Following article is taken from an article on the LeftLion website.
I’ve been to some pretty weird places before for poetry events but the venue for Oxjam’s Beeston Takeover on Saturday 22 October was certainly my favourite to date. It was a dusty, cold building called Barton House and was filled with beautiful bright buses from the past century. It was here that Thomas Henry Barton started off his first service between Long Eaton and the Goose Fair, back in October 1908 but today the visitors were here to see Candlestick Press, DIY Poets, Wes White and a collaboration between LeftLion and the Nottingham Writers’ Studio. There were many highlights, some of which we’ve recorded below, but I was particularly impressed with Robin Vaughn Williams poem about an orange girl and John Micallef’s take on Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. But it wasn’t all poetry as Niki Valentine swung by to give a reading from her new novel The Haunting, which we were eager to get our hands on having had to wait a whole two years and seven months since her last novel Starfishing. You can catch Niki and the Nottingham Writers’ Studio at 7.30pm on 31 October at the Broadway Cinema as part of the Mayhem Horror Festival for a spooky special Word of Mouth.
We’ve sat back and watched with delight as MulletProofPoet has established himself on the poetry circuit. Here, he reads The Galleries of Justice League, where he imagines what super heroes would be doing with their bat mobiles if they lived in Nottingham. MPP will have his first collection, Citizen Kaned, published by Crystal Clear Creators in February 2011 and we can’t wait for more of his cheeky slurs on contemporary culture.
Aly Stoneman , our Poetry Ed and recent winner of the Nottingham Poetry Society Slam, read Distant Star, homage to her childhood home of Devon. Aly will be reading at our Gunpowder, Treason and Pot event at the Nottingham Contemporary on 4 November. She also has her first collection, Lost Lands, published with Crystal Clear Creators in February 2011.
Sue Dymoke was an appropriate poet having formerly worked for Oxfam. Here she reads two poems inspired from a recent visit to Auckland, New Zealand. The first, Getting Rid, was inspired by an Auckland tradition in which people turf out all of their unwanted rubbish on to the street for people to collect as and when needed (or what we know locally as bin day.) The second poem is completely comprised of sayings found in Aunt Daisey’s Book of Handy Hints which was left to the friend’s she was staying with. Hearing a poem contain the line ‘being wary of pussy willow’ and ‘renewing mouldy pudding’ is something I never expected to hear. Then again, I never thought I’d be listening to poetry in a bus depot.
James Walker's website
