Water’s Footfall: Can poetry really fight evil?
by Catherine D Davidson On Monday, November 5, the night before the American midterm elections, poets and fans gathered in the basement of the Poetry Café on Betterton Street in London. […]
The Water Between Us: More on Poetry and Exile
by Catherine Davidson Shortly after Donald Trump was elected I was invited by Exiled Writers Ink to read at one of their Poetry Café events. […]
The Exiled Writers Ink Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award 2018
The Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award A little more than a year after joining the board of Exiled Writers Ink, and a few months after agreeing to Chair the board for the year, on March 29th, I attended the Bart Wolffe Poetry Award evening and was reminded of why this organization is so valuable and [...]
Agit Lit Cafe for International Women’s Day
Collaborative Poem created 5.3.2018: Uncensored Women’s Words An evening focusing on the diverse oppressions against women and their resistance to them. […]
Words for the silenced
By Catherine T Davidson Reflections on EWI’s Second Agit Lit event On February 5, I hosted an event at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden on behalf of Exiled Writers Ink, London’s longstanding umbrella organisation for refugee and immigrant poets and writers. It was our second “Agit Lit” event — where we combine an evening of poetry [...]
Why what we do in small rooms matters
Last night, I introduced the readers at my first ever hosting of the Exiled Lit Café by talking about what we do in small rooms and why it matters. We were in the Betsey Trotwood pub (named for the irrepressible character in David Copperfield) in Farringdon, a London neighbourhood where old and new mingle with [...]
On Love And Tribes In A New World Order
Some time ago I visited a part of the world that I once could loosely call ‘my country’. What was once one country is now seven. If this sounds like a riddle - it is. I use the word ‘loosely’ retrospectively because some people like me; rightly or wrongly, once regarded that part of the [...]
Free Delphi
This is not about Delphi the supernatural oracle, as it happens it's about a natural man/poet. And for that matter not in Greek but in Persian. And as the story goes: on a December evening in Abadan, five plain clothes officers arrive at the Delphi's family home with a search and arrest warrant for Raaouf [...]
Inside and Outside the Dream Room
Exiled Lit Cafe 9th January 2017 Hypnos is the God of Sleep and Morpheus, the God of Dreams. Beds are the theatres in which the nightly drama of our dreams plays out and so they can be a place of danger. Despite the tube strike and unrelenting rain, our guests, Adnan Al Sayegh, Stephen Watts, [...]
Exiled Writers Ink at the Calais Refugee Camp, October 2015
I gasp at my first sight of the so-called ‘Jungle’ camp which is of a sprawl of never-ending tents and of groups of young men walking aimlessly in squalid conditions. The 6,000 predominantly young male migrants originate from Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea with a few from Somalia. They have fled from horrific situations in [...]