WELCOME TO VIRTUAL DODO THIRTEEN - JANUARY 2025
Welcome to the 13th virtual show from Dodo Modern Poets. This programme takes our tally to around 320 performances and contributions since launching in April 2020. We thank everyone who has supported and enjoyed the project along the way.
Our featured acts this month are Heather Moulson and Steve Tasane, both excellent and entertaining exponents of the spoken and printed word. We are delighted to introduce Virtual Dodo 13 with their fine readings. They are supported by a fine group of open mic contributors on video and text.
Steve is a slam-winning performance poet, novelist,
playwright and political activist.
As a poet, Steve has graced stages from Glastonbury Festival to Ronnie
Scott’s, captivating audiences with his powerful spoken word.
His critically acclaimed children’s novel Child
I (Faber) — exploring stories of child refugees — was translated into
11 languages and won The Alexandra palace Children's Book Award, the Leeds Book
Award and was shortlisted for he German Youth Literature Award.
His play for young children, 10 in the Bed, was toured
nationally by Half Moon Children's Theatre in 2024.
His memoir Spitting Bricks was a runner-up
in the inaugural Footnote/Counterpoints Prize for writers from a refugee
background, and he was awarded an Arts Council England project grant in 2024
for Positivity in Practice working as a writer in schools. He's just released a
video using archival imagery as part of that project, which can be viewed
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7YOw-xjDrE&t=333s
Performance poetry remains his greatest passion. His adult poetry collection, Counteroffensive, has been praised by Joelle Taylor as "blistering spoken word from one of the fiercest founders of the scene.” His words dance from his mouth across the stage and into your hearts. Counteroffensive can be ordered from London Poetry Books, here: https://www.williamcorneliusharrispublishing.com/product/counteroffensive-steve-tasane/
HEATHER MOULSON
VIDEOS
Zolan Quobble
Sue Johns
Photoshop 1916
On a 1916 tour of Dublin hearing how Elizabeth Farrell surrendering to the British has her image removed from the photo with Pearse
But clumsy editing means her boots are still
visible in the photo
No photoshop in 1916 but editing now and then was
deep in vogue
Casemont’s pink gayness photoshopped from the official narrative for 90 years
The Black Diaries an insult and rebuke to the new
Catholic and apostolic state
“Casemont was gay” I shouted in a West Belfast
republican pub in the 80s
My gay English friend trying to bundle me out the
door before I too was photoshopped!
Markievicz and the women who were more than friends in Cumann na Mban
Photoshopped and their stories sent to the dusty
files of the National Library
The Magdalen laundries and mother and child homes
with their mass graves
Photoshopped from the collective memories of
generations weaned on Gay Byrne
and the Irish Mammie and a nun offering you a sweet at school if you were good.
Connolly and his message photoshopped to an image of a helpless cripple in a chair
facing a firing squad another stoic martyred verse
in the heroic hymn of nationhood
1966 and the marching troops along O’Connell Street
with snotty children gaping there
dressed in short trousers with Grand Uncle Dev
giving out the presents.
An 18 year old in Toner’s pub hearing Dev was dead and the clink of glasses as some praised the great man and others damned him to hell
His portraits everywhere his presence tangible as
Father Figure of a dull and
philistine state
Photoshopped his pictures now downgraded in a new
version of history where
Collins is the hero
A referendum passed and a new dawn. A photoshop where
only footprints show they once were.
Max Fishel
A Deutsche Bahnhof freight
train clatters through Peckham Rye station
(My mum was German)
Mighty wagon after mighty Wagen
cover-all graffitied by
unsung
artists working under cover,
EU
spraycans were they? Half a
rattly
kilometre long, they rumble
past
as I watch in tennis court
mode,
my head swivelling left right
links rechts
to catch every colour swirl,
every
cleverly rounded letter on
the incomers,
no hostile environment for
these
wheeled Teutonic migrants, no
furious tabloid headlines as
Peckham
gives welcome to these
clacking
shackled-together travellers
from another land, a
motherland
not known to many here, and I
silently whisper guten Tag
out of friendship, and her
memory.
John Sephton
shell shock
Laughing, screaming,
helter-skelter dashing
across the Gaza beach.
Lonely footprints linger,
zigzag trails merging into
darkness, fallen angels
swarming from the void.
