Patience Agbabi at Poetry on the Water

Poetry on the Water, Greenwich Yacht Club, Friday 4 May, 7pm.  Patience Agbabi our star guest. One of London’s best-kept-secret venues - the river on all four sides.  Sit with a drink, see the evening darken and the occasional barge pass. 

 

I’m slim as a silver stiletto, lit

by a fat, waxing moon and a seance

of candles dipped in oil of frankincense.

That’s the beginning of ‘Transformatrix’, last poem in Agbabi’s eponymous collection.  A dangerous sex session with the Muse, a sonnet as sharp on stage as on the page.  Almost a manifesto. Agbabi is a rarity - a poet and sonnet obsessive who is also a performer. I don’t just mean she reads well, she’s a professional. She blends traditional forms and subjects with new ones, from rap to… the problem page (her last book, Bloodshot Monochrome, has a set of prose sonnets: distressed famous sonnet-writers each get 8 lines to ask for 6-line advice from an agony aunt). The result is poems that are funny and/or fierce, zinging with energy. 

In Greenwich Agbabi will read, at least in part, from The Canterbury Tales Revisited, her new project:

Roger on the mike

host, take a hike

bards, on yer bike…

Her agent says: “Roger of Ware meets the Reveller; The Wife of Bafa meets husband number five; the contract killer meets his match. This is contemporary Chaucer: gritty, funny, upbeat, below-the-belt. But who tells the best tale? You decide…”

The Wife of Bath has already appeared in Transformatrix as Mrs Alice Ebi Bafa, a Nigerian trader:

My father had four wives

so I’ve had five husbands.

I cast a spell with my gap-toothed smile

and my bottom power. 

Three were good and two were bad.

Agbabi has written a bit about the Canterbury Tales project on her blog.  I think the Greenwich event may be the first time she’s trying the new tales out on an audience.  That will add to the excitement…  What’s more, my poachers’/poets’ diary says there will be “a fat, waxing moon” on 4 May - only two days short of full.  So come to Greenwich Yacht Club, watch the sun set behind the river and the moon rise, and enjoy Patience Agbabi’s seance. 

Transformatrix and Bloodshot Monochrome are published by Canongate.  There’s a good Agbabi interview (with Roddy Lumsden) at booksfromscotland.