Hi all! Quick post today sharing a new poem I wrote and performed earlier this year. As the Loud Poets sixth birthday show (!!) fell on Valentine’s Day, I decided to surprise my partner with this piece. It’s entitled “Holding” and was filmed live at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on 14th Feb. 2020. Enjoy!
Tyrone Lewis is hands down one of the hardest working people in the U.K. spoken word scene. For over a decade he's not only written and performed his own brilliant poetry, but also tirelessly supported others by running events including Boomerang Club and by filming events, poems, interviews, and documentaries through Process Productions. So many … Continue reading Interview with Process Productions
I'm delighted to share a project I've been developing with I Am Loud Productions for a while: online poetry workshops! Obviously given the circumstances with the pandemic, the majority of educational programming has had to adapt to digital contexts. We've embraced this challenge in part by rolling out a series of workshops for our supporters … Continue reading Free Workshop on Erasure Poetry!
Hello again! A very different post today from yesterday’s … During National Poetry Writing Month (#NaPoWriMo) in April I was working on a major arts funding application (should learn the outcome soon, so fingers crossed!). When it came time to write a poem one evening, the only language I had in my head was the … Continue reading New video: “This Poem Will Be Funded”
Hello all! Hope you're coping OK through this stressful time. Tomorrow (Saturday, 2nd May) evening I'm delighted to be performing in Quarantine Cabaret! This is a fantastic initiative showcasing Scottish musicians, poets, and comedians through live-streamed online gigs. They're streaming over Instagram Live every Saturday evening at 7:30pm GMT. Tomorrow I'll be performing some brand-new … Continue reading Live-streamed Gig Tomorrow! & #NaPoWriMo Loudcasts
Hello again everyone, Hope you’re keeping safe and healthy in these scary times. I’m writing today to share some brand new poetry! One of the ways I’ve been surviving this crisis is by creating new work. This April, the I Am Loud productions team are doing National Poetry Writing Month (#NaPoWriMo), in which people challenge … Continue reading New Poetry! NaPoWrimo & Return to Form
One of my hopes for the new year was to try out new ways of writing and performing, and the start of 2016 has happily involved just that: I've been composing and performing lots of collaborative poems! Before this year I'd never written collaboratively before. Writing poetry had always been an intensely solitary event for me, involving … Continue reading Writing Collaborative Performance Poems
My last post responded to the way media sources were misconstruing Sarah Palin's endorsement speech for Donald Trump as "slam poetry." I gave several reasons why I consider that use of that term to be inaccurate and rather rude, including that the use of 'slam poetry' as shorthand for rambling, incoherent utterances misrepresents a field of poetry … Continue reading Why ‘Slam Poetry’ Is Not a Genre
Now I'm back to the academic schedule, however, and delighted to announce that this October I'm beginning my PhD in English at the University of Strathclyde! I will be researching the way spoken word poetry is used in the U.K. for the expression of marginalised identities. I have many questions I'll be investigating, includin
A different kind of post on the website this week . . . I have a major announcement about my own creative work. As I wrote last week, performance poetry allows fantastic engagement with a live audience, but few tangible products for the audience to purchase after the show. The poet might perform a brilliant set, … Continue reading Launching my Kickstarter!
Katie Ailes 