Roar stage recordings available now

Catch all the majesty and power of the spoken word Roar stage!

Live recordings of our Stowed Out Festival line up for 2021 includes Harry Josephine Giles, Imogen Stirling and poet&geek available now https://stowedoutfestival.org.uk/2021/roar.html

Roar stage Stowed Out Festival 14th August 2021

Feel the power of the spoken word Roar stage! Our Stowed Out Festival line up for 2021 includes Harry Josephine Giles, Imogen Stirling and poet&geek. Nothing is going to stop the action! Join us for live poetry and live music. And it is free. 

Streaming from here 14th August 2021 more on schedule coming soon 

Roar Stage opportunity available August 14th 2021

Do you want to appear on the Roar Stage? Seeking spoken word poet for a short set paid opportunity 14th August at the amazing boutique Stowed Out Festival. 

This year acts will be performing at MacArts and streamed. Acts appearing in previous years include Iona Lee, Harry Josephine Giles, Katie Ailes, Sally Evans, Colin Will, Solareye, Rab Wilson, Saz Clark, Jules Horne, Stuart Jones, Calum Bannerman, Anita John, Thomas Clark and Bridget Khursheed.

We are prerecording at MacArts so flexible on time and date to do that.

Send us your vids ideally by the end of June please but the sooner the better. Get in touch the usual way - see details here - or via our social. Cheers! Cannot wait now!

Loaded Words spoken word 25th November 2020 nearly here

p&g are putting the last finishing touches to our amazing & unique event with Joolz Denby, Gregory McCartney, Gael Curran, Bee Asha Singh and Imogen Stirling.

Spoken word and poetry for your delight and a bit of magic and...a closer look at what spoken word and poetry mean to audiences and performers in 2020; how do you get started? how do you get published? and do you need to?

There are still a few tickets on Eventbrite here where else do you want to be tomorrow night?!

Also a very big thank you to the Scottish Poetry Library for lending us their Zoom account and to MacArts for sound and tech advice from inimitable Chris Wemyss - our event is free but if you want a great t-shirt take a look at their Bandcamp crowdfunder and give this great venue & the musicians who use it some support.

Loaded words welcomes Imogen Stirling

Our Loaded Words event on the 25th November just got even better as we are now joined by our final performer - poet, theatre-maker and musician Imogen Stirling.

Imogen who has been newly revealed as the Poet-in-Residence at Paisley Book Festival is another stunning edition to our roster of rich spoken word, writing and poetry talent at the event. 

The event is less than two weeks away, it is a virtual event on Zoom and it is free - so get your limited edition ticket at Eventbrite here: 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/loaded-words-tickets-125721942715

You can find out more about the event and all the acts here.

You can find out more about Imogen on insta @imogenstirlingpoetry

Loaded words opportunity

You have just a little longer to get in touch - we realised we can't review and make a decision until the weekend. So 3 more days left if you want to join us at Loaded Words!

Thanks to everyone who has already got in touch with us.

We would like to invite you to be part of a unique virtual event on the 25th November. p&g are seeking a stunning new or emerging #poet or #spokenword performer to open the evening. Paid opportunity. Send us your links through the usual contact details - we look forward to seeing your work.

Deadline 06.11.20

Loaded words 25.11.20

Enjoy a fabulous p&g spoken word and poetry virtual event with poet Joolz Denby and - from Scottish rap group The Honey Farm - Bee Asha Singh and Gael Curran, alongside eclectic editor and curator Gregory McCartney of Abridged (one of p&g's best-loved publications) and HU.

Are our words loaded against us? Do we think of and react to spoken word differently to poems in books? And how does online fit in? This debate has been going on a long time but do poets today even want or need to get published on paper - and what extra does that offer them?

This event celebrates both (and a few more methods for getting your word out besides), looks at differences to access between spoken word and book and magazine publishing, and how that might affect poets from less well-represented groups. Hear spoken word at its finest plus a chance to discuss in articulate and inspirational company why and how our words can be loaded to be heard and shared.

