Truth with Vanessa Kisuule

Sounds that move A skylock. Singing in spring, a speech that inspires you to act, a voice that reminds you of home. Words and performance have been vital lifelines throughout my life. And in this podcast series, I'm exploring how language and speech have shaped all of our lives, our work, our identities. Words, English words, but full of echoes, memories.

So I'm diving into the British Library Sound Archive, the nation's largest collection of almost 6.5 million recordings that span the whole history of recorded sound. I'm in here with all of this and... In this series, I'll be sharing some of my favourite recordings with you and some rather special wordsmiths. I'm Lem Susai. Welcome to All About Sound from the British Library. We the new poems, we carry no roses, no snow, or rhymes of rhetoric play. You know, we are very curious, nosy people.

I think by nature. We buy poetry books, you know, we buy literature in general because we want a glimpse into people's minds and we want the the messy stuff, the dirty stuff, the transgressive stuff. We want to feel like we've gone somewhere we haven't already been. You must learn to run.

First and then walk. That means that we have to go places that we didn't necessarily plan to. If you don't deal with the things you're internally dealing with, it will come out in other ways. It will come out in the way you treat it. Why is poetry such a powerful lens for exploring truth? From personal truths to shedding light on topics society would rather overlook, performed poetry in particular, has a special ability to

Express the raw messiness of life in incredible shorthand. American writer and activist Audrey Lord once wrote, Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. But do these truths only really meet their final form as they are experienced alongside someone else?

And reader, performer, and spectator. Today I am excited to be exploring this idea with the help of the British Library Sound Archive and my special guest, writer and performer Vanessa Kisule. I'm chuffed a bit to see that you're here. It's really lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

You came down easy in the end. the righteous wrench of two ropes in a grande plie. Briefly you flew, Corpse screw then met the ground with the clang of toy guns, loose change, chains, a rain of cheers, standing ovation on the platform of your neck, punk ballet, act one. There is more to come. The clip we just heard was from your poem Hollow, which went viral in the moment when a statue of transatlantic slave trader Edward Colston was toppled and pushed into Bristol Harbour.

The people of the city reckoning with this symbol of its own troubled foundations during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Is your rightful home here in the pit of chaos with the rest of us? Take your twisted glory and feed it to the tadpoles. Kids will write raps to that syncopated slang. I think of you lying in the harbor with the horrors you hosted. There is no poem more succinct than that, but still you are permanent.

You end the poem noting of Colston's bronze. Colston, I can't get the sound of you from my head. Countless times I passed that plinth, its heavy threat of metal and marble. But as you landed a piece of you fell off, broke away, and inside nothing but air, this whole time you were hollow. How did it feel, Vanessa, to express that and make such an instant connection with people at that particular point? Six hundred thousand views on Twitter in three days.

A storm of digital attention from the world around this one poem, around that historical event. How did it feel to be at the heart of that? Ooh, I don't know about being at the heart of it. That sounds a bit disproportionate. Um I I I can I just share something with you just there. I know I'm asking you to speak. Um I spoke the other day to a guy called Tony Walsh who read a poem called This Is the Place when the Ben W bomb went off in Manchester.

Sometimes a poem can articulate how the masses feel. The amount of people that are on Twitter that have identified that poem as encapsulating the mood of the people at that time Justifies my point. And you were right at the heart of that. That's very kind, Lem. I'm just doing that classic bumbling British humility thing. Yes, I will concede to the fact that the poem definitely was part of this.

long brewing conversation and I think it's important to have the context that Bristol had been having this debate, this conversation about that statue and whether it belonged in the centre of the city for a long time before the statue then fell. But yeah, it was it was surreal. It was surreal because you never write a poem thinking that it will go viral. I mean certainly some people might attempt to create that moment, but it's a hard it's a hard thing to conjure deliberately.

I think the most moving thing for me is how teachers really grabbed it and decided that this was gonna be a resource they would use in the classrooms with their pupils. And there's many things I love about that. poetry for these kids who are usually engaging with poetry of of, you know, long dead writers are suddenly reading a young, relatively young poet who wrote about something that happened in their lifetime in immediate recollection.

I've written it in a register that you know, I intended for it to be accessible. I intended it to be something that people that maybe don't read poems or don't engage with poetry often might be able to grab onto. So for that to be something that uh who knows how many kids at this point have read, engaged with, and not just academically or underlining when I used assonance or alliteration or any of these dry exercises, but could really feel the immediacy and the rawness of it.

