Poets
The Poetry of Louise Connell
Music & poetry have always been easy bedfellows, teasing each other with magic to create something wholly cosmic, wholly beautiful. Singers like Bob Dylan & Jim Morrison were choral bards whose words meant as much as the melody – to hypnotise with the tune, to penetrate the soul with the vision. Alas, in recent years, across the music scene, the lyrics of songs have been slowly descending into a sewer of indifference, with A&R folk more interested in social media stats than talent. How sparklingly wonderful is the appearance, then, of a young singer-songwriter who really cares about what she is singing.
A few weeks ago I quite randomly found myself in the Voodoo Rooms one Tuesday evening listening to a young lady & her band. The lady has a name, Louise Connell, a quite bonnie & thickly-accented lassie from Airdrie. A shy performer, Louise has an ethereal voice which soothes the listener’s receptability, fooling us into mentally relaxing as she tosses her songs of spinning shuriken into our psyche. Louise, you see, is a poet. It took me a while to realise – the aforementioned thick accent is difficult to penetrate sometimes – but as the gig went on, & the words & phrases Louise chooses became steadily more transparent, I began to screw down, transfixed, into my seat, resting chin betwyx finger & thumb. It was as if the spirit of John Keats had manifested itself into this gentle & honey-tongued goddess from the Central Belt; but with an edge, for Keats could never have sung the opening lyrics of Connell’s self-penned Maria;
The wine glass slithers down the wall
The cooker’s on but the room is cold
Maria, where’s the girl who swallows lies,
And coughs them up as smiles?
—-
Louise has just released an album, a collection of three EPs called Squall Echo Rale. The songs vary in style & entertainment, but it is in the lyrics that I have found the most pleasure. Louise writes from the other side, presenting us with the flawless dichotomy of silken-sheeted songcraft & spine-raking wordplay. The album consists of 18 set-piece songs, the second of which, Rope, reveals the true genius of Connell’s craft. Less song, more an abstract play, it begins with an impressive cynghanedd-laden couplet which reads, ‘I’m forging quite a career in suppression / Whether passive agression or a spineless silence.’ Let us also examine the opening to the fourth song, Ilo, a love paean delivered with calm lucidity, a majestic capsule of poetic insight & phraseology.
———
Spending my day’s trying to claim
No one was seeing any of me
Like I was total, embryonic potential
And zero kinesis
I’d feel my hand at the switch
With my mouth forming, “I lo…”
I could have been a genius
But I crushed the brains out of my skull
I could have been a lover
But soft love would make my skin crawl
I could have been a monster
But the screams would fester in my mind
I could have been a good friend
But I always crossed the line
I always crossed the lineAnd I could have been a genius
If you’d tested me in my native tongue
I could’ve loved you gently, if it ever seemed much fun
I could have been a monster;
sure, I could have the person for you
But friends was just another game
that I was meant to lose
Like life’s a game I’m bound to lose
In ‘Get to Know Me,’ Connell takes on the gratuitous role of a male suitor, who ‘didn’t realise her father was a man of your stature / you intimidate me, sir.’ I mean, who in the music world actually does that? We also have track 17, Viscous Fear, a moody masterpiece which contains this a capella chorus, sang enchantingly;A nursery rhyme for the other side
A microcosm of my life
Coats a hundred glass slides
I creied eyelashes with my tears
My viscous fear
An eyelash tear
My viscous tear
Lee Ann Roripaugh: Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Lee Ann Roripaugh’s new collection effortlessly evokes the brutal powers of nature untrammelled & human emotions devastated by disaster
I thoroughly enjoy a themed collection of poetry, the Vishnu Upanishads, Ted Hughes’ Crow, even John Maserfield’s Salt-Water Poems & Ballads; so went into the reading of Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 with an appreciative bias. There is a certain nuance to the form which I enjoy when done well – it is not easy to make a themed collection hold a reader’s attention, for oftentimes a poet will get lost in the cul-de-sac housing schemes of their inspirations. However, ‘Tsunami’ actually transcends the form, a thought-splintered foray into the plosive destruction & pitiless aftermath of the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake & tsunami, which led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
pulverized cities flung back
to water like sprinkled furikakeher radio-waved wake
an awful flower blossoming
Roripaugh tells the story through a personified tsunami, its effect on nature, & the human fall-out of tragic events both water-slaughtery & wrought by the radioactive chaos after Fukushima. As a poet, her wordplay is practically phenomenal, combining mimesi in startling combinations, like a talented skald getting drunk in a European court, coining exciting new kennings from the play-stuff of their exotic surrounds. In her opening poem, for example, we see the ‘annihilatrix’ ‘Mechatsunami’ described as ‘shellacked wings unclung / from stacticky black elytra.‘ I mean that is just a stunning couplet.
I’ve seen many terrible things:
cages filled with withered songbirds,
horses left to starve in their stalls,
an abandoned puppy that grew
too big for the chain around its neck
As the collection unfolds we are treated to a delicate diaspora of delights; lovely lists explore subjects like the Goblin Market of Rossetti; a soul captivated by nature paints what it sees with a vivid serenity; the terrible aspects of human loss rip thro’ our mentalities with a single spin of a shuriken-phrase. The following passage is a perfect example of Rosipaugh’s ability to weave the epic waste of life & liberty into her visionary free verse;
at first, I concentrated very hard
on trying to see my feet, to know
if I was a ghost or not, but when
sneakers filled with foot bones
began to surface in the Pacific,
I stopped thinking these thoughts
My favourite poem in the collection was ‘Hulk Smash’ a cinematic & pathosean dirge thro’ a father’s pathetic quest to find his missing daughter in ‘a toxic garbage dump’ where he searched for her ‘every month / in the five-hour increments / allowed by radiation guidelines.‘ In the age of Netflix, this is what modern poetry should really be doing, making us all mind movies, & Roripaugh activates the mental mechanisms sublimely. When the collection is knitted together, the overall effect is rather like the Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camões, an epyllionic journey full of constant stimuli, where at one point we may lament ‘the gwa gwa gaw of frogs / stopped from invisible ponds‘ & at another hear a young lassie called Hisako declare;
it’s not like I ever asked
to come here and live
in this drafty prefab box
of corrugated metal
with my silent old granny
By the end of the book, I felt I had just been the weightless passenger on Roripaugh’s precious back as she free-soloed one of the minor slopes of Parnassus. Will she attempt one of the trickier faces? I do hope so, because her talent is unique. I cannot think of a poet since that of the anonymous composer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s ‘Brunanburh’ entry for 937 that has been able to condense so much of the aforementioned kenning quality into their lines. Roripaugh is also a master of moods, whose multiple shades spiral with voluminous variety as the story & stories are told. This is a book of high innovation on a level that you’re not quite sure where, but you know its happening – an excellent, excellent piece.
Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
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Magdalena Zurawski: The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom
The poetry of Magdalena Zurawski has enter’d the poetic firmament, where her star radiates with talent & personality
Magdalena Zurawski is a poet’s poet, a disseminator of the vocation into the very lines of her craft. “The poem is a pair of eyes,” she tells us in Natural Skin, “moving a nose down a page.” We do not read her work to be taken upon fantastic journeys in exotic climes, or to ride the dragon’s back of passionate love. No, we read Zurawski to lie awhile beside her awkward genius, revel in her race-fit wordplay, & to examine the evidence left behind by the world through her almost mournful eye-piece; “the shapes of foreign spoons, the lightly different cut of shirt worn by men over 50.”
Zurawaski is a recent revelation, usher’d into the public consciousness by Litmus Press, when her debut collection, Companion Animal, won the 2016 Norma Farber First Book Award. Three years later, Wave Books are releasing THE TINIEST MUZZLE SINGS SONGS OF FREEDOM, a collection of 42 poems of varying life, but all deliver’d via the voracious appetite for the well-woven word-verve which Zurawski innately possesses.
Her collection is a series of abstractly European movie shorts, flashing with inspired images in eclectic combinations. ‘Someplace in your Mouth’ is an excellent example, which opens with
When the line of heads continued
through the city in a sliver
of tattered oxygen
The poems vary in length & measure, & her stanza blocks are aesthetically pleasing at all times, if a little tough to read at times. However, the more you enter her worldscape, the more you are drawn in, & the more her book becomes something of a page-turner. The reader becomes assiduously addicted to her characteristic & assured uncertainties as she teleports us into her orbit with passages such as
Oh, to have birds cooing,
bells ringing, tofu frying, and unusually
high energy levels!
I loved the pastoral punk of ‘Summer In The Network Of Privileged Carports,’ the sensual cravings of ‘Ladies Love Adjuncts’ & the staccato philosophising of ‘Does My Lip Limp?‘, but it is when Zurawski is translating the poetic experience that she really shines. In ‘The Problem‘ we see how ‘the musculature’ of her hand, ‘could no longer speed the pen to my thoughts,‘ while in the opening to ‘It’s Hard To Be A Saint,‘ she tells us;
I was sympathetic to language, but often
it shrugged me and kept other lovers.
I crawled through the commas ofRomanticism and rejected the rhythms,
though sometimes at night I could feel
a little sad.
There is a subtle prettiness to Magdalena Zurawski’s poetry, which shudders into moments of extreme & sublime majestie, such as the passage in ‘The Tiny Aches‘ with which I shall close the Mumble’s review of a cathartically sensitive poet & her transcendent art.
…Four a.m. keeps ringing
Its spidery snare and all the stars are
your own headache cemented in our most ancient fears.
The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom
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Border Crossings: Laura Accerboni & Kathrine Sowerby
StAnza International Poetry Festival
The Undercroft, St John’s House, St Andrews
9th March 2019
The Undercroft is an intimate, arched, windowed cellar room belonging to the School of History at the University of St Andrews. It is almost too intimate for a mic’dpresentation, but being long and narrow it is not intimate enough to do without. Thereon hangs a problem: microphone technique is not something that everyone has, and a simple operational slip can cause something unwanted to obtrude.
So I’m sorry to start on a negative note – please bear with me. As Laura Accerboni recited her work purely in Italian, she was partnered by a man who alternated with translations into English of each poem. He sat while she recited, and vice versa; the lack of space meant that they had to shuffle round each other to get to the lectern, and whilst Laura recited from memory, her English reader referred to a script, spoke with his head down, approached the microphone too closely, and treated us to a series of plosive, overdriven consonants. Added to that, his script was organised in such a way that on several occasions he had to turn over his corner-stapled A4 sheets in the middle of a poem. Interruption of speech. Rustle, rustle. All this could have been avoided with a tiny bit more planning. He and Laura could have both stood, either side of the lectern, approaching and retreating as necessary; he could have had a better-organised, less unwieldy script. That would have added the little bit of polish that had worn off Laura’s half of the event.
Did it matter much? Well, to be honest, not when one considers the poetry. Laura’s wont is to stand immobile, arms by her side, and almost declaim her work, the listener, to whom it is xenoglossy, being made aware of the aural qualities of the Italian language. Each line of poetry seemed to take a single breath, and there was a rise-and-fall there, regardless of enjambment. As I listened, I recalled how Swiss French has this kind of rise-and-fall, and wondered if what I heard was some characteristic of the spoken Italian in the same country. As my own knowledge of Italian is very sketchy, I found myself listening as though to Baroque music – Scarlatti or Pergolesi – and reflecting how much Basil Bunting would have approved of that! The lack of movement of limb or feature in Laura’s presentation meant that every syllable was crystalline, and that aspect of her half of the event was utterly captivating.
One thing the English translations certainly did do was reveal the sometimes startling imagery behind the musicality. Otherwise who would have guessed, for instance, that “Yesterday all the tallest boys / made their enemies starve / and quickly gathered up their toys. / They showed their mothers / the order / and discipline of the dead.”
The matter of translation is something both poets at this event shared. Katherine Sowerby – we learned from the chairman’s introduction – had recently taken part in poetry translation projects in Pakistan and Latvia. Katherine, right at the beginning of her half, signaled her intention to read twelve poems. It was that structured. There was to be no looking across at the chairman to check how long there was to go, no fitting in a couple of short ones at the end. Twelve were scheduled and twelve is what we got. The result was that this session of ‘Border Crossings’ had a ‘short-and-sharp’ feel to it, the whole event lasting little more than half an hour. Although her delivery was not as straight-ahead as Laura Accerboni’s, although there was animation in her face and voice, there was a non-nonsense feel to the presentation. Title, poem. Title, poem. Title, poem…
House However, her most recent collection, from which she selected part of her presentation, consists of sixty-two prose poems. If, as another contemporary Scottish poet said, poetry is whatever prose wouldn’t dare say, where does that leave ‘prose poetry’? in Katherine’s case it leaves it in a place where (yes!) short-and-sharp images can be strung together, teasing us with their apparent lack of relevance to each other but, true to the concept of gestalt, making up a whole that is other than the sum of their parts. Sometimes, despite this, there is deliberate repetition (“You want to reach us. You want to reach us. You want to reach us. You want us. You want us. You want.”), often there isn’t (“The creak of a chair. Our lit-up faces,” or “Mountains cut in half. I wear a shirt from that day. You told me the cost. You asked me questions about my microwave.”). The answer is, therefore, is that prose poetry can indeed fulfill the same function as any other kind of poetry, move us out of our comfort zone in which we expect step and step, cause and effect, day and night.
