Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

BANG BANG! BANG BANG!

If you see a man ambling about South London talking to himself, but his random tergiversations seem to be in iambic terza rima: that’s probably me trying to memorise my Cantos for my gig at Bang Said the Gun this Thursday.

If you haven’t yet been to BANG then you really need to go. As a perfomer I really feel that it is one of the few venues in London where I can be myself. This isn’t so much a cuss of the other gigs; due to my precarious freelancer existence I do a lot of gigs that have to be family friendly, or shows that reflect a certain theme. These are great fun most of the time and they help me to stretch my horizons and meet new challenges. Bang, however, is one of those rare gigs where I can really let rip and not hold back a thing. The audiences are always boisterous and friendly, the host Dan Cockrill and the rest of the gunslingers know how to put on a show and keep the energy levels high and the line ups are always top drawer. The Raw Meat Stew segment at the end of the evening pilfers from what’s best about open mic and Slam and ensures that the floor spot segment that ends the night is a true burst of entertainment intensity rather than an anticlimactic afterthought.

I’ll be sharing the bill with Dan Simpson, the witty, denonaire and effervescent wordsmith that was part of the Apples and Snakes team that romped to victory at this year’s Page Match at the Roundhouse.

So, make it down to Bang Said the Gun at The Roebuck in Borough this Thursday night, and if dire circumstances prevent you from doing so, make it down some other Thursday and soon.

WHEN THREE TRIBES GO TO WAR

My last entry about mainstream poetry and Dave Bryant’s excellent feature in the Morning Star brought about a ripple of opinion from some of the bubbles within poetry’s multiverse (pun wasn’t intended but I’ll take credit for it anyway). This week Jon Stone expressed his thoughts on the tribalism of poetry, something he’s been mulling over for a while. The three tribes he focused on were the tribes of Spoken Word, Avant Garde and Mainstream. Perhaps the cleverest part of the essay focuses on defining these tribes—he firstly defines them by how they may view themselves and then defnes each by how their detractors see them, very much a Hegelian thesis and antithesis which in turn invite an attempt at a synthesis.

However, some Hegelians, such as Slavoj Zizek, see the synthesis as very tension between these two rather than a friendly meeting of minds. This seems to be a poignant argument to how Spoken Word and the Avant Garde define themselves: very much as an opposition or alternative to the whipping boy of the Mainstream. This antagonism in turn allows the mainstream to define itself as the middle ground, the true neutral reference to which the others are derivatives or alternatives. Figureheads from all three are very cosy with this antagonism, it ensures their roles as poster children. The antagonism is also very useful to cultural commentators and arts correspondents  who always need an angle.

I part with Hegel in his vision that history is some kind of progression of humanity to more enlightened climes, I’m much more of the the “what goes around comes around” mindset. Things got very interesting around the time of the death of Performance Poetry (I’d say early to mid noughties). Around this time many previous figureheads of Performance Poetry began to think more seriously about their written output, with some crossing over into the Mainstream and others skillfully straddling the ground between them. At the same time, many other big names of Performance Poetry became less visible.

However, nature abhors a vacuum while the Arts love vacuums of the creative variety so Spoken Word sprung up in the niche that Performance Poetry left behind. Many Spoken Word artists know nothing of the era that preceded them and are genuinely convinced that they are part for something new. They are half right, SW is a different beast to PP in many ways, yet many of the arguments that the Spoken Worders make are carbon copies of their forgotten predecessors (the page/stage dichotomy, youth, the need for a poem to make its point on the first listening, the inclusion at festivals and the links to contemporary popular music).

So, what’s an unfashionable Spoken Word/Mainstream hybrid like yours truly to do in times when crossover is passée?

Nothing. I’ve been here before. I know what’s coming.

If you read all of this, you missed out on how it sounds in performance.

