Tag Archives: poet

Some new poems I’ve been working on.

Poem
Check in desk one is closed

And check in desk two is closed

And check in desk three is closed

And check in desk four is closed

And check in desk five is closed 

And check in desk six is out to lunch

But

Check in desk seven

Is manned by a chicken.
Did you pack your bag yourself

Did you have your bag all the time.

Have you any liquids or

Small firearms

Did you book your ticket on line.

Buck-aaaaapppp!
I’m still alive

There are so many things.

That can kill you

But none of them have

Killed me yet

Unless you’re reading this

In a posthumous collection.

I’m very much alive.
My chakras may be misaligned

Like wonky buses in the bus station

And my feng shui

Might be all too much feng

And not enough shui

But I’m still alive

And when I saw that chicken

Operating the airline computer

And issuing boarding passes I

Thought

Good for you.

Good for you, chicken.

Good for you.
And I want to live and I want to fly and I want to have a real good time and i want to make this life the best I can I want to be a real man that’s the plan 

I want to live the life ecstatic I want to be the absolute best I want to breathe the sweet sweet air I want to feel the wind in my hair.

I want to live.
At that moment.

A representative of the airline arrived.

And she said

Sorry, is this chicken harrassing you?

It doesn’t represent the airline or any

Of its associated companies.

We’re so sorry.

We’re calling security.
Check in desk one is closed

And check in desk two is closed

And check in desk three is closed

And check in desk four is closed

And check in desk five is closed 

And check in desk six is out to lunch

And now we’ve got to just stand here. 
Poem
Since you left me

I’ve been able to get so much

More done.
I painted the skirting board.

Put up a shelf.

Learned some rudimentary expressions

In Cantonese.

Cleaned the oven.

Planted some hanging baskets.

And I finally got round

To cataloging my cd collection.
I can’t believe

It’s been thirteen and a half years.
Poem
At night

The lighthouse syncopated flashes she translates

In morse.
Irregular yet beautiful words,

Strange juxtapositions,

Poetic devices and

Postmodern cut-ups

Beamed to her coastal cottage.
Who might be this

Mysterious lighthouse keeper?

This poet of the senses?
Enthralled,

She strikes out across the shale

In a trance-like state,

Those breathtaking words 

Spurring her on
Only to find

An automated lighthouse

And a restless cormorant. 
Poem
My friend Ben is monotone.

He says things and they’re monotone.

He speaks to me he’s monotone.

He laughs at things in monotone.

When he has sex he’s monotone.

Unmoving and quite monotone

No tonal shifting monotone

Call him on the telephone

And wait there for the dialling tone

Then he comes on all monotone.

My friend Ben is monotone

He drives a Toyota.
Poem
My cousin Phil

Slipped at the top of Box Hill

Bounded end over end

In a never ending cartwheel

Right from the very top,

Then straight through the middle

Of a loving couple’s picnic,

Damaging a sausage roll

And two scotch eggs

Virtually beyond repair

Falling at such a velocity

His shoes flew off

And one of them clouted a nun

Who shook her fist at him.

He, er, he, huh huh, he died.
Poem
People always ask me

What I think

Might be

The meaning of existence.
Poem
I cheated on my eyetest.

I remembered every line.

I cheated on my eyetest.

The optician said I was fine.

I cheated on my eyetest

It felt so good to do it.

I cheated on my eyetest.

I breezed my way right through it.

I cheated on my eyetest.

This morning I walked into a bus stop.
Poem
They said it was full of monsters and guns,

Hot humid nights and mist hung over verdant valleys,

This ain’t no place for a stranger.

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
A one stop truck stop on a highway heading south,

Too hot to sleep in an un-air conditioned motel,

Nothing on the tv, no Ant and Dec

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
A glowing Coke machine attracts moths and flies,

Throws out its glow on the melted Tarmac road.

I’m probably thousands of miles from the nearest Lidls.

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
There’s a Bush in the White House

And bumper sticker pro-gun slogans.

When I ordered in a diner the room went very quiet.

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
There’s an ice machine on the motel verandah

And everyone’s drinking Mountain Dew, though

It’s a relief to see they still have McDonalds over here in the US

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
Country music on the radio, preachers on the radio,

Jesus is out to get me with his AK47

And now on channel 53 for some reason, ‘Are You Being Served?’

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
The motel laundry doors lit bright fluorescent

Shining hot shirtless lads operate the tumble dryers

I linger in the doorway just a fraction too long

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
Hot drip sweat rolls under my Arsenal tshirt 

A low moany groan emanates from the woods

I’m probably not going to get the latest cricket results

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
The highway sighs as if it’s all too much

The long grass crickets fill the night with sound 

The whole place seems to have a malevolent intent

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
The hillsides loom and

The neon buzzes and

The passing trucks growl and

The world smells of creosote

And disappointment,

Something sticky and

Unsettling in the

Heat of the night,

Restless dreams in wooden homes,

This covered fold, this

Hidden valley,

And I start to wonder, to empathise,

Try to imagine those who spend their lives

Hidden in closets and churches,

Daring to love only in their imagination,

Peering out through fly screen doors

At total strangers,

I, without that frontier spirit,

An ethos without a Jesus or a Bible,

Being different just by being,

Plus you can’t get a 

Decent cup of tea anywhere.

