken-in eyes, pale skin and an ‘extreme look of illness’. All of this is meant to give us the creeps, but what, actually, is so frightening about looking ill? The metaphor, as a device, is key for writers. So why do we so easily, so lazily, use signs of some sort of illness or disability as a metaphor for evil? If you are doing any sort of spooky writing this Halloween, I reckon it’s a good idea to check your descriptors. I love the bloke, but Edgar Allen Poe was always adding a scar or taking an eye away from someone to denote a sense of foreboding. It’s not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but if the “scary” thing in your work is: emaciated, wasted, pale, scrawny, angular, twisted, bony, gaunt, sickly, tired, scarred, drawn, frail or afflicted, I would encourage you to think about why you have used that word to describe something frightening.

If you are doing any sort of spooky writing this Halloween, I reckon it’s a good idea to check your descriptors.

It’s a niche segue, but bear with. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton write and star in the BBC horror/comedy Inside Number Nine. In the audio commentary to the episode ‘The 12 days of Christine,’ they talk about the moment when a man in a rain soaked anorak suddenly appears in the flat of a terrified woman. The director, Guillem Morales, said of the character, ‘He needs to look out of place, something that doesn’t quite belong in that environment.’ There are two important things to note here: firstly, the very effective result of this incongruity-makes-great-horror theory (the moment is genuinely very scary) shows there’s far more scope to the description of frightening characters than people with ‘wasted faces,’ – a man in a anorak does the job nicely. And secondly, it unearths something even more problematic about using illness or disability as a vehicle for a jump-scare. A man, soaked through from rain, with steamed glasses is incongruous to the setting of an interior, dry flat. Someone with a disability isn’t incongruous to anything. I am not separate from society. It should not be ‘out of place’ to see my body anywhere. If that accounts for part of the reason that the horror genre so often uses the metaphors I’ve described, then that, too, needs to change, along with a much bigger shift in representation and perceptions of disability.

I might still be struggling with whether there really is a heaven or not, but one thing’s for sure: I’m not a ghost, I’m not less, not a “nearly person”, not a surprise, not scary. So poets, tread carefully this Halloween, because the words you use can do a lot more than just provide a passing fright.

by Helen Seymour

Helen Seymour is a spoken-poet-word-artist-human-performance-person. She is known for mixing off-beat comedy with dark subject matters. She has been awarded three Arts Council England Grants, been shortlisted for the Jerwood Poetry Fellowship, and performed her play, Helen Highwater, at the Southbank Centre as part of London Literature Festival. She has recently been commissioned to create a short poetry film looking at the doctor-patient relationship on the theme of ‘Translations’ for DadaFest 2020, supported by Apples and Snakes. For more info see helenseymour.com and follow @whathelens on Instagram.

Photo credit: Jake Cunningham

The labels ‘performance poet’ and ‘spoken word artist’ have been variously worn by people who were not allowed to call themselves poets.

The labels ‘performance poet’ and ‘spoken word artist’ have been variously worn by people who were not allowed to call themselves poets. These may have been punk, dub, or hip-hop MCs, comic poets, poets of colour, or those wedded to the discipline of performance. Each successive surge of the grass roots has built new audiences for poetry and elaborated successfully on an ancient tradition of live verse.

But such labels are quickly abandoned by artists as they mature. Why? Because spoken word is infantile. Spoken word is not a destination, it’s a beginning. Slam competitions and rowdy events in clubs and pubs are fun. But they are no place for serious art.

Slam competitions and rowdy events in clubs and pubs are fun. But they are no place for serious art.

Have you absorbed this narrative, even a little? Haven’t we all? I have interviewed over 100 spoken word poets while podcasting, and later researching my book: Stage Invasion: Poetry & the Spoken Word Renaissance which was released with Out-Spoken Press last year. My research has led me to the firm conclusion that spoken word (a name that superseded British performance poetry in the early noughties) is on the way out. As someone who has spent many years trying to describe stage craft, and the manifold ways this enhances and elaborates written verse, this causes me concern.

