Jubilee Weekend Day Two - Poetry

As well as the Jubilee, this weekend is also the annual Charles Causley festival in Launceston. The festival has been going for three years and attracts a wide variety of artists but always as poetry at its core.

The most well known name at this year's event is undoubtedly the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion who will be reading from his new book Silver later today. But yesterday saw a writing workshop and performance by Mark Grist, the former teacher who left the profession to become a battle rapper and performer. (If you want to know what battle rapping is, watch this video - warning, contains lots of swearing).


Mark's performance was of material that will form the basis of his show at this year's Edinburgh fringe, including a poem in praise of red heads and a poem using only one vowel - the letter E.




In addition to Mark, we had performances by two local spoken word artists. The first was Ben Haynes (right) whose work on Hamlet is brilliant. The second was Ricky Lovell, MC Tricky (left), whose work is mainly as a dubstep MC but who does a great job acapella as well. Many thanks to both of them.

Yesterday also saw the main town square street party moved to the town hall because of the weather. I don't think it suffered as a result and the town band entertained a huge crowd.

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