For Litro’s transgression theme, this week’s LitroTV performance is brought to you by multi-slam winning poet Anna Freeman, with an introduction filmed for LitroTV viewers from the poet herself.

As someone whose poetry ‘‘has been known to leave a greasy after-taste of lingering wrongness. Like a kebab”, her work illustrates perfectly how transgression and comedy go hand in hand. Done badly, transgressive comedy can feel like a relentless pursuit of offensive one-upmanship but done well, it looks something like this.

Anna’s first foray into the spoken word scene came whilst she was studying for her BA at University and was required to go to an open mic night as part of her performance poetry module. She has since performed at Latitude, The Eden Project Festival, Shambala, Cheltenham Poetry Festival and Bristol Poetry Festival. She has more recently been involved with Tongue Fu, a brilliantly innovative spoken word event held regularly which experiments with live literature, music, film and improvisation. Spoken word is the only element that is crafted before the show and the performers only have a few seconds on stage to suggest to the band behind them the style of music which best suits their poem. Which is why in her video you can hear Anna mentioning a tune “something like Saving Private Ryan?”

Anna’s first poetry collection Gingering the World from the Inside will be released by Burning Eye Books in May and is available to pre-order now.

Emma Cooper

Emma Cooper is editor of Litro's visual arts channel LitroTV. She is a Bedfordshire based writer, passionate about films and books and in particular short stories. You can see more of her writing at www.skewedstories.com and www.readwave.com.

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