My father passed away in 2017. In the days immediately following, I wrote a long poem based on the stories he would tell of his time working in the Australian outback. He was based in a township called Mary Kathleen, which is no longer there. Although the township was there to accommodate workers at a nearby uranium mine, my dad was there helping test armoured vehicles in the heat of the Australian desert. (He would next be posted to the jungles around Cairns, and then the frozen north of Canada).
I wrote this long poem remembering the stories he would tell and the characters he worked with. It’s set in 1969.
In 2018, the Artizan Gallery in Torquay were kind enough to let me perform this piece, and I asked a friend, Sharon Hubbocks, to accompany it on her violin. I also asked my friend Becky Nuttall to perform on the night. We had a lovely evening. We were later invited to perform it again at the Teignmouth Poetry Festival in Spring 2020, but we all know what happened in Spring 2020!
This recording has been on my phone ever since. Apologies for the sound quality, but it’s a nice little reminder of the night. This would be the only time I’d ever perform this piece.
The poster below was painted by my father, David Garnham, some time during the 2010s, and shows the accommodation huts where he and his colleagues lived.
You can listen to the 45 minute performance / reading right here: poems and an essay 12/5/22
Homecoming (p63)
You know, things were jogging along just fine and the future looked incredibly exciting. I’d spent most of 2019 on the road, not only with the Hammer and Tongue tour to Hackney, Bristol, Brighton, Cambridge, Oxford and Southampton, but I’d taken my show Spout to Barnstaple, Reading, Guildford, Edinburgh and Petersfield, and I’d also performed headline sets in Newcastle, Milton Keynes, London, Swindon, Bristol, Exeter and even the Eden Project, where I’d actually performed in the main dome itself surrounded by thick jungle vegetation, before spending the night in a shipping container which had been transformed into a hotel room. Added to this the corporate work I’d been doing for a certain building society, and my December I was absolutely burned out. I decided to take three months off from performing.
And you’ll never guess what happened next.
I’d been looking forward to 2020. I had gigs booked in faraway places and I was planning a new show, Yay!: The Search for Happiness, which would be something of a departure and I was excited about the whole process of putting it together. If 2019 had been amazing, I was sure that 2020 would be even better, the momentum having built up, but the international pandemic stopped everything in its tracks and all of a sudden, the whole world narrowed down to just my small flat in an out of season seaside town.
I wasn’t alone in this, of course. I mean, obviously I was alone in my small flat, but I wasn’t the only performer for whom the future had suddenly turned to mush. Up and down the country, and throughout the world, singers, artists, performers of all types suddenly found themselves without a livelihood and a very bleak future. In a way I felt lucky that I only had myself to look after, and no mortgage, but on the other hand, things would be tough.
I tried to make the best of it. I launched into online gigs. I made videos. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I started rehearsing and learning the new show. But the one thing that didn’t happen was that I was making any money.
So, things weren’t entirely ideal. But then something wonderful did happen. Torbay Council were looking for artists to pay to do create local works in order to help them recover from the financial hardship of the pandemic situation, and add colour to the local artistic landscape. I applied, with the vague idea of writing about a subject of which I knew very little, yet was a big part of the local culture. I went through several ideas, from hotel workers to those involved in the holiday industry, until it struck me that, in spite of having a wonderful relationship with the town of Brixham, I’d never actually learned much about its fishing industry.
The Trawler Basin (p10)
I sent an email to the Torbay Culture organisation, which was allocating funds, detailing an idea I had to write poetry about the Brixham fishing industry. It would be a strange departure for an LGBT comedy performance poet, but I was looking forward to embarking on a new project, and more than anything else, I was looking forward to earning some money.
Amazingly, they said yes. They gave me a timetable of when things should be accomplished, and then assigned me a producer, who would put me in touch with various people within the fishing industry. And for the first time in a very long while, I felt like a proper artist.
All I had to do was get started.
I didn’t know the first thing about the fishing industry. I knew that the fishing port in Brixham was one of the largest in the UK and that it had been there since god know’s when. My producer was a wonderful person called Clare with whom I had a couple of Zoom meetings and she gave me a few pointers of where to start. The harbour master? The fish market? Perhaps I should write to one of the trawler companies and see if I could interview one of their skippers. I was also interested in the ecological side of the business and how it affects the local ecosystem. But most of all I was glad to be involved in a project which took me way out of my comfort zone and my usual oeuvre of poems about badgers and dentists.
By the marvels of social media I managed to get in contact with the skipper of a trawler. Indeed, he was the only person who worked on the trawler. Officially, it was the smallest trawler in the Brixham fleet, yet Tristan managed to go out every single day and get his catch and then sell it straight from his boat on the harbour side. As a result he had made quite a good living over the last couple of years and slowly built up a reputation for the quality of his fish.
We exchanged a couple of messages and he invited me to come down to the harbour and interview him aboard his boat, the Adela.
This was my official first foray into the world of reportage and I must admit I did not exactly cut a very athletic figure as I clambered from the quay on to his vessel. I’m sure there have been less graceful entrances into the trawling business, but the damn boat kept going up and down on a swell and I kind of managed it by kneeling on the edge of the vessel and kind of falling sideways.
Tristan gave me a quick tour of his boat and then invited me into the cabin where we had a chat about what he did.
‘I started out on the bigger trawlers’, he explained. ‘Several of us going out for days at a time.’