Niall

Dave Bryant’s interview with me appears in today’s Morning Star. You can read it online right here but I’d recommend that you also head out and buy it, it is one of the last true left wing papers in distribution and often struggles to maintain its existence. It’s a lovely piece by Dave which captures the spirit and ethos of Poetry Unplugged. However, word limits and editorial craftiness have rendered one of the final paragraphs a little problematically for me. Here’s the paragraph quoted in full:

“The kind of elitism I think does exist is in mainstream poetry – or what is called ‘mainstream poetry,’ which is written by TS Eliot Prize nominees and Poetry Review regulars, but read by very few people. Their response to the government cuts, the Occupy movement and the summer riots has been nothing, but then none of it touched them. The only vocalisation you get is from Carol Ann Duffy doing a poem about Arts Council cuts, rather than about the people who handed the cuts down to the Arts Council,” he continues disgustedly.

Now, I think a valid point is being made here but people could take the wrong impression. Firstly, I didn’t add anything “disgustedly” (this was the work of a sub editor rather than the author), that comment implies something far stronger than what I actually feel. I’m not disgusted with Carol Ann Duffy for writing a poem referencing many organisations that did not succeed in securing National Portfolio funding from ACE. If anything, Duffy’s laureateship has been the most radical in many ways. Not only should we not lose sight of her being the first woman in the post, we should also make note that she has not written any sycophantic odes to the Royal Family, instead choosing to measure the pulse of the nation with poems about the Stephen Lawrence murder and the death of Tariq Jahan during the English riots.

However I do stand by my assertion that mainstream poetry has not done anything to address the Occupy movement or the subjective, class aspects of the London Riots. We should take the laudable withdrawals of Alice Oswald and John Kinsella from the Aurum supported TS Eliot prize as handwashing, denunciatory gestures rather than overt, proactive strikes against the forces of free market capitalism. We heard more noise from mainstream poets in support of Aurum’s modest contribution to the TS Eliot Prizes administration costs. We heard more protest from mainstream poets about the non inclusion of some literary organisations for National Portfolio funding than against the coalition government that cut the public money available to the arts. Many acted as if poetry itself was under threat if the TS Eliot prize went under (no one seems to be looking at what the future of Valerie Eliot’s stipend, tied to the commercial success of the musical Cats, may be).

Mainstream poetry is mainly concerned about its own survival. This is not the same as the survival of poetry itself. Many statements about the declining health of poetry rely on the unexamined and snobbish assumption that hip hop isn’t poetry. “Mainstream Poetry” as a category is a slippery fish to handle and my offhand comments about the Poetry Review and the TS Eliot Prize don’t help. Poets I admire such as Ian Duhig and Annie Freud are TS Eliot nominees. My own best man, Nii Parkes and fellow Flipped Eye poet Malika Booker have had poems published in the Poetry Review. But these are exceptions rather than the rule. Mainstream poetry is an Islingtonian, dinner party mentality that permeates the social structures and stylisitic tropes that prop up the triad of literary prize, mainstream publisher and Guardian columnist.

Mainstream poets can enjoy relatively high profiles despite the fact that Spoken Word performers outsell them considerably with the CDs and pamphlets that they shift at gigs. Mainstream poetry is mainly white and middle/upper class, no matter how loudly it heralds the occasional exception to the rule. Poets from non white or working class backgrounds often have to ventriloquise the rhetorical aspects of the mainstream in order to gain mainstream recognition. In a recent speech to the Oxbridge bods, Tim Wells compared this practice to English actors that play characters with American accents on American films and TV shows.

Mainstream poetry eschews overt political expression, portraying poetry as something that transcends the political and connects to the timeless universality of the human condition—as all poetries that channel ruling ideologies are wont to do. Poets that dare to say something are often cattily chastised for their lack of sophistication in the hatchet-job roundups that bookend mainstream poetry quarterlies ( see Todd Swift’s review of Luke Wright’s The Vile Ascent of Lucian Gore in the Poetry Review).

