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 [...]

I woke this morning 7am in my hotel in Calgary to the invasive shout of my mobile telephone. “Hi, It’s Robyn Hunter from the world service and I’d like to talk about your childhood.” Considering I had been riding a wild elk through the snow capped forests of Canada , aka Indiana Jones, and considering I was being chased by a a herd of angry (but comical) pygmies and halle berry was clinging to my waist I did good by saying “Um Okay”. Read more [...]

Some artists - poets - despise reading their works to audiences or in schools. I don't and here's why. Every now and again - each time, hopefully - it becomes crystal clear why one does what one does in terms of work in schools. Today I performed at two theatres in two schools. One high school had approximately 2,500 pupils, a big school in any country. I did a forty minute reading to about four hundred pupils in the schools theatre that would be the pride of any city. The technical sound is pitch perfect At Lord Beaverbrook High. This means that each nuance, each note inside a note, that urges from my mouth is picked up and projected with care to each member of the audience. It was time to begin my reading. It is important to set the tone. I set mine by saying “. It is really an honour to be here. It’s my first time in America”. Read more [...]