The Religion of Poetry Meets The Poetry Of Religion part 1 w/ Niall O'Sullivan

We humans create many things that create division between us. I believe power and the hunger for it is what keeps most people divided.

Of course there is also natural division (what we're born with) but here I’d like to explore another language of human division – Religion.

I had a performance piece exploring my religious views (was listening to lots of George Carlin at the time) and it always seemed to create tension.

I know you can’t please everyone and everyone has their own truths. I can tackle my own truths on many things and instigate a constructive and stimulating conversation through my work.

However that never seems the case when exploring religion.

You seem to enforce the belief people already have whether its for or against religion and it always seems to create division between you and the audience.

Maybe I just shouldn’t drop it at a poetry night full of evangelical Christians.

I’ve seen Baba Brinkman’s Hip-Hop show on Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution and its brilliant but I guess Baba Brinkman is an artist who has found his audience. (and it isn’t a group of evangelical Christians)

Anyway I pulled in two London poets ‘Niall O’Sullivan’ who runs Poetry Unplugged at the poetry cafe in Covent Garden. He’s published two books called 'You’re not singing anymore' and 'Ventriloquism for Monkeys'.

He’s written many poems inspired by Darwinism.

I also pulled up young performance poet James Massiah for Part 2 of this discussion. James is a regular face and voice on the London poetry circuit.

Niall was quick to point out that James is not the messiah... he’s a very naughty boy!

So Niall, first question is who is your favourite biblical character and why?

The snake in the Garden of Eden. Read in a certain way, the collection of Semitic literature that we call the Bible begins with a world of dumb perfection brought into being by a god who is very much involved with human affairs and ends in a world of our own abyssal freedom with a god who is no longer involved and has, perhaps, stepped away from the act of being itself. The snake, and the subsequent exile from Eden represent the first step of this narrative.

The snake is often lazily labelled as the Devil or Satan within Christian cultures. The Devil is the product of the collision between Judaistic mythology with Graeco-Roman Paganism. There is no mention of the Devil in the Hebrew scriptures. Satan is mentioned a few times but is often appointed as a devious associate of Yahweh rather than an outright adversary (one translation of his name is The Prosecutor, a role that is carried out in accordance with Yahweh's as Judge, such as in the Book of Job). The snake is not the Devil, neither is it Satan.

The story of a man, woman, tree and snake is older than the Book of Genesis, images of the scene appear in Sumerian seals. The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell points out that the snake is revered in other cultures and religions. Its body flows like water and its tongue flickers like flame. The snake is also a symbol of transformation, illustrated in how it sheds its skin.

What were Adam and Eve before the fall? A couple of babies wandering about Eden, with no problems to contend with, snug in the mind-numbing tedium of perfection. The fact that they were threatened with expulsion if they ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge presented it as the only way to reject the dull, predictable world of perfection. In place of this world they were given a world that contained pain and struggle, but with this pain and struggle their lives were given meaning and freedom. Campbell also goes on to explain that in other versions of the story the serpent is the mother goddess. Is it not curious that in the story of Yahweh, the male god, the mother goddess snake and Eve are both scape-goated for the presence of pain and struggle? With those out of the way, we get the dominance of the genocidal, ethnic cleansing Yahweh of the Flood and Exodus. But this is also the Yahweh that no longer walks with man in the garden. Moses can only glimpse his “hind parts” during their meeting at Mount Sinai. Yahweh becomes a human in the Gospels and is put to death. Finally, he disappears into the skies. What is left is a Holy Spirit, the brother-and-sisterhood of humankind. Could this not be read as the gradual retreat of a god as mankind takes responsibility for itself, all put in motion by the agent of transformation, the snake?

So you’re sitting on an empty tube carriage at midnight and your drunk and on the way back from Jesus’s birthday party (Christmas) and Charles Darwin gets on at Holborn and sits next to you... what would you say to him?

Darwin was a quiet, humble man during his life. He sat on his theory of Natural Selection for decades before Alfred Russell Wallace forced his hand by also discovering the theory. So I'm not sure Darwin would have felt comfortable with some drunk guy yammering on at him on public transport. Darwin is often portrayed as some kind of iconoclast, but evolution itself was a much older idea and non-literal readings of Genesis go back to Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine. If anything destroyed Darwin's faith, it was the death of his daughter rather than evolution. Even on losing his faith, Darwin would walk his family to church of Sundays and sit outside until it was time for them to leave.