In March this year, Spoken Word Educators & Academic Researchers (SWEAR) was established at the UniSlam festival in Birmingham. This is a watershed in the discussion around performance poetry. Given how thriving the scene is, it is amazing it has taken so long. Page-centric poetic dogmas have dominated our educational institutions since English poetry became the subject of formal study two centuries ago.

This has left us without much of a language to describe how professional poet performers can – with the precision of tuning forks – make a crowd shudder with tears, laughter and clenched fists (some early inspirations for me were Mark Gwynn Jones, Benjamin Zephaniah and Kat Francois). Another consequence of this neglect is that pockets of experimentation and expertise get ignored or forgotten. The sub-genre of stand-up poetry, for example, has received almost no discussion, despite the fact that many brilliant artists have dedicated their lives to it (see John Hegley, Rob Auton, Kate Fox and Connor Macleod to name just four).

Such poets didn’t drop out of thin air of course. Stand-up poetry (and UK spoken word more broadly) has deep roots in the alternative cabaret scene of the eighties. Here poetry existed alongside drag acts, comedians, musicians and theatre troops. Anything could happen in alternative cabarets, with costumes, props and a manic experimentation. As Jonny ‘Fluffypunk’ Seagrave remembers:

You’d have things like Ian Saville, the socialist magician…and Randolph the Remarkable who used to pick up a washing up bowl with his stomach…and poetry was part of that…and it certainly wasn’t coming from the canon.

The poetry of alternative cabaret had less of the emotional range and sincerity than we associate with spoken word today. Yet its spirit continued into the nineties and noughties with acts like Rachel Pantechnicon (the comic surrealist drag act of Russell Thompson). Thompson, who served as an Apples and Snakes London Programme Coordinator (and has since gone on to work as an archivist for the scene) laments that spoken word, for all its greatness, has ‘lost some of its experimental edge’.

There can be no props, costumes and stage personas if we absorb the assumption that poetry is not a performing art.

Could it be that there is too much poetry in spoken word? There can be no props, costumes and stage personas if we absorb the assumption that poetry is not a performing art. The fire-side tradition dissipates into the cerebraliterations of “readings” and “recitals”. The ritual theatrics of shamanistic shape-shifting fall into the darkness.

What motivates this argument is not romantic nostalgia, but a concern for the professional survival of the scene I belong to. As stand up poet Thick Richard puts it: ‘”I think what has held the poetry thing back for so many years is the reluctance to improve to meet the standards of other forms of entertainment”‘. I concur.  Too often I have seen punters leave at the interval, never to return. Poet Jem Rolls calls spoken word’s recent literary turn ‘the revenge of the normal’. Add to this a cosy and accepting culture of emotionally sophisticated first-person narratives, and “normal” becomes a toxic combination of ethical high mindedness, and safe, genteel, literary behaviour.

Poets have a long history of leaving poetry in order to do poetry.

When Thick Richard was a double act, he had a partner in crime called Bob Moyler. Moyler subsequently left the poetry scene and now does comedy stage shows involving a robot that reproduces (mis)recorded scripts of Hollywood blockbusters in what amounts to a form of experimental poetry. Could it be that the avantgarde cabaret tradition of breaking conventions is migrating out of stage poetry altogether? Almost definitely. Poets have a long history of leaving poetry in order to do poetry. As neo-Dadaist and cultural historian Olchar E. Lindsann explains:

For most of the nineteenth century, most of what we retroactively identify as “sound poetry” was presented as satire because you can get away with it. If you wanna do something really fucking crazy, just call it comedy and your chances of getting it past just went up about five hundred per cent.

It is not my intention here to regurgitate page vs stage. As someone with a creative writing degree, I’m not qualified to do so, and frankly, we all have better things to do with our lives.  Nor do I mean to defend spoken word carte blanche. Indeed, there is much I would like to see change. Recent trends towards a prevalence of identity politics, “trauma porn” and the aped American cadence of Button Poetry YouTube channel, for example, are stifling the art of creativity. If we are not doing anything new, we are not being creative. This is also true of adopting the writing conventions of accepted literary norms.

it is vital we champion the “high art” of stage poetry – a destination that can take a lifetime to master.