All of which leaves me wanting to read Katherine’s three-novellas-in-one-cover, The Spit, the Sound and the Nest, to find out what in her poetics feeds into her fiction. Poets can make the most startling storytellers, and a story would add yet another dimension to what I was able to experience today.
Paul Thompson
An Interview with Megha Sood
Megha Sood’s talent began blossoming in the Himalayan foothills, these days it is flourishing in the streets of New Jersey…
Hello Megha, so where are you from & where are you at at, geographically speaking?
I was born in a quaint little hilly city called Nangal, Himachal Pradesh, India. I have spent most of life in India and traveled a lot around the Northern states as my father was transferred often. After getting married in 2008 I shifted my base from India to the east coast of the United States. Now I live in Jersey City, New Jersey. My home is next to the beautiful Hudson River.
When did you realise you were a poet?
Writing poems has always given me that cathartic feeling and to pen down your deep thoughts have always given me solace. Writing in any form lets you connect to your deeper self. This change in perspective made me realize that I have a grown appreciation of these moments around me.That slowly seeping feeling was the affirmation of me being a poet and along with a growling list of publications.
Which poets inspired you, both old skool & of today?
I have been influenced by modern poets, such as Kaveh Akbar, Peycho Kanev, Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, Shel Silverstein, Lang Leav, Ocean Vuong, Tiana Clark, Danez Smith, Elizabeth Horan, Courtney Poppell, to name a few. Classic poets have also inspired me. I love to read the amazing and soul-stirring poetry of Maya Angelou, Ruskin Bond, the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, the dark and surreal poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, and the mesmerizing sonnets of Rumi. Also, being a member of literary collectives, I’m extremely blessed to work with and read the amazing writings of the talented poets of the WordPress, such as Christine Ray, Kindra Austin, Georgia Parks, Kristiana Reed, Devika Mathur, Aakriti Kuntal, Nicholas Gagnier, and Stephen Fuller.
What does Megha Sood like to do when she’s not being, well, poetic?
I’m the mother of a smart and energetic 8-year-old boy. When I’m not writing I’m taking care of his activities along with the regular chores.I have also worked in the IT field for almost 12 years as a Project Manager in Business Intelligence and Data Mining. In the last one year, there has been a boost in my writing process and I’ve been blessed to be part of six literary collectives.I’m a collaborative member and associate editor in many of them. So in addition to writing and submitting for my dream publication(s), I also get the chance to review the submission for these Literary collectives and prepare for the next Issue.Being a contributing author on many of these requires me to submit poems occasionally. I also moderate regular features such as ” Pay it Forward Thursdays” on GoDogGO cafe. Also, I volunteer as class president in my son’s school along with a few neighborhood activities.
You have your fingers in quite a number of poetical pies, such as GoDogGO Cafe & Whisper and the Roar – can you tell us about this?
GoDogGO Cafe is a virtual Cafe on WordPress which serve as a place where all writers are welcome, collaboration is encouraged. It was founded by a fellow poet Stephen Fuller and now have raised to the string collective of 16 members. They are brimming with daily features( Writing prompts, Pay it forward, Promote yourself etc) and are inclusive of the writers of the WordPress community. To me, it is a warm and cozy virtual cafe where all writers are invited. It was one of the first few literary collectives which not only published my first poem but also invited me to join their amazing team of writers. Whisper and the Roar is a feminist literary collective founded initially by Georgia Parks and now a strong team of 15 collective members. All the members are well-established authors and seasoned writers with a long list of books and publications under their belt. In addition to the above, I’m also a collaborative member for the Poet’s Corner ( UK Based Poetry website), Candles Online ( India based writing portal) and recently have joined the Ariel Chart ( a signatory of pw.org) as an associate editor.
How on earth do you keep have the time or energy to do anything else?
I was always decent with time management and I guess that skill of mine has helped in juggling all these tasks effectively. There are days where I’m drowned with writing deadlines and there are days where I can simply read, create and revel in the writing of my favorite writers.
When do you know you have just composed a decent poem, & how does it make you feel?
They say if a poem doesn’t stir your soul, it has lost its purpose. As I always say, the writing has been a cathartic experience to me and and I feel if a poem moves me from inside or fills me with the joy of accomplishing something, I know I have written something significant.
You recently won the 1st prize in NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Mental Health Poetry contest, can we see the poem?
Yes, my poem bagged the 1st place. The prompt was “What’s your song?”
My Victory Song
My heart parts its lips
utter something
pure and divine
like the moon in its reverie
you ask “What’s my song”
I laugh and smile
with beauty imbued with
the fluttering of the
butterfly wings
so sublime;
My heart though brimming
with pain and anxiety
but ready for its encore every time.
My love is boundless
like a star-spangled sky
covering every iota of my soul;
gives me the sustenance
clears out the wool and webbing
from my disordered thinking
and makes me feel alive
once more.
I adorn the scars
as victory marks and
leaves the bloody trails
as maps, who follow;
Pushed and shoved aside
for reasons unknown
I thrash like a juggernaut
crashing and crumbling
the voices which pull me down
I simply ignore.
Waving my victory flag
so fervently
and singing my song
under my bated breath;
Here I come to
conquer the
uncharted waters of
my life
with a roar.
Where can we find your published work?
Last Year I was accepted in the Poets and Writers( pw.org) Directory of Poets and Writers. Founded in 1970, Poets & Writers is the nation’s largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers. Their mission is to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public. The following link gives a comprehensive view of few of the places where my writing has been published. My 290+ poems have been published in the almost 70 literary collectives around the world. To know more about my published works you can visit here. In addition to this my works have been published or upcoming in the following anthology by US, UK , Canada, Australia, Philippines,based publishing presses.
Anthology ( Past and upcoming)
“We will not be silenced”, Indie Blu(e) Publishing, Fall 2018, USA
“All the lonely people”, Blank Paper Press, Feb 2019, Canada
“Voices Carry”, Sudden Denouement Publishing, Feb 2019, USA
Madness Muse Press, Fall 2019, USA
The Stray Branch, Fall 2019, USA
Poetica Vol 2, By Me Poetry Press, Australia, 2019
RECLAIM Anthology, Philippines, 2019
Flight Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, March 2019, USA
HAIKU Journal, Prolific Press, Feb 2019, USA
Poetry Quarterly Winter Issue, Prolific Press, March 2019
What will you be doing for the rest of 2019?
After getting published online and in a various print publication I am gearing myself to work for on my full poetry collection.In addition to that, I am planning to attend the poetry-related events in and around Jersey City and Manhattan.
www.meghasworldsite.com
Jericho Brown: The Tradition
The poetry of Jericho Brown is like a magnet. It always pulls you in. His third collection is firmly upholding the tradition.
