Open Call: Poetry School Commission – The Verve Performance Lecture

Poetry School are searching for an established/mid-career poet to create a new Performance Lecture at Verve Poetry Festival in Birmingham in February 2025.

The featured poet will work with Poetry School to create a new Performance Lecture – a vibrant, innovative, cutting-edge, and thought-provoking piece of teaching-as-performance, fusing academic discourse with poetry and spoken word on a subject of their choosing.

Key Outputs

– A performance-lecture of 50 minutes.
– Delivery of the performance-lecture at Verve Festival in February 2025.

Timeline

– Deadline for applications: Monday 28 October.
– Poet contracted by: Friday 15 November.
– December 2024 – February 2025: work on performance lecture, with regular check-ins with Head of Programmes and Artistic Director.
– February 2025 – Perform lecture at Verve Festival of Poetry & Spoken Word.

Eligibility

– An established track record of magazine publication and/or competition success.
– At least one full collection of poetry published, or to be published by 2026.
– Poetry School staff may not apply.

Remuneration

– The poet will be paid £500 for the preparation of the Performance Lecture, and an additional £500 for the performance at Verve Festival.

To Apply

Please send the below to [email protected]:
– A 250-word proposal outlining the direction of your thoughts and ideas for the Performance Lecture, why these are important topics for you personally and their wider importance to the contemporary poetry landscape.
– Up to 250 words explaining why you would be ideal for this opportunity and how it will help your creative practice.
– 3 poems.
– Your Writer CV.

This could be sent either as a Word Doc or in video form, via WeTransfer. Please entitle your document ‘Application for Verve Performance Lecture:’

For inspiration and some examples of what shape this might take, please see the impressive work of our previous Performance Lecturers below:

Holly Pester (A Mock-Epic of Cafés)

In this year’s Poetry Performance Lecture, we join Holly Pester in an innovative exploration of cafés; their utopian promise and their clinking mundanity. This new performance piece will enact a mock-epic sequence of poems – mock in tone, with Holly cast as a parodic heroine, and mocking also in form, where any heroic narrative trajectory of the poems will repeatedly end in quotidian cafés – and work to situate the café as both a conceptual space and a motif to talk about hope, the future, and a life in art. 

Why cafés? The benign terrestrial high street destination of the café is an exemplary time-place, where modes of life and technologies of work are writ large against the age of the planet and capitalism; in contemporary cafés, we see a mortification of work and leisure in the realm of the social. Cafés form a kind of liminal, 3rd space, between work & home, full of aural disturbance and intrusions from other voices, much like poetry itself.

The café is also an important site for writers and so, along the way, we’ll touch on the work of some historical café authors, alongside seeing new poetic work from Holly herself. We’ll learn from Walter Benjamin’s theories of the Paris Arcades (the ‘dream-houses of the collective’) and Baudelaire’s account of ‘all of history and all of mythology put into service of gluttony’ at the new café.

So, join us for this new mock-epic performance, as we examine the crisis of Modernity and explore the café as a unique space for writers, poems, and art with Holly’s lecturer-character, locked in a room, with customers and coffee cups.

Nick Makoha Performance Lecture

What do you know about Basquiat, Icarus and the 1976 Entebbe hijacking? 

In this year’s Performance Lecture, Nick Makoha fuses these seemingly disparate sources and events into poems in a new piece based around his recent work A Low-Pressure System, which won the Ivan Juritz Prize. He brings Basquiat and Icarus back to life in dream-like dialogues whilst gradually, kaleidoscopically, piecing together these stories’ disconnected frames, paralleled against moments from his own life – including fleeing the Idi Amin regime in Uganda – and other historical events, all linked by the motif of flight. 

This new body of work (The New Carthaginians), draws on elements of Basquiat’s iconography and Icarus’s mythology to recast a nonlinear dramatic retelling of the Entebbe hijacking’s ‘Operation Thunderbolt’. These elements work to create a new myth, a new codex – echoing Basquiat’s fragmentary visual sampling as a means to decode the symbolic markers of black Otherness.Join Nick as he explores notions of liminality through airport terminals and poems of the immigrant experience, alongside cultural works, resulting in poems that are not conventionally ekphrastic – their purpose is not to offer straightforward descriptions or narrativisation of the canvasses, but instead offer a slant response to Basquiat’s artworks, like a Rorschach stain, revealing the previously hidden currents of a psyche.

Stephanie Sy-Quia Performance Lecture

In this year’s Performance Lecture, Stephanie Sy-Quia will use poetry to think through mixed race identity, female embodiment, and how ‘structures of faith’ abide in contemporary life, exploring nation states, heteronormative family ideals, and museums as shrines to colonialism. Through a diverse range of poetic and cultural touchpoints – including George Herbert’s metaphysical work The Temple, John Donne’s love poetry, Ariana Grande’s ‘God is a Woman’, and her own recent collection Amnion – Stephanie will explore how exiled texts and the fractured anecdotal histories of mixed-race families can subvert conventional ideologies, asking what do we enshrine and how do these practices ‘other’ those outside of these traditional structures?

Yomi Ṣode Performance Lecture

Acts of violence permeate our culture, existing on the lower frequencies of our awareness as micro-aggressions and micro-linguistic forms of social control. In this year’s Verve Performance Lecture, poet Yomi Sode explores a new response to the unconscious and unintentional (yet profoundly insidious) biases of our culture, drawing inspiration from art history (particularly the Mannerist period and, especially, Caravaggio), and how iconicity – conveying a feeling, narrative or idea in the stillness of a visual image or sign – can be better utilised to understand imbalances of power, and tell more compelling stories about them.

Exploring ideas such as ekphrasis, iconography, permission, and freedom of interpretation, Yomi will ask what poetry can mean in an age where social media affords poets the opportunity to collect and collate visual material, symbols, and signs like never before?

Anthony Anaxagorou Performance Lecture

In this debut Performance Lecture, poet Anthony Anaxagorou will deconstruct, using a variety of artistic and academic modes, some of the ways ‘performance poetry’ has been defined in both traditional and contemporary periods. He will ask what makes the performance of a poem distinct from its reading, and whether there is perhaps something more insidious behind such terminologies that denote race, class, and otherness. Referencing the work of John Cage, Saul Williams, Audre Lorde, Kate Tempest, Adrian Mitchell, and many more, this walk will set out to unpack the bulging suitcase of poetic performance and ask, to what extent, we are all, as writers and readers, participating in a kind of mass social, affective performance.