As we file politely towards the post-spoken word era, we should remember that there remains an asymmetry between the (still-emerging) performance community and the larger and better financed world of literature (spread across hundreds of university departments, arts bodies and publishing houses). In this context, it is vital we champion the “high art” of stage poetry – a destination that can take a lifetime to master. The literary awards and broadsheet articles celebrating those who have made poetry so popular in recent years, do not mention – or wish to support – the stages so many of them grew from. In these conditions, it is easy to see how the low hanging fruits of performance poetry can be basketed, and held up symbolically, in ways that ultimately reinforce those who continue to define poetic value.

Ultimately, people will define their work as they please. So I will finish, appropriately, by talking only of myself. I am a spoken word poet. My words are physical (involving warm ups and breathing exercise), vocal (with beatboxing and other forms of musicality), theatrical (inhabiting onstage personas) and interactive (bants).

When I’m on stage, the poetry I practice is a performing art. It has been a great privilege to experience and write about its distinct sub genres, traditions and practices. It is musical but not music, theatrical but not theatre, literary but not literature, comic but not comedy. It is spoken word poetry.

–Pete Bearder

Pete (the Temp) Bearder is an author, spoken word poet and musician. His new book Stage Invasion was described by Ian McMillan as ‘the book we have all been waiting for’. Pete is a former National Poetry Slam Champion and his work has been featured on BBC Newsnight, Radio 4 and The World Service. petethetemp.co.uk

‘And ever in our hearts doth ring
This song of Spring, Spring!’

and Seedling…

‘As a quiet little seedling
Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
And this is what it said.’

There is something about nature and poetry that is interconnected, something felt and experienced whenever we give ourselves time and space to be present in nature. An indescribable sense of peace that can stay with us as Wordsworth says in I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud, about the daffodils he spied….

‘For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.’

nature feels intense and overwhelming and begs us to write for her

And this is not just some poetic, arty nonsense; time in nature makes us feel better. One recent study showed that spending 120 minutes in nature a week is associated with good health and well-being. But is this really a surprise? I think it’s fair to say that we all feel better for getting outside, feeling the sun on our skin and breathing in fresh air. Poets tend to be observant and sensitive. It’s part of the job description to observe the world around you and to feel as you observe and to condense those feelings and emotions into a poem. It is easy to see how we have ended up with so many poems that reflect on nature, nature feels intense and overwhelming and begs us to write for her.

I suspect this revival is no longer just because of Nature’s awesomeness, but because of her vulnerability

With the Poet Laureate’s new poetry award for nature poems (The Laurel Prize) it seems that nature poetry is back in vogue and there have been many fabulous new poetry collections celebrating all that is nature, from the wonderful works of Nicola Davies to Robert Macfarlane’s and Jackie Morris’ brilliant The Lost Words. I suspect this revival is no longer just because of Nature’s awesomeness, but because of her vulnerability. Climate change has gone from being something we can avoid to a threat we must try to minimise, we have depleted the seas and filled them with plastic, we continue to burn fossil fuels and just in the UK alone our most important wildlife species have plummeted by 60% since the 1970’s! (nbn.org.uk) Nature is in peril and maybe poetry is a way of inspiring change.

My poetry collection A Year Of Nature Poems (illustrated by Kelly Louise Judd) follows on the poetic tradition of nature writing with one poem inspired by the natural world for each month of the year. I wanted to readdress humanity’s apparent separation and disregard for nature by focusing the poems on moments of human interaction with the natural world, such as sitting outside during the April showers, watching mayflies rise from a garden-dug pond and playing in autumn’s dry leaves. My hope was that in centring these poems around the human in nature my readers would reflect on their own experiences in the natural world. Unfortunately it became impossible to just revel in the magnificence of nature in these poems (as poets had the freedom to do in times gone by) as so many of the topics I wanted to write about are directly affected by climate change, from amphibian decline to changes in jet streams affecting our local climate. To that end each poem has a brief introduction highlighting some of the larger issues at play allowing, I hope, for further reflection and action.

