Hammer & Tongue Slam featuring Keith Jarett with support from Aryn Clarke

Order tickets via Eventbrite: http://htcfebruary14.eventbrite.com/?aff=efbevent
Time for the next open round of the Cambridge Hammer & Tongue 2013-14 season… Spoken word artistry and competitive mayhem. What more could you want?

This is your chance to become part of the spoken word slam brilliance that has graced this here fair city since 2009, in the warm and wonderful surroundings of fabulous venue The Fountain. Sign up as one of the eight to compete for a place in the Regional Final next September, become a judge, or just dive in and soak up the atmosphere and talent on display. And some great beer.

Tickets are a silly £5 full price/ £3.50 concessions/ £2 for slammers early bird (from now until 10 days before the event unless the batch (approx. half the advance tickets available) sell out)/ £6/ £4.50/ £2.50 otherwise in advance and a still frankly ludicrous £7.50/ £6/ £3 on the door. Doors are at 7:30pm; kick-off at 8pm. There’s also a bar upstairs… 😀 (Please note that “The Loft” part of The Fountain is, unfortunately, not currently accessible to wheelchair users – please contact us for further details.)

Commonly mistaken for a jazz pianist, Keith Jarrett balances between performance poet, short story writer, aspiring novelist and teacher, among other things…

He lives and works in London, where he is still growing up. Performance poet and fiction writer, he is working on his first novel – partly in verse – which seems to be about a boy with a God complex on the run from the influence of a Pentecostal church.

Keith studied Spanish at UCL, worked briefly in publishing and then took an MA in Creative Writing in 2007, at Birkbeck, London. Since graduation he has written for various publications, including The Mechanics’ Institute Review 5, Tell Tales Vol. IV, Pulp Net and, most recently, Boys and Girls.

He has written poetry in both English and Spanish – a language he became fluent in whilst living in the Caribbean – and is a former London and UK Poetry Slam! Champion.

Performances of both short stories and poetry have included: RADA, Soho Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, the Big Chill Festival, Warsaw’s Spoke’n’Word Festival, and the 2010 World Cup Poetry Slam in Bobigny, Paris.

Keith has set up poetry workshops for schools and taught Spanish at Primary level (KS2). He is one of six Spoken Word Educator trainees teaching at a secondary school in East London and studying at Goldsmiths; the project is the first of its kind in Europe.

To find out more, visit http://zoneonetosix.blogspot.co.uk/

And he’ll be supported by Aryn Clark, who writes intense and personal poetry, striving to combine visceral energy with emotional authenticity.

Welsh-born, Colchester-based Aryn won the April 2013 slam with his deceptively gentle voice and words building to a terrifyingly vitriolic crescendo. http://www.skopt.co.uk/aryn-clark/

Hosted by Fay Roberts, a Cambridge-based poet, musician, and unrepentant geek.

Fancy Slamming?

The rules for H&T slams are as follows:

Slammers are chosen at random from the sign-up list to perform – spoken word only, no music, no props. Each competitor has 3 minutes from the time they start talking on the mic. After 30 seconds’ grace period, they start losing points (1 point for every 10 seconds!). At the end, they’re given points out of 10 by 5 judges chosen from the audience, while the top and bottom scores are removed to ensure fairness. The slammer gets a score out of 30, and the competition moves on.

The winner of that evening’s competition goes through to the Regional Final (the Cambridge one tends to be held in September), and the winner (and runner-up) of the Regional Final goes through to the National Final. The winner of the National Final gets crowned H&T National Slam Champion and can then go on to compete in things like the Radio 4 slam championships, the international slam championships, etc.

Aspirant competitors can sign up either by rocking up as doors open on the night (typically 7:30pm for an 8pm start) or by booking slam tickets in advance online. You can “express an interest” by emailing your name in advance, but that only gets you on the reserve list until you pay on the door.

There are no limitations on style of poetry – a typical slam will see sonnets, blank verse, hip-hop, rhyming iambic pentametric couplets and more all cross the stage – and we’ve seen winners who’ve read their poems out from the written version (paper, kindle, phone, beermat) so, while there are advantages to learning your pieces off by heart, it’s not a requirement!

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