That to me is really exciting because I hope kids are grabbing that and running with it and saying, you know what, I can also respond in this way. I can also have my say about what's going on around me through this medium.

People who perhaps haven't met your work before, I want to properly introduce you because I haven't done that yet. Go ahead. At the time of Hollow you were Poet Laureate of Bristol twenty eighteen to two thousand and twenty. You've also been the official poet of Glastonbury Festival. Uh you've published two collections performed across the world, won more than ten titles as a slam poet, worked as a broadcaster.

uh recently presenting a brilliant series on BBC Radio 4 and I know you're working on a novel and a collection of essays too. How do you define yourself like today, right now? Writer and performer, because that to me is the most capacious way

to describe all the many things I've done over my career. Honestly the the grab bag of things that I've done, often just to make ends meet, but also because I'm curious and sometimes people will say, Oh, do you want to come and write a poem about this random niche topic or Would you like to come and perform in this boat for this very particular community and I say, sure, why not? And poetry has led me into some very interesting

random places and I'm so grateful and thankful for that. I don't want to uh I don't want to be constrained. I'd like to be anywhere where stories, good stories are being told. So, how this podcast works is that I've selected some pieces of audio from the British Library's Sound Archive to inspire our conversation. And the first truth I want to explore here is about putting yourself into the work.

This is a poet and educator, Indigo Williams, in performance and conversation with writer and performer Hannah Silver from the British Library in 2014. What kind of things do your do your students um write? Generally I encourage them to write things about themselves to tell their truth. which isn't always very easy. They they want to talk about anything but themselves. Like the organ, Sister Joyce was a difficult beauty.

A brash presence that had a grip in any room. She was the kind that made Sunday mornings gossip. Her five foot frame body thick as hard o'bread triggered brothers. Um but I what I in particular am interested in is helping them to develop emotional intelligence. So I encourage them to write their stories and to find connections between each other. And I think they've been taught, from my observation, they've been taught not to talk about difficult things. And the problem with that is

if you don't deal with the things you're internally dealing with, it will come out in other ways. It will come out in the way you treat people. It will come out that's why you we work with people and they just have an attitude problem or They're upset because they're not dealing with themselves, they're not sitting in themselves and asking themselves questions. She didn't look saved enough for the old saints who cut their eyes at her under their Sunday hat.

They took turns kneading into her with names, said she dressed like a confession, with every curve on her body. And here is a great opportunity to say, this is how you deal with it. This is a a a tool that you can use to cope, to to stay mentally healthy. But while their eyes were closed in service, she wooed them with a worship song. They were too busy singing to compare her skirt to the length of a hymn.

Vanessa, what did you think hearing that? Uh, Indigo Williams is very, very intelligent, wise. That was really beautiful to hear because again it reiterates what I was saying earlier about how brilliant a tool poetry is in the classroom. In any context where human beings are, but certainly when we're talking about young minds who are so porous and so ready and hungry to learn and what we're telling them at that juncture in their lives is crucial. And, you know, in a time where creativity

And all these ways for kids to express themselves freely is just being slashed and undermined and squashed. It's really great when you get to go into a room as a poet and say, you know what, this isn't about your grammar, this isn't about your spelling, this isn't about me giving you a stamp or a a green tick.

This is about you expressing the difficult things, like Indigo was saying. And I think another thing that is undersold but really crucial is you're not just teaching kids how to express, you're teaching them how to listen. So when they share their poetry at the end of a session or a workshop, it's about saying, you know what, this is as much about you being part of a canon. So you are a writer, but that also means being a reader. You are a performer, that also means being a listener.

they're one and the same. They are they are in symbiosis and I I love Watching pupils that have probably known each other for years, hearing each other sometimes as if for the first time. When you see poets perform live, is it important that it has an autobiographical element, that they are invested In the poem autobiographically, not necessarily overtly, but that they are in the poem uh autobiographically.