Nature is in peril and maybe poetry is a way of inspiring change

I’ve been so awed and impressed with the active role young people are taking in highlighting their concerns regarding the planet they are set to inherit. They have brought the issues of climate change and the natural world booming ever louder onto our TV’s and radios and social media feeds and outside our local schools. There is clearly a long way to go to change government policies to make long lasting significant change but as we strive forward I know that poetry is going to be a big part of this journey. How else can we truly communicate what is under threat, how else can we truly grieve what we have lost?

Joseph Coelho’s Poetry Collection A Year Of Nature Poems, Illustrated by Kelly Louise Judd, is now available in Paperback and published by Wide eyed Books. Find out more about Joseph’s work at www.thepoetryofjosephcoelho.com

Photo credit:  KT Bruce

When it comes to spoken word it can sometimes be hard to define success. For many poets one indicator can be winning a major slam title. This was the case for me. In 2007 I won the UK Slam Championships at Stratford Theatre Royal under my AKA John Berkavitch. My prize included a trophy, a small cash reward, and a title that for the last 12 years has featured in the first couple of lines of my bio.

‘Former UK Slam Champion’ has never really been an indicator of the kind of work I make but has definitely secured me numerous bookings. Slam itself can be a fairly rigid format. There are time constraints, some styles fair better than others and the judging system can be incredibly subjective. The poems I used to win my title had been written with these things in mind. I entered the slam with a strategy and on the day I was lucky. I have never believed that I was the “best” poet on that stage just that I managed to hit the perfect combination of hard work plus opportunity multiplied by luck. 

By 2008 the work I was making had moved a long way from slam but I still felt a pressure to live up to that title. I find this balancing act incredibly interesting and decided to ask 10 other high profile Slam winners for their take on it.

Adam Kammerling
former National Slam Champion

Being the National Slam Champion meant that I got a lot of gigs. I think the artist’s relationship with an audience can be quite problematic and that if you spend a lot of time on stage then you come to need it, or you come to appreciate it more than the things that actually matter. So you lose sight of your own authenticity before you even think about writing your own truth; you kind of exist for your audience and that is when authenticity and truth get lost.

Vanessa Kisuule
winner of over 10 slam titles

I think by the time I was really hitting that stride with slams and winning, I already had an awareness of the limitations of it as a format. The minute everything’s a little bit too slick, a little bit too chill on stage, you need to just go and start writing in a different form, you need to go up there and do a fresh-ass poem and be, like: ah s***, is this any good? You just need to keep yourself a little bit clenched. 

Kat Francois
former BBC TV Slam Champion & former World Slam Champion

I’m actually at a stage where, you know, you’ve got the performance skills, you’ve got the writing skills, what are you not dealing with? We think as performers we can go and talk about anything, but there’s still stuff that is taboo. I think it’s important that I bring some of that to the stage. I think it is. No matter how uncomfortable it makes people feel, or me. I’ve always come from a personal political standpoint, so I talk about things that have personally affected me. I know as writers we can write about anything but there is a level of authenticity with poetry that I like to feel when I read and see people perform. We’ve all got stories, and important stories, to tell so, like, tell your own stories. Those are the strongest stories you can tell.

Jess Green
former BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam Champion

This thing about authenticity, I think I’m obviously very public about the fact that my politics is very tied up with my poetry and my performance. I feel that when I’m performing work that it’s very much that these are my beliefs and I stand by them, and I really want that to be true and not just to be because it makes a good poem that wins a slam. And at times that’s been a bit difficult. The only person you should be making work for really, I feel, is yourself and what you’re comfortable doing. So I think, if you can, you need to make a choice about how much you buy into that pressure.    

Toby Campion
former UK Poetry Slam Champion

I think after I’d done a lot of slam, and essentially come up through spoken word, my interest shifted a little bit more to the page, and creating stuff that works on the page as well as it does on the stage, and opening the door to that world. And I have felt at times, will people that liked my stuff before like this stuff now and be onboard with it? But I think that’s part of being an artist and part of being a writer – that you’re always changing and your work’s always developing – and I think what’s challenging is when people feel like they have to stay in that thing that they were at the beginning. I feel like I’ve seen that more in America where people make a living from being in slams and, therefore, they don’t have room to grow, or they feel like they always have to write that poem just in a different iteration.

