Tag Archives: poetry

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 What if I’m so preoccupied with other things that I don’t have my mind on it and I seem withdrawn and distracted?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! 

 

On the promise of anti-slams

I met Scott Tyrrell at the Womad Festival. He’s a poetry slam champion, but he’s also won an anti-slam. That is, the prize for the (purposefully) worst poem in a slam competition. Indeed, these are competitions where the poets compete to be as bad as possible.
I like the whole idea of this. An anti-slam is a chance, of course, to go over the top, and to employ all those devices which ordinarily result in cringing. I wondered also if there was a sense of the OTT in anti-slam poetry.
The idea of it perplexed me and I wondered if I could write a poem that was purposefully bad, an anti-slam poem, while still employing all the traits, mannerisms and stylings of regular performance poetry.
I’m not sure if I will ever get the chance to enter an anti-slam, but this is what I’ve come up with. It’s an ode to styrofoam extruded polystyrene.
It’s called ‘Poem’.

Poem
Packaging!

Cardboard!

Delivery note!

Box!

Polystyrene!
What are you going to do with all that

Packaging, that styrofoam extruded polystyrene?

Where are you going to put all that styrofoam extruded polystyrene?

This whole room now is filled with styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

We could fill up a bin bag with styrofoam extruded polystyrene,

And then the bin, but there’s so much styrofoam extruded polystyrene

That the bin will be filled with styrofoam extruded polystyrene.
I see you every day ensconced in your styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

With the sultry glare of a rather more sensible

Justin Bieber and the irritability of styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

You have the tenacity of a lion and the litheness

Of styrofoam extruded polystyrene,

The durability of styrofoam extruded polystyrene, the reflexes of a cat,

The longevity of styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

How you glide like a swan made from styrofoam extruded polystyrene,

With your dreams of kings and queens and styrofoam extruded polystyrene,

Knights of the round table, chivalry, jousting tournaments

And styrofoam extruded polystyrene,

Bounding like spacemen on the surface of a moon

Made from styrofoam extruded polystyrene,

How can I see you?

How can I see you?

How can I see you,

Amidst all that styrofoam extruded polystyrene?
Everywhere everywhere styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

To the left, styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

To the right, styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

Give me your hand darling

And I give you styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

What’s that on the ceiling?

Is it coving?

Is it a lampshade?

No, it’s styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

Corn flakes, Weetabix, Frosties, styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

Rain, rain, rain in the morning,

And in the afternoon it’s styrofoam extruded polystyrene!

Hanging in the doctor’s waiting room

With a cold with a chill with a runny nose

With a broken leg with a funny pain in the ear

Is it a fever, is it flu,

Is it an allergic reaction?

No, it’s styrofoam extruded polystyrene!
Stay calm big fella stay calm

The master of the hounds has a particularly

Malevolent stare

Cracking his whip and barking his orders

Taking out his shiny new pistol

And aiming it

Fetch me that blunderbuss big fella

Its wrapped in styrofoam extruded polystyrene!
Squeaky squeaky squeaky

Big white blocks rubbing together

Like Arctic sea ice

Crumbly crumbly see how they snow 

Caught on wind caught on eddies

Pooling in a mini vortex on the kitchen floor.

styrofoam extruded polystyrene.
(Use voice changer) 

Give me your styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

I want your styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

I’ll do anything for your styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

I can’t live without your styrofoam extruded polystyrene.

Dancing in the nightclub swirling gyrating

So sneaky sexual hearty pumping hear

The rhythm thump with styrofoam extruded polystyrene.
My heart is lonely.

The nights are long.

The world is dark.

Nobody hears my song.
 styrofoam extruded polystyrene 

 styrofoam extruded polystyrene 

 styrofoam extruded polystyrene 

 styrofoam extruded Polystyrene

On being a poet at Womad. An ode to Wellington boots!