I love Copper Canyon’s books; soft & gentle pages carress’d by a lip-gloss cover lending a certain bubble-bath quality to the reading of one of their poets. But ultimately it is what is on the page that counts. First things first, Jericho Brown is a poet, a real, poet, he has the elixir in his veins. He also possesses a curious voice, like a multi-sharded cylinder standing steadfast in a storm. That storm is America, its culture & its questionable past.
His first two volumes were received with high praise & deep respect across the English-speaking world, the second of which, New Testament (2014) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Tradition is eagerly awaited, then, & does not disappoint. In places it even exceeds expectations; the lyrical jaundice of Flower, the killer jibes of truth within Bullet Points & numerous moments of the highest pathos & beauty, as in the closing couplet of The Microscopes;
A region I imagine you imagine when you see
A white women walking with a speck like me
The chief pillars of Jericho’s creative temple are his colour, his family & his sexuality. His mother, grandmother, brother & kids all have cameos & something important to contribute to both the poet’s life & our understanding of the world. These very personal takes are full of raw remembrance temper’d by a supreme sense of post-Millennium reality.
……………………………They remind
Me of black people who see the movie
About slaves and exit saying how they would
Have fought to whip Legree with his own whip
And walked away from the plantation,
Their eyes raised to the sun, without going blind.
On a number of occasions I was very much reminded of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, Negro Hero; the pitch & balance of the wordplay are almost identical – is he her spiritual inheritor, perhaps? Jericho’s art presents the Apollonian & the Dionysical extremes of poetic composition; from technical stanza formation full of controll’d & order’d musings, to solid blocks of Wolfean streams of consciousness. The latter sort are often triggered by the smallest things, such as the two copulating rabbits on his lawn, providing the catalyst for an introspective journey into the failings of his own love life. Then, with his title poem, Jericho proves he can turn not just a good sonnet, but an absolutely bangin’ one.
Also a sonnet of sorts are his five Duplex poems, seven couplets where the second line is the same as the first line in the following couplet. From innovation comes mastery, and Jericho is growing into his role as both a teacher in his tactile environment, & a clear-cadenced, beautiful poet-teacher for the planet. Indeed, his academic background – studying at Harvard, teaching at Emery – seems to be a fertile field for inspiring such embedded nuances as his use of Homeric simile in the opening to As a Human Being;
There is the happiness you have
And the happiness you deserve.
They sit apart from each other
The way you and your mother
Sat on opposite ends of the sofa
After an ambulance came to take
Your father away.
Jericho Brown is a philosopher-poet, stood on a crag overlooking the humanity of America, striking the rocks, drawing lightning into his penstaff & tossing electrical ejecta onto his page. The Tradition delights on first reading & invites further study. Each poem contains a different beam of inspiration wassailing from Jericho’s kaleidoscopic soul, altho’ the colors aren’t garish, its too moody a piece for that. This is an extremely intelligent collection, filled with both unpretentious flair & flashes of Faustian confidence. Roll on Brown’s 4th book.
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An Interview with Damian Beeson Bullen
Damian Beeson Bullen’s definitive 2019 collection has been described as ‘The Sgt. Pepper’s of Poetry.’
Hello Damo, so when did you realise you were a poet?
My first poetical moment came when I was like 7 or 8 – there was a poetry competition at Lowerhouse Junior school in Burnley. I won I think, & the opening couplet I still remember; ‘The river flowing by is often wide & high.’ Roll on a few years & I won a Christmas story competition at Gawthorpe high school – it was the story of a leaping being who turned out to be a snowflake. There was no technical poetics, but it was a visionary metaphorical piece. A few years later I was studying music in Barnsley Music College, & it was there one night while reading through William Butler Years that I realised I was actually a poet. I quit college soon after & set off for the English South Coast with a guitar & a yellow suitcase full of poetry books.
What are your thoughts on the poetic art itself?
There’s a passage in Plato’s Euthyphro which always piqued my interest, I really feel it defines what the poetic art is all about. ‘He (Daedalus) only made his own products mobile, while I apparently make other people’s mobile as well as my own.’ This ‘mobility’ is what makes the magical energy of the best poetry fly on the wings of inspiration into the poems of others. To my mind, poetry works on two levels, basically the local ‘zeitgeist’ & then the eternal tradition. If you look back to the 18th century, English poetry was essentially rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. In the same way, some modern poetry editors wont even look at rhyming poetry – according to them we dwell very much the age of free verse. But like the fashion for the Georgian couplet became a busted flush during the Romantic period, free verse is also only a fashion & will inevtibaly be superceded at some point by something else. To be honest, this proliferation of Free Verse masks the fact that there are a lot of poets out there claim to be poets, but don’t really know anything about the craft. I find technique extremely important. I’m always trying to be a complete poet & I’ve realised I have to be serious about studying & experimenting with form – including free verse, of course, which I think is just a small piece in a big jigsaw.
What do you think is the poet’s role & do you identify with it?
Good question. Well, the poet has always been a teacher, but also an entertainer. I like the blend myself, keeps things interesting. A poet should also be connecting with their readers/listeners on two levels; inviting them to think is the intellectual, & inviting them to feel intuitively is the spiritual. The latter is the seer element to poetry, what the Romans called the Vates. Some say poets are merely the human receptacles of divine inspiration, & there’s probably some truth in that. As Horace says in his Ars Poetica, ‘It is not enough for poetry to be beautiful; it must also be pleasing & lead the hear’s mind where it will.’ I also love Phillip Sydney’s, ‘this purifying of wit, this enritching of memory, enabling of judgementy, & enlarging of conceyt, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it com forth, or to what immediat end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead & draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate soules, made worse by theyr clayeye lodgings, can be capable of.’
What is it about composing poetry you love the most?
Its difficult to explain. Its part validation, part duty, part pleasure – there’s nothing like exercising the mind. I also do most of my formal composition, lets say, out in the fields, up in the hills, walking with notebook, paper & my thoughts. There is also nothing like the feeling of knowing you’ve just written a poem which contains the pure juice of Parnassus – you can just tell when it happens. As an artist, I am fascinated with the prosodic elements of poetry – the Welsh call it cynghanned, & its not called composition for nothing. You’ve got to create a symphony in the mind. I do love my music & poetry is, to me, an instrument as important as my bass guitar.
Can you tell us about Completely Novel?
Completely Novel is a brilliant way to circumvent the cliquey world of publishing. They are a fabulous self-publishing service who facilitate print-on demand copies being sent anywhere in the world at a few clicks of a button. I pay a wee hosting fee every much – its not much at all – & get to publish ten books, all with shiny ISBN numbers. Its brilliant. They’re really nice folk to work with too. There’s nothing to stop me ordering as many books as I want, as well, to sell independently or through bookstores.
