In December 2011, Christopher Logue passed away, a shamefully under-known poet. A man who helped reawake the world to the fact that the writing and performance of poetry are two parts of the same process.
Fortunately, a number of an excellent poets will be gathering at The Wreck, near his old home of Camberwell, to celebrate the man, his poetry and his legacy. These include:
John Hegley Kate Tempest Angry Sam Raymond Antrobus Curious
There will be personal reminiscences from Logue's widow, the literary and cultural historian, Rosemary Hill, and from Rick Stroud, writer and TV director;
There will be a raffle, where members of the audience can read random pages from Prince Charming, Logue's autobiography;
And there will be sick tunes from Bobby Gandolf and Xahdrez.
as well as the Chill Pill poets (Mista Gee, Deanna Rodger, Raymond Antrobus, Simon Mole) we'll be hearing from BBC Radio regular, poet 'John Osborne' and BBC 3 Slam Champion Kat Francois.
John Osborne
Kat Francois
Myself and poet Dzifa Benson have been coaching eight young poets to become Slam Champions for this Cultural Olympia project 'Shake The Dust'. This Saturday is the regional final at The Albany. Below is more Shake The Dust events you MUST SEE!
Kate Tempest
National Shake the Dust Weekend Thursday 5 – Saturday 7 July | Southbank Centre
Three unmissable days of spoken word, featuring some of the most celebrated spoken word artists performing today, including Saul Williams, Kate Tempest, Lemn Sissay, Dizraeli and the Small Gods and many more. Plus films, music, FREE events and the UK ‘s biggest ever youth poetry slam! The Shake the Dust Champions, young poets from across the UK, will join forces with Southbank’s London Literature Festival to share a stage with top spoken word artists.
Every Sunday I will be posting about two artists and asking "is this poetry?" The idea came about when I was walking past a pub and a football game was on. A team scored and I heard someone shout "THAT WAS POETRY!" and I wondered what exactly is poetry to people other than something we turn to during a ceremonial wedding/funeral? - can it relate to any display of skill?
I thought I'd start off simple with a 16 year old rapper I was told about by one of the young poets me and Dzifa Benson are coaching as part of Shake The Dust project.
Is this poetry?
Kate Tempest calls herself a rapper but calls her pieces poems... Here she is delivering something great...
Not many people know that singer Pete Doherty and comedians Mark Lemar and Phil Jupitus started their careers as poets.
Going around reading poems, bantering in venues across the country and then crafting their banter into stand up, or poems into indie songs at the request of their commercially minded managers.
Why is poetry something to avoid if you wish to reach bigger audiences?
Some people (mostly poets themselves) blame Rock & Roll.
I asked punk poet Christian Watson for his take on the debate.
Christian, Did Rock & Roll kill poetry?
To say that Rock & Roll killed poetry is simplistic and, ultimately, untrue, mainly due to the fact that poetry is all around us, even if the vast majority of people choose to ignore it. I would say that the proliferation of Rock & Roll during the late fifties and the whole of the sixties denied poetry a place in the Western mainstream culture, sidelining an art form which has within it vast reserves of power.
To me, there is nothing purer than the human voice, and Rock & Roll diluted that purity by joining it with African beats and European melodies, creating a sound which no longer needed to be listened to, merely felt, and at that point the words became merely another instrument and lost the power they have when they stand alone.
I have always thought that if you need to add music to your words so that someone will listen to them then you are wasting my time.
For as long as I can recall the words in music have always had the most power over me, Hip Hop, Punk, Soul, Blues, Indie, whatever- whether it be Mr Lif breaking down the post 9/11 American mind state in 'Home of the Brave' or Ian Curtis summing up working class ennui better than Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ever did with the lines "When routine bites hard/ And ambitions are low"- the music always came second. I don't care about genre, I just want words that mean something, not just to me, but to the voice singing/rapping/screaming them, and Rock & Roll, along with its degenerate offspring, has made it so that meaningless lyrics are not just easy to get away with, but in fact have become the norm in mainstream pop music.
