FPG Sounds: The Repeat Beat Poet, ’A Step By Step Guide To Saving The British Dream’

Focal Point Gallery is pleased to announce the ninth commission as part of ‘FPG Sounds’, an online project to support the development of new sound works by artists from or based in Southend-on-Sea.

For this commission, The Repeat Beat Poet (Peter deGraft-Johnson) has produced audio recordings from his debut pamphlet, A Testament To Life & Death. The poems exhibited as part of this commission are constructed narratives which illustrate the impact of British imperial and colonial legacies on the body politic of the UK.

These poems were written as acts of resistance, reclamation, and reportage. While Tommy Builds A Cocktail takes aim at historical British military and mercenary atrocities and activity during the 50s-70s during an era of formal independence for colonies and a shrinking of the army, poems like Once I Get Out Of Bed and Black View communicate the contemporary and ever-present threats of white supremacist violence, including police and border violence. A Step By Step Guide To Saving The British Dream pokes fun at the absurdity of racial purity before the duo of One Black Lotus and Resurvival suggest alternative freeing ways of being, by using the example of the Jamaican-Scottish 18thC radical and union activist William Davidson, and by retracing the steps back from an imagined future where the horrors of racism are a distant memory.

Peter deGraft-Johnson is an Essex-born Ghanaian poet, broadcaster, and Hip Hop artist known by The Repeat Beat Poet. His debut pamphlet, ‘A Testament To Life And Death’ was published in February 2022 by Verve Poetry Press, he is the producer and host of the Rap & Poetry open mic Pen-Ting and the multi-award nominated Lunar Poetry Podcast, which is archived in the British Library. Peter is a graduate of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, BBC 1xtra Words First, and Obsidian Foundation programmes, and in 2021 was a writer-in-residence at the Library of Africa & The African Diaspora in Accra, Ghana.

Peter is a regular on Soho Radio, with Hip Hop label and jam collective Imaginary Millions, and his solo show show #TheRepeatBeatBroadcast. He has toured across the UK and internationally, performing at venues such as The Royal Albert Hall, the Southbank Centre, Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, at multiple festivals incl Glastonbury, Love Supreme, and WOMAD, at jam nights, and on picket lines. His debut single This That was released in 2020.

PJ has been commissioned by Amnesty International, selected for the BBC 1Xtra Words First and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective programmes, and was nominated for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2019. He is published by Bad Betty Press, Magma Poetry, and #PoetryOnThePicketLine, and regularly works with leading UK Poetry organisation Apples & Snakes, and appears on  independent radio.