Roundhouse Three Sixty Festival gets WILD
Family photo of Wild Thing and guests. From left to right, (top row) Avi, Lisa, Katie, Tara, Jess, Josiane, (bottom row) David, Gareth, Jennie and William.
April is national poetry writing month, we heard, and with spring peeling away the layers of winter, our poets are writing steadily once more. But it’s also Three Sixty Festival at Roundhouse, a month of events showcasing some of the finest artistic talent in the UK.
Wild Thing Poetry were delighted to join Transmission Roundhouse for an afternoon of live broadcasting, hosted by TR alumni and producer Katie Stokes, featuring poetry, podcasting and interviews with comedian Jack Rooke, photographer Myah Asha Jeffers, and Roundhouse Artistic Director and CEO Marcus Davey.
Bringing our Where’s Your Wild campaign to the Roundhouse cafe, we had a special hour of chat and performance from members of our collective Katie, Lisa, David, Jess, and special guests Josiane, Avi, William, Jennie and Gareth (new friends in our new and growing community). Hosted by yours truly and founder of the collective, Tara Brown, we talked about the urgency of poetry as a tool to re-engage with the natural world. And (we hope) our spellbound audience, in the cafe and online, felt this too.
when has nature struck you?
what is wildness to you?
But asking our favourite question
where is your wild?
had a surprising answer for many of us, and that answer was right here. There is a rich ecosystem to be found in the city, every tower block is creaking at the seams with human wildness, estates are populated with audacious magnolia, and the cracks and crevices are teeming with defiant moss, bugs, and wildlife of many different strains. I cycle through London to the sound of vibrant birdsong, small winged creatures that are more air and feathers than blood and bone, setting out the boundaries of their territory, raising their strident call against the traffic and furious haste of the city.
To paraphrase a paraphrase, we think Richard Powers once said: live where you live. A powerful thing we can each do as humans, is not to travel long miles to find ourselves remote, but to seek the wild at home. You don’t even need to get outside to find it: we have ants, spiders, flies, streaming in from the outdoors to remind us of our own animal spirit.
Or, of course, you can step outside. Our favourite stories of each others’ wilds are Jennie’s eight days in a bog, conjuring gruesome poetry that reminds us of the disconcerting in Nature, not just the pastoral and sublime, or Avi’s childhood escape from city smog to the clean mountain air.
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Roundhouse, or tuned in online. As ever, we’re busy writing, recording and planning our summer events and will be updating the website and socials with details in the coming weeks.
If you want to write more poetry this month, check out Katie’s daily prompts on instagram @thepoetryloungelondon. Wild Thing are planning to take their workshopping to the woods in June: if you want to join us, get in touch on insta @wildthingpoets or drop us an email wildthingpoetry@gmail.com
Front row at Roundhouse cafe.