‘Did you get seasick?’
I’d once caught a catamaran from Cairns to the Great Barrier Reef and I’d spent the whole journey honking up.
‘Yes’, he replied. ‘Really badly, for the first six months, every single day I was so ill you wouldn’t believe it. But you know what? I hid it from the rest of the crew. I tried to be all tough and manly about it, but I would find a space where they couldn’t see me and up it would all come’.
The cabin of the boat was decorated with photographs of his family and he explained that the boat was named after his daughter. I then turned the chat to what it was that he caught in his nets.
‘Anything with eyes and an arsehole’, he replied.
We both had a good laugh about that and he said I was welcome to use it in one of my poems.
‘Seriously, though, the impact of climate change is affecting the types of fish that I can catch. Ordinarily, you’d be assured of catching certain species at certain times of the year. But now, it’s all over the place. Fish which rely on warmer waters are spending more and more time further north. And this affects what I can sell on the quay when I return. Most of my customers are restaurants and hotels and what they put in their menus depends on what I can catch while I’m out’.
I asked him where he fishes.
‘That’s a secret’, he replied. ‘I can’t tell you, because I want to keep these places to myself. But let’s just say, some mornings the entire Brixham fleet leaves together, and they all go one way, and I go the other. I have my methods’.
We had a great time chatting and I think I was more tense than he was about it. Indeed, he seemed very media savvy, which was a relief, and the one thing I was worried about was that I would write all these notes and then not be able to understand my own handwriting.
Once we’d done, I clambered off the craft with all the grace of a hippopotamus, then went to the bus stop and wrote up my notes as quickly as I could before I forgot anything.
But I was on a high, because this was my first ever bit of serious community engagement. Perhaps, I thought, people might start to see me as a proper poet after all!
Solo Skipper (p18)
Storm (p21)
One of the things I looked into, with the help of Clare, my producer, was the history of Brixham.
Clare arranged for me to spend a day at Brixham Museum, poking through their archives and chatting to the curator. I was assigned a desk in the stores and the curator brought me files, folders and newspaper cuttings about the fishing industry, and we chatted about the Fishawkers.
The Fishawkers were a band of fishermen’s wives who ran the town while their husbands were out at sea in the 1880s. They would congregate on the quayside and bid on the fish that the fishing boats brought back. As this was conducted in the form of a traditional auction, the winning bidders were usually the ones who had the loudest voices and the Fishawkers had perfected the technique. They weren’t at all averse to using a bit of physical intimidation to make sure that they bought the best fish, which they would then ‘hawk’ from door to door in barrels. The museum provided me with plenty of newspaper accounts of Fishawkers brawling in the alleyways and streets of Brixham, and one in particular who was hauled up before the local judge for a breach of the peace and was then fined extra for her cheekiness in court. The judge had asked her if she had anything to say, and she’d replied, ‘I’ve got a bit of extra money here, guv, if you’d like to put it towards my next misdemeanour’, or words to that effect.
The thing about the Fishawkers was that they were officially breaking the law. They weren’t allowed to bid on fish and then sell them around the town. As a group, they appealed this law and won and as a result struck something of a minor triumph in the advance of women’s rights at a time when women weren’t even allowed to vote.
I also read about the role that the Brixham trawlers played in the First World War, when the fleet was attacked by a German U-boat, the captain of whom demanded he board each vessel and rob their kitchens of food and cooking utensils. I guess such things were hard to come by when working as a submariner. But the most stirring story was that of the work the town did to accommodate refugees from the Second World War. Belgians from the fishing towns on the North Sea ferried across the Channel to Brixham, having forged friendships during peaceful times with visiting Brixham fishermen. And as a the Nazis moved in, they piled all of their belongings, family members, furniture and hopes and dreams aboard their fishing boats and made the journey. In such a way, welcomed by the local townspeople, Brixham became known as ‘Little Ostend’, and the Belgians became a part of the town’s culture and community, getting jobs in shops and on farms, marrying locals and helping with the war effort. When the war ended, quite a few stayed behind. The rest left in a fleet of buses in order to make the return journey, the whole town coming out to wave them off.
And now here I was, at a time of Lockdown and pandemic restrictions, reading about their exploits in the confines of the museum store room, feeling the swirl of history around me and the odd idea that really, no matter what we all go through, we are just the continuation of something much bigger. Which was a pretty profound thought for a comedy performance poet.
Fishawkers (p45)
Little Ostend (p47)
Clare suggested I look at the environmental aspect of the fishing industry. Bizarrely, a couple of months earlier I’d done a couple of online education courses, once it became obvious that lockdown was happening and that I’d be indoors for pretty much the foreseeable future. The two courses I did were both about as distinct from each other as I could manage. The first was a study of the Icelandic Sagas, delivered by the University of Reykjavik, and sure, it gave me one or two ideas for poems and short stories, but I took the course more out of interest. The second was delivered by the University of Queensland in Australia, and it was all about the coastal ecosystem, with special emphasis on coral reefs, mangroves and seagrasses.
So you can imagine my delight when I discovered that an area of Brixham just off the coast was home to a very important patch of seagrass. This was now something I could speak about with a small degree of prior knowledge, of how seagrass is a vital piece of the marine ecosystem in that it acts as a nursery for younger fish and the next generation of fish stocks. Not only that, but seahorses were a feature of the seagrass environment, and I’d always felt a strange kinship with seahorses. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s the flippers.
