Fourth Verve Poetry Performance Lecture – Nick Makoha

What do you know about Basquiat? What do you know about Icarus? What do you know about the Entebbe hijacking in 1976? In this year’s Performance-Lecture, Nick Makoha fuses these seemingly disparate sources and events into poems in a new piece based around his recent work A Low-Pressure System, which won the Ivan Juritz Prize. He brings Basquiat and Icarus back to life in dream-like dialogues whilst gradually, kaleidoscopically, piecing together these stories’ disconnected frames, paralleled against moments from his own life – including fleeing the Idi Amin regime in Uganda – and other historical events, all linked by the motif of flight.
The Verve Performance-Lecture (a stylised form of teaching-as-performance, originating from contemporary art practice), invites a poet who has never been asked to give a lecture before to create a presentation fusing academic discourse with poetry and spoken word on a subject of their choosing. In association with Poetry School.