I do not for a second feel that the kind of poetry that I attack in this article should be hidden away or supplanted. I wish all the best to the TS Eliot Prize, the poets that wish to be nominated and those that do not. All I really want to banish is the idea that these are representative of poetry and, by implication, the best of poetry as a whole. Then we may simply shrug at the all white shortlist, or the occasional all male shortlist such as last year’s Forward Prize—as long as those involved don’t utter the usual lines about how they honestly tried to simply choose the best collection.

Half Time Report

Wow, it’s been a long time since I put up one of these. I have been busy writing poems rather than verbalising about the state of poetry. The Mundane Comedy has been going for six months. For those of you that haven’t clicked on the links that turn up daily in my twitter feed, The Mundane Comedy is my latest (and most probably final) foray into publishing a poem a day online. Last time, Sonnet Hack saw me writing a sonnet a day for a month, this time The Mundane Comedy sees me posting a poem a day in Terza Rima for a year. Some of these poems have been agonised over for the best part of a day at my desk, others have been dashed off on my phone and published while on a crowded, noisy bus. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the former doesn’t always produce better work than the latter.

I am enjoying the project, which is all that I can really try to do. There’s no way a poet with twice my talent (they are legion, don’t appear on too many shortlists) could write a good poem every day in a particular form. Good poems take time, not because they need to be worked on over months but rather because time is the only thing that can allow a poet to get an outsider’s perspective on their own work.

I enjoy seeing how quickly my own limitations become visible, how often I find myself treading the same old ground in the same worn out shoes. I enjoy the fact that technology has taken us from a world where a select few printing presses would place a select few volumes in a select few bookstores in a select few towns to a world where someone can thumb a few thoughts onto a touchscreen and make them visible to a potential, but never actual, audience of millions. I enjoy it when people read my poems, whether they like them or not, even on days when the hits barely rise above twenty. If twenty people have read the whole poem that I just posted then that’s a good day for me as a poet.

Most of all, I enjoy the way that the novelty aspect has worn out very quickly. It’s gone from “Look at me, I’m going to write a poem in terza rima EVERY DAY!!! Nobody’s done that before!” to something that feels as normal to any other daily task. That’s actually reflected in the page views too, there were a fair few spikes where the hits went into the hundreds daily, before crashing back down. Now they potter around the fifty per day mark, which feels like a fair amount of dedicated readers to me. I don’t think for a second that those earlier flurries of hits were the same. They were a whole bunch of people following a link, exclaiming “meh!” and going back to check their facebook. Going viral is for Cats That Look Like Hitler. So, if you’re among those fiftyish people, I humbly salute you. I hope the next six months keep things interesting so that you stick around.

…and the award for most middle brow film goes to…

Awards are for the middlebrow. It is for that which is seemingly cultured enough to atone for its popularity. I enjoyed The Artist for the performances and the dog. It was, in no way, a homage to the most experimental, groundbreaking and magical period in cinema history. Here’s a comment I made beneath a post about The Artist that I’ll share again here:

” I just thought that the Artist came across as a shallow pastiche rather than a loving homage, no matter how well intentioned. I say that out of love for silent cinema and not snobbery against the popular. The popularity of The Artist is all about its Oscar buzz elements, rather than any genuine public groundswell. No film is released in December and January without the expectation of hitting that middlebrow awards vein in the same way that political parties hope to occupy the middle ground during election time.

The Artist may have been stylistically distinct from the homogeneous stirring Oscar winners, but apart from the gimmicky pastiche element, it’s just another heartwarming Oscar nominee. Even Chaplin’s form of crowdpleasing sentimentality was far more believable, subversive and genuinely touching than the Artist. The story of the Artist is not about the redemption of a faded icon, if anything the unconvincing denoument works to try to redeem the fickle studio system and the myth of the redemptive power of fame that it looks to be critiqueing in the middle of the film.

The irony is that silent cinema was truly groundbreaking, it played with rules, expectations, narrative conventions and aesthetics far more than any other era of cinema. I would rather see a film honour these elements of silent cinema rather than simply parrot the shallower aspects of silent cinema’s appearance.”