In the mid fifties the poetry readings were starting to occur in places that they had never touched before, such as coffee shops, bars, jazz clubs and anywhere where the young and the hip were hanging, New York to Long Beach to London. Poetry was becoming a place for the young and discontent to express themselves.
Poetry became so popular that in 1960 J. Edgar Hoover was quoted as saying that the three greatest threats to American life are "Communists, eggheads and beatniks"- yes, beatniks, a media term for the young people who were smoking dope, reading poetry, squatting in cheap apartments and engaging in lifestyles that were totally removed from the type of society America was looking to create post World War II. This generation were looking for meaning and trying to express thoughts and feelings that were, to a point, illegal to express- the examples of Ginsberg and Burroughs obscenity trials can be taken as evidence of this, not to mention the trials of Lenny Bruce(a comedian who was first arrested in 1961 for apparent obscenity- the forefather of people such as George Carlin, Bill Hicks and Doug Stanhope)- and I believe that Rock & Roll diluted this self expression as it gave the discontents a way to express their feelings with sounds rather than words, using guitars and drums to make noises that their parents disapproved of, whilst at the same time singing lyrics that meant little or nothing.
Of course, there are always a few who go against the norm, who can fuse brilliant words with emotive sounds, but on the whole most bands and musicians are happy making something that sounds nice, yet is mentally unchallenging and lacking in verbal finesse. The sounds they create alienate their parents and elders, therefore those creating the sounds can feel they are rebelling, when all they are doing is commodifying their rebellion, turning it into a product that may sound like it is challenging the status quo when it is actually strengthening it, making it easier for their peers to buy into the culture of conformity through established and controlled modes of rebellion.
Popular music, whether it be Punk, Metal, Hip Hop or Chip Dub, has become the main source of expression for the discontent youth, yet, for the most part, the bands playing this music are not saying shit worth listening to.
There have also been many bands and musicians that give lip service to poetry, such as Jim Morrison or Pete Doherty, but they have rarely denounced the musical side and tried to get out there on the power of their spoken word alone.
The only place in the mainstream for pure spoken word seems to be comedy, and there it is only artists that don't challenge the mainstream views and merely reflect an audiences expectations back at them that get big, people such as Lee Evans or that bloke who talks about garlic bread, people who tell well structured jokes about relationships and airplane food. The comedians who challenge this status quo rarely become household names, and people who stand on stage and read poetry have not ever, in the last twenty to thirty years, become household names.
People like Luke Wright, Kate Tempest, Byron Vincent, Buddy Wakefield and even John Cooper Clarke are names that, in modern spoken word circles, are exalted as being at the top of the game, performing regularly to largish crowds, yet none of them are household names, names that the general public know anything about. Kate Tempest and Buddy wakefield get larger audiences when they marry their words with music, but that, to me, is placating an audience, giving them what they expect in order to get your words in their ears. Poets should not need music to gain an audience, but they do, and I blame Rock & Roll.
Rock & Roll didn't kill poetry, but it diverted attention away from a powerful, pure form of expression, a form of expression that allows for a personal and real bond between actor and audience, between writer and reader, between speaker and listener. With poetry you can't zone out the words and listen to the sounds, you can't ignore the lyrics and just tap to the beat, you can't just look at pretty dance moves and scream at a wall of sound. With poetry you have to actively involve your brain, to create a bridge between two active minds, and this takes effort.
I can only speculate, but without Rock & Roll, without the overpowering music and amplification we have now, without the vapid preoccupation with looks and style, without the slick videos and obscene budgets, without the theatre of cruelty parading fetishes youth and PR managed monstrosities across our daily media manipulated retinas, without Elvis and his wiggle, without Bob Dylan going Judas, without Punk becoming Blink 182 and weird legs in leotards becoming the next big thing. Without all this, poetry may have had a place in the mainstream. If Rock & Roll hadn't become so damn good at saying nothing and saying it with style, so good at creating and reflecting the needs and desires of youth, then maybe poetry might have become a force to be reckoned with- it was going that way, but somehow being heard won over saying something worth listening to.