Seagrasses (p50)
During the time I was working on the Brixham project, I was also planning my new Edinburgh fringe show for this year. And as you can tell from the following extract, the project certainly had an influence!
Poet In Residence
The crew soon grew tired of my constant questions . .
Shakka Lakka Boom
At night, the captain regailed us with tall tales from a life spent on the ocean.
Captain and the Sea Monster
Wouldn’t you know, the weather was awful. I’d never seen such rain. I wore my usual ‘performance’ costume, but due to the intense and very persistent deluge, I wore a large raincoat over the top of them, and then a plastic mac over that, too. I was more worried about the camera and the microphone that I was wearing, but John and Clare kept themselves very dry while I stood on the quay with the rain rolling down my neck, performing to the camera. Worse still, the persistent rain flattened my traditional gelled, spiked hairstyle flat to my face, and the gel began to drip into my eyes. The book became a sodden mulch in my hands. In fact, it all reminded me of flyering in Edinburgh.
And thus, the Squidbox project finished with something of a damp squib. But it had brought me closer to the town, and for the first time I felt truly a part of the local community. The poems made their way out into the world and I was asked to perform some of them at Brixham’s Museum during their inaugural poetry festival in the spring. And sadly, when a Brixham trawler sank off the coast of Sussex that winter, the poem We are Brixham featured on the Devon News website. Indeed, the whole tragedy affected me not only that I’d spent the summer with the trawler crews, and we’d chatted about the potential for danger, but also because one of those who died had been a friend of a friend and I’d hoped to interview him at some point, though never got around to it.
Looking back now, the project seems a very interesting diversion. Once Squidbox was done, I was able to concentrate on the next solo show, and I incorporated a couple of the poems into the narrative, the storyline of which poked gentle fun at the whole process. By the time I’d finished the project, I understood that I certainly had the creative abilities to engage myself in something different, and this made me kind of fearless when it came to choosing a new project. But most of all, it demonstrated that no matter where we are and who we are, we are tied to the history, community and environment in which we are placed, and this kind of made me feel a little better about the world itself.
We are Brixham (p62)
You can watch a video of some of these poems, recording in the pouring rain in Brixham, right here:
I don’t get asked to do workshops very much. But every now and then someone will say, oh, hey, erm, someone cancelled, is there any way you can lead a workshop on humour in poetry? Below you will find the notes that I use when I’m doing one of these.
Due to dyslexia, workshops aren’t something that I feel comfortable providing, because I can never successfully answer any questions which might come up. So I have these notes with me which I read from. I hope you find them useful!
Finding the Funny (and what to do with it when you’ve found it)
This workshop gives us a snapshot on how to formulate ideas to use in poetry (or comedy) and how to expand on a theme. The second part of the workshop covers the attitudes we apply to those themes.
The purpose is not to create deep philosophical page poetry. That can take months and possibly years, though it may be a start along that route.
By its nature comedy has the ability to say more than can be said through serious poems, or at least, gives the poet a platform in which they might easily bring to the surface serious themes. These themes can then be explored in a comedic manner, for example, homophobic bullying, gender expectation, heteronormativity.
However comedy is only funny when you’re punching up. If you’re in a minority or an under-represented part of the community, comedy poetry can be a way of connecting with a wider audience, because everyone enjoys a laugh no matter what your background.
Punching down, though, is not funny. It’s downright mean and it enforces stereotypes.
While this workshop might not necessarily result in a fully-formed completed poem, it will hopefully give you the tools and the impetus to get working on something funny and compelling.
So what is performance poetry? What do you understand by that phrase? (There are no wrong answers).
Discussion five to ten minutes, possible discussion points:
A juxtaposition of ‘high’ art of poetry and it’s usual ‘serious’ tone with the mundane, therefore elevating the mundane to high status.
The surprise which comes with elevating the mundane to high status.
Saying what nobody has ever noticed, but through a poem.
Saying what everybody has always noticed, again, through a poem.
The communal fun of a shared experience, including content, rhymes, rhythm and the atmosphere in the room which comes from these.
Breaking up the tone of a poetry recital or gig which isn’t necessarily comedy-focussed.
Hiding serious messages and social concerns behind the veneer of comedy.
The surprise which comes with the juxtaposition of rhythms and expectations of poetry and the conversational tone of words and phrases. (Lidls, muffins).
Punchlines and jokes to make the audience laugh.
Exaggeration and attitude.
Creating tension and then relieving it with humour, punchline, tag, afterthought.
Using language, repetition, rhyme, rhythm, repetition, metaphor, simile, repetition, vocabulary and sounds for easy aural consumption.
Non-verbal communication.
Ideas and material generation
Pick a subject to write about. Tricky, huh? It can be something mundane like turnips or teapots, or something abstract, like ennui or clumsiness. Or a place, or a memory, or a year. Or just an interesting word that you might have heard. Write the subject in the middle of a sheet of paper. (Two minutes)
Add around the subject some free associations, once again ignoring the social editor, and the links can be as tenuous as you like. Just write the first thought that pops into your head. (Five minutes)
Go around the word again and add a second layer of free associations to the first ones. Again, write the first ideas that come to mind. However more than just words, these will be more like statements or ideas. (Five minutes)
Choose one or two of these ‘branches’ and add three, four, or as many new associations as you like. Each one could follow the logic of the last one or it could be an ‘afterthought’ – like a comedy punchline. (‘I like my nephews. But I could never eat a whole one – unless they were served with roast potatoes – however I’m trying to cut down on my carbs’. (Five minutes)
If you’re really lucky, the last association might be a punchline or some kind of method of drawing all of these together neatly. If so, then you’ve probably got the basis of a joke. In any case, you’ve now got the structure of a pretty weird poem.