People would like to see The Artist as important because it could re-engender a love among the general public for silent cinema, but that good work is already being done by Criterion, BFI and Eureka! in producing beautifully restored HD transitions of the greatest cinema ever made. You should check them out.

If you read all of this, I’ll tell you what film the above still is from.

Niall

I will be running a ten week course for intermediate level poets from January 2011 at the Poetry School. The course, entitled “The Next Step”, will focus on technical and practical aspects of writing poetry, from formal poetry to performance poetry. The course will also offer practical advice on other aspects of poetry, from reading in public and getting published to networking and using the internet as a way of promoting and publishing your work. You can find out more on the course by clicking on the link to the Poetry School’s website below.

http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/the-next-step.php

Punchy Poetry

Big plug first for a big gig in North Weezy. The poet that truly does what it says on the tin, The Bros Grim, is holding a benefit for the boxing gym where he works as a trainer tonight. There will be an all star poetry line up at, and in aid of, the All Stars boxing gym . The All Stars gym has a track record of taking wayward youth from the area and instilling focus and discipline with rigorous training, as well as giving them an outlet for their anger. The gym is constantly struggling to stay open and does so currently due to the hard work of its staff and the generosity of its supporters. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you close down all the worthwhile ventures like the All Stars, then this Summer’s riots are going to look like a tea party come next summer.

Anyway, tonight you will get to watch a top bill of top quality poets battling it out within a bona fire boxing ring for your sadistic entertainment. I will be one of the ringside judges, though my Saint persona will not be making an appearance, seeing as he woz ‘orrible. Hope to see you down there tonight.

Epic Poetry

I’ve not been hyping it to the high heavens, but my follow up to Sonnet Hack was made public earlier this week. The Mundane Comedy: A Year in Terza Rima is exactly what it says it is, a year of poems following the form of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I started way back at the beginning of September but only made it public for reasons that will become evident if you follow the link above and have a nose about. I can’t guarrantee a poem every day but I have managed it thus far, adding almost sixty new poems to my canon in as many days. Seeing as it’s probably a bit of a trawl for my average non stalker I will be blogging a best of page over here for each month, so keep your eyes peeled form a best off September post quickly followed by the October highlights.

Magic Poetry

If you don’t want to be in when the trick or treaters come knocking on Monday, I will be reading as part of the Poets in the Pub event at the North Nineteen pub in, you guessed it, N19. Floor spots will be available on the night and there will also be a magician, Joe Raine. The night will be hosted by poet Michael Clift, who will also be sharing his tip drawer poems.

If you read all of this, I’ll take a dive in the second for you.

Niall

It wasn’t me, it was The Saint!

First rule of judging a Slam: never believe the guy that tells you that it’s all a bit of fun and don’t take it too seriously. This is just an implicit statement that actually means that things are deadly serious but we must mutually pretend it is not for the sake of maintaining our appearances as ladies and gentlemen of culture. So, last night at the Page Match event at the Roundhouse, adopting my snobbish heel persona of Niall “The Saint” O’Sullivan, I decided that it would be really funny to give Robert Auton a score of 1.

How people would laugh, even Rob himself would shrug, turn to the crowd and smirk as if to say, Ooh, get that Niall, what a scamp! What a card!

Instead, I drew a chorus of of boos from the crowd, some cries of Nooo and the scorecard lady told me that she hated me with complete earnestness.

The promoter shouted “Is that really it?” across the room and Rob himself stared at me with a gaping mouth, his eyes were keyholes into a world of pain that only Job could have known.
Another one to add to my ram packed scrapbook of jokes that backfired then.

A round later, I relented and changed the score to an eight, which garnered accusations of fixing as the change in score decided the final winners for the evening. This may have been the motive for when some villain made off with the championship belt at the end of the night. Be it last night’s drama or the skirmishes at the Poetry Society, poetry is becoming a bit more like wrestling each day and that’s a good thing.