Poetry isn't dead, it's just being ignored. I say fuck that, one man/woman with a pocketbook full of something worth saying is worth listening to a million times more than the Ga-Ga's and Bono's of this world. Rock & Roll didn't kill poetry, but I reckon poetry can destroy Rock & Roll.
Christian Watson is a poet based in Hastings. He publishes a poetry magazine called No.1 Fake which comes out bi-monthly. He also runs a poetry event called Slam Sandwhich. Here's a very good poetry video he made recently -
Mike Skinner is not a shit rapper; he’s a good poet. Someone needs to tell him that… However, no one needs to tell Polarbear he’s not shit.
Steven Camden aka Polarbear doesn’t like to be hyped up but many would stand by me when I say he’s one of the best writer/performer/Spoken Word artists in the UK by any standard.
If you like your wordsmiths to be humble, home grown and clean cut storytellers in flat caps I may have found you a street corner hero.
Polarbear, your last one-man show was called ‘Return’ and on the flyer it says ‘A Spoken Film’. What is ‘Spoken Film’? Are you pioneering a new genre of theatre?
I dunno. I doubt it. Not on purpose anyways. A spoken film is me speaking a screenplay; shot description, dialogue and so on. I had a story I wanted to tell and an idea of how I could do it. I sat down and with Yael crafted a screenplay for my mouth. The idea is really an extension of what I’ve been trying to do with shorter pieces for a while now. I really wanted to test how filmic I could make a story feel as an experience both to tell and to listen to. I’m touring it until Feb 2011 on and off. It’s been a brilliant process and I’ve grown as a writer and performer through it. I worked really closely with a couple of people and I’m happy with what we made. It’s feels nice to take a starting point and get a piece to be exactly what you wanted. ‘RETURN’ is that.
I want you to know, there are a lot of little Polarbear imitators out there… I saw a performer completely rip you off a few weeks ago and it hurt to watch.. what should I do when I witness such horrific crimes against creativity?
Everything is borrowed lad. I wouldn’t worry. I think when you’re just starting out at something it’s inevitable that what you’re into will be present for people to see. That’s just a development thing I think. People sometimes need a base to grow their style on. A biter is always gonna shoot themselves in the foot at some point, either directly or indirectly. I remember teachers at school saying that imitation was the best form of flattery. I guess I should be flattered. Once, then it’s just lazy.
You’re a Dad. How has fatherhood impacted you as a writer? I imagine you’ve had to have your discipline on lock?
Fatherhood just made me have less time and as a consequence of that a desire not to waste any. I can now get done in three hours what it used to take a whole day to do. In terms of discipline and my work I think it’s added some maturity maybe. I’m now a man capable of acting like a boy as oppose to the other way around. I still wake up at 4am needing to write ideas down and sometimes that can mess you up when you have dad responsibilities, but it’s like anything else, I only do what I’m excited by so if I’m excited by an idea I make time to realize it.
Seems you’ve had a pretty good career as a Spoken Word artist so far but how do you measure success if not by your capital?
I don’t really think beyond the next idea. It’s funny cos every now and then I’m around a conversation about spoken word and important artists in that world or whatever and it always strikes me that the people using the word success the most are the ones I find least interesting.
The fact is I make a living from ideas and that’s something that will never not be nuts. I’m lucky. I’ve paid dues and I deliver so I get opportunities. There are words that I’ve written that might live longer than me. Crazy. I work on a lot of writing/performance projects and have made a lot of friends. Thanks to my email inbox I know there are a couple of writers who have an interest or passion to write stuff in part due to me and that there are a few more people who believe that stories can be written by anyone who’s good at it regardless of back ground. That’s pretty cool. How do I measure success? To be honest lad I don’t know. Where I come from work is work and play is play. I get to blend the two and that’s as successful as I need to be.
