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:

Sunday Poetry

Sunday 24 July 7.30pm. Poets for Peace hosted by Dan Kennedy. free. Poets from the floor welcome.

Also Torriano in cyberspace at 6.30.
There is no guest reader. The live session at Torriano is not broadcast here. Bring poems to read or just listen. Join us there, all welcome. All welcome to read or listen. Free.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3940991487?pwd=VXN0djNHU0F5M2pDK0dscXdRTkJwZz09
 Meeting ID: 394 099 1487
 Passcode: 8dFNdWq

Poets for Peace

Torriano Poetry

Sunday July 3rd, 7.30. Cash £6/£5 (or more) according to pocket

Forrest Gander, translator of Coral Bracho’s, It Must Be a Misunderstanding: New and Selected Poems, introduced by poet Leo Boix. Readings and conversation hosted by Lisa Kelly.

Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Torriano Teas

Hosted by Agnes Hay, Dan Kennedy and Penny Dimond. Drop by for conversation, poetry, music, tea.

Poetry Sunday

June 12th, 7.30 – Judi Sutherland reading from her new pamphlet ‘Following Teisa’ introduced by Pauline Sewards. £6/5 according to pocket. introduced by Pauline Sewards.

Torriano Poetry

Torriano Poetry, Sundays 7.30pm. £6/£5 according to pocket, cash on door. Poets from the floor welcome.

May 15th – Patrizia Longhitano, Destiny Adeyemi, Alba Frederick, Lisa Kelly, Stuart McKenzie, Cheryl Moskowitz with Fortune Teller poems.

Torriano Teas

Hosted by Agnes Hay, Dan Kennedy and Penny Dimond. Drop by for conversation, poetry, music, tea

Saad Mushatat: Retrospective.

Final weekend.
Friday 8th April viewing 5-10pm
Saturday 9th April live music 5-10pm with Master Soufian, Almighty fingers Recardo, Tara Mushatat and others.

Exhibition: Saad Mushatat

Friday 1 April, 6-10pm. Opening night
Saturday 2 April, 6-10pm. Storytelling.
Friday 8 April, 6-10pm. Viewing.
Saturday 9 April, 6-10pm. Music.

Saad, a natural raconteur – perhaps one of the most socially engaging on Earth – a writer of short stories, progressed from John Cass to the Canterbury School of Art at the age of 31, before  switching to Camberwell School of Art in 1990.

Since discovering the power of the image, Saad has never looked back. Painting became a foundation, a release, a story-telling tool, facilitating multilayered possibilities and interpretations. A medium that conveys thought through visual language, with a naive and primitive approach that characterises Saad’s work.

 Torriano Meeting House presents an alternative setting for Saad’s work to reach the community.

 An Iraqi artist and refugee in London, escaping the hell of Sadam Hussein, he was thankful to have fallen into the arms of John Rety, a Jewish poet from Hungary, who had experienced war, choosing instead love and poetry, and gave Saad his first exhibition in london in 1987 at Torriano Meeting House ! So it makes sense Saad’s last show in london would be where the roots started.

Torriano Poetry

At Torriano in the flesh, Sunday March 20th, 7.30pm.

Guest readers Serge Neptune and Richard Scott.
Poets from the floor welcome. Please pay in cash on the door £6 or £5 according to pocket.

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Torriano Poetry in Cyberspace

At 6.30pm every Sunday Joan Michelson and Dan Kennedy will be hosting Torriano Poetry in cyberspace. Come at 6.15pm for pre-reading socialising.
There is no guest reader. The live session at Torriano is not broadcast here. Bring poems to read or just listen. Join us there, all welcome. All welcome to read or listen. Free.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3940991487?pwd=VXN0djNHU0F5M2pDK0dscXdRTkJwZz09
 Meeting ID: 394 099 1487
 Passcode: 8dFNdWq