But of course you are because you wrote it right. I think that's unavoidable. And certainly this thing that spoken word performers, whatever you want to call them, performance poets get accused of of essentially writing indulgent diary entries and putting hokey rhymes on them and them calling them poems. You know, I'm I'm I'm putting all of that in bunny quotes. That's what a lot of people would accuse spoken web poets of doing. This idea that people that write poems about chaffinches or

observing people from the the side of the road as they drive by. The idea that these people aren't also writing autobiographically or that there isn't a well of self that they're drawing from, even if they are doing it in a slightly sideways or opaque way, is just really dumb to me. Like, did you or did you not write the poem? Were you not compelled in some way to express something

In a way that only you can. So I think every piece of art is autobiographical and some are just more they just wear that more overtly as you say than others. Thank you.

who people would not have thought of as an autobiographic poet, who I don't know whether it was before he passed on or after he passed on, released the birthday letters which people then suddenly said, Oh my gosh, that that is autobiographic, you know,'cause it was explicitly autobiographic. Right. Um but it's it's it's very gendered and racialized as well. I feel like there's an assumption that, you know, women can't help but to write all of these rambling confessional poems and you know

same for yeah the blacks and the gays to again be very flippant about it. But that is how Poetry from people like me is often discussed, often to try and undermine our craft and undermine the fact that actually we do consider the language as well as the subject and the content. So yeah, I I would just like to say that even the poets that seem to be, you know, very cool and objective and don't use the word I in their poem, you are still in your poem, bro. I can see you. You're there.

Myself, from the beginning, I've spoken my story. And in fact, poetry has helped me be able to call to account some of the people who I was writing about. You know, over the years, like from the age of You know, the the first gig in Moss Side in at eighteen years of age, I was telling stories about my story. and I was letting people know what had happened to me in the previous uh years and that has actually continued throughout my career over over 30 years. So

My version of the truth is important in my writing because it's only my version. Absolutely. Somebody else will have another version of me. And that's their truth. And and and that's all good as well. But but the poem is the place where I am Exposed to truth.

And that's not always complimentary. Right. You know, it's that the poem is the place that you can't hide where there is all light. Who's welcome then to say, there's one poem that I want to read to you which is like get down religion It wasn't by a black family actually it was by a uh And when you try to hide in a poem that you're writing, you can feel it, right? You can feel that you're not being You're not getting to the heart of the thing.

You're you're you're serving ego or you're writing something to win a slam or to be shortlisted for a prize. You're not but you're not getting to the to the thing. You can't fool a poem, you know. Absolutely not. You knock upon my door and open a drink to you. And this is a bad trip. Something about Armageddon and pigs possessed by devils flinging themselves from cliffs. Look back into my house and I may turn to salt.

Blackened horizons with itching locusts, whole pieces of earth slump, swallowed by the devil's breath, yea, as I walk through the valley of death. With the devil in the crick of my back, an avalanche of commands befalls me, and I whimper from the cross. Flipping it to the audience's perspective at the start of your twenty seventeen collection A Recipe for Sorcery Euro.

Please do not fool yourself to consume the inner workings of someone's mind is a form of cannibalism, a hunger both perverse and insatiable. If it's any consolation, you are not the only one with this affliction. Can you unpack that for me?

You know, we are very curious, nosy people, I think, by nature. That's a sweeping thing to say about seven billion people, but you know, this is why gossip pervades. We wanna know what's going on with people. So I guess What I was trying to get at was we buy poetry books, you know, we buy literature in general because we want we want a glimpse into people's minds and we want the the messy stuff, the dirty stuff, the transgressive stuff.

I think we feel dissatisfied really when we close a book and we didn't go to places thus far untraversed by ourselves. Do you know what I mean? We wanna feel like we've gone somewhere we haven't already been. Yeah. Which requires a lot for us as writers. That means that we have to go places That we didn't necessarily plan to um or feel ready to. But you know, you in the writing process you kinda go, whoop, you know, and then you you're in there and then it's up to you whether you're

To really commit to that. You actually give audiences permission to consume your work. Um it sounds like it it's almost a violent process. Oh yeah, sometimes. And I don't mean to do, you know, that cliche thing of like, oh you know, to to make off To suffer or that suffering is a requisite of making good art. But I think to be honest, in a world that's set up To make it easy to be dishonest, to dissociate, to disengage from the truth of who you are and and what would truly make your life.

Wonderful when you move away from that and you decide to make a life of art or of expression or of you know speaking truth to power. That can be hard and difficult and, you know, the path of most resistance. So by virtue of that it can it can get violent and um other people can really hold you

to task and and question you and shun you sometimes. You know, we live in a world where there are countries where there are serious consequences for writing down the truth as you see it. So yeah, absolutely violence can sometimes be a byproduct. In fact the poem that you became known to the world for, the introduction of to you to the world, is a poem which described a violent act. Absolutely. Which is what the statue represented, which was slavery. Yeah, yeah.