As an atheist, I find myself just as exasperated by the appropriation of Darwinism as the last nail in god's coffin as I am with biblical literalists. Both the vulgar atheists of today and the Young Earth Creationists of the evangelic community are tied together by a mutual misunderstanding of mythology. The relevance of mythology has nothing to do with its facticity, mythology is a mirror of human nature.

So, back to Darwin, I don't think I'd waste my moment with the great naturalist talking about religion. I'd tell him about what we've discovered since his work on the Origin. He knew the mechanism of Natural Selection, but he didn't know of the unit of inheritance, DNA. I would also have told him that his hunch about Africa being the cauldron for human evolution was also true. I guess I'd ply him with knowledge about how far we've taken the science so far and after giving him ample time to take it all in, I'd ask him where we are currently going wrong. Of course, if Darwin had figured out how to get and use an oyster card, he probably would have got up to scratch on the current science and wouldn't need it explained by pish like me. I think I'd be happier to leave him sitting alone as he did outside that church, his mind hovering around the periphery of something brilliant.

Considering all holy books and scriptures are written poetically does that imply there is some form of authority and empowerment embedded in poetry and how does poetry and religion interact with each other?

I'd not go as far as to say all holy books are written poetically, there are countless tedious passages in the Scriptures about who begat who and furnishing tips. For every Ecclesiastes we get a Leviticus. We should also remember that our idea about the uniform poetical qualities of the Bible are more inherent to the King James translation than to the variable content of the original Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament books.

That said, it cannot be denied that there is plenty of beautiful language in religious texts. An otherwise ridiculous and nonsensical statement can seem to make sense when phrased poetically. The ear tends to casually accept that which flatters it. Rhyme, assonance and alliteration all lend their own logic to a sentence. Moral instructions are often phrased in rhyming mnemonic ways to help them lodge within the brains of children and adults. I've often heard poetry audiences hum in approval to lines that Larkin would have dismissed as beautiful crap.

As someone with an inherent distrust of organised religion, I find it heartening that we can appropriate the poetry of religious texts to strike against it, in the way that William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche have. Is Nobodaddy not one of the most perceptive names man has given to god?

It is interesting that a lot of contemporary poetry has shied away from the “heightened speech” of religious texts, making use of more intimate and casual terminology. Poets that try to bring “heightened speech” into poetry often end up sounding comically archaic. That's not to say we might not see a return of this kind of rhetoric, but it takes a poet as good as Blake to make the breakthrough.

Slavoj Zizek made some interesting points about god in a recent lecture ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68Lco_PFKXg ). Many have removed the need for a god in our discourse on reality. We know that god doesn't exist, but does god know this too? What does this question mean? It simply means that we cannot get rid of god by disqualifying him from reality, not when so many religious and theistic assumptions make up the functional fictions of our world. Those functional fictions come from religious poetry and mythology, deeply meshed together within the implicit and the unconscious. We have killed god, but every time we open our mouths, he lives again.

PiP Poets In New York pt 3

Me and Maria got to the bar that supposedly put on poetry events, it was a dark Brooklyn night and no one knew what we were talking about when we said “we’re here for the poetry” in fact, the bouncer outside looked at us like we offended him, “POETRY!? nah man!” he scoffed. We decided to go in and have a drink anyway. We got a lot of curious looks from the people in the bar, we certainly stuck out, my bronzy mustard skin and Maria’s Pilipino features were carried loudly among the dominant black crowd. Most women had angels, flowers and names like “Daze-E” or “Shawty” tattooed on their arms or chest. They also had weave in their hair, wide gold looped earrings and bellies that hung down too much to be a pregnancy, we could have been in Seven Sisters or Wood Green back in London. It was someone’s birthday, me and Maria sat at the bar as a cake came out and everyone sang Stevie Wonder’s funky ‘Happy Birthday’ genius, the vibe was contagious and even me and Maria stood up, clapped our hands and sang Happy Birthday to the strangers at the table, we got a few head nods and took our seats with the complete feeling of acceptance.

“Wow New York, your poetry is as big as your buildings”

The crowd whooped and clapped, I had just been called to the stage, I was on Marcus Garvey Boulevard. The venue had a chess chequered floor and dimmed lights generating intimacy. The audience seating was scatted but filled to capacity (about 60-75) I was dazzled by the poets that got up before me and changed my mind about which poem to perform four times, throughout this trip Joshua tells me my best two poems are “my dad poem and my ‘hit me’ poem” but the ‘Hit Me’ poem seemed too delicate considering I’ve been asked to “never perform that poem in public again” so I played it safe with my dad poem (Not For The Dead) and it went down alright, Josh gets up and kills it as usual.

