Homework Is Due

So yeah, had a faboo weekend over in Liverpool at the Bluecoat, doing some challenging and fun gigs and getting to soak up some culture. I really enjoyed doing the Revolutions In Form gig on the Sunday, which featured live doodles, a poem passed Chinese Whispers style through the whole audience, performance art, music and film. I realise I'm not a very credible advocate for a gig I was part of, and I don't usually like bigging up gigs I liked anyway, because it makes me sound like an awful fawning luvvie, but I thought it was a really interesting show. 'Performance art' especially gets a bad rap as a blanket term, but at its best it just means someone doing something cool and fascinating live.

Um, so next Wednesday, the 28th of October, you should come to the final Homework of the season. Aisle16 will be performing The 9½ Commandments Of Aisle16. Okay, here's the pitch:

'When the British Council approached stand-up poetry collective Aisle16 wanting to commission a brand new live literature show for a "live, appreciative audience", they jumped at the chance. After doing a poetry tour of Britain’s motorway service stations and becoming the world’s first poetry boyband, as well as their regular appearances at festivals such as Glastonbury and Latitude, they were used to taking verse to new audiences. But there was a catch.

The show would be at the 2nd Annual Children’s Book Festival in Athens – and the "live, appreciative audience" would be composed entirely of Greek 7-year-olds, who hardly spoke any English at all. Never ones to shy away from a challenge – or money – Aisle16 set about trying to write a new poetry show that could be understood by people who barely speak the language.

The result is The 9½ Commandments Of Aisle16 – a stand-up poetry show featuring fat bullies, God’s rejected fish prototypes, and a portrait of the yeti as a young man."

So that'll be Chris Hicks, Luke Wright (interviewed here), Ross Sutherland (interviewed here), and Joel Stickley (interviewed here). There'll also be supporting performances of new material from me, Joe Dunthorne and John Osborne. Which means it's going to be that hella rare equinox where all seven members of Aisle16 are in the same place, at the same time, performing at the same gig. I know. You're correct to water your underpants in entrancement and terror. It will doubtless be a dead good finale to a super-successful season of Homework. Come, imbibe heartily with us as we say adios to our darling literary cabaret night for another year. And gawd bless the Arts Council for supporting our efforts. We've done our best to make it memorable, and give our audiences something more interesting than just blokes chuntering on in a vaguely artsy way.

Oh, and hey - you ought to check out the new online ventures from two of our members. Joel Stickley has started a blog called How To Write Badly Well. Partly based on his experience as a creative writing tutor, each short lesson builds up into a step-by-step guide on how to excel in composing dreadful prose. He claims he's going to update every Friday. Even though this seems a modest schedule, from experience I expect it will prove to be a SORDID LIE. Still, you should read it because it is well-wrought and funny. As someone who does a bit of the old creative writing tutoring from time to time, I enjoyed a few recognition laughs, along with a few twinges at stylistic gaffes I'd committed myself.

Also, Ross Sutherland has a new website up, here. Lots of poems, vids, links, gig dates, etc. I reckon 'The End Of Our Marriage' is particularly good.

In other news, after a weekend of appalling eating habits in Liverpool, including two takeaway pizzas and two meals at McDonalds culminating in a McGangbang (a double cheeseburger with a chicken mayo shoved in-between them... I KNOW) I am in the midst of a week of detox. No alcohol, no nicotine, no caffeine, no meat, no dairy, no sweets, no crisps. Steering away from unrefined carbs and stuff that's high on the glycemic index as much as possible. Losing Diet Coke feels like the cruellest blow thus far, which I suppose only goes to prove how much of an addle-pated addict I am. Yesterday I spent the whole day feeling like absolute crap, with a pounding headache. Today, I feel a bit better, albeit enfeebled. It's only until Saturday morning, anyhow, then I get to go right back to stuffing hot hogsflesh into my slavering unclean craw.

The Performance Poet Interviews - #6: Joel Stickley

Since you asked, Cone O' Tragedy's most popular feature is my weekly interviews with UK performance poets. We've heard from Dockers MC, Polarbear, Nathan Filer, Yanny Mac and Nathan Jones. This week, it's the turn of Joel Stickley.



How did you get into performance poetry?

I saw Luke Wright perform a few poems at a cabaret night when we were both at university. Immediately seeing that perfomance poetry was a formulaic and creatively bankrupt art form, I wrote a parody of him hilariously entitled 'Luke's Right.' When he heard it, he was so angry that he offered me a gig at a night that he and Ross were putting on. Rather than trying to make a two-minute poem fill a ten minute set, I wrote some more material. One thing led to another and, three months later, I found myself standing in the rain at the Edinburgh Fringe, handing out flyers for a perfomance poetry show. That was seven years ago.

I see this as a kind of cautionary tale.

How would you describe your work?

