London Liming Spoken-word: Confessions of a Poetry Eater

It has been so long since I last heard spoken-word that, had it been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten it. But cardinal events are not to be forgotten; and one such was London Liming, 9th February, at the Rich Mix.
I believe we consume literature when we read it: we enact a process of digestion, taking something in, absorbing what we can, and hopefully retaining some part of it. Printed poetry enables us to return to a poem endlessly, and restart the process once more.
While the page is a morsel that feeds eternally, Spoken Word consumes itself as we consume it. It hangs in the air very briefly, before running into the past. It has been a week since I attended the London Liming Spoken Word event at Richmix, and I have no notes, no record, other than a few photos, of that day. I hope this article can serve to prove that something of that process of digestion still remains. I hope this article will encourage you to begin a similar process yourself.
My first memory of London Liming is of Deanna Rodgers, proposing poetry as an antidote to depression, alluding to its medicinal qualities in her SLAM poem. In this poem she approaches someone (a friend? a stranger? the audience?) with poetry in her hands, offering her redemptive words. Perhaps I remember this poem in particular because of the ‘Cradle to Grave’ installation by Pharmacopoeia, currently at the British Museum. On display is a lifetime of pills (over 14,000), woven into a plane of a fabric extending thirteen metres. Deanna’s words feel imprinted on this exhibition now.
James Messiah has imprinted his performance in a different way, emerging through the relived lure of his rhyming. His line “And as we run we share these thoughts, like intellectual astronauts” has resonance, particularly in this contemplation of the flight of spoken-word into the past. His lines continue to play around in my head and carry me back to his performance, back to his stage exuberance and his charm.
Dean Atta remains in the form of his poem that responds to the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence. The repeated refrain and title, ‘I Am Nobody’s Nigger’, rings out vigorously. Yet, it is not just repetition that allows this poem to linger. It is remarkably more powerful than Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Stephen Lawrence’. Atta’s stage poem endlessly plays out in my mind, overcoming Duffy’s page poem continuously, as an eternally affective work of spoken word.
I am still digesting the awesome power of Inua Ellams’ words. His images are hauntingly vivid: I see light streaming through a window, hitting a mirror, and ricocheting onto books and works of literature, coloured red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Literature as a prism, refracting and dispersing rays of visible light, intangible and beautiful, hanging in the air only briefly, before disappearing out of sight. His words have refracted and broken into this image, escaping themselves and affecting always with the relived power of spoken word.

Next London Liming event at Richmix, East London, Thursday 12th April; inc. John Hegley, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Roger Robinson, John Agard, Simon Mole; with music by James Ingham. Check out: http://ontilt.org/