I’m scared. I’m scared,

I’m so very very scared,

Scared out my wits in Burnsville. 
The next morning

I had breakfast in a diner

And the waitress

Made me read her the menu

Because she liked my accent

And the man at the next tab,e

Asked if I knew his cousin

In Clapham.

Poem
There’s a circus in the town.

The big tops on the green

There’s s circus in the town

The biggest one I’ve seen

There’s a circus in the town

But I am not so keen

There’s a circus in the town

The clowns are really mean.
Six of them this morning.

In the beach front coffee shack

Sadly stirring their cappuccinos 

With the face paint flaking

The whole place reeked of

Caffeine and stale disappointment.

One of them was reading the Daily Mail

And nodding in agreement with

The letters to the editor.
Poem
Ben,

He’s trying to park his car.

Not getting very far.

He’s worked out all the angles wrong
He’s got

The car stuck in first gear

He’s getting nowhere near

The place he wants the thing to go
And now

The traffic’s building up

I guess he’s out of luck 

Drivers are shaking their fists
At him

They really are appalled

And now he’s gone and stalled

The sweat is rolling down his brow
And now

The satnav’s voice comes on

She says he’s got it wrong

And now it is recalculating
He 

Cares not one iota

For his grey Toyota

He wishes that he had a bike
It’s like

His life is on the blink

He finds it hard to think

Things now are so complicated
Rams

The car into reverse

He couldn’t have chosen a worse

Moment to do such a thing 
He scrapes

His car against a van

It’s owned by a big man

With tattoos and a sour expression
That night

He gets home to his wife.

Coquettishly,

She pats the bed

Next to her and says,

Over here, big boy,

My brave warrior.

He leaps on to the mattress,

Misses, collides with the bedside cupboard,

The lamp stand slowly spinning around 

As he lands in a crumpled heap on the floor.
Poem
That dream again.

All hot and humid in the sultry night,

Me in bed, and he’s there,

The prince of darkness,

Olympic diver Tom Daley,

Preparing for a back flip on to the duvet

He’s wearing Superman boxer shorts and,

Inexplicably, a cowboy hat.
He comes often between the hours

Of two and three, 

Bathed in an ethereal glow,

imparts his wisdom,

Says things like,

‘The best way out of Basingstoke

In the rush hour

Is the A331 heading towards Farnham.
Love is an accident, pure chance,

A private dance

Skipping on fate 

And being brave, it comes

Deep from within.
We’re talking about professor Brian Cox

And how his tv shows, informative as they are,

Might be half an hour shorter if he didn’t 

Speak

So

Slowly.

The cat wants to be put out, and Tom

Volunteers,

Come here Kevin, he says,

Come here.

The cats called Kevin.
Mists swirl and time does that thing it does,

Rewinds.

I’ve only ever wanted companionship,

A guide through life,

A small banana farm in northern Queensland 

And Olympic diver Tom Daley

This afternoon I bought the latest

NewYorker and a packet of custard cream biscuits

And Tom immediately chided me for

Eating too many.
What an appetite you have.

Why is it so untidy in here?

When was the last time you went

Around with the duster?

That picture’s crooked.

When you walk wearing those trousers,

(Those ones, there),

I can hear a shushing sound.
Softly, dusk fell,

Just like the Ukrainian who

Tom defeated in the European quarter finals,

Yet without that big belly flop that became

An Internet click bait Youtube hit,

Dusk, hiding with it the pain and the paranoia

As well as his classically handsome features,

Trained, toned physique,

Winning smile, you know how

People have often said we could

Be twins.
When Frankenstein’s monster tore himself

From the angst and ennui of the

Mer de Glace in Chamonix he passed

Right through Surrey on his journey north,

Just like Tom Daley on his way from the

Bournemouth diving championships 

To an exhibition he undertook in

Milton Keynes

Whereat I nabbed a pair of his pants.
My friend Anne once opined that

True love is not caring when your sweetheart 

Leaves a floater in the toilet bowl

After having a dump.

My hand reaches out,

Fumbles for the custard creams,

Finds nothing there.

I’m only happy when it rains.

