Words and Voices 1 3 Spoken Worlds. The last in this year's series of Spoken Worlds went out on a high tonight with a guest poet, a luxury not normally indulged in, Ash Dickinson playing to a full house. It was a fitting climax to a year of hard work by organiser Gary Carr who has successfully moved venues during the year, losing few, and adding several to his core audience.
These are the unsung heroes of the regional poetry circuit, blagging rooms, providing PA systems, preparing, producing and distributing promotional material, and constantly having to nurture attendances, cosseting their existing audience, while winning new ones โ all on pretty much no money.
Gary opened proceedings by remembering the recently deceased poet Peter Reading who died on 17 th November. Reading was an English poet and the author of 26 collections of poetry, known for his choice of ugly subject matter, and use of classical metre. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry describes his verse as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical".
It was an inspired gesture by Gary to read three Reading compositions in tribute. Ash Dickinson himself was excellent.
He started by telling us that he was going to combine stand-up, theatre and rap mash-up as the thinking man's Axel Rose, and he was true to his word. The best performance poets transcend genres and are simply good in their own right, that is Dickinson's forte. Two poems, including Chiller Queen amused about the domestic fridge, and he railed about Facebook โ despite having no less than three Facebook pages himself!
