Her poems are gritty and fierce, and she is a bold and fearless author, memoirist, broadcaster and poet of Jamaican-Irish heritage. Salena Godden and Yomi get to grips in an intimate conversation around the duality of the artist – from writing monster to gigging monster, and the solitude of creation against the performance on stage. She performs her poem ‘Our Anarchy’ – a poem that asks us feel deeply, resist, and reassemble what’s been broken. This episode explores the emotional cost of creativity and the challenge of writing from a place of grief and rage. Together, they watch Maya Angelou’s ‘We Wear the Mask’, a piece about how something simple, like a smile, can hide so much pain and fear in the face of oppression.
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Our Anarchy – Salena Godden
I’m daydreaming, how I might slow down and mellow
with age and write easy poetry about the happy little
dog on my knee and the pale lavender sky and the
soft snow. How maybe, one day, I will stop writing
so much protest poetry, stories soaked in trauma and
rooted in our grief, our anarchy, our hopes for
humanity, but then I remember I live and write in
the 2020s and the world is frightening and I am me
and here we are. Still, I often wonder what poems
we’d write in a more peaceful time, in another reality,
another era; work made from a place of freedom
and creativity and not in response or defence, nor
in anger or fear. Oh my loves, what dreams we dare
to dream, what beautiful books we write. Imagine
what art could look like, our theatre and music, what
lyrics we’d sing that were about anything but this
brutal and divided world. Oh, to create in a safe and
gentle space, a kind and listening world. Oh, to write
poems about how I love the happy little black dog,
so warm, sleeping on my lap, our breath rising and
falling together, the sky outside my window, lilac
and dove-blue, soft snow falling, and feel that love
and peace within me, how wonderful it would be to
live just like this, and write without a shadow.
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