I’m writing this on a very rainy morning. It’s a Saturday. I’m writing this at my desk which is next to my window, with the windows open a little bit. The rain is beating against the window and I can hear the gutters gurgling and the remaining leaves in the tree roaring in the wind. It’s dark, murky, and misty. The surrounding hills are shrouded in mist as the rain pummels this little seaside town.
And do you know what? I absolutely love it. And I always have done.
Rainy days have always felt special for me. Ever since I was a kid, I knew that a rainy day would be a day when you didn’t have to go outside at lunch time at school, that you would be able to sit inside and be creative with bits of paper or, in my case, write stories. I loved writing stories when I was a kid and a day which passed without the opportunity to do this was always a sad day. Rainy days were special.
And as I’ve grown up, a really horrible rainy day has still felt special, even though I’ve worked in shops for years and rainy days are bad news for the retail sector. Every time it gets gloomy and starts raining, I feel an urge deep in myself to sit at a desk next to a window and just write. It’s what I’m doing right at this very moment.
I’ve often wondered why this is. I was never an athletic child, so I never felt the need to go and run around a playground, or play football, or to be all manly and masculine with all the usual accoutrements of the sporting elite. For me, true prowess came with a pen and paper and the imagination, and the rain helped me to do this. I’m like one of those formula one drivers who always does well when it rains, I felt. A rainy day has always been a special day.
I’ve always had an affinity with the rainforest. I’ve always wanted to visit that place in Venezuela where they have thunderstorms every afternoon. Not for me the holidays spent in the sun lying on a beach, I’d much rather be somewhere rainy, like when we were kids and we’d go down to Bognor and sit in a car on the edge of the beach, with the windscreen wipers wining, looking out at the angry sea as the rain fell. The rain pummelling on the car roof. Those were ideal holidays.
So that’s why I writing this. Because it’s raining. And soon it will brighten up, which is a shame. One of the songs I’ve always hated is that one which goes ‘I can see clearly now the rain has gone’. I’ve always found that a really depressing song.
  

On having a sofa phobia.

During a performance in Plymouth the other night, the host encouraged the poets to talk about fear and what it was that each was afraid of. Ever since I was little I’ve had an irrational fear of sofas.

I have no idea why this is. The look of a sofa, to me, is really quite disgusting, so much so that it becomes a hindrance especially when people want you to come round their house. I do not have a sofa of my own and I doubt that I ever will, and I can’t even watch a sitcom or a soap opera if there is a sofa present on screen.

I go around to visit friends and I just kind of linger. Either that, or I sit on a kitchen chair. The worst thing about dinner parties is that, eventually, the host will say something like, ‘Let’s all go and sit in the living room’, and sure enough they will have a sofa, looming there with all its evil intent, and I will shudder inside and try to summon up some courage. It’s why I don’t go to many dinner parties.

I cannot describe how disgusting sofas are. It’s the cushions, primarily, and the fact that they are so big and cumbersome, and that people sit on them and eat and generally live their lives on sofas. The worst thing of all – and this really does give me the willies – is when you are on a train and you see abandoned sofas in people’s back gardens. It really does make me feel quite queasy.

At the moment my favourite art gallery in Torquay is having an exhibition of abstract art, the centrepiece of which is a giant sofa covered in graffiti, and there is no way that I will be going there until after the sofa has gone. I saw a picture on the internet and it was like being slapped in the face.

My sister thinks that this bizarre phobia goes back to when we were kids, and there was a particularly nasty sofa at a relative’s house, sitting on which felt like you were being eaten by a big cushiony fabric-covered monster. This might be true, but I think the real reason is that even before this, when I was a baby, I remember having jelly and dropping some on the sofa at my Uncle’s house. I remember being upset because the site of that jelly on the sofa was so disgusting, and I remember people fussing around reassuring me that I would have some more jelly, and me trying to explain that this was not what I was freaking out about. I’ve always hated jelly, too.

Coffee shop sofas are okay so long as I sit directly in the middle of them. So is the sofa at Tim’s house, a good friend and poetry colleague. Again, so long as I sit directly in the middle, equidistance from the arm rests. (Just typing this is making me feel sick).

So there I was on stage in Plymouth the other night, talking about my sofa phobia, and the audience was laughing, when a woman said that yes, she completely understood, and that she, too, had a sofa phobia. ‘Is it the cushions?’, she asked. Yes, I replied.

Because of that I feel able to write about this now. It’s an unusual affliction and quite humorous to the uninitiated, but it’s real, and I thank you for your support in sharing this with you.

I’m going to go for a lie-down, now.

  

Shouting Out Words at the World! And feeling strangely good about it . . .

I’ve just had a great weekend in London performing a half hour set at a trendy film festival in Hoxton, in a studio gallery underneath a railway arch converted for the weekend into a one screen cinema. It was a great event, under the banner Lets All Be Free, showcasing films which probe notions of freedom and what it means to be human in the modern world.

