022 Joelle Taylor: Social Surrealism
In this episode, we chat to author, performer and poet Joelle Taylor. We speak about the process of translating page to stage and the juxtaposition of social realism with surreal imagery in the articulation of complex tensions around class, gender and sexuality. We discuss the rebel butch dyke community of the 80s and 90s, the queer club as a place of resistance and the destruction of these spaces by gentrification. We talk about poetry as grieving ritual and the necessity of reclaiming allyship and communality within the LGBTQIA+ community (and beyond) in an age of division and toxic internet culture. We speak about the body as a site of metamorphosis and the relationship between language and flesh. Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+nto won the T.S Eliot Prize in 2021, The Polari Prize in 2022 and was named by The Telegraph, the New Statesman, The White Review & Times Literary Supplement as one of the best poetry books of 2021, as well as DIVA magazine’s Book of the Month, and awarded 5 stars by the Morning Star. She has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre, a Fellowship of the RSA, and her poem Valentine was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. She is a co-curator and host of Out- Spoken Live, the UK’s premier poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She is the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press 2020-2022. References: The Night Alphabet (forthcoming from Riverrun Books) by Joelle Taylor C+nto and Othered Poems (2021) by Joelle Taylor Songs My Enemy Taught me (2017) by Joelle Taylor The Woman Who Was Not There (2014) by Joelle Taylor Ska Tissue (2014) by Joelle Taylor