Whose Muse Is It Anyway?

Last Thursday, we decided to try something different. Wanting to put on a celebration event for our former writer-in-residence Nii Ayikwei Parkes, we decided to put on a different type of poetry evening (knowing, somewhat self-referentially, that calling it 'a poetry evening… with a difference' doomed it to failure). The whole point of the writer-in-residence programme, which has featured exclusive blogs and work from Patrick Ness, Evie Wyld and Nii Ayikwei Parkes , has been to make different types of writing accessible to all. How best, we wondered, to make poetry accessible.

First of all, with open source technology like Ustream available, we can live-stream everything we do online so that people who don't live in London, who don't have nights near them, can get involved and thus interact with us on things like Twitter and Facebook.

Secondly, we needed to come up with a format that circumvented the traditional poetry evening. It appeared to us in a dream: what is we do a poetry version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? With Nii up for it, the concept for Whose Muse Is It Anyway? was born.

To do improvised poetry is hard, especially when lots of parameters are changing around you, like props being thrust in your face or words thrown at you mid-consciousness stream to confuse you, and there's an audience in the room and the online viewers and of course performer-bravado in front of your peers. Which is why we got seasoned performers like Laura Dockrill, Luke Wright, Doc Brown and Dizraeli to round out the line-up. Dizraeli and Doc are from the freestyle school, rap stalwarts with poetical and comedic arrows in their quiver. Laura is a consummate performer, free and open and thoroughly engaging on stage and in person. Luke Wright is a poet's poet, careful with words, yet brilliantly wry and somewhat macabre, almost Dahl-esque. With this rounded, experienced and diverse cast of characters, we were go.

The night was chaotic, hilarious and brilliant. The performers, slightly apprehensive about being thrown in without reliance on their pre-written material, took to the games (involving working words from our Twitter stream into poems, playing a verse-prop game and poeticising about each other's works) with verve and energy and two hours passed with permanent grins on each of their faces. Nii Ayikwei Parkes was an energetic and mischievous host, constantly trying to get the poets to respond to new parameters, which made them work harder. They were wowed by Dizraeli's sharpness, magnetised by Laura Dockrill's energetic humility, impassioned by Luke Wright's words and engaged by Doc Brown's tales of growing up a misfit.

It was a successful night and if you missed the live stream, we shall have videos of the night for you shortly.

If you missed the live stream of our improv poetry event featuring Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Laura Dockrill, Luke Wright, Dizraeli and Doc Brown, never fear for we have two videos from the event (an unfortunate technical error meant we only have the first 10 minutes to share with you)... but here we go... Laura Dockrill and Dizraeli in performance at Whose Muse Is It Anyway?