And like any good party, it’s busy. “You can’t even get up the stairs now when you try and go and see it,” says Laurie Lynch, a filmmaker and poet who’s performed at Adult Entertainment a few times, referring to the East London boozer, The Haggerston, that’s become the event’s spiritual home. “It’s bloody small, it’s super hot, and overcrowded, which I like,” says Denisha Anderson, a photographer and filmmaker whose work often centres on creating intimate spaces where her subjects can be unguarded. She performed at Adult Entertainment in the summer of 2024. “It’s like an old school shoobs, everyone’s just in one room trying to cut a few shapes without elbowing someone in the face, except, you know, you’re on the mic and sharing your thoughts, feelings, whether they’re bright and lovely or dark and isolated, do you know what I mean?“
Massiah’s first poetry night, titled The A and the E, started at a bar called Alter Eager in Balham, before setting up shop at different venues in Peckham and Shoreditch. During lockdown, when events were off, he kept at the poetry, distributing free-flowing poems to friends on massive sheets of paper he calls Drafts. When restrictions lifted, it was time to start getting together again to read properly. Adult Entertainment was born. “We’ve been messing around long enough, you know, it’s like time to get serious!” says Massiah. “We’re adults now, we’re adults,” he says, explaining the name. “And also,” he smiles, “it was a bit cheeky.”
To maintain the Adult Entertainment vibe, it’s important to keep things moving, and the energy high on the night. “One of the key tenets of party poetry is that it’s short, succinct, digestible,” he explains. People might come to the mic with a short story, an excerpt from a novel, an essay. That doesn’t matter: within the space, it’s all poetry. “Everything that happens there is a poem,” he tells me. “We’re gonna keep it through that lens, and we’re gonna keep it short. No one’s gonna read for longer than three to five minutes. It’s a party. We’re having a party.” The Instagram flyers encourage people to acknowledge everyone, arrive early, and accept everything.