Just concentrating on one of these ‘branches’, free write a poem, ignoring the social editor.
The social editor is the part of the brain that tells you that you can’t say or write something because it isn’t proper. Part of writing comedy is learning to ignore the little voice that says, ‘Hey, that’s not logical, you wouldn’t find a duck driving a bus’, or, ‘In real life, people would certainly not try and have a conversation with an elephant about prunes mistaking them for a supermarket manager’.
Often when you ignore the social editor, several disconnected themes suddenly connect. Writers have been trying to think of methods to achieve this over the years. Some take to drinking, some take to drugs. My own method is to kind of take my brain out of gear, relax, free-write and see what emerges. (Fifteen minutes)
(Read examples people have come up with, ten minutes).
Attitude
This is the ‘what to do with it once you’ve found it’ part of the workshop.
There are many attitudes that you can take while writing or performing. You can write in praise of a subject, or you can rant against it. You can be angry, venting, quizzical, perplexed, speak from a certain authority, you can be in awe, laughing at it, laughing with it, having fun, or you can be surreal or just plain weird. There are many different attitudes.
Others include : fun, surreal, plain / neutral, angry, ranting, in character, monotone. A lot of these depend on your tone of voice, facial expressions, movements and gestures.
Think about what kind of attitude you might like to apply to what you have written. (Five minutes).
(Let people demonstrate some of their attitudes, five to ten minutes).
Now look at these attitudes again and choose what you would consider to be the complete opposite. For example, ranting might become fawning, fun might become scared, angry could be enthusiastic. Or just pick a completely different attitude at random just to play around. (Five minutes).
(Let people demonstrate some of these attitudes, five to ten minutes).
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been re-reading Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Kerouac and kind of fell in love with the idea of freedom and movement, jazz and friendship that his books described. Consequently I grew up with the idea of the Beat Generation being this mighty art form of expression and culture which has gone on to inform the literary movements of the present day.
Naturally, this idea was just the romantic side of me attaching importance to something I really liked. Because when I was a teenager, I wasn’t into sports or football or anything like that. The big names of literature were the equivalent of major league football teams. I didn’t care about Liverpool FC, or Real Madrid, or Bjorn Borg. For me, the big names were Kafka, Camus, Dorothy Parker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And of course, Jack Kerouac.
As I grew older I had to get a job, and real life kind of intervened, and this meant that I didn’t read, or dream, quite so much. Around the year 2000 I decided to study with the Open University, and this led me to the poetry of Frank O’Hara.
I hated poetry. I always enjoyed English Literature at school, but I hated poetry. It left me cold every single time, from what’s his name with his bog bodies, to Byron going on and on about how much he liked Napoleon. Wordsworth was just a pain in the arse. Poetry never spoke to me the way that prose did, and most poems seemed to be a puzzle that had to be solved, but never would be solved, or at least, never by me. Some of the words were pretty, but really, who had the time?
I was very excited when I learned that one week, we’d be studying Allen Ginsberg. A-ha! Wasn’t Ginsberg a friend of Kerouac and William Burroughs? Sure, he was just a boring poet, but wouldn’t he be saying something as exciting as the saintly Jack?
And sure, the beginning of Howl was great, but then it just became words again. And my mind started to drift. And I’d re-read lines. And the text would say, ‘Look how exciting this next verse is!’, and I’d read it and think, ‘What?’ The whole week was very disappointing.
The next week we were due to study Frank O’Hara, and I thought, oh jeez, not another bloody poet. But perhaps this defeatist frame of mind was just the ring thing at the time, and it has probably changed the entire course of my life. Expected to be bored arseless, I was instead completely captivated by this slightly camp fresh new voice writing poems about drinking cola, eating hamburgers, calling up friends of the phone and watching B-movies. And of course, sexual acts in train station toilets. Frank O’Hara, I said, where have you been all my life?!
If you’re reading this, then you’ll probably know all about Frank, and how he was a member of the New York school of poetry in the 1950s, allied to the abstract expressionists and employed by the Museum of Modern Art. I liked New York, and I liked abstract expressionism, and I’d been to MoMA several times. More than that, Frank seemed to be talking just to me. Sure, everyone who reads his poems probably thinks the same thing, but I sensed in his voice the sort of personality that I could easily become friends with. Who needs those Beat Poets with their beards and their sandals and their grimy treks across the continent when this urbane, funny, whimsical precursor to Warhol, who hung around cafeterias and galleries and burger bars, (and station toilets), existed and elicited more or less the same artistic response from the reader?
It’s been 22 years since I discovered O’Hara and I’ve read almost every textbook, biography and anthology you can think of. Because O’Hara showed me that poetry can be about anything which you want it to be about. There doesn’t have to be something metaphysical or metaphorical about it. Sometimes a poem about eating a sandwich at lunchtime can just be about eating a sandwich at lunchtime. And it can be funny! Who else could end a poem with the words, ‘Lana Turner we love you, get up!’, the poem in question being ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed’.
