Torriano Meeting House

Poetry Art Politics Community 

Torriano Meeting House  is a user-funded grass-roots volunteer-run arts and community organisation in Kentish Town. We are best known for our poetry events but we have many other long running strands including storytelling for adults, writing and storytelling workshops, hosting local political campaigning groups, theatrical events, left wing folk club, and we very much support grass-roots creativity and social change.  

Torriano is a space for you to organise events and projects.

“What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated and studied too, right now.” – Rebecca Solnit

 

Please bring a mask to events.

If you would like to make a financial contribution, donate here:

Torriano Poetry 26th March

Taken with Lumia Selfie

Guest readers: Dominic Fisher and Kathy Pimlott

7.30pm £6/£5 according to pocket. Poets from the floor welcome.

For many years Dominic Fisher was an English language teacher before turning his full attention to poetry. He is a co-editor of Raceme magazine, and a member of poetry performance group the IsamBards. His poems have won competitions, been widely published, and sometimes broadcast. He lives in Bristol near the allotment he shares with sparrows and foxes, and his second collection, A Customised Selection of Fireworks, was published by Shoestring Press last May.

Kathy Pimlott’s collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press in spring 2022. She has two pamphlets with the Emma Press, Elastic Glue​, (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). Her poems have been published widely in magazines, including Magma, Mslexia, Rialto, The North, Poem, Finished Creatures and Under the Radar and in many anthologies Kathy lives in Seven Dials, Covent Garden, home of the broadsheet and the ballad.

ALSO ONLINE
Every Sunday at 6.30pm Joan Michelson is hosting an online Poetry in Cyberspace. All welcome to read or listen. Free.
Bring poems to read or just listen. Join us there:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3940991487?pwd=VXN0djNHU0F5M2pDK0dscXdRTkJwZz09
Meeting ID: 394 099 1487
Passcode: 8dFNdWq

Calling poets and artists

– knit – note – knot – quote – weave – word – sew – song – thread – thought – text – textile – TEXTUS –

TEXTUS: An exhibition this summer at the Torriano Meeting House, Kentish Town

TEXTUS: An exhibition exploring the entangled relationship between text and textile

TEXT US: Calling all poets, artists and designers whose work explores this relationship. Whether you use the language of fabric in your poems, draw upon the poetics of cloth in your art, or design lyrical garments, we warmly invite you to TEXT US.

TEXTUS will run from the 8th July until the 3rd of September, with an opening night featuring poetry readings from our contributors. Following the opening night, we will run a collaborative workshop in response to the selected poems and exhibited artwork. Open to all.

Make submission

Submissions close 28th April.

Torriano Poetry: Viv Fogel & Julian Bishop

Sunday 12 March, 7.30pm. £6/£5 according to pocket. Poets from the floor welcome.

Viv Fogel’s first poem was published in Peace News when she was sixteen. A second-generation adopted child of Holocaust survivor refugees, she is passionate about human rights.

In the early 80‘s she was part of a feminist quartet of performance poets The Evettes. For many years she co-ran local poetry benefits and events. Last year she took part in the Poets for Ukraine benefit, opening the event with her poem Prayer for Peace (since published, and which was also distributed in a refugee trauma-counselling newsletter on the Polish borders.) Recently, as part of Exile Ink Writers, she co-organised a Flames of Remembrance poetry event to honour Holocaust Memorial Day – not just for 2^nd or 3^rd generation, but for other oppressed countries – with a poet from the Uyghur region and one from Iran.

She has one previous poetry collection Without Question (2006) and two pamphlets Witness (2013) and How it is (2018). For 40 years Viv has worked as a psychotherapist.

Julian Bishop’s first collection of eco poems called We Saw It All Happen was published earlier this year by Fly On The Wall Press. The book asks whether bearing witness to the climate emergency is enough or whether it’s an excuse for disclaiming responsibility.

A former environment journalist turned poet, he lives in Barnet with his family and dog and runs a small media company. He’s worked for many years as both reporter and producer with the BBC and also on ITV’s News At Ten. Many of his poems are based on news stories.

Torriano Poetry

Sunday 19 March  Louise Warren & Alan Price with pictures by Charlotte Harker & Herve Constant

7.30pm; £6/5 according to pocket
Louise Warren’s latest collection is ‘Sometime, in a Churchyard’ a collaboration with artist Charlotte Harker . Inspired by visits to St Pancras Old Churchyard and published by Paekakariki Press. There will be an exhibition of drawings and prints from the book on display at Torriano during March, and a chance to meet the artist after the reading.