It was the Saint what said it

So another thing that my Saint persona said also probably made me a few enemies. When the ref/host Polar Bear asked me what I was looking for as a judge, my persona responded, “You’re twenty-one, you’ve just split from a three month relationship; no-one gives a fuck.” While there is obviously some truth in this, I wasn’t saying that young people shouldn’t write about these things, but rather that they shouldn’t assume that the strong feelings they have for their situation always automatically transfer to the poem. Same with poems about the problems of the world—it works when written well but often comes off as a tedious sermon. Like many ex Catholics, I don’t like being preached at. Hence why I marked down a few poems that started well but turned into sermons. Come on you spoken worders, you’re young talented and full of spunk, you can do better than that!

If you read all of this, I’ll give you a ten.

Niall

Hello all, it’s been a while since the last entry. Looking back at my initial reaction to the riots during my last entry, I seem to have been prematurely jovial and offhand in my response. Despite the ability of Brixton rioters to inadvertently stick one to big business, the riots spread through the country and claimed small businesses, homes and lives. In response our government threw ridiculously disproportionate sentences at young people whose lives will also be irreparably damaged in order to appease the foaming mouthed “it’s not an excuse” brigade. You can read a poem I wrote on the subject, alongside the responses of many other poets and spoken worders, on the Riot Pieces blog set up by Joshua Idehen.

15 years of Poetry Unplugged

Spoon, O'Sullivan, Citizen, Dhiman

My second ever open mic reading was at Poetry Unplugged, just a few months after Jon Citizen kicked it off. So the 15th Birthday Bash this Tuesday holds a lot of significance for me. It’s amazing how much the night has changed since the frontier days of Citizen’s tenure. The early days of Unplugged were very much a part of the Performance Poetry years, with many poets belting out their greatest hits, sharpening their performance for any future gigs. Compare that with today’s crowd and you’ll find a group of poets that are mostly anxious not to repeat a poem and keep on churning out new work, through no intervention of my own, it should be added. We don’t attract as many eccentrics (and the incidents that accompanied them) as we once did. That makes my work a bit easier, but I can understand why many might miss that element of things.

It really fries my noodle that, circumstances willing, we’ll be celebrating 20 years in five years time. Will I still be the host then? Who knows? I’m already the longest running doctor host with over six years under my belt and I don’t feel weary yet. If the time comes in my life to make a change, or if the whole thing gets a little stale because of me, then I’ll be sure to make the exit quick and painless. But for now, I still having the time of my life every Tuesday.

You can help celebrate the birthday of Unplugged by coming down to the Poetry Cafe this Tuesday 6th September. Citizen and Dhiman will be down to host a segment each and there will be cake! Remember to sign up between 6-7pm and due to anticipated demand, the show may start at 7pm rather than the usual time of 7.30pm.

Speaking of Anniversaries

Today marks a year since I started on the Sonnet Hack project. I’m still quite proud of the poems looking back, writing regularly from  a formal perspective helped me to develop my ear and improve as a poet. If things have seemed pretty quiet since then I can assure you that many projects are currently bubbling under and will become more visible in the months and years to come. In fact, I started on a project today that is probably more grueling and ambitious than the Sonnet Hack project, but it’s going to be kept under wraps for the next few months before the big reveal. I will say no more about it until then.

If you read this, I’ll let you read in the first half.

Niall

Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most…

So, after a few weeks of negligence, of course I’m going to come up with something about the current unrest in and around London. I won’t harp on about Tottenham, as I don’t live there and only know what I’ve seen on the web (the standard news media are just looking more and more inept and irrelevant). All I can say is that what happened in North London was the product of a real and sudden anger and should not be judged as if it was some rational, predetermined and strategised strike against injustice.

However, I took a walk down to Brixton town today to check out the fallout of the looting that happened last night. Foot Locker went down in flames after being cleared out, and the boutique chain stores and takeaways along the high street succumbed to a similar fate. From the tweets and updates of my friends, it seemed as if Brixton was a ghost town this morning.