Poetry is applied with another layer when performed. In our next clip, from the same British Library collection, Black British Poets in Performance, we will hear from Anthony Joseph. Again, these recordings were made by poet Hannah Silva. I once read this essay by Sartre, John Paul Sartre, and he was saying that a lot of people assume or a lot of people think or believe that language is inside of us.

that we have all the language in our brain or in our or experience and we we possess language and then we bring it out. We take it out of us and we put it on the page or we speak it. He says that language is all around us. Language is above us. It's around. It's in the air. And we pluck it out of space and formulate. My brother Dennis became the father first last Friday. He called collect from five rivers, I wept a cold sweat, wet at the best news I'd heard all year.

Dennis laughed, I laughed, we laughed like children. On my bedroom wall hangs a time stained monochrome of finger sucking innocence. It even smells of 1970. Of toy trucks, of mud, of saliva, coconut oil, talcum powder, and now Dennis says write me. I say, send me some photographs. So that idea of language being outside. I guess is what I'm trying to get to, in the sense that in reading the poem,

you access a bigger pool of language. You access, you know, the collective language field, I guess. And then words suggest themselves to you. You know, I think writing it on the page is a very insular process, just reading it like that is very insular and you yeah, you you you you generate words that are in your vocabulary and in your space. But speaking it, reading it somehow connects you to other musical ideas.

Anthony Joseph on the act of sounding out poetry as a way of embodying it, this becoming part of the writing. Any reactions? sitting in my particular ethos of poetry and I really want to emphasize that this is this is me. I'm not trying to make any grand pronouncements about how others should write. But I will always lead from my vernacular. I sh I will always lead from how I speak.

and the liveness and the ephemerality of a moment and that's why I love performance. You can edit a poem tens or maybe even hundreds of times and you think, Okay, I think I'm eighty percent there, ninety percent there.

you think you've gone through and and gotten rid of any gnarly bits or things that don't work. And then the minute you say it aloud, not just by yourself in a room, because that's one thing and that can help. But when you say it in a room full of other people who are listening, Immediately something that you didn't pick up on in those hundred drafts, you say it out loud in that room and you go, That's not right.

Well that wasn't well actually there needs to be. And it's so immediate and clear. So these poems are just beautiful, fluid, messy, insucient things. The in the end, for me, the the thing in the book is kind of like the skeleton, you know. So people buy the skeleton of the poem. But if you if you want the real juzge, if you want the real experience, come see the poem being read.

You know, that's what I would say. Sorry, I got very goodness I'm almost out of my seat with passion. But yeah. I've got to say that this is very much of the now what you're talking about. That idea that of going on stage, reading a poem and editing it as it's happening and then trying it the next time and it just getting better and better. But the the performance as part of the editing process, that is something that is very particular of

uh writers in the performance space. Yeah. Much more so than it was in the eighties. Yeah. That's really powerful that that process happens, that you take your poem from this place where there's just you, the singular And you take it out, you give voice to it to an audience. Yeah. And the the thing that comes back to you

is an edited version of the poem. It's it's Absolutely. So the the performance is not the end of the poem. No. And you know, when you think about it, it makes sense because musicians are exactly the same.

They'll have the version of the song that they recorded, you know, the album version, and everyone's familiar with that. But you know, particularly if you're gonna have a career that spans decades, you have to keep letting the song or your body of Flex and move with your growth as an artist, with your audience.

Okay, let's play our next clip. Now this is from sound poet David J. Hello, David J, Vocal Pugilist. It's the pugilist. D to the A, V today, D to the J. Connected to the Medical Andrew DNA of Mrs. J J J. You you're just over as they say, you have an overactive brain. And I'm like, yeah, but if I was a scholar you would have given me an award. Don't be like that. And put us outside the classroom. And this is the thing with people who don't find a channel for their energy.

You know, that guy who overturns the table and throws the chair, I mean You talk to him, he's gonna be hard word, but once that Force is channeled. Oh man. it can work. I remember when the English teacher said, I'm trying to help you I'm like, No, man, I'm just English. I just want the words cause we got a battle at lunchtime, you know what I mean? So if you want to tell me who's this guy, William Blake. Yeah, I don't really read the poetry and stuff. Who's that? Thou for art. Thou for art.

