Don’t Get Mad, Get Uneven: Our stories in poetry.
I now have a poetry moment I will never forget for as long as I live, and it surrounded a poem about grief.
I did a support headlining set at To Be Frank Poetry Night, my first 20-minute full set in a long time. And halfway through my piece ‘Red’ my voice crackled and broke with emotion, it was about my late friend Shuggy. I had lost my friend and I wanted to share with people the injustice of his loss. I had to speak over the empathetic humming and furious clicking of the crowd. I will never forget that sound. Thirty-to-twentyish people just adding fuel to my fire. Or the wave of guilty joy that came with it.
I’ve already written about my turmoil over the sudden passing of my friend on this blog, the aftermath involved complicated emotions that came with him being homeless and how that forced me to have conversations with myself and others. I asked a close friend of Shuggy’s as to whether they’d be okay with me performing the poem, whether they liked it. And they did, thankfully. They told me they loved it, which made me very glad and I like the poem, too. Enough that the thought “I could win a slam with this” had popped into my head uninvited several times.
There’s a lot to be said about misery porn in poetry. It’s inescapable; I don’t believe I’ve met a single slamming poet who hasn’t sworn that they came up against a poem that they believed was not as good as their own but twanged at heartstrings or played to righteous anger. Poets from every walk of life, each of whom has cards of their own to play, agree on this.
I agree to the extent that it correlates; you’re going to remember a gut-wrenching poem performed well about an experience connected to current events and concerns, more so than a poem about something less immediately connecting. Clarity is an important factor for judges and audiences, we like to understand what we are feeling. But there are some subjects that have been overlaboured and poems that need some work on these same ideas that don’t get through to the next round, it is confirmation bias at the end of the day. If someone knocks you out in the first round, it is very tempting to attribute some of that victory to factors outside of skill, it lessens the sting. Poets are human, it is to be expected.
Misery porn isn’t what I want to discuss, I want to talk about that human malarky. When I performed ‘Red’ that night I was looking to connect with people, not humble them with my experience or guilt them for not doing enough. I didn’t want them to be separate from what had happened. I didn’t want it to be something that likely happens, but something that had happened. I wanted to tell them about my friend and just how angry I was when I fully took into account the building blocks of what had happened, how cruel and apathetic it all was, that Shuggy may have been someone they passed on the street or even had said hi to.
I wanted my poem to be powerful, but what can that mean when an audience can interpret it as an attack? Or a leg over the competition? I believe it comes down to what an individual can bring to the table. To make a story a story, instead of what we don’t want to hear. A rather plain-faced truth is that we hate to be lectured, even on things we totally agree with. I will totally admit here that I bloody hate poems waffling about feminism 101, I despise having to sit through them, and that isn’t because I’m against the content but it is something I have heard. I’ve seen a hundred twitter fights on the subject, and a hundred more gaudily thumb-nailed youtube videos on it. I dislike being told mental illness is bad, and the tories are bad, etc etc.
A story is more than that; it is a piece of you. It is a transcript of a therapy session. It is several labourious texts to a good friend about what you can’t believe that guy just said, ugh. Its what you mumble to yourself in the bathroom mirror when you wash your hands after peeing at 4am. It is not meant to be convincing. You are an unreliable narrator, not a TEDtalk. If you get up on stage wanting to convince someone, you’re going to lose them. If you get up on stage wanting to share something, they’re going to take something away.
I can’t promise it will be exactly what you want them to take away, however. I remember one of the first performance nights I saw last-last year had a guy stumble through a poem he wrote about why girls shouldn’t need makeup. That piece wrought more conversations and questions than anything else on that night. I disagreed and still disagree, but it raised questions about why I hated it, why I wanted to reply the way I did, why I wear makeup, why I didn’t feel men had a place to comment on it. But most importantly, it made me see why he felt this way, I still thought he was a low-key twat talking about how his girlfriend was pretty regardless, but I thought about it.
Roya Marsh’s work speaks for itself. It is guts and no glory poetry, it is conflict and heat. This piece does in two minutes what I have seen poets fight to do in whole headlining slots. It is a microcosm of a world, there is fear, anger, regret and a million questions from every glinting facet.
It doesn’t state an objective, it doesn’t tell you what questions to raise, there are no buzzwords or signposting, in fact, it leaves you asking how Marsh really feels in the end. And that is what is human about anecdotes, we have to take the time to translate what we have been told and that time spent produces more than a plain argument can. Because an argument begs opposition.
This piece by Antosh Wojcik leaves you asking exactly what is happening at times. What does hitting your head on the moon mean? What does that ending mean? Were we supposed to laugh at masturbating with vaporub? It doesn’t seem to phase him when people do. This was deeply personal, so much so that parts are still impenetrable to me. Wojcik has surrounded this picture with a personal frame you cannot get past. But this piece is so tangible it doesn’t matter, it is obviously about severe bullying and the long-term effects it can have, but when we reach in to find something, we pull out what we recognise.
Insomnia has been a horrible coping method of mine, and it has destroyed me in the past. It reminded me of the anxiety I had as a child, the things I have only just understood as anxiety back then. Wojcik just gave me my own memories back. I am going to remember burning my spine at both ends for a long time.
Okay, so maybe no one in that audience had a Shuggy. Maybe I should have told them more about his bear hugs and his gurgly voice, his blue humour and his polka-dot reading glasses. Maybe this is a very long way of saying show, don’t tell. Maybe my guilt is just mourning in disguise. I think ‘Red’ is still more than bile and grief, it is misery, but it is my own. It is not Shuggy, it is what I recall about my last memories of him, it is what I carried and what I want to share. People can disagree with me that if there is an empty building with a bed in it, someone should be able to sleep there. But they won’t be able to deny that the consequences of that not happening transformed me on that stage, if only briefly. It might not have been pretty or rational, but that wasn’t me, either.
I hope people got to see that for what it was. I hope my poetry gives and never takes.
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