Grayson Perry, Lunch with Poets and Poetry For Lunch

Poetry For Lunch is a great lunchtime event hosted by Jan Watts (former Birmingham Laureate) last week the Worcester Stanza Group took over for the whole session, thanks to Claire Walker for organising this event, which is usually 30 minutes but was 45 minutes for us.

We made a whole morning of it. The Grayson Perry tapestries are on show at the Museum & Art Gallery until the 11th May.

We hit the gallery first, it was amazing, if you get a chance to see it, do. Hard hitting but also aspects we would all recognise from our lives – across a broad range of ages. I am in awe of the work that went into these tapestries. I also (being a writer) loved the use of text in them. The story they told. Photography is not allowed so we went to buy postcards from the gift shop. The colours were not as vivid as the real thing, and buying the whole collection was nearly £7 so after a little deliberation, I bought the catalogue for £14.99 – a treat!

It is really good, documents all the lead up to the work, I will be using it to write new material.

We had lunch at the gallery and then went onto the library to perform in the amphitheatre. It was great performing alongside fellow Stanza members and well worth taking a day off work. A pity it rained – but we carried on!

Towards the end of the session we met a wonderful young performance poet Damani TruStar Dennisur, who was Birmingham’s Young Poet Laureate the same year as Jan Watts. (2012), he had the final slot – and boy, am I glad we didn’t have to follow him! Blew me out of the water. WOW! A name to look out for. He looks like he’s dancing towards Jan in these photos.

Bernard Davis photographs many of the events in Birmingham and kindly came and took fabulous shots of the Stanza group – which does include men and a few more members – obviously not everyone is free to perform in the middle of the day!

STANZA: – Kathy Gee, Ruth Stacey, Claire Walker, Maggie Doyle, Myfanwy Fox, Nina Lewis & Amanda Bonnick with Damani TruStar Dennisur & Jan Watts.