Last week I read at the Troubadour (she said casually), the most famous basement in English poetry. I was one of many voices there to launch the new edition of Magma, which I’m in (she said casually) so it was a feast of at least thirty poets.

This edition of Magma seems to have brought together everyone I’ve ever met in poetry world – Anne Caldwell and Clive McWilliams from the north, Alison Brackenbury and Lawrence Sail from the south west, Charles Bennett now of Northants. In the audience were friends including Daljit Nagra and Derek Adams. And there were plenty of  voices I didn’t know – Christopher James, the brilliant Imtiaz Darkher and others. I was chuffed to see how many people read from memory, and what a difference it made when they did. I can’t always remember my poems but I do try.

In last week’s thrilling episode, I mentioned Bunch of Fives and how we developed it by seeing other shows. As we performed it, of course, we discovered what Al Gore might call an inconvenient truth. Dammit, that same critical scrutiny we’d so liberally applied to others was now being applied to us. Other people were taking away ideas from our performance, and they were giving us feedback too – some good, some negative, all useful. This is the other half of the critical loop and it can be a right bugger.

I saw the anthology Some Girls’ Mothers in performance earlier this year, and heard one of the writers say ‘well, part of this came out of hearing what Bunch of Fives was doing’. Maybe these writers thought we were brilliant – maybe they thought, ‘now there’s a thing we want to avoid.’ Either way we have done something useful. Every time you stand up to perform, you step into the critical loop. You also learn something new about what you want to do next time – and in our new show Fourpenny Circus we have pushed ourselves further without losing the spit-and-sawdust feel.

In summary, as that nice Mr Roethke says,‘We learn by going where we have to go’. So to Jonathan Coe (whose piece I critiqued above) and others, I humbly say – forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. It’s not actually trespassing – it’s a big cultural conversation, conducted with affection if we do it right. At the Lit Up event I was reminded of this whole process. Live literature consists of a million little parts: each show reacts to its predecessors and informs its successors, in a sort of live lit evolution. That’s why we have to do it as well as we can. That’s why live literature is growing and getting better. That’s why it is bigger than the sum of its parts.

And you, dear reader, need to go out and see as much live literature as possible – especially those things that you wouldn’t normally choose. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to go out in the next month, see one live lit or cultural event you would never normally attend, and see what it teaches you. Oh, and don’t forget to fill in the bloody feedback form.

We saw bite-sized chunks of new work – from Stanley Cook poems, presented in straight ‘stand up and tell it’ style, to the more elaborate kitchen-sink drama which opened the show. Every one of these formats can work. Polarbear delivered a piece straight to the audience simply and effectively. Kate Fox got us more involved, made us laugh; again her writing was true, and we respected it.

Every performance you see is a chance to reflect on your own practice. When you like it, it’s great and you ask what you can learn from it. When you don’t, you should still respect the performers who had the balls to perform it. You have been given an opportunity, at their expense, to analyse what you didn’t like.

One piece at Lit Up presented us with actors speaking a story by Jonathan Coe, with music by the High Llamas. It was a bold combination of music and words, and held my attention for an hour-long performance. Yet for me, it didn’t quite hit the mark. Why not? The actors and musicians were professional, the staging was attractive and slick (in a good way). But for me, the content wasn’t engaging. The music/ words seemed to operate on different planes rather than working together.

Marcus Moore and Sara-Jane Arbury are the king and queen of poetry slams, bringing a funny hat, a sparkly dress and quality control to any occasion. On Thursday they were at Cheltenham Science Festival and so was I, to take part in their eighth Slam the Atom! event.

It was a dream line-up, unless of course you were hoping to win. Here was smily Spoz, former Birmingham laureate and scatologist supreme – veteran slammers Brenda Read-Brown and Peter Wyton – Steve Rooney, comic genius from the East Midlands – Robin Cairns, ditto from Glasgow (see www.robincairns.com) – and plenty of other great voices, some of them new to me. It came down to a head-to-head between Steve Rooney and Brenda Read-Brown, and Brenda carried off the crown. I was knocked into a cocked hat by Steve Rooney and deserved to be – I cried with laughter as he performed a stonking set.

One of the contenders had said to me earlier, ‘The problem is, it’s harder to win now’, adding with a nostalgic sigh, ‘There aren’t so many idiots about as there used to be.’ It’s true – the standard of poetry reading, performing, and telling is so much better than it was even five years ago. God knows I hope my own has improved in that time. It used to be that a good slam was great, and a bad slam was bloody embarrassing. Now the good performance poets are numerous enough that a slam should always be lively, funny, thought-provoking and a good night out. This is what we need, if we want get bigger and more mainstream audiences.