Faciliated by p&g's own Bridget Khursheed.

This event is free. Yes that's right! We are available worldwide on Zoom. And don't forget that we are still looking for one more performer/poet - send us your links the usual way.

Learn more about the event and find out how to register here. Limited tickets available.

*****

More on Joolz Denby - if you need it - here.

More on The Honey Farm -"potentially the first and only and by default greatest Scottish female rap group of all time" - here and insta here.

More on Abridged here and HU here.

Seeking you?

We would like to invite you to be part of a unique virtual event on the 25th November. p&g are seeking a stunning new or emerging #poet or #spokenword performer to open the evening.

Paid opportunity. Send us your links through the usual contact details - we look forward to seeing your work.

Deadline 31.10.20

Making spoken word videos

Over the past few months due to Covid-19 I have been asked for a few spoken word videos. The results can be seen on Hugh Macmillan's Poems from the backroom #plagueopoets, as part of the upcoming Scottish Poetry Library's Vision 2020 project and Stowed Out 2020 [Locked In].

It is a very different thing making a video of yourself, as opposed to being filmed performing live. 

First and foremost for someone who has been living in the Borders (with for a considerable part of that time only access to local opportunities due to caring responsibilities), it is a liberation to do it yourself. Breathtaking. And share it yourself too! And the feel of a lot of doors opening. The viewing of other people's work has been astonishing also at events I never would have been able to get to like the Poetry Wales lockdown edition launch and Nine Arches Press Peter Kahn Little Kings launch: these events allowed me to effectively meet in person writers that I had only read before; private to well not exactly to the public but better as an online reading is intimate and powerful and feels personal.

Technically however my first thoughts on how to do this were quite basic. This was after all not going to be a multishot feature film  but quick and dirty engineering. So sitting in one place to read with a single static shot seemed wisest. I used Microsoft Teams and set up a meeting and recorded myself that way. The result was ok but felt a bit clunky requiring some tweaking in a video editor to remove the meeting name at the beginning. It also felt like I was speaking at a meeting which in my case was ok but might be a downer for some people. Subsequently I have converted to using my phone - still with me sitting at my desk to record so far - and I think I get a better result. Easy to move the phone around to get some simple effects but try them to see what they look like first. But also easy to knock the phone though if you wave your hands around a lot as I do and have it propped up against the laptop screen. You can sneak a cheatsheat on your screen too with nobody the wiser. Quality overall was better in my opinion and easy to stop and start. If you have no access to editing software don't start recording until you are ready (ideally with everything you need close by) and maybe even plan what you are going to say, read and how you will finish - to avoid long pauses. I just write some keywords on a bit of paper if I want to remind myself - the same kind of notes I would make for a live reading in person. One more tip is make sure to video landscape. You can see the dangers of filming portrait in the screenshot showing short films in my channel screengrab below. For those particular videos of water, it wasn't much of an issue but if your film is being spliced in with a lot of others - landscape may be a requirement.

For the Vision 2020 project I was tasked to make a video to accompany my commissioned poem. This one I wanted to be more experimental. I decided almost immediately to absent my person entirely from proceedings which works well with the poem but also usefully opened up a few more possibilities as to how it could be shot. For this project I used a full on video editing piece of software Adobe Premier Pro. It's not cheap so find someone or an organisation, school or college who can let you use their copy or use a free video editing utility and face the fact you may have to show their logo (not the end of the world). I wanted to weave together several short video source films I had made locally to where I lived - this stage of making the films on my phone was step one and involved an image walk around the settings of the poem. My poem has several times in it all in the same place - so I had to use diffferent nearby landscape to recreate the before and after. It ended up getting a bit drizzly once I reached the site itself (where the trees were cut down) but I think that added to the end product atmosphere - in fact I added some scratches and dust to grain the image further using effects. So make the most of unexpected changes in conditions and don't chuck stuff away just because it isn't exactly as you planned. I then made a voice recording - separately using the voice recorder again free on my phone. Once added, the video elements were quick to put together but there was quite a lot of sound tweaking to be done. This was because my source videos had sound which I liked; so it was kept in places and subdued in others. The voice track needed to be enhanced too. I really enjoyed experimenting with the editing software. 

