Malika Poetry Kitchen Anthology
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Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (also known as MPK, aka Kitchen) is a writers’ collective founded in Brixton by Malika Booker and Roger Robinson in 2001.
It nutures the writing, performance and careers of poets by emphasising craft, community and development.
Jill Abram was the Director from 2010-2022. Under her stewardship the group met for workshops on Friday evenings (the saying goes that, as MPK members give their Friday nights over to poetry, we must be very dedicated).
During the lockdown meetings were on Zoom, before a shift to Tuesday evenings at the London Library.
Some sessions were led by members of the collective, others by guest poets from the UK and beyond, such as Kei Miller, Mona Arshi and Olive Senior. MPK Alumni include Inua Ellams, Warsan Shire, Kayo Chingonyi, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Denise Saul.
This lively, London-based community of dedicated poets inspired similar Kitchen models to be set up worldwide, from Chicago to Delhi, creating an international MPK family.
Three Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen
The poems were written by Jacob Sam-La Rose, Ugochi Nwaogwugwu, and Peter Kahn.
The poems are:
“For the Young Men Popping Wheelies on Southwark Street in Late Afternoon Traffic” by Jacob Sam-La Rose
One day, you will die.
But not today. And perhaps
you have already tasted it,
whatever endings taste of –
a mouth full of road and iron,
the weight of something implacable
you couldn’t lift yourself from under.
Not today. Today you are brazen,
quick as a blade, wheels
up, and threading into an HGV’s path
and out again, uproarious, alive
and testing whatever binds the rest of us
to good sense,
whatever weights another driver’s fist
with righteousness and ties us
to our quaint and tidy appetites
and has us hook our eyes
to pull you down and safe and anchored
to the meek and common ground.
Today, everything lifts from you,
like the ringing of a bell in clean air.
Like smoke.
“SiStar” by Ugochi Nwaogwugwu
African
women hold up half the sky with
one hand on their hip.
“Home Again” by Peter Kahn
In the red phone box across the street
from the Royal National Hotel (which
I just walked by yesterday – thirty years later)
I plink coins into a hungry mouth while tears
bump and grind in my eyes as I tell Dad,
I can’t do this. I want to come home.
He’s in Ohio and I’m three days into
a semester abroad in London that I’m
begging to make four days abroad and back
to Boston where my junior year of college parades
forward without me. My pocket was stuffed with
pounds but I reach in and only three still reside there.
Dad says, Give it another week and we can
figure it out then. I’m coinless and only get
out the O in OK before Dad is just a rude tone.
A week stammers by and then thirteen years
later I live here for two years. Then every
summer. Then again for a year six years ago
so that London is where Mom says, Enjoy
your time back home.