One of the good things about this mentoring lark is that it sends the mentors back to the poems that first got them going. At one of our coffee-drinking sessions, I mentioned to Charlie a Sharon Olds poem called First Sex. It’s a gem, full of precise observation and slightly embarrassing details that prove the truth of the story. Almost before I got back home, there was an email from Charlie with her own tale of First Sex. Eureka – this was the real thing! It was rich with dark physical details and one or two lines that made me cringe on her behalf – so I knew she hadn’t made them up. This is what we do – the poet boldly going where no-one else has gone before, and usually for very good reason. Think of the money we save the NHS on counselling.

This subject had taken Charlie’s fancy and she had grabbed it by, as it were… well, that reminds me of a powerful line in the poem. It’s very rewarding for me to see Charlie absorbing and working through the things we discuss – taking in anything that is useful, and being open to experiment. It’s not about the mentor being a guru or the mentee a disciple at her knee, but rather about the mentor saying ‘ooh, this worked for me, have a go and see if it helps’ or ‘I know you’re interested in X, have a look at Y for writing on that’. Charlie will try anything that might stretch her poetic wings a bit. This one certainly worked for her, and also made me feel that I might be offering something of use to her.

Charlie is nothing if not prompt. She produces a cat poem and a mouse poem based on the photo I sent her, and I’m chuffed that she thinks the experiment worth trying. It’s great to see her playing with these different voices. After all, if Jo Bell always writes in the same voice, as the same narrator, it’s a bit bloody boring after a while (as you may well have found out). Sometimes you want a poem to tell a story which you couldn’t experience yourself – ergo, you need to shape-shift every now and then.

So these two poems are a valuable experiment – and so is the other experiment I suggested. Once, in a session with domestic abuse victims in Staffordshire I asked them to write curses, maledictions – poems that would unleash all their repressed feelings about the people who had done them harm. Obviously, they had some ‘cursees’ in mind and their poems were forceful and fierce – things to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. But they were bloody good stuff, and everyone felt a bit better afterwards.

I asked Charlie if she fancied writing a curse. She obliged immediately, producing one for our next session. I begin to feel like the wicked demon on her shoulder, taking a perfectly nice woman and turning her into a bitter twisted curse-hurling hag in my own image. But this was good stuff, with the true personal touches that make a poem come alive when read aloud. Now, it’s very unkind to take a first draft and critique it as if it were a finished piece – but of course I do it anyway. Charlie is fantastically trusting, allowing me to see her work at an earlier stage than she might normally – which I hope allows me to make constructive comments in time to help them develop.

In this case, the piece was just a little unwieldy. Charlie had taken a few lines to ‘write herself in’ to the subject, with the meat of it at the end – something we are all guilty of, especially in a first draft. So our conversation turned to the subject of editing and ‘killing your babies’ – taking out those lines which you think are brilliant but which actually hold back the poem, especially in performance. It’s all good stuff and useful to both of us, I hope!

Right then. Here’s how it happened. Once upon a time there was a little poet called Jo Bell, who was mentored by a more experienced poet called Cathy Grindrod. Some time later, Jo Bell was slightly more experienced herself, and then became a mentor to the slightly less experienced Charlie Jordan. Eventually they all became fully-fledged neurotics and wrote masterpieces, and lived unhappily ever after (because happiness is no good for raw material).

So, I’m being given an opportunity to do for someone else what Cathy did for me – building up confidence and awareness. At first it’s like a penpal correspondence. Charlie bravely sends me a few pages of her work, including a piece on travelling in Australia and a couple of short ones. I decide not to make any critical comment until we meet – even the friendliest critique can be a harsh and hurtful thing without eye contact. I’m a bit surprised by these pieces. They don’t seem like ‘performance poetry’, but neither are they solidly lyrical personal poems. There’s an openess and a sense of wonder in them. They tell personal stories, yet I feel as if a little something is being held back – the real grit, the embarrassment or joy that makes a poem absorbing. The raw material is all there, but Charlie’s work seems ever so slightly inhibited. Let’s see what we can do about that!

Blimey, I’m a mentor to the lovely Charlie Jordan. Does this mean I am a grown up now? Apples & Snakes seem to think so, and since they’ve done more than any other outfit to raise the game of performance poetry, that’s good enough for me. More about Charlie’s work soon, but first I’ll set out my stall – what does a mentor do?

Mentoring provides the thing that everyone needs but no-one really wants: genuinely critical feedback. Like poetic Fibragel it does you good and gets things moving, but may not be pleasant to swallow. In performance poetry, feedback is especially necessary because it’s so tempting to think you don’t need it. On a good night the roar of the crowd can convince you that you are at the top of your game – powerful, funny, sexy, satirical. You are a hit! You don’t need to write any better than this! But ladies and gentlemen, the audience has a great advantage over the cold-blooded critic. The audience is pissed.