  I was initially sceptical that my poetry would go down well. After all, my oeuvre is mostly comedic and some might see the approach I take to serious matters as Taking the Mickey. The block of films shown before my performance dealt with subjects such as migration and political activism, with serious, weighty themes which were greeted by the audience with respect and contemplation. I was due to perform at half eleven in the morning.
A year ago this would have given me cause for concern and I would have been phased by the whole festival and its spirit of underlying seriousness. Yet now, I am able to approach such events with a sense of wanting to entertain and amuse and to give everything to my performance and the words.
The tactic seemed to work. The audience were appreciative and they didn’t escape to the bar while I was on, indeed, more came in and watched. Not even the sudden death of the microphone halfway through was a problem, I just spoke louder. Because of this I was very happy with the way that it went.
So what’s so different now? Several things have helped. For one, I’ve been concentrating less on the writing process and more on the rehearsal. This is thanks to my unofficial director, the wonderful Ziggy Abd El Malak, who’s shown me several techniques which I now employ regarding movement, pausing, etc. Secondly, I’ve been watching other poets and performers and the way that they do things rather than what they are saying. SV Wolfland, for example, has a wonderful microphone technique and employs body movement, as does Susan Taylor. I’ve even been watching my favourite pop stars to see how they move and how they use the microphone.
And thirdly, I’m just not afraid of things going wrong any more. Spending time with people like Jackie Juno, who can turn a whole situations round and just Have Fun while performing, has been invaluable. Watching the poets at the Womad Festival in close quarters also showed me how the big names control the audience and make every situation that crops up a part of the show.
So that’s why this weekend has been so great. And now I’m sitting here at Reading Station, waiting for my train home, and looking forward to the next opportunity to shout out words at the world!

On heckling at poetry performances. 

You don’t normally get hecklers at poetry nights. This is a good thing, really. Poetry isn’t like comedy, where you do get hecklers. Comedy is a shared conversation, and the best comedians talk to the audience, not at them. Hecklers are usually joining in. Poetry is more of a shared, rhythmical experience. You might get the occasional nod, or someone shouting ‘Yeah!’ in agreement, but not any actual heckling.
I went on a comedy course and we did a whole lesson on dealing with hecklers. Apparently there are three major types:

 -Those who are trying to join in

– those who shout out encouragement or even displays of affection

– those who try to be funnier than you.
Alcohol is usually involved.
I’ve been heckled every now and then, and I kind if expect it at comedy nights. But the weirdest and best hecklers are at poetry nights, because they are so unique and unexpected. In Totnes, for example, halfway through my set, someone shouted ‘I love hummus!’ 
Which was nice to know.
In Torquay recently I had a Spanish lady shout out at the end of a poem, ‘oh, I understand that! Very good!’
But the best, or the worst, came at Exeter. One of my poems starts with the line, ‘Isn’t it annoying when you turn the page’. I got as far as ‘isn’t it annoying . . .’, when someone shouted, ‘Yes!’
There’s no possible comeback from that.
So heckling isn’t frequent in poetry, but as poetry increases in popularity, perhaps poets should learn to deal with it.
The best comeback I ever did was at a comedy night. Mentioning badgers, someone shouted, ‘You fancy badgers, don’t you?’ I replied, ‘Nevertheless’, and carried on with the poem.
I felt quite happy with it. And everyone laughed. 
I’ve not done the badger poem since.
Anyway, for no reason whatsoever, here’s a poem about cows.
Poem

1. How would you describe the behaviour of cows?

Cows line astern 

Grass munchers in a row

Like forensic detectives

At the scene of a crime. 

2. Are you familiar with bovine behaviour? Y/N

N

3. Describe the types of cow that you saw.

Fresians black and white

Flanked by invisible maps.

Half of an hour hyped up.

Are they black cows with white splodges

Or white cows with black splodges?

4. Have you ever been caught under the silvery moon suddenly transfixed by the inate beauty of cows and the way that they seem to reflect the celestial moonglow as if lunar objects themselves?

N

WTF

5. Were you aware of this before the incident?

I had a crush.

6. Explain in a single haiku the beauty of the cows you saw.

There once was a field of cows

Upon which I would browse

By the side of the gate

And other places on the farm

Often in shady areas but sometimes in the full glare of the sun. 

7. That’s not a haiku.

Oh

8. Eulogise a cow for me.

Daisy

I know this rhyme is lazy

And people may think me crazy,

Daisy

But in this rhyme I praise thee.

Says me.

Daisy

You are amazy.

9. Tell a cow joke.

In what way is a cow like my parents bungalow?

10. I don’t know.

They’re both fresian.

11. Do you have anything else to add?

I have no beef with you.

12. So I herd.
  

Anatomy of a gig

  Before the gig:
At this precise moment I’m on a train and I’m going to a gig in Bristol. Indeed it’s quite an honour to be doing this gig because it’s a fundraiser for Poetry Can, an organisation I rather like, and it’s part of the Bristol Poetry Festival, and I’m one of two main guests. I thought I’d write this blog to tell you exactly how I feel.

The answer is mega nervous. My mind keeps running over the small things that can go wrong. And then it runs over the big things. The main concern at the moment is ‘will I be crap’? I know that the organisers have asked me because they like my stuff, and also because I’m cheap and available. But what if tonight’s the night where it all falls apart like a cheap microwave lasagne? What if I’m so preoccupied with other things that I don’t have my mind on it and I seem withdrawn and distracted? What if tonight’s the night that something really bad happens in the news and no one cares about my own particular brand of whimsy?

