Name John Row | Role Poet | |
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Books The Pong Machine, Stewed Tea & Bread Crumbs, Where Theres Muck, John Relic Versus the Ranters | ||
John Row (born 1947) is an English storyteller with roots in Ipswich, UK.
Life
Row tours schools around the world and other institutions such as prisons. He has a presence in Texas where he has performed in detention centres for the young inmates. He was the first storyteller in residence in a British prison and has completed a writing residency at H.M.P. Highpoint in Suffolk.
He is a regular performer at festivals throughout the U.K. and runs the storytelling tent in the kidz field at Glastonbury Festival and the storytelling area at Cambridge Folk Festival. He has a weekly radio show on Ipswich Community Radio one of the first community radio stations in the county which now has a full time license.
He is a regular contributor to 'On Track' a magazine for rail travellers in the Southern Region. Touring with singer/songwriter Paddy Stratton he is one half of 'Serious Times', a music and poetry show. This takes him back to his poetic roots. Performing in the 1960s he joined up with Graham Flight from the Canterbury band 'Wild Flowers' which spawned both 'Soft Machine' and 'Caravan'. In the 1970s he toured with Nick Toczek in 'Stereo Graffiti' and in the 1980s and early 1990s with 'Sound Proposition' an anarchic combination of free form jazz, funk and poetry which toured East Germany in the last weeks of its existence.
Throughout the late 1990s and the first half of the 2000s (decade) he concentrated on storytelling apart from on his visits to Texas where he appeared at the Austin International Poetry Festival. His book of poems for children 'The Pong Machine' was published in 1999.
He also participated in a workshop for children in Algeria on September 2012, a workshop held by the British Council in Algiers, alongside that was a workshop for English teachers and how to teach English through storytelling.