You have just released a collection of poetry through Completely Novel called MUSICALS. How did you choose the poems to be included?
I selected the poems from 20 years of composition. Some, especially the sonnets, are just as they were composed originally. Others can be quite edited-down versions of longer epyllia. The poem about Pendle Hill, for example, is about 5 percent of the full piece – it contains the quintessence of my inspirations ,if you will. Over the years I’ve always had moments of editorial, when I’d look at my all work in the bank, & see where my new compositions fitted in to the overall scheme. Its a bit like a crawling snake – the ancient symbol for wisdom by the way – after every pulse forward it pauses & half recedes, & from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries it forward. With Musicals I think I’ve finally reached my destination, or at least a place to hang out for a while, promote the book, do some readings & stuff, maybe even some slams. It’s been over a decade since I performed my poetry in public.
Are there any unifying themes?
There sure are. Poetry is about bringing all of its constituent parts into harmony. With Musicals the same principles apply, & the book is flush with harmonizing forms & themes. At its core the text is an autobiographical journey across the world. I’ve also got a nice sub-plot with a romantic interest called ‘Rosie’ – its a Stone Roses thing, big fan. She’s actually an amalgamation of a number of ‘love poems’ I have created over the years. The lady I’m with now, however, provided most of these – she’s my proper soul-mate, like, my muse. As for the title, of course we have the ‘muse’ embedded in the name, but I also feel like each of the chapters is a bit like a musical – a combination of narrative, drama & lyricisim.
You have put Musicals online for anyone to read – what’s all that about?
Well, Lord Byron said a true gentleman shouldn’t make any money from writing. He did make a fortune the sale of Newstead Abbey, though, enough to fund an army in the Greek War of Independence, so he would say that. The idea is essentially they same, tho, anyone can read my work online – but, if I sell copies that’s a bonus. I am not alone in appreciating the true beauty of proper books is their tactility – so I’m catering for both worlds here, the modern internet-haunter & the traditional lover of the page. You’ve also gotta go with the times, & my online versions will eventually all have youtube videos of me reading the poetry. Another bonus to doing it online is that I can make corrections & improvements at any point. My plan is to release fresh editions of the book by uploading a new file & replacing the old one – its quite a simple process really. So in 2020 there will most probably by a second edition of Musicals.
Musicals has been described as ‘the Sgt. Pepper’s of poetry,’ why is that?
Well, I think it’s the mixture of form & content. With Pepper’s you have English country garden vibes, Indian mysticism, proper rock & Roll, all complemented by a wide variety of instruments & musicianship. In a similar war Musicals expresses political terza rima, transcreations of Tamil love paeans, reworkings of English folk songs, free verse sonnets, French sonnets composed in Italian – I could go on. There’s loads of influences in there, its packed.
What other titles have you released?
Musicals is the ninth book in what I call the Pendragon Collection. A few years ago I kinda realised I had actually embark’d on something like the classical bardic training as described by Julius Ceasar. This passage I basically took to heart & soul & it became my mantra; ‘In their schools they are said to learn by heart an extraordinary number of lines, and in sometimes to remain under instruction for as many as twenty years.’ I started to take the poetic vocation seriously in in 1997/98 – I was 21 years old at the time – so as my own twenty years of training began to climax, I thought it prudent to draw a line in the sand of my studies. The final collection has 9 titles, of course; alongside Musicals there are another five collections of poetry, including my main epic, Axis & Allies, which I pretty much worked on during the full twenty years.
The vast majority of poems in the Musicals collection are taken from these five volumes, excepting Axis & Allies – essentially, this epic is for posterity, but Musicals for the now. The Pendragon Collection also includes essays on poetry, personal epistles telling the stories of my adventures, & the final volume of the nine, which I’ll be re-releasing later this year, an assemblage of historical studies called The Chisper Effect.
So what have people to expect from Musicals?
Well for a start its the very best of my very best work, & that means colour. I try & put a lot of colour in my poetry – so much modern stuff is like a twilight sky of opalescent grey! There’s also the travelling element – people get to go to Italy, Greece, India, America & even beautiful Burnley. I enjoy poems of place, Byron’s Childe Harold & Wordsworth’s Tours of Europe for example, so it was natural that I’d create something similar. Along the way its a composite blend of all the ‘Ms’ – there’s a mixture of music, moods, moulds (ie forms) & measures Just as a poem’s form can be divided into MEASURE & MOULD, so a poet’s voice is divided into two composite halves; the MOOD & the MUSIC. The Mood can be defined as a trance which envelops the poet as they compose their piece. The Music is the pure artifice of linguistic creation as the poets translate their Mood into words. Understanding such a pretext, the order of poetical creation is as this; Mood (then) Music (then) Measure (then) Mould.
Can you tell us about the Global Laureacy.
I will, & thanks. The Global Laureate has no choice but to dedicate themselves unto the Liberation, the Unification & the Education of Humanity. I have only been in the role officially for a few months now, so it is still early days, but to adhere to the three job specs, so to speak, I am creating three texts. These are The New Truth (Liberation) a universal language (Unification) & a purification my Humanology piece (Education), which is itself based on the Kural of Thiruvalluvar. I am also in the middle of transcreating the 24 poems from 24 international poets published by Gingko as A New Divan. The idea is to translate these transcultural pieces into my new language as its first ever text – a neat choice, I think, reflecting an international sangam of poets
Can you tell us about Stars & Stripes?
Sure – I’m very proud of it – I think it’s my best work. You can read it in full here. The catalyst was meeting my good lady, who is from Seattle. Her ancestor was Colonel Daniel Gillespie, who was at Valley Forge. Thus, Stars & Stripes is what you get when the bloodline of an American patriot meets an English epic poet. My partner & her spirit gave me the connection to the American fibre, while being from Burnley shouldn’t really matter as America is the ultimate immigrant nation.
“The United States,” wrote American scholar, Ed Simon, “seems rare among nations in not having an identifiable and obvious candidate for national epic.” What made you think you were qualified?
Well, for an epic poem you need an epic poet, & they don’t really pop up all that often. There’s also something about the organic matter that is a language, that it should spring naturally from the soil & bedrock of a land. Thus, the English language in America is an immigrant language & by proxy America cannot really produce a true epic poet unless they were writing in the languages of the native Indian races. With Stars & Stripes, however, I have just made an attempt, to show that something close to epic poetry can be written. America offers wonderful subject matter. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” opined Walt Whitman, & there’s some truth in that. The creation of that particular nation at that particular time in the universe is an absolute fascinating jumble of conflicting forces.
Can you tell us about your music?