Alan Price has collaborated with the Moroccan born abstract artist Herve Constant in ‘Bewilderment’ (The Martello Press 2022. His interest in the visual arts is also on show in ‘The Cinephile Poems ‘(The High Window Press 2023) a book of prose poems illustrated with B & W film images.

Wednesday 22nd March, 3 -5 pm, Teas

As part of Torriano Teas Charlotte Harker and Louise Warren will host a salon in which there will be a short introduction to the Sometime in a Churchyard project followed by an interactive session where participants are invited to respond to the drawings with a poem/drawing or both.

Exhibition in March:
Sometime in a Churchyard: Drawings, Prints and Collages by Charlotte Harker

Sometime in a Churchyard is a collaborative project which began in 2020 between Artist, Charlotte Harker and Poet Louise Warren.

The drawings, prints and collages by Charlotte Harker in this exhibition are inspired by many visits to the Old St Pancras Churchyard in London.

Some of work in the exhibition is included in the publication Sometime in a Churchyard published in 2022 by Paekakariki Press with poems by Louise Warren. In this publication the poems and drawings are arranged like a journey through the churchyard. The drawings do not illustrate the poems but rather respond to them and in some instances the poetry was created in response to the drawings.

The drawings and prints depict incidental detail, for example, the edge of a tombstone, a flower on the ground, as well as viewpoints within the churchyard, the clock tower of the Old Church and beyond the churchyard boundaries, the boundary railings, for example. The drawings depict architectural and natural features and collectively are an observation of what creates a sense of place.

The collages included in this exhibition reflect a recent development in the artists work inspired by the collaborative project. The collages shown in this exhibition combine the artists photographs as well as found images.

Charlotte Harker is an artist whose work has been supported by, amongst others, Arts Council England and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York. Her work has been exhibited both in the UK and in Europe, USA and Australia. She has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Heath Robinson Museum in North West London. Supported by the LB Tower Hamlets and Chisenhale Studios, she has been Artist in Residence at Victoria Park, London. Her work is in both Public and Private Collections.

http://www.instagram.com/charker2001

http://www.axisweb.org/artist/charlotteharker

contact; charker2001@hotmail.com

International Women’s Day

Wednesday 8th March 3 – 5pm

(Image: Josep Gesti CC4.0)

Torriano Teas will be marking IWD with Tea, Song, Conversation, Poetry and Conviviality.

Nothing Just Vanishes

11.00am to 5.00pm Saturday 25th February 11.00am to 5.00pm Sunday 26th February 2023

An exhibition of sculptures fashioned from found wood and stones. Dave Chapman retrieves unloved fragments of wood, twigs and stones, re-orientates and brings them into new relationships, creating strange gardens, fantastic creatures and cosmic events.
https://www.instagram.com/davechapmanart/

Torriano Poetry

Saint Bride’s Day Feast was a joyous celebration of the patron saint of poetry. Poetry at Torriano is alive and well. For tomorrow and the next few Sundays at 7.30 we have an open mike hosted by Dan Kennedy then we return to guest poets in March.

ONLINE: 
Every Sunday at 6.30pm Joan Michelson is hosting an online Poetry in Cyberspace. All welcome to read or listen. Free. This is not a broadcast of the live sessions at the Meeting House.
Join us there:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3940991487?pwd=VXN0djNHU0F5M2pDK0dscXdRTkJwZz09
Meeting ID: 394 099 1487
Passcode: 8dFNdWq

A Feast for Spring

Come eat and drink

(Picture of St Bride by John Duncan Creative Commons CC by NC)

We last had a St Bride’s feast in 2020, so long ago, so much has happened. Her spirit presided…

Poetry starts again

22 January 7.30pm: In the Company of Poets.

Dan Kennedy hosts an evening of poets from the floor, come to read or listen. £6/£5 according to pocket

29 January 7.30pm: Jacqueline Saphra and Sue Johns

Poets from the floor welcome. £6/£5 according to pocket

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright and activist. Her second collection, All My Mad Mothers was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and her most recent one is One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets (both from Nine Arches Press). Her next collection, Velvel’s Violin will be out from Nine Arches Press in July 2023. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches for The Poetry School.

Sue Johns originates from Cornwall where she started performing as a punk poet, in the 1980’s. She has published 3 pamphlets and 2 full collections, the most recent Hush (Morgan’s Eye Press 2011) , Rented, Poems on Prostitution and Dependency (Palewell Press, 2018) and a new pamphlet Track Record (Dempsey & Windle, 2021). Sue has also written and performed theatrical monologues and worked on numerous art/poetry collaborations

Torriano Teas

Starting again on 11 January, every Wednesday tea, poetry, conversation, singing, conviviality hosted by Agnes Hay, Dan Kennedy, Penny Dimond