I once read an interview you did a while back where you spoke about your frustration with the lack of quality in the UK ‘Spoken Word scene’ and you went on to disassociate yourself with the term “poet”… Has Spoken Word poetry moved along or are you sticking to your claws? Again I’ve gotta be annoying and say I don’t really know. I rarely go to spoken word events I’m not involved with because of time and I still have no desire to be known as a poet. It’s pretty simple to me. The form of spoken word at it’s best to me is immediate, engaging and hopefully has a lasting resonance. I just wasn’t seeing a whole lot of stuff that met all of those points. There are lots of strong artists doing it and a whole heap of absolutely crap ones (in my opinion) but none of that really enters my head when I’m writing.
I don’t consider myself to be a poet. I feel comfortable speaking work on stage to an audience so I’m cool with the spoken word label, but if I wake up tomorrow and decide to write a cookbook, then that’s what I’ll do. Has spoken word moved along? Of course it has and so have audiences. There’ll always be good and there’ll always be awful, it’s just with spoken word there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s important that individuals keep pushing themselves and their ideas. That sounded a little more political than I intended.
You are part of the OneTaste collective. Each poet in there really holds their own. Kate Tempest, David J and yourself couldn’t make a better example of how three completely different styles of writing and performance can be equally as powerful as each other. Are you three on any kind of mission as the poets in a collective dominated by musicians?
No. OneTaste is a bunch of artists who just do stuff together. Sometimes people collaborate, other times we just perform on the same night. We’re friends who make stuff. Some of us talk, some of us sing and play. I don’t see the rest of them half as much as I used to so I don’t want to speak for them, but for me it’s just a mark of quality. Justice League, although to be honest I always found Justice League to be a little bit wet, but I mean when you’re around quality you want to bring more quality and that just makes it good for anyone watching.
Musa Okwonga once said to me that the term “Spoken Word Artist” sounds apologetic. So many of us essentially do the same thing (write and perform) but market ourselves with different names e.g. poet, writer, performer, live literature artist… why can’t we all come together and figure this out… aren’t we confusing our audience or are we trying to avoid the stigma of the terms “poet” or “poetry”?
Man you think properly about this shit eh?
I don’t have these thoughts lad. I’m a writer. I can say that with confidence now. Sometimes I speak my work to an audience, but I don’t need to. I don’t have dreams about being on stage in front of screaming crowds. Used to be that I spoke stuff cos it was the quickest way to share stuff. Now I enjoy the craft. Musa’s funny. He can be the most apologetic person ever then switch and be proper hardcore. I get called all kinds of stuff from beat poet to everyday word wizard and it’s never once changed what I do. I’ll just keep doing that and let other people worry about the definitions.
Finally Polarbear, you’re an absolute legend and an inspiration to so many poets and writers out there… you’re going down in history and your imitators will die nameless. Yay!
I come from Birmingham.
Here's Polarbear at Chill Pill a few weeks ago with his poem 'The Scene' - "there's a reason they call it 'the scene', it's because it's not real"
The first series of the Q&A comes to a close… Mighty thanks to Paula Varjack, Jon Sands, Paradox, Hollie Mcnish, Bohdan Piasecki, Deanna Rodger, Rob Auton and Simon Mole for your thoughtful and honest answers… I salute you!
Meanwhile... myself, Mista Gee, Deanna Rodger, Kim Leng Hills and Craig Tomas have been working hard developing our weekly Spoken Word Poetry and Music night ‘Chill Pill’ at the top of East London’s Brick Lane.
It’s been a smash hit. The first three weeks we had a room of an average 25-30 people a week…
we’re now cramming them in at an average of 50-65 heads a week after running for two and a half months…
Spoken Word Poetry is on the rise and it’s as cutting edge as ever!
Here's some shots of some of the poets we've had down the last couple months...
The man, the myth, the legend – ‘Rodney Christopher Paradox’ is one of those rare human beings with the aura of strong gales of wisdom and knowledge you feel before he’s even fluttered his lips. His story is awe-inspiring but I’d rather let him tell it. I was doing at least 3 gigs a week in 2008 on the London Spoken Word circuit and ‘Paradox’ is a name that kept coming up. “Yo man, you seen that cat Paradox – he’s amazing but I haven’t seen him for a while” I hadn’t met the man but I felt his presence. Then a good friend of mine, Dr.Stewart sent me a video of him performing up a tree that blew my mind! I did a gig recently at Chris Redmond and Shane Solanki’s night of improvisational musicians and Spoken Word poetry – Tongue Fu. The line up was Laura Dockrill, Bryon Vincent, Deanna Rodger and the man himself – He performed a piece about losing a limb, I’d waited two years to hear that poem and it was everything I wanted it to be. He’s the fourth Spoken Word poet to make me cry – and I got a strong heart dammit!