Just writing this adds to the nerves!
And what about the other things. Will nobody turn up? Will I not make it to the venue? Will I spill my drink over someone important? Will I get drunk for the first time since 1991 and upchuck over the first row during my performance? Will I have a sudden attack of the willies and run out of the room screaming? Will nobody laugh?
I’m already in costume, if you can call it a costume. I’ve got the glasses on and spiky hair, a nice jacket, some sensible shoes. I’ve got a card with me in which I’ve written the set and what I’m doing and in what order, and I’ve read it so much that it’s started to look a bit crumpled. Even so I keep having last minute jitters about the poems I’ve chosen. The set is a comfortable mix of old and new, funny and one deeply serious one which I’m worried people will laugh at. Maybe that might be a good thing.
I’m also listening to music. I listen to the bands who inspire performance rather than writing, so it’s Pet Shop Boys, Sparks, Erasure. The train has just passed through Tiverton and I’m wondering if I should turn the music off and concentrate. 
It should be a good evening. In fact it probably will. But that doesn’t make me feel any better and part of me is wondering why I do this kind of thing at all. I’m sure it will all feel much better when I’m at the venue.
After the gig.
Yes, it went very well indeed. The audience was not huge but I knew a lot of people there. I was worried initially that they might not have appreciated my oeuvre. The open mic element of the night showed a bias towards weighty, traditional poetry, and the other co-headliner was Claire Williamson, a wonderful poet, deep and meaningful and totally human, she went down very well with the audience.

But there were plenty of friends there: Melanie Branton, for one, a poet with a similar sensibility to me yet much, much better. She did her poetry to huge acclaim, and that’s when I thought that they might like me after all.
There were a few young people in the front and a young man with a big bushy beard, I’d already singled him out to be the one I point to during the Beard Envy poem. He wandered off halfway through the evening and I felt a bit of a panic that I’d have nobody else to pick on. As luck would have it he came back just before my set, and he laughed and clapped all the way through, which made the whole night that much better for me. There was a big grin on his face, and afterwards he came and chatted and said how much he’d liked my set.
As ever I don’t know what it is I’d been worrying about. If anything I worry now that it’s done that I could have done more comedy poetry, as I did a couple of serious ones halfway through. I also wonder what the night had been like if the young people weren’t there, and whether the audience would have had the same dynamic. But it doesn’t matter: it was a good night, and I really enjoyed it, and the audience enjoyed it, and that seems to be the main thing. There’s no sense in overanalysing.
At this moment I’m in my hotel room in Bristol, looking out over wasteland towards the station, and the mist is hiding the sun and making everything monochrome. Life is certainly weird at times. Next week I have to do this all over again, the exact same set yet this time in London. No doubt the same old paranoia and nervousness will kick in once more!

An Interview with Scott Tyrrell

Last month I spent an enjoyable four days in a tent in the pouring rain in Malmsebury at the Womad Festival. The whole site was filled with exotic foodstuff stalls and examples of world music, and lessons where you could learn to play yak skin drums. I spent all of my time at the poetry tent, marveling at the artistry and dedication of some of the finest performance poets in the UK. One of them was Scott Tyrrell.
        I’d heard that he was both very good and very funny, a multiple slam winner and the current Anti-Slam Champion. Nothin quite prepared me for how good and how funny he actually was. He was very good indeed, and very funny indeed. Hilarious, animated, his wit and wordplay precision crafted for maximum effect. I was immediately captivated. So it was not a surprise when he won the BBC Poetry Slam at the Edinburgh Fringe a couple of weeks ago, meaning that he is now officially both the best and the worst slam poet in the country.

  

One of the reasons I celebrated his win was that as a comic poet myself, I have often come second at slams having been beaten by someone really incredibly serious and worthy. My poem about being envious of beards was completely obliterated in the final of the Bristol poetry slam by Stephen Duncan’s excellent piece about the history of black culture from slavery to the present day. Scott Tyrrell’s win showed me that you can be funny and still win slams.

         This cheered me up a lot. But then it also depressed me, because it meant that I just need to be funnier.

 I decided I would interview Mr Tyrrell as soon as possible to find out more about him, and to share in his amazing accomplishments.

 – You use the craft of comedy to good effect in your poetry and I believe you had a background in stand up. How did you get in to performance poetry?

 I actually started writing poetry before standup. I was 26 and it just happened one day. I wrote 3 poems in a row. No reason, I was inexplicably compelled. And they weren’t complete shit – well one of them was pretentious drivel but the other 2 were reasonably crisp and funny for first goes. I had a very pushy flatmate at the time called Leila who pushed me into going along to an open mic night at a pub in Byker, Newcastle called the Fighting Cocks (None of these names inspired confidence if I’m honest). Despite my legs actually shaking I got through a 4 poem set – with laughs in the right places and a pint at the end of it. I was hooked and I kept going back every week (wearing baggy jeans so no one would see my legs shaking) and that’s where the Poetry Vandals formed – 4 of us initially – Jeff Price, Aidan Halpin Annie Moir and me. To be followed later by Karl Thompson and Kate Fox.

