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Tubthumping at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival: poetry driven by politics
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IT WAS when the train was leaving Waterloo that news of the London Bridge terror attacks started appearing on people’s mobiles. I had to leave early to catch the last train home after attending Tubthumping, an evening of political poetry at the Stoke Newington literary festival in north London.
Whatever conclusions some may draw, these terrible, crazed happenings make politics irrelevant, for the moment — and that is why the parties more or less suspended election campaigning, briefly, in the aftermath. And that’s also why the most important poem performed on the night at the Mascara Bar in Stoke Newington in retrospect became Jess Green’s Friday Night, which she wrote within two days of the Paris attacks of November 2015.
It includes these lines: “Because Friday nights are made for laughter … nobody told the kids at that gig they were going to war … Friday nights are sacred.”
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