Poetry is so personal. Regardless of whether it is your experience or not, people are going to assume it is when you’re performing it on stage and it’s just you and the microphone. And I think there is more of a question about that now – of is it your story to tell? And who should be telling that story?

Sara Hirsch
former UK Slam Champion

I think authenticity looks different to everybody, and I think success looks different for everybody. I had to experience inauthenticity to understand what authenticity was. I think I probably did alter what I was writing, or felt like I needed to maintain the same standard, and then very quickly realised that that was taking me away from what I wanted to write or how I wanted to express myself. I’m not one-hundred-percent convinced that once you’ve got to that level you can stay in slam and remain completely authentic. I think the trick is to just keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, whatever your comfort zone is. My comfort zone was ‘three minute slam winning poem’, so I just keep trying to make sure that I’m writing stuff that challenges that or, if it doesn’t, as long as it feels like what I wanna write, that’s fine. 

Solomon O.B
former National Slam Champion

If your internal compass and what you want to get out of your art is the most important thing, then I think, regardless of any kind of outside influences, any success, you still know what you wanna do. For a lot of people it can be hard to keep that focus, especially when you start to get your eyes pulled in a certain direction of what other people are doing and what you think the public might want from you. But again, for me, that was just kind of more confirmation of ‘ok, well you’ve got to a certain level of success by doing you, so why change that now?’

When it comes to artistic voice, I feel like once you’ve got to a level of craft, a level of expertise, and a level of development with your skill and your voice, I think probably the most important thing is for your unique voice to come through. Ultimately, you are the authority on your art, and there’s only one version of you, so make sure what comes out is as true to that as possible.

Harry Baker
former World Slam Champion (youngest ever winner)

For me, it always felt very natural to write from a place of experience. So when I started, most stuff was about coming of age, but I think I’ve realised that I’m in a different place now to where I was when I started writing and performing poems. I’ve had to think about where I’m at now and where I’m writing from. So I think, just trying to keep writing new stuff that feels relevant, but also analysing why you’re writing what you’re writing and the place you’re coming from.

Zia Ahmed
former Roundhouse Slam Champion

Who defines it? Because if it’s about truth and authenticity, are you defining it? Because if you’re doing a gig and some next person says: oh, this guy’s authentic. Like, how do they know? I guess it all comes down to how you define truth and authenticity for yourself. You’ve just got to remember why you started. Remembering the intension while you’re writing will give you a centre.

Stephanie Dogfoot
former Singapore Slam Champion & former UK Farrago Slam Champion

I do sometimes find it harder to take risks and risk failing in my writing because it feels like people will doubt my achievements, question whether I deserve to be where I am or start to take me less seriously if I try something new and it doesn’t work. I’d say this has definitely sometimes made it harder for me to write new things. I remind myself of the reasons why I started writing in the first place, for the fun, joy and human connection that I got out of it. I also remind myself that I am most powerful and connected when I’m being vulnerable and honest in my writing, and that this vulnerability does not just apply to the things I write about but also in trying new things and daring to write ‘badly’ sometimes. Also, reminding myself to be open to taking advice and criticism from everywhere.  

How were we to know/ that when we were cleansing/ we were erasing our whole existence – CUNTO, Joelle Taylor

My whole life has been a protest, and my body a political placard. My body has also been a battleground and a bar room, a tourist spot and a cemetery, a haunted house and a roadside memorial. What it has rarely been is mine.

I hitched to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp from Lancashire several times in my teens, having read about the radical nature of a women-only protest. Founded by nuns who had walked from Wales to Berkshire to confront the cruise missile base, the camp became a homing signal for all of us badly written girls.

A furious mix of naive and brave, I turned up to Yellow Camp (main gate) aged 17 with nothing but a borrowed rucksack of rages, a notebook crowded with small black handwriting, and a pen. The pen is important. Think of it as the same one I write with now.

Greenham was far more than a peace protest for many of the dispossessed under-class women who made our way there. It was alive with possibility, mutable, irreverent, long-talking, kind, bad-mouthed and above all woman-focused. We were a new way of doing things, we were new things. I spent most of my time crouched in front of the fire, taking copious tiny handwritten notes and writing letters, or listening to elders talk about the first wave of feminism and CND. I was alive.