 We toured a bit round the country and did the Prague Fringe 2 years in a row and it was great fun. Then I moved to Manchester and chanced my arm doing actual standup – with poems – but soon learned that if one is introduced as a comedy poet in a comedy club one is met with groans before a word is uttered. So I prised the two disciplines apart and did straight standup in comedy clubs and tried writing poetry with a little more depth for poetry nights. It was while living in Manchester that I was invited to Bristol to compete in my first poetry slam representing Newcastle/Gateshead at the Capital of Culture Slam and was (much to my own surprise as well as everyone else) the winner – against the likes of a young Luke Wright and Julian Ramsey-Wade.

 I pursued the comedy a bit more but despite winning a Manchester new act competition I was becoming disillusioned and bitchy as a comic. I’d become the comedy cliché of complaining about why so-and-so managed to get a weekend at the Store (he must be sucking up to Don Ward or manufacturing his reviews, etc.)

I met my future wife about this time on a trip back up to Newcastle and she has a daughter who neither of us wanted to uproot so I knocked the comedy on the head, moved back to Newcastle and went back to my first vocation as a graphic designer. But the need to write wouldn’t leave me alone so I continued with the poetry. There were a few wilderness years but I hit a stride again a few years back. I was talking to James Mckay (fellow poet who started in Newcastle the same time as me) that the secret to success is to just not go away.

 – Who are your poetry heroes?

 Spike Milligan was my first but there’s sometimes over-sentimentality and shallowness that puts me off his poetry now. John Hegley was the real revelation. He was silly, poignant, but with a melancholy that hinted at such ache under the surface. He still blows me away, both in the subtlety of his writing and his performance. He just has to flinch an eyebrow or sigh and you’re in the palm of his hand. Contemporaries I respect that come to mind are Elvis McGonegall, Kate Fox, Ann Porro, Anna Freeman, AF Harrold, Vanessa Kisuule, Jonny Fluffypunk, Erin Bolens and Megan Beech. There are loads that have me ache at the skill they employ. I feel like such a cheeky poor cousin to some of these guys.

 – And who are your comedy heroes?

 Late eighties Billy Connolly, early nineties Eddie Izzard, the Pythons, Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Vic and Bob, Eric Morcambe, Julie Walters and Victoria Wood, early Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, early Mel Brooks, Graham Linehan, Dylan Moran. People with a distinctive uncompromising voice that exude real warmth and intelligence.

 – What kind of a strategy do you adopt for slam competitions?

 Show range. If it’s a 3 rounder I try to have a solid funny one, a deeper serious one and one that tries to combine a bit of both. But in what order I perform depends entirely on the order you’re picked and what has been previously performed. I try to contrast with what has just gone. You have to forget it’s a competition. You just have to focus on giving your best performance and feel a responsibility that the audience have come to have a good time. You’re not there to impress or prove how clever you are or preach a gospel. As soon as you get behind a mic you’re an entertainer.

 – Where do you get your inspiration? Your Trip Advisor poem is just genius!

 Aww cheers. That was one of those serendipitous occasions where a natural juxtaposition happened. It was close to Christmas and I just happened to be piecing together the supposed chronological events of the nativity with a colleague from what we remembered from school on a coffee break (must have been a slow day). I joked that Joseph and Mary must have been really pissed off that night as they’d travelled all the way from Nazareth whilst Mary was in the final stage of pregnancy on an uncomfortable donkey only to be offered no accommodation, just a shit-strewn stable with loads of weird strangers turning up while you’re giving birth. On the way back to my desk someone had Trip Advisor open on their machine, so I put the two together. I then made Joseph into a grumpy Geordie and that was it. Most of my ideas come from my family. I could literally (and may yet) write a book about all the weird shit my 7 year old son comes out with.

 – How do you go about writing a poem for an anti-slam?

 Pick your character first. Give them a basic backstory. Then either place them out of their comfort zone or let them spill their beans about something. Malcolm Odour (my Anti-slam character) more or less wrote the poem himself. He’s me if I’d never had sex and never moved away from home – a complete awkward loner who believes he’s had many girlfriends because he has a vivid imagination and has in fact stalked most of them.

 – What is your rehearsal method?

 It’s changed over the years. I used to be able to retain my material so easily when I was younger. 2 or 3 readings and it was in. However, since having kids I’ve found it harder as I have all the stuff they’re likely to forget about stashed in my brain corridor along with whole episodes of the Power Puff Girls and the words to every Julia Donaldson and Michael Rosen book. I have method now. I record myself doing an exaggerated version with over emphasis on rhythms and words, then play it back in the car while driving so I can remember it musically.

 – How important are regional accents in extruding comedy from material?