Q. Paradox, you know there are quite a lot of emcees and Spoken Word artists called ‘Paradox’ but you’re the only one worthy of the name I’ve yet to see, what does it mean? Why Paradox?
Actually I didn't know that Raymond, but I think its perfectly appropriate that there are many singular beings called paradox! The definition of paradox that I like best is; "an apparent contradiction which nevertheless feels true" e.g. the "sound of silence". My life has always been defined and even dominated by paradox, in that the "worst day of my life" was the "best day of my life", the "stupidest thing I ever did" was the "smartest thing I ever did", and the "worst thing that ever happened to me" was the "best thing that ever happened to me." It was these painfully perfect personal paradoxes that inspired me to start writing performance poetry at the age of 35, having never written a poem in my life before that. So by taking on the name, I think I was basically honoring my muse, whilst at the same time ensuring my contradictory experience would continue to provide me with poetic material! Most importantly though, its just a shit hot stage name innit? hahaha.
Q. You quit a £70,000 a year job and discovered Spoken Word poetry. Please share that story with us.
Well Raymond, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat! And after 14 years in sales, marketing, media and advertising I discovered (with a little help from Bill Hicks and Bob Marley) that I was living someone else’s life... and that someone was an ignorant, selfish consumer-competitor with virtually no social conscience and an empty hole in his life where meaning and purpose should be. So I decided to quit his life and get a life of my own. Initially this involved using skills developed during 7 years as a media researcher to inform myself about the mysterious entity that is the raison d’être of the rat race and (apparently) makes the world go round. What I discovered about money and the private "bankstas" who create it out of thin air, at a profit (while saddling the people and governments of the world with an un-payable debt), and the astonishingly far reaching and wholly negative impact this insane and fraudulent system of money supply has on our society, completely blew my mind and left me utterly disillusioned with the world. In fact I was so disillusioned that I decided to give it all up and become a homeless Big Issue Seller!
However as a consciously destitute, conscientious objector to a world run by private banks, I didn't fancy the urine and Special Brew soaked boudoir of your typical street sleeper, so I decided to go back to nature and sleep under a tree. As a London boy that meant going to live in my favourite park!!! So on April 11th 2002 I arrived in Battersea Park, with a bin liner full of clothes and a bin liner full of books and a determination to stay there until the Universe showed me what the hell I was supposed to do with my life. After an hour long reconnaissance I found my spot and made a home for myself under a tree in a fenced off area called "The Meadow", which was just across from the tennis courts and near the Buddhist Pagoda by the river (for those of you who know London's loveliest park;). For 7 months I contemplated life, the Universe and Oligarchy from my ex-army sleeping bag bed, under the stars of south London. I'd get up in the morning, walk to the Big Issue offices in Vauxhall, buy my magazines for the day and then walk down Vauxhall Bridge Road to my pitch on Victoria Street. Fortunately there was a homeless shelter there called "The Passage", where you could get a hot shower and your laundry done, so I managed to stay pretty clean and sweet smelling (well relatively speaking anyway) ;-)
I was lucky enough to be offered a room in a squat in October, so I didn't have to face an English winter exposed to the elements and I had an ex-army waterproof blanket to keep me dry when it rained, so I was actually pretty comfortable under my tree! As for my day job, I didn't know it at the time, but selling the Big Issue was an ideal preparation/practice for becoming a Performance Poet, because I soon figured out that if I gave an "entertaining performance" not only I could sell roughly 15 magazines per hour, but the often soul destroying, awkward and humiliating experience of Big Issue selling, could actually be a real buzz for me and lots of fun for my "audience"!