When I first started performing and writing performance poetry fourteen years ago, O’Hara was my reference point. He helped me find my own poetry voice. This would be before I was introduced to the work of people like Ivor Cutler or Salena Godden. It’s probably fair to say that if I hadn’t read O’Hara, then I’d never have taken up spoken word.
There are literary stories which I love. These are usually about writers meeting, and some of these may be so mythological as to not actually have happened at all. One of my favourite stories involves a cab ride shared after a Parisian party by those two giants of the literary scene, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. And apparently, they sat side by side in the cab, completely silent the entire journey, and when they arrived at the first dropping off place, Joyce said, ‘Evening’, and that was it.
But there’s another literary meeting of world which I enjoy, and this involves Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara. Representatives of the two different schools of poetry, the Beat Generation and the New York School, they apparently did not get along.
Now this was a shame. It’s like discovering that two of your uncles don’t like each other. I tried to stay neutral in this battle from seventy years ago, but while I liked Kerouac, and while Kerouac was a big part of my formative years, I decided very much to put everything behind Team O’Hara.
It’s not quite clear how this enmity existed. There have been some who have accused Kerouac of homophobia, though a lot of his friends, and a lot of the content of his work have been concerned with homosexuality and very non-judgementally so for a time that was significantly more conservative in these matters. There have even been some who suggest that Kerouac was simply jealous that Frank could be so open about his sexuality. Others suggest that Kerouac’s antagonism towards O’Hara was because his friend, Gregory Corso, was a big fan of O’Hara’s oeuvre, which made Jack jealous, and Ginsberg was also an admirer.
Whatever the cause, word has it that at a poetry reading in New York, while O’Hara was reading some of his poems, Kerouac is supposed to have shouted, ‘You’re ruining American poetry!’ To which O’Hara is said to have responded, to much laughter, ‘That’s more than you’ve ever done!’
I’d love this story to be true. Especially as Kerouac is later meant to have apologised a few months later, by visiting O’Hara’s flat, saying nothing, but typing out an apology on his typewriter. Something along the lines of, ‘Sorry for what I said that time’.
How I would love to have been there. I can imagine Frank afterwards, probably at a party, bitching about Kerouac. He would probably have found it hilarious.
In today’s podcast, Robert is still walking in the woods. He ponders on a scummy pond, a glimpse of London through the trees, and reads a poem about Icarus.
When I first started performing I would travel up to London every month or so and perform at open mics. This was a great way to meet new people and see other poets. One of the biggest and noisiest nights was Bang Said the Gun, which took place at the Roebuck pub near Borough, and I would go often, sometimes just to sit and watch, and sometimes to perform.
It was at one such evening that I first saw Mary Dickins. I fell in love with her poetry immediately. Joyous, funny, an delivered in a deadpan that added to the comedy. We would later work together making TV adverts for a certain building society, and at one or two corporate events. Mary’s poetry has a joyful playfulness which masks a serious subtext. Well observed descriptions of every day life combine with a true poetic sense of wonder.
Mary’s book, Happiness FM, has just been published by Burning Eye, and I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to interview her.
How did you get into writing poetry?
I have a distinct memory of writing my first poem when I was four. It was a nonsense poem called “The man wrapped up in a Pin” and it rhymed. I was much more excited about it than the rest of my family. Throughout my life I’ve used poetry and creative writing as a therapeutic outlet but I saw it as more of a hobby and I never thought my work was ‘good’ enough for performance or publication until much later.
I’ve seen you loads of times performing on the London spoken word scene. How did you start performing live?
I have always been interested in the performance aspect of poetry and in my professional life was a conference speaker and lecturer but it wasn’t until I was 60 and attended an Arvon course run by Matt Harvey and Kate Fox that I got the confidence and self-belief to give my poetry a try. This led me to do open mic at the brilliant Bang Said the Gun and for the first time I experienced a really noisy and enthusiastic response. I thought that was wonderful and I wanted more.
Who are your influences as a poet and artist?
My influences are many and varied. I was very taken by the Liverpool poets and the irreverent breath of air that they brought to the poetry establishment in the 60s.. I was an early and devoted fan of John Cooper Clark and John Hegley and also poets such as Maya Angelou and Grace Nicholls. I am now an avid reader of all kinds of poetry and I think I probably take a little bit from everyone I like.
Your collection Happiness FM has a bright, upbeat feel. Was this a conscious decision at the start of the project?
I do feel that the best poetry is usually uplifting in some way so I suppose I do aim for that. I guess this evolved as I thought Happiness FM made a good title poem. My daughter Hannah designed the cover around that and together we aimed for an eye catching joyful feel. I was worried about the irony bringing out a book with this title at a time when the vast majority of people were feeling singularly unhappy then I thought maybe it could bring a little joy into my readers lives.
You have a wonderful knack at finding the eccentric and the odd beneath everyday reality. How did you develop this quirky worldview?
Is it me that’s quirky? I always think it’s everybody else. I think that feeling excluded while growing up (long story) made me into an acute observer and gave me the ability to step back and view reality objectively. Let’s face it there is plenty about the world that is eccentric and odd so there is no shortage of ideas.
Your poetry can also be deeply serious. Do you think it is a poet’s duty to look at the bigger issues in society and life?
