LifeJacket

New year, new voices.

This week's episode of LifeJacket features young poets from ArtfulScribe's Wessex Schools annual poetry slam, radiant young writers expressing themselves in lyrical slam poetics, surprising allegories, daftly poignant soliloquies and moving anecdotes.

You’ll hear poems from the 2024 cohort, students of Applemore College, New Forest Academy, Hounsdown School and The Romsey School.

LifeJacket, a literary podcast and buoyancy aid, produced by ArtfulScribe, available to stream on all platforms, with episodes released every other week. Follow the link in the ArtfulScribe bio or on the website at artfulscribe.co.uk to...

How is our lifejacket holding up? From what crude materials did I compose its sleeveless visage? Through life’s shrapnel and stray pebbles, brackish currents and brutal rapids, it has seen better days. A crude yet crafted thing. The poem is such a thing, too. Both a crude, yet crafted thing. The poem, a composite of those simple stray truths and experiences, yet honed and crafted into a structure, either recognisable, like a jacket, or disparate.

Featuring poems from Jayne Ede, The Village Boy, Syd Meats and J Pyrite.

LifeJacket, a literary podcast and buoyancy ai...

This episode of LifeJacket concerns the desires of poets, clearly catalysed by experiences and lyrical dreams. We’ll hear from Harley Truslove as they navigate their intimate relationship with the moon, as all poets are wont. Claire Griffin stokes the fire one feels in the gut when they are homeward bound. And Claire Hillier interrogates the visages and visions of a woman burned to the ground, to rise from the ashes anew, ablaze with renewed possibilities.

These performances are all scored by the Tongue Fu band, led by Chris Redmond, recorded at the showcase celebration of ArtfulScribe’s Ho...

Episode 4: Relearning My Name

The name is the story. In this LifeJacket special, two young writers navigate systemic and social issues in an expression of solidarity, hope and future-making.

Relearning My Name is an audio docu-drama which combines dramatic monologue with real interview extracts to show the racial prejudices faced by students of South Asian descent in the UK school system.

Written and Directed by Batool Zaidi & Cassie Wicks.

Mix and Mastered by Andy Halliday.

Originally commissioned by BBC Arts, executive produced by Jeremy Routledge at Calling the Shots.<...

The writer sometimes doubles as a psychogeographer, imbuing place with human behaviour, nature and emotion - or the reverse, imbuing the human with the elements of a place. This week’s episode of LifeJacket plays two pieces from Angela Chicken and Issa Loyaan Farrah-Kelly, and strafes processes/practices such as ‘inscaping’, to borrow the term from Gerard Manley Hopkins and ‘zoning’ from Wanda Coleman, with some Ezra Pound and Catherine Liu concepts sprinkled in there for good measure.

LifeJacket, a literary podcast and buoyancy aid, produced by ArtfulScribe, available to stream on all platforms, with episodes released every othe...

Poets and writers often find themselves navigating the perimeter. You face the physical perimeter of a line or paragraph end. You skirt the boundary of the idea trying to find the right way in. Pause at the perimeter of your drift, feel the ebb of the moment, seize a gap in your day and examine what happens inside the lines with poems by Liz Amos, Craig Chalmers and Jo Fisher in this week’s LifeJacket.

You can follow Liz Amos' work at https://liz-amos.com/

Craig Chalmers is a regular performer at Hampshire & Dorset open mi...

As we wade in the waters, we find ourselves stepping across time - the past, present and future flows through language. A poem from further up the river remains in these currents and in our listening, remakes our understanding of language, ourselves, time.

In this episode of LifeJacket, we hear the poems of Concha Méndez, whose poems, in the words of poet and translator Harriett Truscott, shift from vibrant statements of desire and possibility, through grief at the loss of her first child and her country, to an expression of the role of the poet as t...