The Maori log drummers kept me awake last night. I mean, they might not have been Maori log drummers, but that’s what they sounded like. Womad does strange things to you. Yesterday, as I was walking through the campsite, I thought I heard a new Tibetan wind instrument made from yak’s horns and twigs belting out some kind of rhythmic shamanic hymn to life itself. Only it turned out to be some bloke pumping up his inflatable bed.
I think I’ve gone native. This morning, I almost went to tai chi. Instead I went to a tea shack. The pelting rain hammered on the canvas roof. I was surrounded by tea lights, lanterns, rugs, shabby chic tables and chairs. The radio was playing Leonard Cohen. I pondered on what a death trap the place might be if the tea lights got too close to the Mongolian fabrics draped in each corner.
I knew nothing of Womad before I came, except they it sounded like Gonad. And how incredibly grateful I was to be asked. For the last three days I’ve spent time with some of the finest performance poets in the country. Vanessa Kisuule, Matt Harvey, Scott Tyrrell, Chris Redmond, Jonny Fluffypunk. I arrived with Lucy Lepchani and we immediately ran into difficulty trying to erect her tent. Mr Fluffypunk came over, took one look, hammered a few tent pegs, and the whole thing looked much better. That’s the spirit of camaraderie in the poetry camp.
The poetry tent is listed last in some of the Womad promotional material. And my name is listed last in the poetry tent promotional material. Every morning, when it walk into the main arena area of the festival and see the massive stages and the tents and the flags and the stalls I think to myself, ‘I am the lowest ranking performer here. And it feels great!’ There’s probably far less pressure than being the headliner.
Yesterday’s poetry headliner was MC Dizraeli. He’s someone I wanted to see for a long time since listening to him on a cd about ten years ago. And the highlight of my festival so far has to be that he performed his hour long set in front of a crowd of about three hundred people while sitting on MY camping chair. In fact, as I type this, I’m sitting in it right now. It’s a story to tell my grandchildren. If I hadn’t brought the camping chair with me, then MC Dizraeli would have had to stand.
I’ve spent every day so far in the poetry tent, watching the performers. My own sets have been well acclaimed, and I’ve been stopped by several people who have seen me perform and liked it. That’s what makes a difference to a performer, the knowledge that someone has been touched, no matter how briefly. It was sunny yesterday and we performed outside in the ‘arboretum’. They laughed in all the right places and I felt that I could have taken on the world!
It’s raining again today. I’m not going to be wearing a jacket and tie, like the last couple of days. I shouldn’t have worn cream colored trousers, that mud is just not going to come out. The Wellington boots are just about the best thing ive bought in ages. I was watching Bellowhead the other day, they were performing on the main stage, but all I could think was, ‘I’m so glad I bought these Wellington boots’. When I get back to the real world later on, I probably won’t wear them until the next festival. But right now they are everything. Mainly because my sneakers are buggered after all that rain the day before yesterday.

Set construction and the importance of narrative (while the poet is wittering on).

Many performance poets and spoken word types see an open mic slot or poetry night appearance as an opportunity, rightly so, to show the world how good they are. There’s minimal banter, a bit of a hello, and then they launch into their work. Which is excellent, of course. Until recently, this is exactly what I’d do. Hello everyone. Here’s my first poem. It’s about ironing boards.
One of the drawbacks of this is that once the audience has got used to you and your oeuvre, there’s no real change or sense of resolution or ‘journey’. A good set has to have a good narrative, just like a book. I suppose with me the problem was that I was influenced by music more than comedy. ‘Heres our latest single . . . and here’s an old hit’.
Over the last year I’ve been working more in comedy venues and with comedians as well as poets. Comedy audiences expect to laugh, but they also expect to be taken somewhere. And the same is true of a really good poetry set. Thinking back to all of the poets and performances that have struck me as good, there has always been this carefully constructed variance and journey, linking the poems and stringing them along with extra material, comedic asides, truisms and chit chat.
I think of people like Nathan Filer, Liv Torc and Byron Vincent. They understand that the poetry should take the audience on a journey from the heights of comedy and bliss to the darkest depths. The in-between linking material adds to the whole effect. The audience is there to see more than just the poetry. They also want to see the poet.
At the weekend I performed at Glas-Denbury music festival. Tim Vosper was on the bill, and he was amazing. His poetry is fast paced, comedic, funny and clever, but it’s all extenuated by the excellent linking material which makes use of such comedic devices as the afterthought and the callback. It was all very cleverly done, and the audience loved every minute. As did I. 
Therefore I’ve been thinking more than ever of the necessity of narrative, even in the most hurried environment. Last week, I was called in to a comedy venue with forty minutes notice, not enough time to create a proper set with linking material, and while it went okay, I think it would have gone much, much better had I had time to sit and write.
This may all appear to be basic stuff, to the seasoned professional, but the results are amazing. Good set construction makes everyone feel better, and this is an area where I shall be concentrating in future. I cringe to think how many times I’ve just stood there and said, ‘Here’s my new poem . . . here’s my famous poem’. 