I’m not sure about the word ‘duty’ as this rather saps the enjoyment out of it. Poets describe and interpret the world around them and also chronicle the times they live in so the bigger issues are pretty hard for any of us to avoid. Exploring identity, for example, inevitably leads to us to examine and challenge existing values and systems. Poetry can be a powerful tool for change and personally I do like my poems to contain some kind of social comment however oblique. I think anyone with a public platform has a responsibility to try to make the world a better place and that includes poets. I want the poets I admire to have integrity and be truthful. But they should be allowed to express themselves as they choose.
What is your writing process? Do you have a specific time and place for writing?
I’ve never been very good at keeping to a self-imposed writing schedule although I can be disciplined and dogged if the situation calls for it. A lot of my writing takes place in my head and I find that 2am in the morning is the time when random ideas and solutions suddenly emerge. This means that the kitchen table is often littered with strange and obscure post it notes to self in the morning. I find poetry courses and writing groups very useful as they give you homework deadlines and a reason to persevere.
What was your best ever gig as a performer?
It has to be when I won the Golden Gun at Bang Said the Gun a few years ago. I performed a somewhat blasphemous poem called “The Richard Dawkins Delusion by God” and Andrew Motion who was Poet Laureate at the time and also performing said how much he liked it. I floated home on the tube that night.
What are you working on at the moment or what will your next project be?
Well this is the rub. At the moment my biggest challenge as someone in a vulnerable category for Coronavirus is how to maintain a poetry presence and promote the book. Luckily there are online opportunities at the moment and I hope these continue as there are a few of us who might be stranded if they don’t. I have a number of new poems up my sleeve so I am looking towards the next collection.
What advice would you give someone who would like to follow on your footsteps and be a poet and a performer?
Don’t wait as long as I did but at the same time it’s never too late to start.
Today I interview Laurie Eaves. Laurie is one of my favourite poems and he was due to be one of our headliners this year at the night I run, Big Poetry. Alas, the lockdown worked against that.
I’ve seen Laurie perform plenty of times on my trips to London and I was always struck by his mix of life, emotion, humour and the sensitivity and power of his words. His collection Biceps was recently published by Burning Eye and it’s an absolutely absorbing poetic description of a romance from start to end, a stunning piece of autobiographical poetry whose light touch belies the deep emotion behind its subject matter. It is a beautiful work.
I’m hoping still to have Laurie visit Torquay at some point, but for now, here’s an interview with him.
How did you get in to writing and performing poetry?
I started writing poetry way back in secondary school.My first one was called ‘Elephants Can’t Do Press-Ups’ and it was pretty awful – most of my poems at the time were just silly novelty rhymes that I mumbled too fast. In 2009 I moved to Norwich and found a very warm spoken word community. That’s where I first started performing proper gigs. At the time I did a lot of heavily rhythmic rap-style poems but over time I’ve moved further and further away from that – the new book, Biceps, couldn’t really be a lot further from that starting point. It’s very still, non-rhyming and more “pagey”.
Who were or are your major influences in poetry and performance poetry / spoken word?
I think my influences have shifted a lot over time. When I started out, I was mostly doing a semi-decent John Cooper Clarke impression. I was also thinking a lot more about the rhythms of my poetry than the meaning then and drew a lot on music for that. I was listening to a lot of hip-hop like Dream Warriors, Public Enemy and Kate Tempest back then but also nicking rhythms from prog bands like Tool, Dream Theater and Porcupine Tree and trying to emulate them with my mouth.
Music still hugely informs my writing, but in a very different way. Around the time I started writing Biceps, I got into a lot of US hardcore punk – bands like Minor Threat, Black Flag and the Minutemen whose songs each barely last a minute. You wouldn’t necessarily get that from reading the book, because tonally it’s not exactly raging punk… but the idea of trying to get an idea across efficiently and quickly is definitely there – very few of the poems go over one page.
Tonally, I’d say the book is closer to writers like John Osborne, Laurie Bolger or even Jarvis Cocker. The story is very intimate, soft and pretty kitchen sink. Caroline Teague described the book as “heartwarming and heartbreaking” which pretty much nails what I was going for.
How do you write? Do you have a specific method for writing? Do you write at specific times and places?
I do have a specific way of writing these days but it took me a very long time to discover it. I used to “make time” for my writing. I’d tell myself “ok, on Sunday you’ve got a couple of hours – let’s put that aside for writing.” Then Sunday would come and I wouldn’t do it. Something else would come up or I wouldn’t be in the mood or I’d just not do it. I didn’t have a lot of discipline around it. And after a while I realised I needed to snap myself out of that…
So in August 2017 I bought a tiny pocket notebook from Flying Tiger and started writing in it as a diary. I’d carry the book with me at all times and just write down what I was up to, anything unusual I saw, what I was eating – just anything. I burnt through the notebook in about a month and bought another. I’ve now got a big shelf full of those notebooks and I’ve written in them every day for nearly three years (except for three days when I was ill).
I know that 99% of what I write in the notebooks is rubbish. But there’s 1% in there that’s good and which I would have lost if I hadn’t written it down. So now when I do “sit down to write” or go to a workshop, I flip back over the latest notebook, see what I’ve written in there and use it as a jumping off point. The pen feels lighter because I’ve been writing anyway and I already have an idea to write about.
When did you decide to make a themed collection?
2018 was a year with a lot of change for me. On New Year’s Day, my partner and I broke up after seven years together. And my reaction to that was to write about it. A lot. It was a lot cheaper than therapy.
