This evening is last of what here in England is called Black History Month. I have been out of the country for the most of it but today it got me with a vengeance. And wonderfully so. I somehow think there is a waiting room somewhere where black artists wait for this month each year so we can radicalise on demand. Ofcourse I am joking but I said as much to a packed audience at Clapham Library. Thankfully they laughed. I pretended to be serious and to be slightly bemused by the laughter - but there is a point.... Read more [...]

Just been to hospital for sleep studies. They were going to keep me over night (the clue is in the title apparently) but fortunately it isn’t happening and I have been given some apparatus to use at home that will monitor my sleep pattern and makes me look like a cross between buzz lightyear and a ghostbuster. At the moment I sleep on average about five hours a night and I am up early writing. Still the day does not have enough hours. But I love what I do and I do what I love. However whatever the case to do good work one must also do good rest. Read more [...]

Tonight I am doing a reading at Hampstead Library on Keats Grove right next to Keats House – the house were the writer Keats lived in Hampstead. Did I mention that Keats lived there. It is dark. Pitch Black. And I arrive by bike and train. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to go to a reading on a freakin bike – how cool is that. Read more [...]

As part of the residency here at The South Bank on each day I send a poem to all the workers of The South Bank. This includes the construction workers, the security guards, the administrators, the cleaners and the other artists. Read more [...]

Lomography at the South bank. Click. Amira is the boss of the Lomograph project. http://www.lomography.com In answer to my intrusive and obvious but well intentioned question she says in a syrupy voice “I am from Vienna” . Click. She sucks on a cigarette with what could seem like disdain but is actually her total immersion in the project at hand - trading places and the Lower Marshes wall outside the festival hall.Click. Today it was featured in the centre pages of the Guardian Newspaper. Click. Click She has what my Parisian sister has: Chic and I like it. Click. If any family members are reading this I am talking of Teguest.Click. Read more [...]

The nature of pretension is pretence. We are the real thing keeping it unreal. This is why I like to go to readings cause you just had to be there to see howw good it was. As the Irish brothers The Gallaghers suggested - Be here, now. Read more [...]

7.30pm the grand opening of kwame Dawes Wisteria. http://www.rfh.org.uk/poetryinternational/kwameDawes.html Five hundred or so people fill the Purcell rooms and the concert introduced by Ruth Borthwick is on. Wisteria are a set of poems and photos written by Kwame Dawes in interviews with the people of South Carolina. Kwame is a Caribbean academic and poet. The music is operatic and of the deep South and I am moved to tears. Maybe it’s the jet lag mixed with the moving tones. Read more [...]

Wake 5.30am. Leave Hackney apartment at 7am arrive at the south bank for Poetry International. There’s a panic on at The Lower Marsh installation. It's raining and the exhibits are outside.. Lomography is a new word. I like it. It’s all about the camera. It’s all about the camera being given to the hands of the community and the pictures being reproduced placed side by side. It’s a great mosaic. And that’s us, right, a great mosaic. Art, and here it is by the walls of the festival hall. For more info on lomography go to http://www.lomography.com Read more [...]

I am deep in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. I am not  only surrounded by spectacularly angular mountains but I am staying half way up  one of them. I am in what the pioneers have called Tunnel   Read more [...]

I am surrounded by mountains. Rather than  in Phoenix where the mountains circled a massive basin these mountains are so   close that I am at the base of one of them and feel as if  this town is held Read more [...]