Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost spoken word artists and poets. A regular performer at literary festivals in a career that is now entering its third decade, Salena tops the bill at literary events nationally and internationally. She’s appeared as a guest and writer for many BBC Radio programmes including The Verb, Saturday Live, Loose Ends and Fact To Fiction, and has written and presented several arts documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4. Burning Eye Books published her first full collection Fishing In The Aftermath: Poems 1994 – 2014, marking twenty years of poetry and performance, with the majority of the work included previously unpublished in book form. Her literary childhood memoir Springfield Road was successfully crowd funded and published with Unbound in 2014. Widely recognised as a trailblazer for fellow performers, Salena has dedicated herself to mentoring newcomers to the scene. Her voice is distinctive and unique, her performances are electrifying, hilarious, intensely powerful, and full of warmth.
Intention – The word inside everything, underneath everything – the intention behind a creation, a book, song or painting is what I am interested in discovering.
From the Latin intentionem ‘a stretching out, exertion, effort’, from intendere ‘to turn one’s attention’.
Believe – When someone says, ‘I believe in you’, it means so much; it means I believe you will be you, that one that I love and believe in. I love that Neil Young song, too.
From Old English belyfan ‘to believe’, based on PIE leubh, ‘to care, desire, love’.
Bollocks – My favourite word to yell when shit goes wrong! Makes me laugh.
From bollix, meaning ‘a bungle’, a respelling of bollocks, from Old English beallucas, ‘testicles’.
Meniscus – I feel like I am a full glass a lot of the time, a balancing lip of liquid, about to spill down myself.
Used since the early 19th century in reference to liquid surfaces, from Greek meniskos, ‘lunar crescent’, diminutive of Greek mene, ‘moon’, probably from root me-, ‘to measure’, in reference to the moon’s phases as the measure of time.
Salena will be at Margate Bookie on Saturday, August 20th – all info here