On Putting Up The Ticket Price at Hammer & Tongue

You think it’s easy,
being this airy poet dude
and still going out to earn a living?
My usefulness, such as it is,
resides in twisting words into strings of sweetly wrapped
bricks of meaning
to smash the glass walls of the discourse we’re trapped in.

Poem for National Poetry Day 2017: Whom Do We Thank for Women’s Conferences? – Ama Ata Aidoo, 1992

Whom Do We Thank for Women’s Conferences?
– Ama Ata Aidoo, Dangaroo Press 1992

Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian poet, the “first published African woman dramatist”, a title she gained for her Dilemmas of a Ghost play that she wrote as an astonishingly mature 21 year old. This poem comes from her collection ‘An Angry Letter in January’, published 30 years after that play was written.

Slam poetry is a genre. Or how to avoid slam clichés…

I saw someone share Canadian poet Chris Gilpin’s blog from last year arguing that we need to avoid “adopting the term ‘slam poet’”. Slam poetry, he says, is not a ‘genre’. It’s a way of running an open mic and it’s an international movement, emerging historically with the aim of freeing poetry from the “elite cultural gatekeepers”. It is excellent critique and I hope it is read far and wide by young poets who engage in live performance. Gilpin complains:

“Aspiring slam participants (and apparently even those who have no interest in participating) … copy the most obvious elements of performance cliché—yelling, speed, tones of distress, waving their arms—believing that they are correctly recreating a cool, new poetic style. In this way, the idea of slam poetry has crushed a great deal of artistic self-expression, encouraging poets to conform to something they can’t even define.”

The fact that he can describe a set of conventions in writing and delivery which are followed by its producers and recognised by its consumers suggests that ‘slam poetry’ has become a genre. And that genre is a bit wack. Can we turn back the tide? I’ve been running slams for ten years now in the UK, so I thought I’d give some tips for fellow poets to consider.

Chris Gilpin

Dalston Anatomy Poems, live at Ace Hotel, 18th Sep 2014

Full video of a 15minute set of my Ridley Road Market poems performed live at Ace Hotel, Shoreditch, London on 18th September 2014 for Local Transport event, introduced by Michael Salu.

Poem for National Poetry Day 2014: John Berryman’s ‘Of Suicide’

Recently, I opened up some John Berryman again and been enjoying his poetry, so for National Poetry Day, I thought I’d offer up one of his poems. Berryman (1914 – 1972) was, says Michael Hofmann in the introduction to my Faber edition, “of the first generation of American ‘professional poets’”. i.e. he taught in university, toured around giving ‘readings’ and winning prizes. He was also an alcoholic and suicidal. His father had killed himself when Berryman was 12 and the poet himself ended the same way nearly 50 years later. The dates of his publications make interesting reading:

Poems that Make Men Cry

I was invited this Saturday as a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme to discuss issues around the theme of poetry, emotions and masculinity. My fellow guest, Anthony Holden, is one of a father-and-son team of editors of a new anthology, ‘Poems That Make Grown Men Cry’ (Simon & Schuster), in which 100 well-known men each introduce a poem that moves them to tears. On the radio, we only had 5 minutes right at the end of the show, so I thought I put my ideas down more fully here.

Poem for World Poetry Day 2014: ‘Massacre, October ’66’, Wole Soyinka

Massacre, October ‘66

Written in Tegel

Shards of sunlight touch me here
shredded in willows. Through stained-glass
Fragments on the lake I sought to reach
A mind at silt-bed

The lake stayed cold
I swam in an October flush of dying leaves
The gardener’s labour flew in seasoned scrolls
Lettering the wind

Hammer & Tongue Hackney, November 5th 2013

“Stephen: (He taps his brow) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.” – Ulysses, James Joyce

1. On this 5th November at the Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Dalston, E8 3AS, we are preparing a night of poetic fireworks in solidarity with regicides everywhere. So from 8pm, we have two talented spoken word artists for you:

Market Cafe

Food is prepared with genetically modified soya bean oil.
We can only please one person per day.
Today is not your day.

On Watching the 1st test: Australia vs British and Irish Lions 22nd June 2013

Second Half.

Stomach-gripping tension.
Do we trust the fates too much to believe
this lead will hold?
Could half-perfect Halfpenny’s half-freakish, half-time miss
be the code for the way this will unfold?

Nerves seem to have got the players too.
Bodies fly into bodies round the fringes of the breakdowns.
Errors abound:
an overcooked kick, a pass spilt
a rolling maul driving headless into touch
and then relief.