So you can imagine how surprised I was to get there and find the place buzzing. There was almost a carnival atmosphere, with teenagers congregating around the TV cameras. One girl exclaimed “I’ve been tryin’ to get famous all day!” All the footfall was diverted away from the sectioned off high street and into the back streets and market. I have a feeling that today was pretty good for the majority of small and independent businesses around Brixton. How ironic indeed that a group of hooded, masked teenagers hooked on consumerism hit a bigger blow against corporate, multi national capitalism than the erudite students of the anti cuts movement.

These kids could have looted some far more profitable places, but the ones they struck pimped the very products that are shoved down their throats, from billboards, pop up ads, touted by sportsmen and hip hop artists. Real objects of desire, status symbols. Reminders of what they don’t have. Sweatshop spun trophies of little practical value but of toxic symbolic relevance. Every ad and namecheck from up high reinforces this. Every mugging and snatch/grab below reinforces this.

Meanwhile, as a peaceful vigil is planned in Tottenham, the BBC news are streaming live footage of what looks like the beginning of skirmishes in Hackney (filmed from a helicopter!). I wonder if they realise that they are creating a beacon that shouts “Get the f*** down to Hackney, it’s all kicking off!” ? When it kicked off in Brixton last night, there wasn’t a peep on the news channels. It amused me to hear from many residents about how they hardly noticed the looting, but the helicopters kept them awake all night.

Book Slam!

I will be a part of the South London cultural vanguard next Monday 15th of August when I host Book Slam at the Clapham Grand. The show kicks off at 7.30 and features Hari Kunzru, Joe Dunthorne and Ross Raisin will be featuring and I’ll even get to peddle my poetical wares for ten minutes. Masterminded by Patrick Neate, Book Slam is one of London’s biggest literary nights and I’m very excited to be a part of it.

If you read all of this, I’ll grab you a widescreen.

Niall

Another late blog, we have slowly shifted from Sundays to Tuesdays, I hope noone out there is setting their clock by me.

Ringing True

I am currently in the office of most on London’s artistic and literary community, the South Bank Centre, tapping this out on my fancy new tablet (no, it aint Apple). I have a big smug look on my face only rivalled by someone that’s just wrote a sestina and used the word “sestina” in the title. I have also been taking part in one of my favourite passtimes, which is talking about poetry with Nii Ayikwei Parkes. We were putting the final touches to our Urban Arvon course Poetry that Rings True. The course starts on Friday and there are still a few places available, go on, pull a sicky in the name of culture. Actually, in my gardener days I once entered “ennui” as the reason for not attending work on the absence form, and noone got back to ask if I was taking the micheal.

Anyway, myself and mister Parkes will be investigating how reading a poem aloud can help us to edit and shape a poem, how the voice of a poet lends authenticity to the poem, and work on aspects of poetry that involves rhythm and repetition but aren’t necessarily formal. You see that Urban Arvon tab to the right of this page? You should click it, go on, click it.

When do we want it?

And while smugly tapping a swiping away at my non-Apple tablet device, I caught sight of a headline in one of my blog feed applications. It was entitled “In Praise of Protest Poetry” and I jabbed it enthusiastically with my finger, expecting to find something about how poets in the UK are weilding their pens (and fancy, gorgeous, gleaming new tablet devices that you want to lick when noone’s looking) against the current ideologically motivated cuts to public services. Instead, I followed through to a Grauniad editorial about some Arabic poets coming to London to recite poetry about the Arab Spring. Now, I am obviously right behind the people taking back the power in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, but what I like most about it is that they couldn’t give a hoot as to whether my tablet touting arse approves it or not. I’m also sure that the title of the article was more down to copy desk aliterative tendencies rather than the actual author. But it does point out the gaping absence of class issues and protest within contemporary mainstream poetry complemented by a love of protests happening on the other side of the world. Again, before anyone accuses me of being parochial, my point is that the events of the Arab Spring don’t really depend on the approval of urbane British liberals, they’re doing it for themselves.