Well, after being in bands on & off since a teenager, I’ve recently gone solo as DAMO. In the past twelve months or so I’ve been assembling my back catalogue of recorded music into two albums, last year’s ‘THE LAST OF THE SHINY RIDERS’ & this year’s ‘GEMINI FIRE DRAGON.’ I now have a platform to work on an as yet untitled third album, which I’ve decided to play all the parts on – drums, bass, guitar, vocals, etc. I’m looking forwards very much to the process – it should be ready by next summer.
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Murder Ballads
Woodland Creatures
Leith Walk, Edinburgh
30/10/18
Not only does Max Scratchmann possess the most deliciously suave of names, but he also loves to present the poetry-lovers of Edinburgh something different, something theatrical, something cool. His Halloween special, therefore, drew in poets from across Scotland to interject & connect with the continuous tartan thread that is Jennifer Ewan & her band.
The prominent theme, of course, was the frighteners, but I found the evening less fearing & more full of fun, for the performers were all of the highest level. So, half of the time we were being regaled by the band – alongside Jennifer on guitar & vocals were Kim Tebble on accordion & Simon Fildes on bass; all were clad in black & their music swarmed into the ears of the healthy & ever-appreciative, sometimes-even-dancing audience, like bison reaching a prairie water-hole. We were given a steady stream of well-chosen numbers; of Jennifer’s own creations & also covers, when numbers such as Bessie Smith’s ‘Take me to the Electric Chair‘ sounded amazing with a Scottish burr.
As for the poets, there were five of them, who did cheeky wee floor spots in between the ballads on both sides of the interval. Our host Max’s first poem defined Edinburgh as a ‘city of murder ballads‘ & we were off. A lot of the material was freshly written for the night – Molly McLachlan admitted to composing hers in Leith Weatherspoons earlier that day; not that you could tell – it flowed with elegant mastery. She, & the other poets – the shamanic Stella Birrell, the regal & dramatic Nicoletta Wylde, our beloved Max of course, & the rapid-tongued Scott TheRedman Redmond – presented some of the highest standard & absolute quintessence of performance poetry a la 2018 – when the post-modern polemical story-chaunt is all.
I’m not dying I’m transcending… & if I transcend you’ll transcend with me
Nicoletta Wylde
With half of the audience & all the performers making an effort aesthetically, & webbing & branches hanging off the walls of the venue, a genuine Tam O Shanter like vibe was gothically invoked. Thus setting & content were perfectly matched, upon which occasions good times are guaranteed, a tradition which Murder Ballads perpetuated with ease. A fluid, fascinating, & above all entertaining night’s entertainment.
Damo
Bukowski’s Irrepressible Brilliance
Ignored by the larger mainstream anthologists of America, Charles Bukowski is the ultimate proletarian anti-poet, an American hero their establishment would rather not possess on account of the fact he is by far their best, or rather truest poet. His style was refreshingly honest, a Tu Fu of the Beats, inspired by the twentieth century ‘Poetic Revolution‘ when poetry had, in Bukowski’s words, ‘turned from a diffuse and careful voice of formula and studied ineffectiveness to a voice of clarity and burnt toast and spilled loaves and me and you and the spider in the corner.’
Among Bukowski’s massive, almost industrial, output I have found a poem of his which is, in relation to the convetional poetic spheres, just so brilliantly curveball. It is found in a collection entitled ‘Love Is A Dog From Hell,’ a whirlwind of poems dated 1974-77. The book is midway between the publication of our poet’s first collection, ‘Flower, Fist & Bestial Wail’ (1960) & his death in 1994; & may be seen as the highwater-mark of his career. In this period Bukowski’s star was very much in the ascendency; success in Europe, breakthrough interviews with Rolling Stone Magazine & an acceptance into the American poetical elite as a notorious enfant terrible. On 25th November 1974, Bukowski read in Santa Cruz alongside Gary Snyder & Allen Ginsburg, an event memorialized by Ric Reynolds, who described Bukowski as; ‘a man of genius, the first poet to cut through light and consciousness for two thousand years & these bastards dont even appreciate it.’
The mid-seventies also saw Bukowski engaged in a string of affairs with women; including Linda Lee Beighle, Pamela Miller – who becomes Nina in his short story, Workout – & Jane Manahattan – the Iris Hall of his Women. Of her time with Bukowski, Jane commented, ‘he was funny all day every day. A great love of life, & an enjoyment – always to be seeing the funny thing, & making a comment. he was a comedian.
The poems within ‘Love Is A Dog From Hell’ are both sexually visceral & brutally protagonistic, with an incredibly poised ‘cogito, ergo sum.‘ Here we have the American sonnet sequence to Laura, but of course fashion’d via fabulously free ‘verse libre’ & the even freer love of the sex-addl’d seventies. In one of the poems, ‘how to be a great writer,’ he declares at its opening the creative & spiritual ordination of the entire collection;
you’ve got to fuck a great many women
beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.
Ever since the publication of his first poem, ‘Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,‘ in 1944 – at the age of 24 – the German-born Bukowski & his writing was dedicated to the holy trinity of Wein, Weib & Gesang – Wine, Women & Song. Thirty years later, his dedication to those core tenets was as strong as ever, only the delivery had changed to that of an ageing & cynical amourouse.
So to the poem I have chosen, artists: (Bukowski never respected the principle of capital letters), a classic laissez-faire love-affair with a groupie. Next to his omniscient genius – Bukowski almost breaks sweat telling us so – she is a minor writer, & not even that inspirational a lover. The scene is set for a droll masterpiece that could never find its way into an establishment canon, but for pure drama & in-the-moment magic it is unsurpass’d in all the poetry I have personally read. For the purposes of this essay I shall give the poem in full, adding a little critigloss in the interludes.
artists:
she wrote me for years.
“I’m drinking wine in the kitchen.
it’s raining outside. the children
are in school.”she was an average citizen
worried about her soul, her typewriter
and her
underground poetry reputationshe wrote fairly well and with honesty
but only long after others had
broken the road ahead
In eleven lines Bukowski brilliantly introduces his muse. We know so much about her already; a bor’d mother who writes to differentiate herself from the hum-drum. In a damning piece of critique on both her style & the state of modern poetry, Bukowski portrays her quite ruthlessly as lagging far behind the original poets who have ‘broken the road ahead.’
she’d phone me drunk at 2 a.m.
at 3 a.m.
while her husband slept“it’s good to hear your voice,” she’d say.
“it’s good to hear your voice too” I’d say.
what the hell, you
know.
