To Do Wid Me

Benjamin Zephaniah: To Do Wid Me is both a Selected Poems by Benjamin Zephaniah and a film portrait of Benjamin Zephaniah by Pamela Robertson-Pearce drawing on both live performances and informal interviews. The film shows him performing his poetry for different audiences and talking about his work, life, beliefs and much else. You see him live on stage at Ledbury Poetry Festival, Newcastle's Live Theatre, Hexham's Queen's Hall and Brunel University, and engaging with school children at Keats House in London, where he was writer-in-residence. As well as the main film, the DVD also has a bonus feature: music videos made by Zephaniah with the Beta Brothers. This is a new concept in poetry publishing: not a book with a DVD but a DVD-book. The book supplements the film and includes the texts of all the poems and songs from the film and videos. (But because the DVD is a free giveaway inside the book, it is classed as a book not a DVD so you don't have to pay VAT, hence the great price.) The DVD is PAL format compatible with DVD players in most countries apart from Canada, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Taiwan and the United States but playable on laptops produced for those countries.

“An exuberant experiment in poetry publishing, as it is not meant to be simply read but seen and heard.”

World Literature Today
I loved it. I’d already known from watching her films on Vimeo that Pamela Robertson-Pearce is a good director who knows how to get out of the way and let the poems and the poet speak for themselves, and this talent is very much on display here. I watched the DVD in two long sittings and was entranced… The film is playful and serious by turns, just as Zephaniah’s poems are, and gave me a lot to think about, especially on the role of performance in poetry, the social responsibility of artists, and the various ways in which oral and literary traditions intersect… Brilliant performance poets like Zephaniah remind us that poetry is first and foremost an oral, embodied medium. Zephaniah’s example challenges us to take living more seriously, and to question whether our words and actions and politics are truly aligned as they should be. And needless to say, for a type of poetry that so emphasizes the physicality of language, film/video is the ideal medium. Neil Astley’s Foreword in the book offers a more comprehensive biography than any I’ve seen online, and people who already own some or all of Zephaniah’s earlier books with Bloodaxe and Penguin will want this one, too, since it includes different versions of many poems, updated to reflect how they have evolved as he continues to perform them on stage. -- Dave Bonta movingpoems.com
The two-hour DVD tucked into the back cover of To Do Wid Me encapsulates four years of filming by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. The footage of 18 poems from five live performances is intercut with interviews at his home and with his eloquent mother Valerie. Every word of the poems on the DVD is printed in the book... In 2009 a BBC poll voted Zephaniah Britain's third favourite poet of all time after T. S. Eliot and John Donne. While he is in his way as musical as Eliot and as witty as Donne, To Do Wid Me reinforces my sense that he is permanently atop an alternative galaxy where other superstars...include Bob Marley and William Blake. -- Michael Horovitz The Times

Best-known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults - and his poetry with attitude for children - Benjamin Zephaniah has his own rap/reggae band and has made many recordings. He grew up in Jamaica and in Handsworth, Birmingham, where he was sent to an approved school for being uncontrollable, rebellious and 'a born failure', ending up in jail for burglary. After prison he turned from crime to music and poetry. In 1989 he was nominated for Oxford Professor of Poetry, and has since received honorary doctorates from several English universities, but famously refused to accept a nomination for an OBE in 2003. He was voted Britain's 3rd favourite poet of all time (after T.S. Eliot and John Donne) in a BBC poll in 2009. In 2011 he was poet-in-residence at Keats House in 2011, and then made a radical career change by taking up his first ever academic position as a chair in Creative Writing at Brunel University in West London. He has appeared in a number of television programmes, including Eastenders, The Bill, Live and Kicking, Blue Peter and Wise Up, and played Gower in a BBC Radio 3 production of Shakespeare's Pericles in 2005. He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. Their later meetings led to Zephaniah working with children in South African townships and hosting the President's Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996. His first book of poems, Pen Rhythm, was produced in 1980 by a small East London publishing cooperative, Page One Books. His second collection, The Dread Affair, was published by Hutchinson's short-lived Arena imprint in 1985. He then published three collections with Bloodaxe, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black Too Strong (2001), the latter including poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case, followed by the DVD-book To Do Wid Me (2013) with a full-length feature film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. His latest book is his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes and Benjamin Zephaniah (Simon & Schuster, 2018). His other titles include poetry books for children from Puffin/Penguin and novels for teenagers from Bloomsbury.

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