Our Right to Thrive Poetry Competition: Winning Entries
Our Right to Thrive (ORTT) is a creative writing and multimedia poetry project led by disabled artist, musician and poet Ivan Riches. The initiative is aimed at nurturing creativity, improving communication with the disabled community, sharing experience of living with disabling barriers, and fostering strength, challenging discrimination, and celebrating disabled people’s right to thrive. We ... Our Right to Thrive Poetry Competition: Winning Entries
Black News 
Our Right to Thrive (ORTT) is a creative writing and multimedia poetry project led by disabled artist, musician and poet Ivan Riches. The initiative is aimed at nurturing creativity, improving communication with the disabled community, sharing experience of living with disabling barriers, and fostering strength, challenging discrimination, and celebrating disabled people’s right to thrive.
We invited disabled poets to submit original poetry exploring disability, identity, justice, resistance, and thriving. The brief asked for poetry of a minimum of 5 lines and a maximum of 25 lines.
We received 98 poems from 65 poets and were deeply impressed by the quality of the work submitted. Poetry covered a wide range of writing styles, across all forms and variety of approach to the themes. Finally our judges Ivan Riches and Kuli Kohli selected the following poems for the first three prizes.
Benedict Phillips – 1st Place
Benedict Phillips is an Artist ,Writer and Curator. Benedict’s poetry is born from a lifelong struggle with words. At three, he spoke a made-up language; by 16, he left school illiterate but earned a place at Art College. There, he pioneered a neuro-affirmative approach to text, blending it with photography, drawing, and collage. In 1995, his seminal manifesto, “Agenda of the Agresive Dislecksck,” marked a turning point in Disability Arts’ understanding of neurodivergent thinking. In 2012 Benedict was featured in “Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature by Dyslexic Writers”. His revised hardback edition of “A Benedictionary” 2011 redefined the cultural position of dyslexic spelling, embodying his philosophy that “Everyone can be dyslexic; You just have to try harder.”
Benedict is the custodian of the ‘Art Dyslexia Trust’ archive which he believes to be a unique collection of Neurodivergent creative history, culture and art works spanning 1992 to 2012.
10 Minutes Easy
It should take you 10 minutes
I just spent four hours
Doing a thing you asked me to do
But It look like lazy
I feel like stupid to you
It should take you 10 minutes
A thing so excruciatingly hard
It bends my body to hurt
My head being swollen
My heart, put on guard
It should take you 10 minutes
I am battered by your voice
Expanded and exhausted
Thoughts leave me cold
Fear leaves me no choice
It should take you 10 minutes
Like 10 minutes is easy
Like 10 minutes is true
Like 10 minutes is simple
Simple like me being told what to do
It should take you 10 minutes
Switch on your brain, try again
Listen carefully do what you’re told
Before your disobedience grows old
Just do it in 10 minutes, then do it again
Afidi Nomo-Ongolo – 2nd Place
Afidi Nomo-Ongolo is a poet, playwright, musician and multidisciplinary artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Rooted in African-Indigenous knowledge systems, Black musical traditions and access-centred practice, her work spans poetry, theatre, music and immersive performance. She performs as Radikal Queen, and creates bold, genre-crossing work exploring liminality, Black presence, sensuality, power and transformation. www.theradikalqueen.com
Dysfunction
Executive dysfunction
Removes memories
like the broom the Untouchables
are forced
to tie around their waist
it trails behind them
erasing every single footstep
everywhere Earth is tainted with the indentation of their existence
in case a high-born
is offended
Mary Krizka – 3rd Place
Of course, when you move from one world – science and medicine – to another – that of creative writing – you’re going to be susceptible to different afflictions. I was bitten by the poetry bug and, due to an intervening period of time, am now thoroughly infected. I enjoy meeting with fellow sufferers to mull over our condition and the lesions we express. Some of mine are included in Between the Lines anthologies and online at Fish Publishing during Lockdown. At present, I am not seeking a cure.
PIP Form
On completing the ‘How your disability affects you’ section and moving through the application form for Personal Independence Payment after Disability Living Allowance (which I was awarded for an indefinite period) is discontinued, with gardening metaphor
- Oh, do flatten me further – weigh flagstones down
on the soil I try to cultivate:
a) squeeze all oxygen out
b) ensure it suffocates. - Drench me in concerns to drown my interests,
leach away any impetus.
(In addition, saturation may facilitate 1. above). - Remove tools that I am adept with. Replace them with ones too complex for
me to grasp, let alone use. - Make me question whether:
a) I should be watched
b) I am capable
c) my actions are appropriate. - Grub me up with worry. Leave me feeling exposed
and rootless so that I cannot fortify myself through rest,
which must be stripped away lest I have any energy left to care. - Visit – to:
a) trample my sanctuary
b) scatter doubts
c) rake over my efforts. - And do repeat this process seasonally or at least biennially
to facilitate a speedy demise.
(This approach may ensure that no resource-needy weed
will ever survive).
A selection of the other entries have also been added to the Our Right to Thrive blog: Part One, Part Two, Part Three
An Our Right to Thrive Watch Party is taking place on 29th April at 6pm. This event will include a sharing of the multimedia outcomes from the project and readings of the winning poems from the poetry competition. Find out more and book tickets.