In this next segment, Bukowski introduces himself into the poem – he is always the star -, converging on illicit daft-o’clock phonecalls with his faraway ‘mistress.’ There is no background to these calls, but the not-knowing encourages our minds to calculate why? She is a poet of an underground scene, did they meet that way? Did they sleep together then, or are these late night calls the first sordid steps towards her infidelity. We get all of that from just five short lines, which are followed by five superbly brusque words in which Bukowski’s soul & voice are eternised. He’s up for it, why not, wouldn’t you?
she finally came down. I think it had
something to do with
The Chapparal Poets Society of California.
they had to elect officers. she phoned me
from their hotel“I’m here,” she said, “we’re going to elect
officers.“o.k., fine” I said, “get some good ones.”
I hung up
the phone rang again
“hey, don’t you want to see me?”“sure,” I said, “what’s the address?”
With another piece of blasé indifference to his groupie – this time, given to his muse directly – Bukowski reaffirms all what he has been telling us about the situation. She is a poetess & she wants to see him, while he is completely indifferent to both her place in the poetry world & whether he gets to sleep with her or not. The Chaparral Society, by the way – Bukowski spelt it wrong – is the oldest and largest poetry organization in California, founded in the Los Angeles Area in 1939.
after she said goodby I jacked-off
changed my stockings
drank a half bottle of wine and
drove on outthey were all drunk and trying to
fuck each other.I drove her back to my place.
she had on pink panties with
ribbons.
Here, in its most poetically pungent, is the visceral sexuality I mentioned earlier. What stands out the most, & what for me first shone a light on this poem’s architectural majesty, is the brevity & poetry contained in, ‘I drove her back to my place / she had on pink panties with ribbons.‘ This is all we are allowed to hear about their sexual union, delicately tantalising & teasing us with what the poet secretly knows, but refuses to share, with just a hint of frilly lace to set our minds racing & our libidos rising.
we drank some beer and
smoked and talked about
Ezra Pound, then we
slept.its no longer clear to
me whether I drove her to
the airport or
not
In this post-coital aftermath, Bukowski sounds almost bored with the scene – going through the motions. He was in his mid-fifities at the time, & one imagines hundreds of notches on his bedpost from literary groupies. Many, many beers & many, many conversations about Ezra Pound. He then reinforces our instinctive inquiry by completely forgetting the episode’s denoument. There is no teary farewell at the airport, his muse simply dissapears into the aether.
she still writes letters
and I answer each one
viciously
hoping to make her stop
In this short stanza we get a suggestion of the interplay between Bukowski & his muse – they have a relationship, the student-teacher-lover type – & it is the only moment when Bukowski shows any real humanity in the poem. The fact that he takes the time to answer her letters proves she’s got under his skin, when other groupies were simply swatted away. There is something about this lady that was incorrigibly annoying to Bukowski, but whose spirit he could never truly shake off.
someday she may luck into
fame like Erica
Jong. (her face is not as good
but her body is better)
and I’ll think,
my God, what have I done?
I blew it.
or rather: I Didn’t blow
itmeanwhile I have her box number
and I’d better inform her
that my second novel will be out in September.
that ought to keep her nipples hard
while I consider the posibility of
Francine du Plessix Gray.
The last two stanzas of Bukowski’s remarkable poem differ from the mental theatre of the earlier stanzas, launching the poem into the more philosophical chambers of its creator’s mind. He is free now to pronounce judgment on both the affair & the poem, & does so with a flourish of bravura. Two leading literary lionesses of the seventies are dragg’d into the picture – one hardly expects Bukowski letting them know of his decision to do so – placed on pedestals beside his muse. Erica Jong ‘s 1973 novel Fear of Flying blew female sexuality wide open, while Francine du Plessix Gray was a Pulitzer-winning grand dame of the New Yorker magazine. To Bukowski, all three are simply sexual objects who just happen to write, & the most important happenstance here is actually his second novel – Factotum. This was published in 1975, giving us a terminus ad quem for the composition of artists:.
Personally, I find the ending a little abrasive – in the same way Millenials are being offended by some of the patter & subject matter of the Friends sitcom. But the honesty of artists: is what makes this poem transcend the confines of conscious dignity into the realms of cosmic genius. The afterburner proplusion of an already unchallengable classic. In a letter to Nancy Flynn (1975) our poet attempts some kind of explantion as to his psuedo-misogynistic style.
I’m no woman-hater. They’ve give me more highs and magics than anything else. but I’m also a writer, sometimes. and there are variances in all things
To conclude this essay, I would just like to show how Nancy Flynn could well be the muse of the poem. The drawing above shows a clear hint of sexual union, while in a letter dated April 7th 1975, Bukowski asks Nancy, ‘what’s this here shit about going to Turkey? It rains there too.’ This of course connects with the poem’s opening scene of a bored houswife writing about the rain. In another letter, dated April 21st, Bukowski mentions slipping ‘a couple of poems past the APR‘ – the American Poetry Review. The informal substance of this comment suggests Nancy is familiar with the poetic establishment. This fits easily into his muse’s connection to the poetic establishment and her links to the The Chaparral Society.
Finally, in the letter of the 21st our poet also tells Nancy; ‘finished the 2nd. novel, FACTOTUM, at last. It should be out in Sept,’ which is a clear match to the poems, ‘I‘d better inform her that my second novel will be out in September.‘ Nancy Poole is a poet, on whose website we may read, ‘I spent twenty years in Ithaca, New York, working and raising a son, before moving to western Oregon in 1998 with my husband and cats.’ She rather does look a lot like the literary photfit painted by Bukowski in his poem, & with that I rest my case.
Damian Beeson Bullen
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An Interview with Imogen Stirling
Who is this Imogen Stirling, who is breaking over the Scottish Poetry Scene like a sudden Tsu-Na-Mi? The Mumble managed to catch her for a wee blether & find out…
Hello Imogen, so where ya from & where ya at, geographically speaking?
Imogen: I’m originally from North Berwick, a small town just outside of Edinburgh, and have since spent a long time living in Glasgow. I’ve also traveled a lot, mainly through music work, and have lived everywhere from Germany to the Canary Islands.
You have a background in musical theatre, so why the shift to spoken word?
Imogen: My roots will always be in theatre and music and I’m currently planning projects which really merge all three art forms. However, when I was solely working in musical theatre, I began to find the genre quite stifling in that you’re always performing somebody else’s material. Transitioning to playing in a band brought more creative freedom but there’s still that constant audience demand to hear cover songs. It just wasn’t me. Spoken word gives me complete autonomy over what I perform which is liberating. I find it a very exciting and malleable art form because it allows me to draw upon various genres to find a balance that feels right, so forming a show and performance that is creatively unique and very much my own.
You’re really enjoying quite a shooting star ascent into the Scottish poetical stratosphere, are you enjoying the journey?
