POETRY… Well-versed
FROM THE WORDS OF AUDRE LORDE TO THE MODERN SONNETS STIRRING UP SOCIAL CHANGE, POETRY’S IMPACT IS UNDENIABLE. WELCOME TO IAMBIC PENTAMETER’S NEW FRONTIER
FOUR YEARS AGO, Instagram saved poetry. Or, if not saved, certainly gave it a boost, with the rise of poets such as Rupi Kaur, who now has over 4.5m followers on the platform. Poetry became cool and, more importantly, read.
Now, the poets on the scene are multi-hyphenates whose work doesn’t just stop at stanzas or social posts, but spans podcasts, visual art, photography, film and fashion. London-based artist Destiny Adeyemi is inspired by politics, everyday life and ‘the random bits people say in conversations’. Their 2020 poem Fat, Black & Sad, created in response to Boris Johnson’s anti-obesity campaign, was accompanied by a short film of them lying wedged between kitchen cabinets. Meanwhile, this summer, the artist, writer and former Barbican Young Poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley releases her debut collection Quiet. Playing with form and ideas of Black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, the poems are so compelling that you won’t be able to stop reading them.
Another name to watch out for is Eloghosa Osunde, also a novelist, visual artist and filmmaker. Her recently released debut novel Vagabonds! is set in her hometown of Lagos and focuses on urban decadence and Nigerian mythology. Osunde also directed a short film called Tatafo,
named after one of the main characters in the book. But it’s poetry that keeps inspiring her: ‘I think about what the language needs,’ she said. ‘And that’s something I learned from poetry.’ For more on the scene, seek out SPAM zine,
where the Glasgow-based author of the collection Hothouse,
Alice Hill-Woods, is poetry editor. Their mission? To ‘make poetry cool again’. We don’t need convincing…