Extra Second London is a new monthly poetry/debate night where we take an extra second to reflect on the ideas touched on by our featured poets. We give you, the lovely audience, a chance to make your voices heard - because poetry shouldn't just be a spectator sport. This month's theme is: The Future of British Politics.
With the Tories taking a sharp turn to the right, Labour seemingly on the verge being torn apart, the rise of UKIP, the possibility of another Scottish referendum and the small matter of an EU exit to negotiate, our political system seems to be approaching a turning point. So where do we go from here? Come along and have your say.
We have 4 wonderful featured performers this month as well as an OPEN MIC! If you'd like to perform we ask that you keep it topical, but it is a free county (for now...).
Sign up is on the door from 7.30.
Once all that poetry is out of the way we will open the floor for the main event - a roundtable audience discussion on the month's theme. Looking forward to hearing all your opinions on a topic that's sure to spark some heated debate.
This month's featured speakers:
JASON PILLEY has been performing poetry in London for the last four and a half years. In 2012 he won and lost various slams, he featured at all the best and most of the worst poetry-nights, he won the oh-so-prestigious "Farrago Zoo Awards" award for Best Debut Performance and was selected to take part in Apples & Snakes's "The Word's A Stage" programme. In 2013, in a futile but glorious attempt to position himself as the Humphry Osmond of poetry, he put together a group called The Mind Gang and organised open acid-trips at various unlikely sites: groups of poets took legal analogues of LSD in the British Museum, Kew Gardens, the Tate Modern, Durdle Door, etc. In 2014 he collaborated with the classical violinist Oktawia Petronella on the epic "The Invention Of Opera": having decided that pubs and bars and coffee-shops are the opposite of poetry, the pair performed their reimagining of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice at graveyards and in churches, in art-galleries and on random buses, in a disused cavernous tunnel under the Thames and by the legal-graffiti wall in Leake Street... Also that year he handed out three million free copies of his one-off poetry-zine entitled "Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!" 2015 was boring. So far in 2016 he's published a collection of his and his friends' poems called "SPIES 4 LIFE," he's distributed three hundred copies of that collection to random strangers as part of Intergalactic Poetry Day, and September will see the release of his new poetry-pamphlet, a depraved experiment entitled "SEEDPOETRY.".
MARC LIVINGSTONE is marxist poet from Glasgow. He writes poems slagging off capitalism in the vain hope that he will be appointed poet laureate after the revolution.
DEAN MCKEE is a spoken word performer based in west London, who has a taste for word play and imagery and uses these to create stories that will touch your very core. He uses honesty about his upbringing and childhood to give you a look into who he is and his almost rap like flow will mesmerise you. Definitely one to watch for the flow alone.
SAM BERKSON, aka 'Angry Sam', has been hosting and promoting live poetry events with Hammer & Tongue for ten years. He has won slams, performed in three continents and published two books of poetry with Influx Press. His debut, 'Life in Transit' was described as "a highlight of 2012" by cultural theorist Mark Fisher. He followed this with a commission for Fishbar photogallery of poems written around Dalston's Ridley Road market, composing the text of Lorenzo Vitturi's award winning photobook, Dalston Anatomy. His most recent collection, Settled Wanderers, records his experience living on the Western Saharan refugee camps and contains the first English translations of Saharawi poetry. Poet Chris Searle, writing in the journal Race & Class, said that the "poems carry a particular kind of powerful witness in their lyrical solidarity. They are narratives of empathy with the lives of people he encountered”.