Imogen: I certainly am! It’s been a whirlwind. I’m very driven and knew from the outset that I wanted to find success in spoken word. It’s required a lot of work on my part but has paid off as, in less than a year performing spoken word, I’ll have put on my first full length show, toured the UK, and performed at some major festivals. The effort is cushioned by being part of such a warm and supportive community. There’s a unique sense of camaraderie that motivates my work.
Which poets inspired you, both old skool & today?
Imogen: I have pretty eclectic influences, and a lot of them come from outside of poetry. I first drew inspiration from music – the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, Alex Turner, James Taylor. I’m a Kate Tempest girl through and through, her work brought me into poetry and consistently drives my performance. At university, I was taught by both Kieran Hurley and Kei Miller, between them they demonstrated the way that theatre and song can emerge through poetry and I still refer to them to hone my vision today. I’m a big fan of Jahra Rager who fuses contemporary dance with poetry to create some of the most blistering work I’ve seen. Ocean Vuong is a beautiful page writer and a useful foil to the more extroverted performance poets. I’ve found myself working alongside the most incredible talent in my current project: Piers Harrison-Reid, Zoka, Thomas Wolfe, Tamar Moshkovitz, Minty Taylor, Rob Carnie, and Billy Pilgrim with The Heartsease Kid. The diversity and sheer quality of the work they produce keeps me on my toes and encourages me to push my writing.
HIPSTER
Everybody wants to be a hipster
I come home, different’s taken over
And I adore itThe bearded baristas
The hashtag heroes
The craft beer, the matcha
The smashed avocados
The tattoos, the typewriters
Gluten-free dieters
Instagram, instagram, instagram
WorshippersEverybody wants to be a hipster
I come home, different’s taken over
Time for my go at breaking this mould
I dye my hair
I get the piercings
Start writing poetry
Learn how to tarot read
Know which wine is which and
Which coffee to ditch and
I think I could get used to living like thisEverybody wants to be the most hipster
I come home different’s taken over
And grown addictive
Whose beard is the longest
Whose man bun the tightest
Who’s the best read
Knows their Hamlet from Titus
Don’t know what the goal is
But we’re all chasing it
Topping the craze and the craze and the craze and it’s
All competition
Post-modern ambition
It’s all a distraction
Isn’t it?Because something is missing amidst it
We inflate the gravity of this dress up game
Engage the safe space to exercise difference
To learn to talk recite and proffer
But not to offer any real substance
Seems unconstructive, seems over indulgent
Seems underwhelming, seems empty headed
Seems where is the empathy
When we resort to trending hashtags to mitigate apathy
Seems appearance has superseded moral integrity
When do you know you have just composed a decent poem?
Imogen: To be honest, it takes a while. I’m a very harsh critic and need to have a piece well received by an unknown audience before I believe in it. A lot of what I write is political and intended to motivate a response from a crowd so it’s hard to judge its merit purely by my own opinion. That said, I’m at the stage now where I can recognise when a piece of mine is creatively strong – for me, it all comes down to flow, wording and clever rhymes. It’s quite mathematical really. But I can’t judge the overall impact of a poem until I’ve performed it live.
What is it about performing your poetry you love the most?
Imogen: How much it seems to affect people. The responses I get from folk after performing poetry are so different to that of a theatre or music audience. Perhaps it’s because poetry is so inherently personal, perhaps it generates a more emotional response in a listener. Whatever it is, it’s special to see the way words can communicate. And plus, it’s exciting. Performance poetry is so dynamic, such a show, and has the potential to be quite interactive – you can see who is responding to a piece, you can speak directly to them.
Can you tell us about Words w/ Friends?
Imogen: Words w/ Friends is a collective of poets working with producer, The Heartsease Kid, to creative innovative collaborations of lo-fi hip hop and spoken word poetry. We’ve just released an album, Words w/ Friends vol. III, which we’re touring around the UK in July. By fusing the genres, we;re aiming to heighten the accessibility of poetry through creating an art form that appeals to more diverse audiences. We want to re-establish the relevancy of poetry for a modern crowd.
What does Imogen Stirling like to do when she’s not being, well, poetic?
Imogen: I like to travel. Once the Fringe is done, I’m keen to get back to the Canary Islands, practice my surfing and my Spanish, find the sun. I’m a vegan activist and write for Vegan Connections, it’s great being involved in such a proactive and important movement. I love theatre – both performing it and watching it. Spending time with friends, drinking wine, discovering new music.
NICOLAS
Nicolas died in Somalia
When I met him we were both staying
In Gran Canaria
I told him he reminded me of my brother
Both fiercely determined and destined to be doctors
He said is that right
He said
Your brother
Must be smart, funny and handsome too then?
I laughed and said yesThe bomb was so strong that most victims could not be identified
It took me 5 weeks to learn of his fate
Every day I saw papers detail the events of the shooting in Vegas
58 victims described and mourned
Yet just two weeks later
Over 300 Somalians ignored
I learned more news of strangers
Than the boy I’d learned to surf with
As though covering his life had not been deemed worth itI looked at Nicolas and saw my brother
Others looked at him
And saw the third world urchins
The BBC leak through Comic Relief sob reels
We’re taught they’re used to extremities
So we could not assimilate
He was too much other
He must not have suffered
The Mumble caught you performing at Eden festival last week. Where else will your words be winging off to this Summer?
Imogen: I’ve a couple festivals still to come, V in the Park which is a new vegan festival, and then Latitude Festival in July. After that it’s all go with the Words w/ Friends tour, we’ve got 10 dates all around the UK. Finally it’ll be Fringe time where I’ll be performing #Hypocrisy alongside doing some other guest spots throughout the month.
Can you tell us more about your Fringe show?
Imogen: The show is called #Hypocrisy and is a fusion of spoken word, theatre and original music. It’s my Fringe debut and will be on at the Scottish Poetry Library from August 8-12th at 7pm. The show is a response to the bizarre world we’re living in. One where dangerous politicians prevail, where the media constantly sells us fictions masquerading as realities, where an ocean of social media sympathy can pour forth for western terror victims but backs turn on the migrant crisis. Ultimately, a world of staggering hypocrisies. It’s presented from my perspective as a young white woman. Beginning by looking into my experiences travelling as a musician through Europe (during which time I often found myself reaping the benefits of my skin colour) it opens up to explore what is evidently becoming an increasingly racist world. The show is a contemplation and an interrogation of western privilege. It’s an exposure of hypocrisy and a reminder of perspective.
What will Imogen Stirling be doing after the Fringe?
Imogen: Hopefully a brief stint in the Canary Islands to unwind a little after what’s been a very full on year. I’m planning a tour for #Hypocrisy, an album, and a new top secret music project. There’s a lot to look forward to, I’m very excited.
www.imogenstirling.com
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