Egg poet I see before me, if so make haste your departure, be gone my way with some for a bit life innocent just so I could murder one I bring death to you like Queen Margaret's coast upon a tardy cropped rabbit so curb your futilities will overthrow me an easy lies the head to track yeah that'll work. We can put that in. And that will help because you're thinking, No one does that and no one's doing it now but you

And my uncle said you must learn things or get into things that you and he would say you as a black person that's not supposed to know. And I'm like, why uncle? He said, look, when you're in these battles or whatever, he said, um, as soon as you're born. because we're talking from the oppressive right here as a black guy as soon as you're born You must learn to run first. And then walk.

David J! That was David J the Pugilist, recorded in 2016. David's a very different type of performer, isn't he? I do you know how many conversations I've had with various poets? You know, we all came up in that spoken word world and there was a time where David J. was on the scene, like just blowing everybody's minds. And we just we just like, oh David J man. Like the things that he was doing with sound, with his voice.

Ah, you know, people aren't doing that anymore. There's a new crop of poets that are doing exciting things and playing not just with telling stories but also like, you know, playing with actual vocals and sound. Um I know Hannah Silver does that amazingly, but you know, Jasmine Gardosi is doing really cool stuff with beatboxing and and poetry and but anyway. Rabbit hole, rabbit hole, rabbit hole. David J This is all about sound, it's all good. Yeah, David J. was j oh

Man, I miss David J. He writes poetry with text and sound and whilst the result is joyful, it's incredibly technical what he does. Absolutely. And you know, he he was very good at creating something that went down little slip roads in the most

disarming ways. So, you know, he would he would bring you in with the charm and, you know, you're really taken in by the dexterity of what he's doing with his voice and all of this stuff and he'll make you laugh. And then all of a sudden it will become very sinister.

and he'll, you know, sort of open the door a chink into this other more uh disturbing, unsettling notion of, you know, mental health and, you know, the the dark, dark places you can go in your mind and then he'll shut that door again and go somewhere else and His ability to do that at the the the switch of a moment was

Incredible, never gimmicky, just just very brilliant. Amongst the fun of it he talks about his style being linked to this idea. His uncle said, as we heard, as a black guy, as soon as you're born you have to learn to run for and then walk. That's an uncomfortable truth, isn't it? Absolutely. And I think I could feel that in his stylistics, this sense of uh the voices of society telling him to be a certain way or all of these restrictions and and social mores.

And him having a mind and a brain that was, you know, five, six step steps ahead of all this stuff. And essentially that battle, that constant battle, the din of it, the dissonance of it. Yeah, I really feel that. I really feel a man running.

whilst there's like four different weights on each of his limbs as he's trying to do so, you know? So w is it the responsibility of the artist, the writer, if they're going to speak of these monsters That they also need to somehow be able to look after their own selves if they're going to transport that message.

All of us can be consumed by the horror of what we're describing. So how do you look after yourself? I think it's very important to look very honestly at your ego. If you are the sort of person who feels very drawn to and excited by the idea of getting up on a stage. And making a bunch of people listen to you, you've probably got a sizable ego. I'm not a sociologist, you know, I can't say that unequivocally, but let's just go with that idea.

So you're already set up for A certain battle in terms of w or having to learn that This persona review on stage, and even if you are yourself, quote unquote, on stage, you are still a persona. You are a heightened version of yourself or a curated version of yourself. just having a healthy distinction between that and who you are, because I think that's what swallows people. Living a life in service to that stage life and then everything else.

that they do is essentially waiting in the wings until they can be on stage again. I'm very lucky in that I have the most supportive friends in the world, but they don't care. And by that I mean they're very proud of me and you know, if if I wanted them to be at an event they'd be there, you know, if I buy a book, they'll buy it. Whether they read it, I don't know and I don't again I don't really care. But like I have people in my life that love me.

For reasons other than because I I I do shiny things on stage, you know. And so I'm very aware that that is not the only thing I have to offer this planet. I love it. It's amazing. It's my life. Oh, I feel so lucky and grateful to do it. And yeah, it does, it does feed my ego to know that I'm a good performer and a good writer. But just that healthy distance of like, okay, that's that's not all.

As your work has gradually shifted to become less autobiographical, how do you choose the topics that you're going to approach? I always say to people in workshops'cause I think we have There's the things we want to talk about because we think those are zeitgeisty or they make us sound smart or there's sort of external reasons. To pick certain topics. And I always say don't go there. If your natural obsessions happen to fit into that.

