Out-Spoken: March — Nikki Giovanni, Mary Jean Chan, Hannah Lavery

Out-Spoken has run as the Southbank Centre’s resident poetry and live music night long enough to have built a genuine audience — people who come back month after month, not because poetry is supposed to be good for them but because the evenings are genuinely alive. Each gig at the Purcell Room is hosted by Joelle Taylor, the TS Eliot and Polari Prize-winning poet, with Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield spinning reggae, soul, and R&B throughout the night in the way that makes the whole thing feel more like a cultural event than a reading series.

The March edition brings together three poets with markedly different registers. Nikki Giovanni, who emerged from the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and became one of the most celebrated and controversial voices of that era, has spent more than six decades writing poetry that places Black love, Black struggle, and Black joy at its centre — not as abstractions but as lived material. Mary Jean Chan, a British-Hong Kong poet and the author of Flèche, works at the intersections of queerness, family, and the pressure of cultural expectation. Hannah Lavery, a Scottish-Caribbean poet and playwright, brings a theatricality and urgency to her work that reads very differently on the page than it does performed.

Music for the evening comes from Kadie Aquarius. The combination of three poets from different generations and traditions, performing in the same room alongside live music, is precisely what Out-Spoken does well — it creates an environment where poetry feels like it belongs in the present tense.