Feed: Lifestyle | The Guardian
Posted on: Monday, March 21, 2022 10:00 AM
Author: Paula Cocozza
Subject: A new start after 60: 'I became a performance poet at 62 – and finally I have a sense of who I am'
| Mary Dickins spent time in care as a teenager and always felt like an outsider. She suffered intense shyness, but taking to the stage has helped her find her voice Mary Dickins had been a spectator at poetry nights before and knew "the poetry clap". She mimes a polite tapping of fingers. But when she made her debut as a performer at the age of 62 at the legendary Bang Said the Gun night in south London, "it was so anarchic and wild – like nothing I had seen before". The audience stamped feet, shook shakers. "It felt transformative. I thought: 'I've got to have more of this.'" Even though Dickins says she "constantly has impostor syndrome – I always feel that I'm going to be found out", becoming a performance poet has given her a place on a stage of her own making. |