Talk Art · Russell Tovey and Robert Diament

Joelle Taylor

·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

At 45, Joelle Taylor discovered menopause was her 'ride or die' moment for groundbreaking art.

1. Talk Art, hosted by Russell Tovey and Robert Diamant, interviews spoken word poet Joelle Taylor about her career, her T.S. Eliot Prize win, and her work in prisons and with young people. 2. Joelle Taylor is a British poet and performer who founded the National Youth Slams in 2002 for the Poetry Society, directed it for 18 years, and won the T.S. Eliot Prize in January 2022 for her collection Cunto and Other Poems. 3. The episode's core thesis is that spoken word poetry has spent decades fighting for legitimacy against a class-stratified literary establishment, and Taylor's prize win represents a structural shift in that dynamic. 4. Taylor describes the binary between 'page poets' — 'the clever and the elite and the high establishment' — and spoken word artists, historically dismissed as 'a bit stupid' and predominantly working class. 5. She explains that over the last decade, page poets started attending packed spoken word events and concluded they could perform their own work with more presence, while spoken word artists got published and saw their work differently on the page. 6. Taylor grew up in Lancashire without gallery access or author visits, finding her way into art through punk music: 'punk music in particular, those lyrics on the sleeve' served as her 'gateway drug into highfalutin poetry.' 7. She traces a personal intellectual chain from the band Crass to the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, and through Bauhaus discovered the Bauhaus art movement in Germany — describing this as 'a weird kind of intersection.' 8. Her mother was assistant manager of a cinema, and Taylor spent her childhood watching four films simultaneously from a projection box, which she identifies as the reason her poetry is 'rhyming on images' and 'physically picture-based.' 9. She introduces the concept of 'artivism' — art as activism and witness — and cites the Khmer Rouge's killing of poets, writers, teachers, and artists upon seizing Cambodia as evidence that authoritarian regimes understand this threat. 10. Taylor founded the National Youth Slams to take arts access into communities that lacked it, working for 18 years with young people from difficult backgrounds, and describes the grief of stepping back from it to write her own novel. 11. She identifies several writers who emerged through the Youth Slams and are now award-winning poets: Anthony Anaxagorou, Jay Bernard, and Kayo Chingonyi. 12. On perimenopause — which she calls 'women's second puberty' beginning around 45 — Taylor says it triggered a 'ride or die' creative energy that led her to write Songs My Enemy Taught Me with Arts Council support, running workshops with 32 groups of marginalised women. 13. She describes being asked repeatedly, on tour, why she writes female characters — questions she says male authors writing male characters never receive — and frames her insistence on writing women as a 'rebelliousness.' 14. Taylor describes her work at Pentonville Prison, including leading creative writing workshops with men and co-running the annual 'Slamming the Slammer' open mic in the prison library with librarian Mona Banerjee. 15. She volunteered as a poetry judge for the Koestler Prize — established by author Arthur Koestler after his imprisonment as a conscientious objector — and was later commissioned to curate the physical exhibition of artworks at the Southbank Centre. 16. A prisoner made a bronze paper-mache sculpture of Taylor performing at a microphone — using his own spit and paper from his cell, without a computer — and the Koestler organisers gave it to her; it now sits under a dome in her house. 17. Taylor won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2022, describing it as a 'shock' because performance poets who 'move their bodies' are not expected to win; she says it felt like 'putting a frame around an ordinary everyday object' that suddenly directs attention. 18. The episode is conversational, warm, and personal; the hosts clearly know Taylor from multiple prior events, which gives the dialogue an intimacy and ease absent from standard interview formats. 19. People interested in spoken word poetry, queer arts history, prison arts, or the class politics of literary culture will find this episode substantive and direct. 20. Listeners expecting a straightforward arts biography or a focus on Taylor's published poems rather than her political and community work may find the breadth of topics diffuse.

As heard by us

Joelle Taylor makes performance poetry feel like a self-built stage, a fight for recognition, and a living art form.

Joelle Taylor's Talk Art conversation frames poetry as a live, physical act as much as a written one. She recalls coming up outside the familiar route of magazines, chapbooks, and prizes, instead building stages, running spaces, and finding audiences through performance.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want poetry talk that moves from childhood language to public performance.

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