Haile Selassie I was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. He rose to power as Regent Plenipotentiary of Ethiopia (Enderase) for Empress Zewditu from 1916. Haile Selassie is widely considered a defining figure in modern Ethiopian history, and the key figure of Rastafari, a religious movement in Jamaica which emerged shortly after he became emperor in the 1930s. He was a member of the Solomonic dynasty which claims to trace lineage to Emperor Menelik I, believed to be the son of King Solomon and Makeda the Queen of Sheba.
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She is the first woman, the first Scottish-born poet and the first known lesbian poet to hold the position.
Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
Spoken word refers to an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a late 20th century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetics of recitation and word play, such as the performer's live intonation and voice inflection. Spoken word is a "catchall" term that includes any kind of poetry recited aloud, including poetry readings, poetry slams, jazz poetry, and hip hop music, and can include comedy routines and prose monologues. Unlike written poetry, the poetic text takes its quality less from the visual aesthetics on a page, but depends more on phonaesthetics, or the aesthetics of sound.
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is a British writer and dub poet. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008.
"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. The poets included an older generation - Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, Andrew Crozier, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair—and a younger generation: Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.
British Poetry since 1945 is a poetry anthology edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, first published in 1970 by Penguin Books. The anthology is a careful attempt to take account of the whole span of post-war British poetry including poets from The Group, a London-centred workshop for whom Lucie-Smith himself had once been chairman.
The Liverpool poets are a number of influential 1960s poets from Liverpool, England, influenced by 1950s Beat poetry. They were involved in the 1960s Liverpool scene that gave rise to The Beatles.
Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group the Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's Merseybeat zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. He was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry since 1945 as the "theoretician" of the three. His characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth. He was influenced by the French Symbolist school of poetry and surrealist art.
Allan Hope, better known as Mutabaruka, is a Jamaican Rastafari dub poet, musician, actor, educator, and talk-show host, who developed two of Jamaica's most popular radio programmes, The Cutting Edge and Steppin' Razor. His name comes from the Rwandan language and translates as "one who is always victorious". His themes include politics, culture, Black liberation, social oppression, discrimination, poverty, racism, sexism, and religion.
Malik Al Nasir, formerly Mark T. Watson is a British author and performance poet, born to a Welsh mother and a Guyanese father. He grew up partly with his family in Liverpool and after the paralysis of his father, he was taken into local authority care. He successfully sued the government for neglect, racism and physical abuse whilst in their care, and received a public apology from Liverpool's Lord Mayor.
Michael Yechiel Ha-Levi Horovitz was a German-born British poet, editor, visual artist and translator who was a leading part of the Beat Poetry scene in the UK. In 1959, while still a student, he founded the "trail-blazing" literary periodical New Departures, publishing experimental poetry, including the work of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many other American and British beat poets. Horovitz read his own work at the 1965 landmark International Poetry Incarnation, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, deemed to have spawned the British underground scene, when an audience of more than 6,000 came to hear readings by the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The Lancashire dialect or refers to the Northern English vernacular speech of the English county of Lancashire. The region is notable for its tradition of poetry written in the dialect.
Jim Bennett is a British poet. He performed alongside Roger McGough and Adrian Henri in the late 1960s.
Yasus Afari is a Jamaican dub poet.
Clive Fencott is a writer and sound poet, a performer associated with the British Poetry Revival, and an academic.
Michelle T. Clinton is an American poet.
Deryn Rees-Jones is an Anglo-Welsh poet, who lives and works in Liverpool. Although, Rees-Jones has spent much of her life in Liverpool, she spent much of her childhood in the family home of Eglwys-bach in North Wales. She considers herself a Welsh writer.
Robert Gavin Hampson FEA FRSA is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, studied in London and Toronto and settled in London. He is currently Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London; Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway; and Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria. He is a member of the Poetics Research Centre and the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway. He is known for his contributions to contemporary innovative poetry and the international study of Joseph Conrad.
Peter Thomas Barry FEA, FLSW is a British writer and academic.
