Blackdrop poets Coming to Dublin

dublin | arts and media | event notice Sunday June 07, 2009 22:51 by Sarah Lundberg - Seven Towers Agency info at seventowers dot ie

Performance by Michael McKimm, Jonathon Morley, Antony Owen, Raven, Paul Casey, Billy Ramsell and Jen Matthews

At Cassidys Bar, Westmoreland St, Dublin 2 7.30pm 23rd June

Blackdrop is a lively and entertaining group of performing poets of Irish and African descent, based in the UK. Their work is challenging, humorous, revealing, socially observant and human. In September they presented, at the mini-Momentum Theatre Festival in Nottingham, working with Dublin based Raven ... (more)“Irish Roots” -- a spoken-word performance combining poetry and theatre, examining the intersection of their Irish and African heritage; it introduced the audience to thought-provoking experiences and insights from a unique aspect of both the Irish and African diasporas. Now they are bringing their magic to Dublin and will perform with Raven and Paul Casey in Cassidy’s of Westmoreland St, Dublin 2 Bios: Michael McKimm was born in Belfast in 1983 and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. He lives in London, where he works for the Geological Society Library. His poetry is widely published, most recently in Dossier Journal (New York), Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, The Warwick Review and The Wolf. Still This Need, his first full-length collection, was published by Heaventree in 2009. From the wide skies of his native Antrim glens to the secret damp corners of urban England, McKimm’s richly musical verse evokes a haunting landscape against which the intricacies of memory, myth, history and love begin to unfold. “McKimm’s poems get under your skin with their clear, emphatic rhythms and their exploratory soundings of adopted territories as well as personal and public histories and homelands” – Peter Carpenter. Eric Gregory Award winner Jonathan Morley’s debut collection, Backra Man, is available from The Heaventree Press. He is currently editing Derek Walcott’s Collected Early Poetry. His essays have been published in the Oxford Companion to Black British History, Wasafiri and The Warwick Review, while poems appear in Horizon, The Wolf, The Allotment: New Lyric Poetry, edited by Andy Brown (Stride, 2006) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, edited by James Byrne and Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe, 2009). Protean and ebullient, this debut ranges confidently “from the delightfully and deliberately graceless to the coolly satisfying, taking in some streetwise dialect along the way” (Shearsman magazine). “An extraordinary, powerful set of poems, with flashes of brilliance and disturbing, dark currents of perverse and righteous emotions.” ― David Dabydeen Antony Owen is from Coventry, England and is the Commercial Manager for Coventry Rugby Club. His first collection, My Father’s Eyes Were Blue, was published by Heaventree in 2009. His uncompromising sexual and political content has led to him being banned from most US poem-ranker websites, but the shock tactics are deepened and made significant by his fluency with complex, finely wrought images and by the sense of a necessary bleakness, reminiscent of the Mersey Beat poets and their French forebears. Raven hails from San Francisco. A mesmeric live poet at the very top of his game who has shared the stage with the very best, including American poet Saul Williams, the world’s premier live literature and spoken word artist. Raven is a native Californian and perfected his skill at the seminal Sacred Grounds Poetry, San Francisco immediately prior to relocating to Dublin in May 2005. In Dublin he runs Rá, Ireland’s premier performance poetry event, and his work was published in the recent Seven Towers anthology Census. Paul Casey was born in Cork, Ireland in 1968. He began writing poetry in 1992 and has been reading since 2003 at numerous venues and festivals. Between Ireland, South Africa and other countries he has worked largely in film, multimedia and teaching. He lectured in scriptwriting at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, where he convened the Eastern Cape poetry competition. He is the founder and organiser of the weekly Ó Bhéal poetry event in Cork where he now lives. Since his return to Ireland in 2005, Paul's work has begun to appear in Irish journals and a chapbook of his longer poems, It's Not all Bad, was published and launched by Heaventree Press, at the Coventry Literature Festival in May 2009. He is working towards his first full collection.