When you live in a park you can live pretty well on £20 a day, so after an hour or two of "performing" I'd spend the rest of the day hanging out "at home" feeding the ducks, or in the library studying or in an internet cafe researching. After three months of this my disillusionment had transformed into the natural peace and joy of a happy simpleton. And out of my renunciates bliss, paradoxical metaphysical poetry poured forth from my virgin lips, like a kind of spiritual dysentery. Having never considered myself an artist or even particularly creative, the experience of "hearing" a poem forming in the ethers of my mind with a hitherto unknown and unutilised extra sensory perception, was so indescribably orgasmic (not to mention having been shown my life purpose so definitively) that in my puppy dog enthusiasm I found myself accosting innocent members of the public to ask them "would you like a poem?" and launching into one well before they'd had a chance to reply. After a month or so of doing an uncanny impersonation of the "mad guy in the park", I discovered the weird and wonderful world of Open Mics. Firstly at The Foundry on Old Street and then at The Mass in Brixton, where I met Shortman, El Crisis, Mr Gee, David J, Floetic Lara, Dom de Mic and other super talented Poets who were taking the London Spoken Word scene by storm. The rest, as they say, is History.
Q. Your poetry has many philosophical qualities and provokes much radical thought – What do you essentially hope people get out of your work?
Well I'm not a good enough writer to inspire people with my lyrical imagery and I'm not a good enough performer to blow em away with a David J-like dramatic Tour de Force, so the heart of my work has always been the message. All of my poems were originally inspired by some kind of insight about the human experience, (the literary definition of paradox is "an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unorthodox insight) and in the process of composing them I attempt to construct and engage an entertaining, adult nursery rhyme around that insight and hopefully evoke the same inspiration in the audience that evoked the poem in me. I see my job as a poet as passing on the inspiration I've been given, so if the audience is inspired by what they've heard, then they've made an old man very happy. As a poet, what they do with that inspiration is none of my business, but as an workshop facilitator, youth worker and social activist, I would hope they would be inspired to live a more meaningful life and make the world a better place for them being in it.
Q. Who do you rate on the scene at the moment? Is there even a “scene”?
I'm not really clued up with the scene any more, "scenes" are for the young bruv! But the poets I admire most are Yap, Tony Bison, Moksha, Dave Pepper, Ash, Interference, Spliff Richard & Kate Tempest. Writing that list it's clear to me that the poets who inspire me are those who are continuing the oral tradition, which we sometimes forget is thousands of years older than the literary one. The original spoken word performers and the Bards of these isles, were all about informing and empowering the people with their hard earned life wisdom and insight, in order to inspire growth and social action. All the poets I've mentioned are true to that "bardic" spirit.
Q. Where do you see Spoken Word poetry going as an art form/ genre in the next decade? What’s the way forward?
Well given my view on the "scene", it won't surprise you to hear that I feel Spoken Word will go back to its roots and be more about inspiring growth and social action and less about "art for art sake". The economic crash of 2008 as well as the current situation in Greece was both inevitable consequences of basing the world’s money supply on a Ponzi scheme. So as the inherently insane and self destructive nature of a world ruled by banks becomes more and more obvious, I can see more and more Poets using Spoken word for what it was originally intended for...to inform, inspire and empower. In fact I think this is already happening. I put on an Open Mic night in Brighton called Attitude Kings and I go to about 7 or 8 festivals every summer, and most of the super talented young poets I've seen are socially conscious "Bard-Poets." Thank fuck!!!
Q. Can we expect any publications from you?
Yes I'm working on an album. But don't hold your breath!
Q. Paradox you’re a legend and an inspiration! You know that right?
Well I've been called a legend a handful of times, but I figure those people were just easily impressed or slightly retarded, or both i.e. fans of Big Brother, so I'm not buying that. However I have been told that I'm inspirational thousands of times, so despite the risk of inflating my ego even further (if that's even possible) I've decided to accept that it must be true! After all, thousands of people can't be wrong can they? Drat! I've just realised how many people voted in the general election in the belief that the party political system is actually democratic. Bang goes that theory!