The only place where the exploration of domestic issues, be it inner city knife crime or anti cuts sentiment, is visible is the performance poetry scene. It may not be the most free of cliche or predictable rhymes, but this is where large groups of people will conmect on these issues. The only visible dissent from the unpopular cuts from the poetical mainstream has been from the Poetry Cuts movement, which has shown poets up in arms about the Arts Council cuts to some poetry organisations ( and dare I say their life lines) but not following the line to how the cuts effect public service workers, students and those on benefits.

The only conslusion I can come to is the class divide: that more working class and minority members, the people most affected by the cuts, find performance poetry more inclusive than the more academic literary scene. I can only also conclude that the people that consume mainstream and academic poetry feel more connected to the issues concerning oppressed people many miles away but have little time for those that people the estates and tower blocks that they live in the shadow of. This is normally the point when I take a pop at the Poetry Review, but it at least featured an excellent article by Ian Duhig in its latest issue about locality and politics. Here’s hoping it’s the beginning of a trickle of ideas between our worlds.

I you read this, I’ll chain myself to something in protest at the world not saying you’re great often enough.

Niall

Yesterday, I caught up with a few poets at a little Apples and Snakes shindig to celebrate their National Portfolio funding. Among all the how-do-you-do’s and me-me-me’s, I ended up waffling on about the perennial topic of the poetry/spoken word scene and television. Since then, I’ve been grinding my caffeinated gears about the subject, and I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear that I have a few opinions about it…

I’ve actually been part of a few poetry TV show pilots in the past, filmed at different venues from the Poetry Cafe to the Imperial Gardens nightclub in Camberwell. None of these were ever picked up, despite the best efforts and boundless enthusiasm of those involved. Rather than gloat on how amateurish these were, of how embarrassingly the about turns of the most earnest poets can be when catching a scent of national exposure, and the resulting adulation from the populace; I’d like to offer a few pointers on the mistakes people keep on making and the angles people should make with regard to getting it right.

Firstly, many artists see Def Poetry Jam as a kind of pinnacle that we in the UK should work towards replicating. My first reason for not feeling the same is that I think that DPJ is bloody awful. It reeks of an earnestness mined from Oprah’s book club and a suffocating sense of its own importance. It has a famous rapper that introduces the acts with zero enthusiasm and little in the way of inciteful preamble. The audience are very obviously drilled in how to react, overplaying the laughter and applause. Perhaps this kind of thing works in America,  but I don’t think so. You can find live recording of the poets reciting the same poems on youtube and the whole thing comes across as a lot more genuine, authentic and energised than what happens with lots of interference from floor managers, producers and a few tonnes of light rigging.

That pretty much sums up what I think people should do, get out there and record the live poetry scene as it happens. What caught the magic of musicians like Hendrix? The reels of live documentary footage or his appearance at a sound stage for the Lulu show? The scene is already there, it just needs to be caught at its natural best. Allow the sound of traffic to leak in from outside, don’t let the audience know they’re being filmed (most producers do fine by just posting a notice on the door that hardly anyone pays attention to). Let the heckles come and let the poets deal with them. You can still be selective with the editing while sculpting it for TV. Hell, you can even do that little cut to black and white camera trick if you think the ADHD TV audience would otherwise choke on their midnight snacks (let’s have no illusion as to when they’ll put us on…), but let’s avoid topical little inserts or reconstructions of what happened to the poet because they really are shit.

Another good thing is that a show about the live scene would send a little message that it’s the scene itself that people should aspire to being a part of, rather than wanting to be on the telly. Audiences would get a sense of poetry as something out there in the world, rather than another rivulet of contact between the hermetically sealed sanctums of living room and sound stage.

I have previously looked a proper tit reciting my poetry on Henman Hill before the Murray match, which is as good a fifteen minutes as being on Come Dine With Me. I’m most happy performing, reading, writing, and listening to poets and try, with little success, to keep my attention whore tendencies out of it. So I’m not expressing my interest in being a TV poet, just offering some advice to those that want to try that path. And now, over to Tom for the weather.