My latest experiment has been with a video export of a Microsoft PowerPoint animation - you can watch it here. So no tool is too simple to integrate into your video.  You'll have this piece of software if you have Microsoft Office and you can export a ppt file as video - simple as that. Students can get Office for free btw!

Work in progress using this technique though: timings are the key issue for experimentation at this point - e.g. the first shot of titles lingers! Next time I will also record a voice track and add it using Premiere Pro again. 

There's plenty to include and explore - video, art, animation, voice, sound poems, editing all of which I pursue in my practice - along with what is effectively publishing to voice mechanism via YouTube. Not least the ability to quickly get poems out (not to mention building a bit of an archive). Experimenting with video certainly fills the performance gap enforced by lockdown and more. Try it! Let me know about your experiments with video in the usual way - happy to review and link to my favourites.

***

My channel is here: perhaps of most interest to trainspotters and lovers of the very short unitheme film. If you have already checked out my insta @poetandgeek you will know the stuff I like.

Review: PASSION, PAIN and DEMON SLAYIN by Nick Igbokwe

The collection trilogy PASSION, PAIN and DEMON SLAYIN describes itself as written "through the heart, from the heart and for the heart". But it operates through the senses too in a visceral TikTok vision: anything can be resampled and welded together to create the new.

I N T E R T E X T U A L I T Y

My dish is made of a recipe
of sugar, spice and everything nice;
heartbreak,
pain
passion.
Play.

This is a lengthy collection of three often overlapping sections each themed with a nod to Kid Cudi's 2016 release of the same name. In the original Kid Cudi collaborates on tracks with artists ranging from Andre 3000 through Travis Scott to Willow Smith. And in the book, poems bounce off each other in what the author describes as a “plethora of contributions”. Lines are samples, song themes riffed and artists walk though as characters; a mashup of singers, thinkers, film dialogue, quotes from poems, texts, tweets, jazz, lyrics; there's even a shout out to Danielle Steele.

Reimagining is key. A Mike Posner sample highlights this with its self-referential echoes of the meetup with Avicii that led to I took a pill in Ibiza: itself a remade encounter put into words and then remixed before the track found success. Intertextual hints question versional reality: who owns the truth here? The lyricist, the singer, the remixer, the fan? The reporter?

[Interlude: Mike Posner]
Avicii died, and little homie calls me up, and he's crying. (Drip) I told him, "I'ma be honest
with you, if you don't get your shit together, you're next." And the truth is, by the time you
hear this song, I don't fuckin' know if he's gon' be alive or not. This is all compounded by
the fact that she and I do not speak anymore. I mean, am I the only one here who doesn't
know what the fuck is going on?

Earlier extract from WHAT ARE WE

...Took a long long walk
down a street in Ibiza.
Thoughts of flashing lights,
you on my arm
The other arm in a sling and cast.

Plaster o. Plaster of Paris.
Everything was rosy
till you took a trip
and I thought it was a bright idea
to sneak my side piece into our night stand....

The reader needs to work at times - has to be surefooted - to see where the poet and the sample connect (as direct quotes although usually attributed are often given different presentation as shown in the Molasses sample below). The text sample is a different beast to its music counterpart; the poet has to be vigilant on the reader's behalf to avoid confusion.

p&g can envision this book filtered into 45 minutes of live music, spoken word and video but in its present state this collection is a whole performance in a book. We look forward to seeing what comes next from Nick Igbokwe and the Mans Way Of Seeing Things collective. PASSION, PAIN and DEMON SLAYIN is published by The Blueprint Ng and you can find out more here @_nothingnobody @thoughtsbyman