A town called Burnsville, West Virginia.

I’ve been very fortunate to have travelled all over the world from an early age, and since I started work I’ve travelled on my own to some fantastic places. Also, as a part time performance comedy poet, I’ve travelled all around the UK, too. I’ve seen some nice place and visited some wonderful cities, and I’ve seen some downright grotty places too. Yet wherever I’ve been, the thrill of travel has been half the fun, and it usually only kicks in once I’m back at home.
It would be a bit naff right now to list all my favorite places, or those in which I have – (and I hate this phrase) – found myself. Tokyo and New York, for example. The rain forests of Australia. A four day train journey I took from one side of Canada to the other in the middle of winter. (I said I wouldn’t make a list, but now look at what I’ve gone and done).
I live in Devon, now. It’s a long way from the suburbs of Surrey where I grew up, and it feels like another world. Yet when I was barely eighteen years old, I took a journey out to Canada to see my Uncle and we ended up visiting a place that has stayed with me ever since. And I have no idea why.
In 1992, I was an enthusiastic traveller, diarist and amateur writer who saw the whole world as a source of adventure. Raised in the dull suburbs, yet defiantly liberal in outlook and, it has to be said, possibly a little camp, I wasn’t totally sure of who I was yet but I know what I liked, and I knew that I was different to everyone else. A holiday with my Uncle in Canada would be a chance to feel slightly independent, yet still under someone else’s care for a couple of weeks.
During my stay my uncle decided we would drive down into the US and just keep going, with the vague idea of going to Roanoke, because it sounded nice. We hired a white van and duly set off, driving all day and then stopping at motels, meandering across the southern states. And one night, when my uncle was too tired to drive, we stopped at a small town called Burnsville, West Virginia.
It was hot. Humidly hot. I’d never felt a heat like it. The moment I stepped from the air conditioned van, the humidity would cause me to sweat, instantly. We pulled up at a motel called the 79 and booked in. I remember thinking that it was the hottest I’d ever been.
I couldn’t sleep that night. The noise of insects kept me up and the small town had a rather unsettling feel to it, with valley sides and hills and forests, bleached white grass, hot car parks, and a deep starry night. Soaked in sweat, I decided to go for a walk.
The town was so quiet, except for the sound of traffic on the highway. I didn’t see a single person as I walked, in a kind of zig zag pattern. There was a bit of a valley behind the hotel with a stream in it which seemed to have dried up, and a bridge over the stream, and the sound of insects was quite loud. I think my allergies were possibly playing up. I saw a cat and I wanted to say hello to it, but my uncle had warned about diseases, and when I got closer to the cat I could see that it was badly injured as if it had fallen off of something. I felt really bad.

  
Kind of feeling that I should get help, I wandered around the side of the motel and saw light streaming out from a room beneath, in the basement. There seemed to be a laundry there, whether it was the laundry for the motel or a town facility, I did not know, but there were two young men in there of my age, shirtless, doing the washing. The moisture and the sweat made them appear to glisten in the fluorescent light and, well, you know me, I just had to stand and look at them for a while. It was the first time I’d thought about sexual matters for weeks, and this combined with the heat and the injured cat and the incredibly long day to make me feel strangely dissociated from everything.
I went away, sat for a while next to the road, which was mostly traffic free, looking at the woods on the slopes around the town feeling like a very small person in a very bit universe. Away from my family and from the comforting blanket of suburban Surrey, I suddenly realized that the person I was would stay with me for the rest of my life, no matter where I happened to be. Yes, I was in a strange new place, and there was the horror of the injured cat, but the glimpse of the sexy young men in the launderette reminded me that I had a culture and a life of my own.
I think we left fairly early the next morning.
As I grew up, and as I’ve travelled to other places, the town of Burnsville has stayed with me, always there at the back of my mind. Every time I feel hot or humid, like today, I’ve thought of Burnsville. Every time I’ve doubted myself I’ve remembered the motel and the launderette.
Lately, I found a Facebook page for the township of Burnsville and I’ve befriended a couple of people from there. They do not share the same beliefs as me and some of their Facebook posts can be quite infuriating for a suburban city liberal performance poet, but I can’t get angry, because this is their culture and this was the town where I realized something rather big about myself. It’s better to change the world slowly by example. And if I can’t sleep tonight, I know where my imagination will take me once again.