I spent most of my time crouched in front of the fire, taking copious tiny handwritten notes and writing letters

I can’t remember the names of the women who parented me at Greenham, but I do remember the cheap tent they erected for me, the blanket they found. I remember the quiet fire, and the crackle of conversation. I remember the plans for a changed world that showed us the shapes of our own mouths. I remember the long and freezing nights curled around ideas. I remember how we unpicked sections of the 9-mile wire perimeter fence as though it was a badly knitted jumper that needed reimagining.

My first direct political action involved cutting an opening in the perimeter fence over a number of days, taking care to tack-stitch it together again so the soldiers wouldn’t notice the base had been breached. Using wire cutters to slit a fence takes time, and so we divided the work between several of us, cutting it by increments. If we had tried to cut the whole opening in one go we would have been easily caught. On the appointed night of the action, seven of us quietly stole ourselves away from Yellow Gate into the surrounding woodland. We slept in the open and waited. At 4am we returned to the tacked opening, unpicked it and entered the base. We used blankets to help each other pass under the inner razor wire fence, until all seven of us were inside the facility, next to the runway. It was that easy to break into a high security nuclear missile base. This was one of our main points; if a group of 7 untrained women ranging from 17 to mid 70’s could break in, imagine what a militarily trained organisation could do. We made our way directly to the missile bunkers, carefully planted the saplings we’d brought with us and waited. I probably took the opportunity to hand roll and smoke a cigarette (which I also did while in the dock at my trial – irreverence for authority was a particular Greenham tactic, arguably natural to a group of little sisters and grandmothers). After far too long a time the soldiers came and aimed their rifles at us. We giggled. We could: we were all white.

Writing allowed me to put a thin piece of paper between myself and a world that did not want me there

We were arrested and taken to separate huts for interrogation, but all refused to speak. This is much more difficult than it sounds. Eventually I was charged under the 1984 Prevention of Terrorism Bill and was tried and sentenced in court.

Over the years, there were more actions and more arrests and detainments, but through it all was the pen. It seemed to me that I would always be safe if I had it with me, if I immediately wrote down what was happening and how. Writing allowed me to put a thin piece of paper between myself and a world that did not want me there.

From that point on poetry and political action have always walked beside each other for me. They are twins I sometimes have difficulty telling apart, in the same way that my politics and my body are linked.

The butch woman wears bare face and short hair not to accentuate a masculinity but to force a rethinking of what a woman is. Is she just clothes and make up? Really? In the 80’s it was a frightening thing to do, to stand there like that out in the open. And it helped us recognise each other, to form a strong and instinctive community. After Greenham we tribed together in dyke bars and art squats, still political by the simple act of being. We were kings of nothing much. To live outside the system is easy with a community such as this: no job, no fixed abode, no bank account. In the background were other activist groups;  Act Up was ferocious in its defense of gay men and tackling prejudice around the AIDS epidemic, and the Lesbian Avengers staged protests, including abseiling into the House of Commons, and breaking into the live Nine O’Clock News. Culturally we had spaces where we could hang out, from bars to theatres and even Dyke TV on Channel Four.

Poetry and political action have always walked beside each other for me

Now that all of this lesbian-focused space has receded like the tide before a tsunami it is time for us to remember our journeys, our bodies, our friendships and how radical an act it was and still is for us to simply breathe.  

My spoken word poem CUNTO is a way of breathing. It highlights the journey we masculine women, we butches, we gold star lesbians have taken. It speaks of the female body as a political act and focuses on one simple intent: the taking back of a body. It looks at homophobia and misogyny and talks about the community we forged to overcome the grief of our own lives. But it is also a celebration of the protests led by women from the 80’s through to mid-2000’s, and how much I owe them as a woman and as a writer.

Today writing has become my political act. The fact that I choose to write is political in itself. There is something about the contradiction between the potential longevity of words and the brief and unrepeatable act of performance that attracts me, that is radical at its core, and which proves to me that I am still alive.

See Joelle perform CUNTO as part of Rallying Cry | 28 & 29 May, 7.30pm | Albany, Deptford | info & booking

Banner photo: Suzi Corker