I’m away from home in the Shropshire Countryside all week.  I wrote a review which is in  the Independent newspaper  today. It’s about  an exhibition at The ICA called Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.      And there’s an  article in South Africa’s style magazine  Design Indaba.  Design Indaba and The ICA have  style in common.   The Indaba piece is the first comprehensive article on my Poems as Landmarks exploration from Manchester to London.  Just heard today that The Letterbox club  has just been shortlisted for The  Excellence Awards. You can read about it and see the shortlist here: 

The human being has patterned his every move, sound, and image after God’s other creatures and natural wonders. So begins Music and the Primeval by Duke Ellington. Tonight alongside Tomorrow’s Warriors Jazz Orchestra I kicked off the first half of the event with his words at The Queen Elizabeth Hall through a piece written by rising star of Jazz Peter Edwards. The entire event was introduced by a letter from The Queen.   more »

Pelecanos compliments me on my quilted chucks (quilted all star converse) and asks where I got them from. It was a cool note. And with pride I tell him Hackney, only in green. But I think it was a sampledesign linenot sure you can get them, but I tell Pelecanos that there are stores all over the country. That's George Pelecanos who wrote The Wire.   more »

I travel through hackney past everywhere to the Southbank Centre threw my bike into the office hiked up to the Westminster Pavilion on 6th Floor. David Buckland and Peter Gilbert he who made the film Hoop Dreams.   more »

I spend the afternoon at The Institute of Contemporary Arts inside Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. an exhibition of words in art from the concrete poetry of the 1960's to now.   more »

The audience were there at 10.30am. But my contract says 11am. At 10.30am the audience was full but many had left obviously feeling rejected. Not good for an event for kids in care.   more »

The parents had to decide which child must be eaten for the survival of the others. So terrifying was the process that they convinced themselves God would choose who must be eaten. When the children enquire after their brother they tell them He must have left us and tried to get break free of the island The parents cried in front of their children as they ate. And their children secretly resented their brother for this. where is this food from asks one of the children. God provides says the mother, tears filling her eyes.   more »

Here are the poems: BBC Radio Four. Saturday Live 9am until 10am. Woke at 6am to finish these two poems off as best I could. The first one is broadcast at the beginning of the programme and the second towards the end.   more »

It is surprisingly the most moving event of the entire year so far. A woman who wears a top hat with her daughter is sat in the front row. It is Gil Scott heron's daughter with her mother. After we have a long chat and I cycle home.    more »

And so today I travelled two hundred and fifty miles to Manchester. Tiredness has crept into me like a homeless person. “Would you like some chocolate with that” asks the man in Euston station’s newsagent.   more »

Ella Fitzgerald said I am never bored because I am never boring. It isn’t the end of the world if I don’t document all the events in my life here and so I don’t. There are times that I think how boring it actually is. It is no bad thing to be boring every now and again. It was a friend of mine, a gallerist, who said of my life that it is full of over stimulation and so I find it difficult to relax in the spaces inbetween.   more »

Other than unformed notes I hadn’t yet written the introduction to Benjamin Zephaniah for his appearance at The Queen Elizabeth Hall in London tonight. But the wild horses were gathering on the horizon. I arrive home un-rested and unwritten after a five thousand mile overnight flight from South Africa. I unpacked and balanced the South African Masks upon their plinths around our home and then cycled to The Southbank Centre.   more »

In Kippies guns were passed under table and gold toothed smiles above. The gangster sat next to the musicians and both escorted the international model who was in town for a photoshoot and wanted some nightlife with her friends. A place for a poet. Kippies - straight out of a Walter Mosely novel. 'cept those harlem bars have long since gone.   more »

The taxi journey was hair raising. At 5am it was dark and we sped with unnecessary urgency from Grahamstown to the airport in Port Elizabeth. It was one, seat gripping forehead sweating, hour of hell. We , Gill Anna and I, sat in stoney silence as the driver pursued the bumper of every car in existence upon the motorway.   more »

A tall shouldered ruddy nosed gentleman selling Kudu steaks from behind the counter says in a gruff south African Settlers accent. “I came to your show yesterday” he passed me the burger with a stern twinkle in his eye “food for thought” he says. His daughter looked at me with pursed smile as if to say   more »

Here in South Africa my producer tells me how Benjamin and Helen Suzman at her behest helped campaign to free South African poet Muzwhake from jail. Benjamin wrote to Nelson Mandela in which he said “you can tell how well a country is by how it treats the poets.”   more »

I wrote the piece to try and show the writing fraternity that my l life as poet was beset by the greater need to piece together my story to find my family.   more »

In rehearsal and in the play this evening a bat flew down from the rafters. It dived in and out of the stage lights casting shadows around me like dark ribbons . It circled me and then disappeared – a spirit chased by an invisible kite runner   more »

Look at the Geese from this morning, those migrating geese. They migrate from one country to the next and each country where they alight thinks of the bird as their own and yet it is of either. Now what simple lesson can be gained from that. We were immigrants from the beginning of time... Man came from Ethiopia and travelled outwards... how have we come to this. What is the world cup except one mass movement of economic migrants. What is Nike, what is sponsorship but economic migration and globalisation.   more »