 As important as the emphasis you place on them. If the writing demands it, do it, but I’ve never been drawn to one accent or another with comedy. It’s all about the writing and whether the point comes across for me. Saying that, when Julie Walters performs Mrs. Overall saying “Coconut Macaroooon, Miss Babs” I snort.

– What advice do you have for other slam poets?

 It’s just a bit of fun. It’s an arbitrary competition in which a bunch of people judge the most subjective art form there probably is for the purposes entertainment. A few poetry lovers give you 0.3 more than the next poet and hey, you’re a winner! It’s absurd, but people are strange creatures that have invisible shelves in their brain for you and your capabilities. And an award puts you on a higher pretendy shelf. Them’s the crazy rules.

 – How does it feel to be the BBC champion!

 See previous answer – plus kinda great despite that 😉

 – What next for Scott Tyrrell?

 Some nice gigs coming up on the back of the BBC Slam. Doing a headline spot at the Bare Knuckle Poetry Slam at Northern Stage, Newcastle November 5th. Doing gigs that haven’t been officially announced yet in Leicester, Southampton and Yorkshire over the coming months. Especially looking forward to representing the UK along with Sophia Walker, Toby Campion and Paula Varjack at a slam in Boston USA next July. A hugely respected gig has been offered to me next year that I can’t announce yet. And this Saturday (12th September) I’ll be joining old comic friends in a fund-raiser for Syrian refugees at the Stand, Newcastle – organised by Jason Cook, writer of BBC2’s Hebburn.

Why I am not a painter / decorator (after Frank O’Hara)

Poem (after Frank O’Hara)
‘Why I am not a painter / decorator’
I am not a painter / decorator, I am a performance poet.

Why? I think I’d rather be a painter / decorator,

But I am not. Well,
For instance, Jim Shufflebottom

Is doing some skirting boards. I drop in.

‘Help yourself to a cuppa’, he says.

I drink, we drink. I look up.

‘You’ve dribbled some paint on the Lino’.

‘Yes, I’ll clear it up in a minute’.

‘Oh’. I go, and the days go by,

And I drop in again. He’s still doing the

Skirting boards, and I go, and the days go

By. I drop in. The skirting boards are

Finished. ‘Where’s the bit where you dribbled

On the Lino?’ ‘I used sanding paper and

White spirit and removed it’, Jim says.
But me? One day I am thinking of

An animal. A dromedary. I write a

Performance poem about dromedaries. Pretty

Soon it’s a three minute slam poem, and then a

Five minute piece. There should be

So much more to it, not of dromedaries,

Of hats, of how terrible dromedaries are,

And badgers. Days go by. I learn it by heart.

I am a real performance poet. My poem is finished

And I haven’t mentioned dromedaries yet.

It’s twelve minutes, I call it ‘Poem’.

And one day I see Jim and he’s

Doing some plastering and he’s dribbled

Some on the Lino. 

Due to the sloping floor, stay away from the Edinburgh Fridge! (Four years of festival accommodation)

I’ve been to the Edinburgh Fringe four times now. Each time was great and I’ve made a lot of friends. The first two times I went was merely to watch stuff, and the last two times was as a performer. The city and the whole event are maddeningly beautiful, insanely vibrant, the people are nice, the weather is mostly bearable. But the highlights each time for me have been the various places I’ve stayed. Year One. 

I went up with friends. There were six of us. We decided to flat share and we managed to find the most magnificent flat in a converted school down by the Water of Leith not far from the book festival site. We each had our own bedroom and the place had obviously just been converted into flats, the whole place felt new. Admittedly, it was a bit of a stroll to get to the old town.
But the most interesting thing about the place was the upstairs door. There were six bedrooms, one bathroom, but eight doors. One day I decided to see what was behind this door and I was intrigued to find a staircase going down. The staircase was carpeted and decorated and seemed to go on, down and down, twisting and turning throughout the bowels of the old school. Finally I came to the very last turn and the staircase just stopped. There was a wall. The staircase went absolutely nowhere.
Year Two

The second year was a cracker. I went up with the same people and again we hired a flat. This time it was in the new town area, a fantastic tenement building looking out over the street to a church.
For a start, again we all had a bedroom. Yet the place had seen better days. The floor in every room sloped down so that all the furniture was at an angle, and the fridge freezer looked like it might topple over at any moment. I was too afraid to use my wardrobe. It had a beautiful internal staircase which wound around the outside walls, the kind of staircase that one could easily make a good entrance on in an old black and white film. And most intriguingly of all, the seventy year old landlady turned up on the first day so that she could show us her wedding dress.
Which was somewhat bizarre. No towels, but we saw her wedding dress.
She warned us not to open the door upstairs at the back, and that it was off bounds. With that, she took her wedding dress and left us at it.
Naturally, the moment she had gone we opened the forbidden door only to discover that the room inside, which had once been another bedroom, had no roof. No ceiling, no roof. Just the leaden grey Edinburgh sky.
Year Three

