No holds barred as performance poet Joy France fights her corner in 'battle rap'
She started out by making a nervous debut a number of years ago on the open-mic stage at Write Out Loud Wigan. After establishing a reputation as a warm and popular performance poet, she appeared in Nationwide TV adverts and on building society posters as well. Now Joy France has shown she doesn’t give a stuff about stereotypes by throwing herself into the in-your-face performance genre of ‘battle rap’. In doing so she has att...
News and Opinion
The poet laureate Simon Armitage is next month publishing a new collection of poems focused on Marsden in West Yorkshire – the Pennine village where h...
18th Feb 2020 5:49 pm
Free Verse, the poetry book and magazine fair, returns on Saturday 22 February, and to its traditional location in London’s Conway Hall. The book fair...
16th Feb 2020 11:22 pm
Ben Ray, pictured, and Cheltenham poetry festival founder Anna Saunders will be judging entries for the festival’s £200 Wild! Poem competition. Entrie...
31st Jan 2020 2:30 am
Wigan performance poet and BBC New Voices winner Louise Fazackerley has broken new ground with her poetry collection The Lolitas. Its subject matter i...
16th Feb 2020 10:51 am
The deadline is 29 February to enter the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, to have a poetry collection published by Indigo Dreams. There are two wi...
16th Feb 2020 11:21 pm
This week’s poem is one of my favourites and I can’t explain why in the 15 years I’ve been writing this column I’ve neglected until now to share it wi...
18th Feb 2020 12:00 am
Despite what it says on the back cover, prose poetry is hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary writing. As the editors point out in their helpful ...
18th Feb 2020 10:01 pm
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