I'd pretend to be thinking about it for a while, cock my head to one side and make a kind of humming sound before asking the interviewer how he would describe my work. Then I'd agree with whatever he said.

Do you think there's a difference between 'page' and 'performance' poetry? If so, what?

Yes, definitely. I think performance poetry is closer to stand-up or music than it is to page poetry. If there's a performance poem that works on the page, it's probably only by chance, like having a computer that also works as a door-stop.

Why should someone come to a performance poetry gig?

Well, there are two possible reasons. The first is that they should come to a perfomace poetry gig because they've been to one before and know that they'll like it. The second is that they haven't ever been to one before and have no idea what to expect. The second reason's better than the first, but you can only use it once.

What do you think your best poem is, and why?

It really would depend when you asked me. I tend to like ones I've written more recently, whereas old ones I can see all the flaws in and am bored of. Given that, the only real measure I have of one of my poems is how long it manages to stay in circulation before I get too embarassed to perform it again. On that metric, the winner is probably one called 'The Rhyming Poem', which I've been wheeling out for a few years now.

But if you're asking for my current favourite, I'd have to say my poem about the evolution of fish, 'Playing God', which is only a few weeks old. I wrote it for the Athens Children's Book Fair and illustrated it myself in brown felt tip.



If you could nick one other person's poem and claim it as your own, which poem would it be, and why?

I'd love to be able to pick something that made me sound well-read and intellectual, like saying that I'd nick something off John Donne or Pablo Neruda, but let's be honest - I'd sound like a right ninny reciting 'To His Coy Mistress'. If I was going to try and pass something off as my own, it'd probably have to be something written by one of my fellow Aisle16ers. Boring, I know, but plaigarism is all about being methodical.

What typifies bad performance poetry to you?

Ambition.

Tell us about a particularly memorable reaction you've had to your work.

At Port Eliot Lit Fest a few years ago, I did a set which caused one member of the audience great offence. The first poem I did was called 'My Passport Photo Makes Me Look Like A Suicide Bomber'. She didn't have a problem with that one. The second poem was called 'The Tale Of Britain's First Paedophile Prime Minister'. She laughed along with everyone else. Then I did a poem called 'The Rise And Fall Of Lightning Jim', about a snail who throws away a promising career in snail racing after a doping scandal involving salt. It's a poem I tend to do when I go into primary schools. She glared at me throughout, then turned to her friend and, with barely concealed outrage, said, 'I don't think that's very funny, actually. My uncle was an alcoholic.'

I read the moral of the story as being this: you never know who's going to be offended by what, so you might as well tell jokes about terrorism and child abuse.

You say 'ambition' typifies bad performance poetry for you. I have no idea whether this is one of your clever meta-answers or an utterly straight response, and if either is the case I still wouldn't quite be sure what you meant. Would you mind clarifying?

I thought about how to answer that question for a while, and I actually think that's my real, considered and unflippant answer. Most of the really cringe-worthy poets I've seen had one thing in common - they took what they were doing incredibly seriously and thought that poetry was the most important thing in the world, a powerful tool to affect real change in society. And they're wrong. Poetry isn't the answer to anything - it's just an entertaining way to ask the questions. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes it's just a game you play with words. And you know what? That's fine. That's what poetry's for. Trying to use poetry to correct all society's ills is like trying to travel from London to Manchester on a space-hopper. By all means play with it, mess around and enjoy yourself, but if the journey's that important to you, buy a fucking train ticket.

You say your starting point as a performance poet was parody - I wonder if you feel that was the beginning of a long creative arc that finally culminated in Who Writes This Crap?, a book and show entirely fashioned from lampooning the form and content of different everyday texts. I say, 'I wonder if you feel' - what I mean is 'I personally believe and want you to agree'.



It's certainly been a common thread through the whole time I've been writing and performing. I think I just like writing things in character, inhabiting other people's voices, and parody is one of the most fun ways to do that. And by parody, I mean the whole range of ways to imitate: satire, pastiche, homage, parody, tribute. Taking the piss. Stepping into someone else's shoes. Taking a piss in someone else's shoes. It's all good.

With regards to poetry, you seem to have wound in the performing duties a bit. What are your plans? Are you hoping to produce and perform lots of new poems, or are you searching for pastures new? Or what?

I don't gig compulsively. I never have, really. I've always enjoyed impromptu, one-off shows more than huge, unwieldy tours. Luke and I did a very short tour of the Who Writes This Crap show earlier this year and it was an absolute joy. A handful of dates, then a bit of time at home to write. Once I rack up fifty or so performances of the same material, I start to get really sick of it. So the thing is to keep working on new projects. Luke and I are collaborating on a script for an animated film at the moment, as well as tentatively trying to work WWTC into a radio-friendly format. I've been doing a lot of work in schools, getting kids to write poetry. I teach on a creative writing course for adult learners. I write when I have the time. It's all great fun. I wouldn't have it any other way.