By April, I was still writing a lot. Not poetry really, just a lot of long free-writes, trying to process this new change in my life and starting to work out who I wanted to be in the world now. Then one Sunday, I went and had a pub lunch with my friend Laurie Bolger. I told her about all this writing I was doing. At the time I had no idea what this writing was – whether it was a play, a novel, a spoken word show, I just didn’t know.
Laurie said it sounded like it might be a poetry book and that I should go home, print out all these bits of writing and lay them out on my bedroom floor. So I did. Over the next few weeks I started to see the connections between all the pieces and that they basically fell into three categories: poems about making a relationship, poems about the relationship breaking up and poems about starting to rebuild as a new individual person. I started sorting them into those three piles “Make”, “Break” and “Build” and that structure stuck through to the final book. It’s your classic beginning-middle-end structure. Once I realised that, it became clear that I was writing a narrative poetry collection. It was very organic – I never sat down at the start and decided that’s what I was doing, I just stumbled into it.
Were the poems in Biceps written at around the same time, or over a number of months and years?
Of the 44 poems in the book, there are maybe four or five that existed in some form before 2018. By the time I consciously sat down to write the collection, the first poem “The Story’s Better When You Tell It” was a few years old. I knew I wanted that one in there because it fit the narrative and was also the first “page poem” where I felt I’d really nailed it. That’s why the collection starts there.
But the vast majority of the book was written in the first six months of 2018. It’s a very weird way to write a first collection. I think a lot of poets use their debut as a sort of “Greatest Hits”, which Biceps definitely isn’t. It felt risky – I know a lot of people who’ve seen me perform might expect a book of novelty rhyming poems – but I think the book is better because I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and focused on writing new material in a very different style.
Do you do a lot of rewriting?
Definitely. Honestly, I feel more like an editor than a writer at heart – I love pulling apart writing, seeing how it works, diagnosing problems and sticking it all back together. I love to edit for other writers and think it gives you a better understanding of how to improve your own work.
For me, the best writing communicates the thoughts in the author’s head into the reader’s head as clearly and concisely as possible. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the Biceps poems started as rambling free-writes, so they needed a lot of work to cut down. The poem “Hull” started out as a three or four A4 page piece. That worked fine for a three minute slam, but made for a pretty boring read.
So the first big challenge for me was boiling the pieces down – making them more condensed and getting the language to be more efficient. We touched on it earlier, but I was listening to a lot of hardcore punk around that time. I was really fascinated by the way those bands would create songs that communicated a lot, often in less than a minute, and wanted to apply that same philosophy to my writing. “Why waste words?” was definitely a motto.
About three months after the infamous pub lunch, I had a draft that I was happy for other people to look at. I sent it to four poets I love and used their feedback to start redrafting. I worked on the manuscript pretty consistently until November 2018, working on it most days, before submitting it to Burning Eye. By the time I sent the manuscript I’d been through 10 full redrafts and about 30 “mini-redrafts”. I’m definitely not the most talented poet I know, but I like to think I make up for that through hard work.
Burning Eye took the book on in early 2019. That year I worked on it a lot less: I wrote 6 new poems to go in, but mostly focused on touching up the way it looked on the page. Form and layout definitely aren’t my strong suits, but I had some amazing advice from Roger Robinson and Amy Acre that helped pull it up a few notches.
All of which to say: yes, I do a lot of rewriting.
Did any poems on the same theme not make it in to the collection?
Yes, there are a few poems that didn’t make it in. At one point I was toying with the idea of doing a pamphlet called “More Poems About Break-Ups and Tidying” with some of the off-cuts… but the poems I cut were all for good reason. Either the idea wasn’t quite there yet or they were too similar to poems that did make the cut.
I originally had a run of three poems near the end of the book that just didn’t quite fit the story. When I first started the book, I thought those three were the best examples of page poems I had, but because of that I didn’t push them as hard on the rewrites. So by the time I really had to make decisions about the book’s direction they were suddenly the weakest poems and didn’t really fit at all. They had to go to make the book stronger overall.
There’s a prose poem in the book called “Check”, which almost didn’t make the cut. It took me a long time to write that piece – I couldn’t quite work out how to make it work, but knew it was an important beat in the story. It went through a lot of variations – at one point it was a sonnet, then a pantoum… it went everywhere. Eventually I realised: I was writing about quite a dark part of the relationship. I was writing about behaviour that was ugly and that I wasn’t proud of. Trying to force an ugly theme into a lovely poetic form wouldn’t work, so it needed to be prose. I’m really glad I managed to eventually make that one work – it pushed me and I think the book is better for it.
How did you feel once the collection was complete? Was it a therapeutic experience to talk about the relationship?
Was it therapeutic? Yes. I definitely feel like writing the book gave me a sense of closure and thankfulness about the relationship. But also I think it’s very easy to write badly about a relationship after it’s broken up – it was really important to me that the book felt like it was coming from a loving place and not feel spiteful or nasty about the other person.
The very first line of the book is “the story’s better when you tell it”, acknowledging that this is only one side of the narrative. There’s another, better version of the story waiting to be told. And the final poem in the book ends on a sense of thankfulness for the relationship, which was very important to me.
As for how I feel about the collection being complete… I don’t know. The book released a week before the UK lockdown, so I’ve not been able to tour it and hear what people think of the poems live yet. In a way it’s still not complete and I’m not sure it ever will be…
What has the reaction been to the collection?
