As part of the unit, use extracts from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2019) as the basis of a RUAE paper. It’s radical to offer spoken word poetry for a Heathrow promotional video (outside this particular collection) and state that We don’t all sound like Downton Abbey / Not all Northerners speak like Wayne Rooney and to actually tell the listener to teach your ears the different accents.

If I could, I would do nothing more than read Poor from start to finish with a Senior Phase class and allow Femi’s words to be absorbed and his messages to permeate. It’s likely that Femi and I might have passed each other on the street, sat next to each other on the bus.Though autobiographical anecdotes are threaded through the collection, the relationship of his work to his own life story is not straightforward. One of the most culturally arresting moments of this quite extraordinary year was the arrival on our screens of the BBC/HBO comedy-drama I May Destroy You. In a poem entitled “Survivor’s Guilt, or Anikulapo” he spells out the emotional toll taken by the deaths that were part of ordinary life for anyone who grew up on the estate: “My presence at funerals felt like bragging … I am a museum of all / The ghosts I could have been. That’s something I wanted to investigate: the impact of urban landscapes in impoverished public housing areas; how it shapes the way that people who live in these spaces see themselves and how the world sees them.

His two-year tenure as young people’s laureate coincided with one of London’s most horrifying urban design disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire.I feel like it was important to make this work, but henceforth I’m solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy,” he declaims, rising to his feet with a rhetorical flourish. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. This book flows from the fabric of boyhood to the politics and architecture of agony, from the material to the spiritual, always moving, always real. Even by using the word ‘poor,’ by emblazing it as the title of his book, Femi announces without apology the lived reality of poverty in the present, not in a Dickensian past.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. The book is more than a poetry collection: containing a selection of Femi’s striking original photography, it is an impeccably curated and often beautiful snapshot of lives lived on the North Peckham Estate. I didn’t have the best experience of school growing up, but there was still space for your imagination and your individualism to at least stretch its legs a little bit.Femi Caleb shines light on the darkness that speaks not only of Peckham, London, but internationally POOR lifestyle can be found in Brooklyn. Alternatively, implement the practical strategies offered by Alex Quigley in Closing the Reading Gap to help readers get to grips with reading social science texts. As artists, both Coel and Femi have both done something revolutionary, political and vital with their art form, foregrounding the lived inner-city experiences of black people in the UK today. In A Designer Talks of Home / A Resident Talks of Home, Femi overlays one viewpoint of Peckham over another, demonstrating the literal and figurative ways in which the poor have been silenced and buried, bulldozed to make space for market forces. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

In 2015 he won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam and performed at Tate Britain, and in 2017 he was included on the Dazed 100 list of the new generation shaping youth culture. Femi dedicates his poem “How to pronounce: Peckham” to Damilola Taylor, a name once known to all Londoners, and beyond, when he was killed at the painfully young age of ten. Both areas have been subject to gentrification; once abhorrent working-class no man’s land, now fashionable places to open a wine bar or restaurant for the middle-class people who have the capital to invest. If Peckham were to be remove from the content and put in Flatbush or Brownsville or Redhook or even Bedford-Stuyvesant the (lifestories) poems would speak truth to those communities.He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over. What a thing it was, to be nearly forty, having been an avid reader from childhood, and to finally find, for the first time, my home, a deprived council estate in inner-city southeast London, represented in poetry. For someone who loved Yeats and Pope and had discovered a reflection of his own experience in TS Eliot’s descriptions of Margate in The Waste Land, it was a bitter disappointment.