Standing up for poetry

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.

Let’s think about how your work sounds to an entirely sober audience at 9.00 in the morning – a thing I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. At its best, yours will be brilliant poetry, brilliantly performed – viz A F Harrold, Elvis McGonagall, Murray Lachlan Young, John Hegley. Too often, though, we allow performance poetry to mean ‘second rate poetry, brilliantly performed’. At its very worst it means ‘I’m rubbish but you have to applaud my courage for standing up, don’t you?’

Actually, no we don’t – not if we’ve paid to see you. The audience is on your side, but you owe them your best work – not only funny or thought-provoking, but technically good. Every time you stand up on stage, you stand up for poetry – all kinds of poetry. If we are going to spread the word, let’s make the words as good as we can. Otherwise, as the inflatable schoolteacher said to the inflatable schoolboy with a pin in his hand, ‘You’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down and you’ve let the whole school down’.

Here’s an example. I have a piece called History which usually goes down really well. Last year I included it in a touring show called Bunch of Fives. It was politely received, but the audience (damn them) liked other poems much better. Why? Because normally I can introduce it – tell its story, slap its bottom and set it going, prime the audience. Without that introduction, it didn’t stand up. I looked at it again. Oh dear – the narrative was wobbly; the rhythm was tricky; in fact, I had stopped writing before I needed to, because it was ‘good enough’. In fact ‘good enough’ is never good enough. It has to be plain good. I’m reminded of the great director who watched a performance by a minor actress, so riddled with faults that he didn’t know where to start. ‘I’d like you to do that again,’ he drawled – ‘but better.’

I certainly won’t need to say that to Charlie Jordan, who is already writing about her residency at West Brom with great generosity, enthusiasm and curiosity. My role is to be a kind of critical cattle-prod – keeping her writing the best work that she can. That means exposing her to new work or performers, suggesting different approaches to familiar subjects – asking her to think about writing encourage her to keep looking at it, learning, tweaking, so that in two or three years she is writing better stuff still. Her blog will already be showing you some of the results – and I’ll blog again soon about how we got there.

thanks folks, see you soon -

Jo