[Reader-list] Spoken Word at British Council, Delhi

[Vivek Narayanan]

British Council invites you to a Spoken Word Performance
By John Hegley and Anjum Hasan
7 pm on Tuesday, 20th February 2007
 
at the British Council
17, Kasturba Gandhi Marg
New Delhi 110 001
 
The performance will be followed by a reception
 
There is strict security at the British Council.  To add your name to the Guest List, you can do one of three things, before 3 pm tomorrow:
1) Contact Shubha Patvardhan at 41497322
2)Email Shubha Patvardhan at Shubha.Patvardhan at in.britishcouncil.org
3) Send an SMS with your name, asking to be added to the guest list, to my number: 98109 36654

Like a kind of twenty-first century Ogden Nash, John Hegley’s reputation is as an endlessly inventive comic poet, always ready with teasing, quirky wordplay and rhymes, delightful for adults and children alike.  But Hegley exceeds Nash in many ways: his poems are often not laugh-out-loud funny, but deeper, subtle and tinged with the sadness and surprise of everyday life; on stage, the poems are interwoven with storytelling and song.  For many years Hegley worked as a bus conductor, a social security clerk and a nurse in a mental hospital.  Now he is one of Britain’s top performers, and the author of nine books of poetry / prose / lyrics / drawings and one mug.

Anjum Hasan’s poems seek real beauty in the ordinary, the insignificant, the half-remembered.  Often set in small towns like Shillong (where she was born and grew up) with their cast of longing dreamers, drifters and has-beens, they search for the link between landscape and emotion.  In performance, she recites from memory in a sharp and haunting style.  Hasan’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Poetry from Asia and the Middle East; her first collection, Street on the Hill, was released last year by Sahitya Akademi.