Then great. But I always say lead with your obsessions. Like what are the things that just run laps around your brain all day, every day? Could you give me some examples of the areas where you've explored that? Right now I'm writing something about separating the art from the artist and the obsession I had with Michael Jackson as a child.

and as an adult reckoning with the person who you thought was the shiniest, most wonderful, amazing human being on the earth, potentially having done the worst thing a human being can do to another human being. And I think we're very poor at dealing with that, this notion that People are capable of good and terrible things simultaneously. We want to put people in either camp and then wash our hands of it, right? Which is how our whole prison system works. You lock up the baddies and you've

sorted out the badness somehow. Um and when you think when you speak of it in those terms, you can see how ridiculous that is that we would somehow address the issue of why people commit crime or abuse each other by just locking people away. But yeah, you know, that's something that I'm really interested in. This idea that, you know, we are capable of of wonderful and terrible things all of us, given certain circumstances.

And how we really grapple with that without reducing things to binaries and overly simplistic conclusions about how men behave, how women behave, how poor people behave, how rich people behave, whatever it might be.

Vanessa, I want to play you one final piece from the archive now, an excerpt from a poem by James Berry, recorded at the nineteen eighty-three Angels of Fire Poetry Festival at the Cockpit Theatre in Marlebone. This was digitized as part of the British Library's Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project. James was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. and wrote extensively around the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship.

of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society. He's a man I knew well and who saw me when I first came into poetry with Bogle Lovore in nineteen eighty eight. And he's passed now. I'm so pleased we're gonna hear this. The next poet who's going to read for us this evening, I think, is well known to all of you. He's a nomad in the city, I believe, and his name is James Berry. Please, James.

I'm gonna read your poem which it's only second time I'm reading it and uh it's still For me a new poem that I'm going through. important than nuclear threat is this new thing of bake breaking down barriers and people coming and learning to recognize other people and trying to reconcile a a truth of variety and diversity in the world. I call it New Reading Like Rebellion.

We the new poems, we carry no roses, no snow, or rhymes of rhetoric play, a desperate breath. Each is a time stillborn, echoing. We say that bright new barriers came drifting overseas into dream time and settled over boundaries where roots repeated, unsung, and branches have their brains. Struggle is what we carry. Deliveries of hot voices and arousal of own echoes meanings, like let my people go, let the offspring's happened innocence be right.

Mandingo faces, Congo faces, Yoruba, Ashanti, Dahomey kingdoms we show, How they walked with the new names of Mackay, Reed, Dubois, Mittelholzer, Bennett, Delissa, above memories of the beaded crown, And the golden stool, we say how these days some of the continentals move bulldozed, and sunlight shows the lovers fettered as outsiders on their own land's currency.

We say, in making disorder of the people, a state makes other ordered areas. In having harvests of happiness out of them, the state empties a people of their happiness. Archive papers too we are, you see. Inside stories that outside were demons. That was a reading by James Berry. I think the person who introduced him may have been Ruth Padell, uh may have been Fleur Adcock. James was there when I first started reading poetry in the mid nineteen eighties.

Shortly after that reading, he published a book called News for Babylon on Chateau and Windus and was the editor, introducing a whole set of Caribbean poets who are living here in England, Fred Daguire, who's now in Harvard, uh Valerie Bloom who's here in London, John Agar, Grace Nichols, Merle Collins, uh Gene Binterbrees. Those are poets from Jamaica, from uh Antigua, from uh Guyana, etc., who

Four fathers, four mothers of the poets who are now making a lot of noise on stage. I'm really pleased to have heard him. Vanessa, it has been fantastic exploring the archive with you. And what are you gonna be taking away from the recordings you've heard today? I just love remembering the company that I keep and this amazing, very lively.

ever evolving scene community that we're in. Yeah. And we we want it to keep growing and recruit as many people as possible. Join us, join us. So it's been lovely. It's been lovely. Thanks Vanessa. We say how everyday words confuse in attacks on companion citizens. Like the organ, Sister Joyce was a difficult beauty, a brush presence that had a grip in anything. It even smells.

Of 1970, of toy trucks of mud. Is that a a poet I see before me? If so make case your departure, be gone my way with some forever, but in it's interesting so I could murder one. I bring death to you like Queen Margaret's coast. But history is a sneaky mistress, moves like smoke. Colston, like saliva in a hungry mouth. This is your rightful home. Here in the pit of chaos with the rest of us. Take your twisted glory and feed it to the tadpoles.

If you'd like to dive into the British Library Archive, you can now listen to the recordings featured in this episode and thousands more at sounds.bl.com. Thanks again to Vanessa Kisoule. All About Sound has been a Pixie production for the British Library. From me, LemCay, thanks again.