Oh dear. My first visit to Edinburgh as a performer was with a colleague and we decided it would be much cheaper to camp. We found a lovely campsite at Morton Hall to the south of the city, about forty minutes by bus. Yet this was my first camping trip since 1984 when I was ten. 
We arrived at ten in the evening after a twelve hour train ride and then a fraught taxi, only to have to put up the tent. I remember feeling very miserable but willing to make light of the matter, only for me to accidentally break the zip of the tent once it was up. You can imagine how bad this made me feel. And then to be woken at two in the morning by the intense cold, a cold unlike any other I’ve ever experienced, all the time wondering if that room with the missing roof was still vacant.
When I told all my friends, they laughed heartily.
Year Four

And so to this year. Once again I decided to flat share, yet this time it was with a website who paired me with four other people in student accommodation. Thankfully, the building was brand new and right in the city centre on the Meadows, and everything was shiny and modern, clean, efficient. We had a room each as well as a lovely living room and kitchen which looked as if they were sets from Star Trek. 

  

Only . . . there was only me there. Or at least, that’s how it felt. I never saw another person, and if they had snuck in, then they were very quiet. I had six rooms all to myself, in the middle of Edinburgh, during festival season!
But were there other people? There were subtle clues. One day, I found a Sainsbury’s carrier bag in the fridge. And another day, a floater in the toilet. Neither of them were mine. Ostensibly, I was alone in my own flat.
Or was I the mystery one, who my flat mates never saw, and pondered over?
So yes, Edinburgh is a place full of memories for me, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what kind of accommodation I have next year! 

What did I learn from my two and a half days at the Edinburgh Fringe?

What did I learn from my two and half days at the Edinburgh Fringe?
Unlike my friend Mark, who’s bald, Edinburgh Festival has a humdinger of a fringe. Every year I go along and every year I’m astounded not only by the variety and the general craziness of the place, with every nook and cranny turned into a performance area, and every footpath filled with flyers, barkers, publicists, posters and people, but also by the intense hard work put in by those who have shows there.
I was in a show this week. It wasn’t my show. I was a guest in someone else’s, and that kind of meant that I didn’t have to do any flyering. The guilt I felt at not doing this seemingly simple chore was far outweighed by the relief that I didn’t have to spend all morning standing in the Royal Mile speaking to complete strangers, or leafleting similar shows, and talking, talking, talking about it.
You see, that seems to be the knack. If you can summerise your show in just three or four words, then you can save your breath and get everything out as the tourist walks straight past. ‘Its a show about a man who realizes halfway through his driving lesson that the whole world is counterfeit and that he is just a figment of the imagination of a dog owned by his brother in law’, won’t do. Better to say, ‘Imaginary dog show with fart jokes’.
I went along to a few shows and three in particular stood out, not only because of their subject matter, but also because of the work put into them to promote and engage with the audience. AJ McKenna’s Howl of the Bantee affected me deeply, it really is one of those shows which changes the way you think. Excellent performed, thought provoking, incredibly well-written, I could not fault it. The only problem seems to be that it has been put in a venue a little outside of the city centre in the new town area. The show is timely, honest, angry, looking at the media portrayal of transgender issues and the dangerous labeling of anti-trans thought as ‘banter’. You will learn something from this show.
The second show which affected me was Dominic Berry’s Up Your Game : The Downfall of a Noob. A comedy / music / poetry show about Dominic’s self realization through gaming and computer games, I was hooked throughout due to the humor, the energy, the storyline and the promise that Dominic might get his kit off. (Actually, I only discovered the nude part of the show afterwards, and it just happened to be the night I came that Dominic had decided to drop that element from his show). Funny, philosophical, wise and sexy, the show spoke to me and stayed in my head for days afterwards.
There are other good shows, too, of course, in the spoken word bracket. Rob Auton’s Water Show is a highly polished, funny, thoughtful piece, as you would expect from a performer for whom I have the most incredibly respect. Tina Sederholm’s show is mighty, thoughtful and incredibly well put together. I’m so totally in awe of her performance style and general oeuvre, and I’m glad that it was she who was crowned Swindon Poetry Slam Champion all those years ago beating me in the final! She oozes talent and class.
I came back too soon. I’m so glad that I went along. I really don’t think I could manage the whole three weeks, unless I were financially secure and had help from others. It’s this help which seems to be a part of the spoken word community at the fringe, with all the poets and performers seemingly sticking together and helping each other out. I spent a very fine afternoon in the bar with Matt Pernash, aka Monkey Poet, chatting and laughing, drinking and writing silly poems, drinking and listening to music, drinking and chatting about all kinds of stuff, and drinking. Indeed, the highlight of the fringe for me was persuading him to perform the outside of a crisp packet. Actually, he didn’t need much persuasion. I could have spent the day just listening to him talking about his poetry adventures!
So, what did I learn from the fringe? That it’s the hard working poets who seem to achieve the most success. Which, I suppose, is a way of telling myself that if I want to go next year, I’d better start working on it now!