So far people have been really positive about it. I’m really glad that it seems to be connecting with people – I’ve even had a few people who don’t really read poetry tell me that they enjoy it which is a real compliment to the work.
It’s funny to see which bits of the book people enjoy most – poems that aren’t necessarily my favourite seem to speak a lot to other people and that’s beautiful to see.
What are you currently working on, and what is your next project?
I have a few projects going on right now outside of trying to re-schedule the Biceps tour.
I’ve just recorded all the poems from Biceps as audio and have put them out on a shiny red cassette tape over on my Big Cartel page https://laurieeaves.bigcartel.com That’s been really fun to put together – I set up a record label for it called Buried Vinyl and I’m starting to think about a second release. I’m planning on doing a vinyl compilation album of poets I love for the next release, so I’m starting to put that together right now.
I’ve also started some “pre-production” work on a second collection which for now I’m calling “Get Human!” I have a few ideas I’m playing with for that at the moment, but I doubt it’ll be quite the “poetry concept album” that Biceps is.
The other big ongoing project I’m always working on is Dead Darlings Podcast which I co-host with Rebecca Cooney and Hannah Chutzpah. It’s a monthly poetry podcast with interviews, writing tips, book reviews and event shout-outs, which you can get wherever you get your podcasts. We’re coming up on our first anniversary and our latest episode has an interview with RikTheMost, who’s an incredible poetry tour de force.
I’m also starting to take on more editing work again at the moment – both for individual poems and manuscripts. If anyone’s reading this and is looking for an editor they can drop me a line on https://www.laurieeaves.com for a chat.
A tinsel littered terminus on the greyest grey of days.
A gleaming marble concourse and a smoke machine haze.
Excitement builds in tight T-shirts, dressing to impress.
A train’s due in at platform six, it is the Queer Express.
The chuffing puffing mother huffing pumping disco train,
This gently swaying high heel sashaying, otherwise quite tame
Lip sync boa something of a goer power ballad queens
Leather clad sexy dad, this transport of my dreams.
Everyone is welcome as it thunders down the track
A destiny that’s shining bright, the rhythm of the clickerty clack.
Clones and drones feel so at home and big butch bears too.
Take a seat on the Queer Express, carriages L G B T and Q.
Our history is one of Pride and those who dared to stand
And fight the law and rise above let’s shake them by the hand.
And now there is sweet freedom sung amid the pumping beat
The rainbow flag flies proud for you, hop aboard and take your seat.
This sequinned rocket this tinsel train there is no quiet zone.
The ultimate community where no one feels alone.
I climbed aboard twenty years ago, never again felt like a loner.
A sexy hunk in the opposite bunk is giving me a
Reason to be here.
This all embracing heart racing Diesel engined chuffer.
This laser choo choo homo loco never will hit the buffer.
It’s thundering and building speed and passing through the night,
For souls in need who feel indeed that now the time is right.
There’ll be moaners haters zealous types and those who don’t agree.
The train is there for everyone and that’s what makes us free.
The point of life is that we live up to our history,
And if you can’t be what THEY want, you might as well just BE.
The Queer Express is said by some to be an urban myth.
Stand by the tracks on a foggy night and see its glow in the mist.
The train exists in every soul who’s felt the world’s askance.
Hop aboard the Queer Express and join this blissful dance!
I’d just like to wish everyone I know a wonderful festive period and new year.
2019 has been mega for me and there are several things I’m proud of, such as my show about tea, (Spout), the little web series I made, (Unbearable Lightness), a little book I made of previous show scripts, (Gazebo), and other projects too, such as In the Glare of the Neon Yak performed with the jazz band Shadow Factory, and my one-off show The Moon Wrapped in String, which I performed with violinist Sharon Hubbocks. On top of this, I undertook my first tour of the UK, which was hard work but flipping amazing!
And there’s so much to look forward to for 2020. I’m putting another collection together with Burning Eye for 2021, and I’m working on a new show to accompany the book.
The other things I’ve been up to is that I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I got in to performance poetry more or less by accident and chance, and before this I’d always written comedy short stories and scripts. Lately I’ve been returning to these and finding my voice again as a writer. That’s the reason why I’ve been a bit quiet lately on the performance front, I’ve fallen in love with narrative and stories again and I’ve been busy working on short stories.
Naturally this is a time when you look back. The sad passing of Melanie Crump was a shock to the Torbay spoken word scene. We had a few lovely events including one at the Blue Walnut Cafe in honour of her and her work. I do believe that Torbay has the most diverse spoken word community in the country with the emphasis very much on comedy and humour, and long may this continue. It’s also incredibly supportive and friendly.
I’ve read a lot this year, as ever. I recommend books by the wonderful Melanie Branton and Becky Nuttall, Tom Sastry and the forthcoming collection from Tom Austin. Jason Disley’s CD is amazing, a mix of jazz and voice, and the DVD from Jamie Harry Scrutton showcasing his amazing animation. In fact, there’s so much good stuff out there that I’m sure I’ve missed something.
As a lowfi Christmas special, I’ve made a recording of my show, Spout, and you can find a link to it right here: https://youtu.be/EtBTc7ANM6M
I hope everyone has a great year next year, and thanks for everything. See you out on the road very soon!
Robert Garnham 