Afterwards, a poet called “Jon Sands” is announced, he walks onto the stage with the cheeky smirk of a precious infant with secret knowledge, the crowd transfixed before his jaw even flinched, a smooth and genius crowd engaging technique… “DAD HAS A PENIS TOO!” he yells “HIS PENIS IS MUCH LARGER THAN MY PENIS, HIS BODY IS LARGER THAN MY BODY, HIS PENIS WOULD LOOK RIDICLIOUS ON MY BODY!” the audience laughed and cringed at the same time as Josh poked my ribs, and muttered “and you were scared of doing your piece” I laughed and shook my head, in fact I probably continued these motions through Jon Sand’s entire set, I was witnessing one of the best all round performers/ writers I’d ever seen, the guy was electric and gave a performance that managed to stay with me. He had balls, passion and his poetry was sharp and filled with the sly kick of sudden heart attacks.

A poet called Chris Slaughter got up and did a terrifying poem called ‘Blood Line’ about two guys in a street fight – “every time (a fist or a kick) landed the crowd howled as if they were looking at two moons” woah! I must also give an honorable mention to a poet who had me spell bound with a story about the future self when your present self is plunged to despair and how the future self that got through your present hardship comes to you to comfort you through the process of pain, and how you’d feel in that moment, to have that connection as if you were your own God” … ugh, I cannot do it justice, just trust me, it was amazing… unfortunately I can’t remember his name.


My initial expectation of New York or even American Spoken Word performances was that they were going to be great performers with weaker writing, I was wrong, very wrong, New York’s Spoken Word artist carry a standard alien to the UK. Poetry in general holds greater appreciation, which is shameful considering the UK produced Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Wilde, Byron and even Chaucer.

Spoken Word artists make it onto daytime and prime time TV (HBO, Comedy Central etc) as well as having Def Poetry Jam to aspire to as well as the National Slams, poetry is referenced on the walls of most subway stations, the pavements leading towards NY State Library have poems and quotations by Emily Dickinson among others graven into them on bronze plates, there is a strong community of poets and many weekly poetry and performance workshops are held, Spoken Word/poetry is the hustle of many, all the poets in the higher ranks sell merchandise rather well at their shows, venues such as the NYrican poets café and The Bowery are huge theatre venues dedicated to Spoken Word poetry.

I spoke to poet legend ‘Tshaka Campbell’ about this and he helped me put it into perspective “the poetry in NY is different and intense, the UK for the most part is still only interested in the entertainment side of poetry and there is much much more” I agreed.

Something I found interesting was not only was there similarities between the areas of London and New York, there was also similar characters, I went to a poetry venue which resembled The Poetry Café in Covent Garden, just bigger, I noted how professional the lighting was, a small, slightly elevated stage with a mic in a spot light is simple but very effective, it was called the ‘Cornelia Street Café’

This venue was indeed just like Tuesday night at London’s Poetry Café’, I think there was a London equivalent of every poet that got up and read, I mean in terms of form, style, voice etc it was quite surprising, I think I’ll sway from judgments and name dropping but if you haven’t been to the Poetry Café’ in Covent Garden you typically listen to about 40 poets with 5 minutes each and an average 35 of them will think their audience is either a shrink with a caring ear or a lump of meaningless matter that doesn’t matter more than their delightful poetry.

Anyway, Joshua had his video recorder out and captured possibly the most contrived, pretentious performance poetry I’ve ever seen in my life! I refer to this poet as “the awful one”. I will get him to upload that video as my description will not do it justice. There was a poet who was up before “the awful one” who was telling an amusing story about a car crash that changed his life and almost crippled him and his father.

“as our lungs shrieked and impact threw me and my father through the window screen, we lay bloodily…”

A bell rang and the female host walked to the stage and said “I’m sorry we have to move on” it was so abrupt; the poor guy was approaching a climax in a painful story of his life. He smiled awkwardly, “ok thank you” he said and hobbled off stage probably in the same manner he hobbled from the car crash… bless him.

I got good feedback from a few audience members after the show, I tell you, I can’t stress that enough, if you go to a poetry night and you like a poet, please tell them, "most poets die without compliments." - Niall O'Sullivan.