The Performance Poet Interviews - #5: Nathan Jones

How did you get into performance poetry?

There were some important men in my life early on. Mainly Ginsberg, then Gershwin lyrics, then the terrible Thomases (Dylan and R.S)… and Eliot! Where am I going with this?

Through certain half deserted streets, probably. So anyway reading Eliot really gave me a kick up the arse – the time when we were taught Prufrock by Matt Jordan in John Moores University, and he was giving up fags and marching up and down the room going DO I DARE! And DO I DARE! That was a big turning point, when I started to find a voice that wasn't 'beat'.

Anyway, I was writing poems about the drinking booze in the neon city and suchlike all the way through university. But they didn't give us much idea about what you actually do with poems once you've written them, aside from the fact that you send them to poetry periodicals. I didn't really see why you would want to do that. So after university I started writing kind of Odes for Mercy magazine, which seemed to be the only real outlet that wasn't just for other poets, and I had a pseudonym so I felt I didn't have to be all lofty or serious. My first Odes were for The Grapes, a pub that wound up being called the Sick Lizard for a while, which I lived in sitting at the bar and eventually we drank all the liquor, paying for it by standing behind the bar and pouring it for ourselves, and I remember that every afternoon we would have to go to the off-licence and buy more cans of beer – ostensibly to sell, but seeing as there was no heating or running water in there you couldn't blame anyone for not coming in and eventually we drank the cans of beer and went to sleep on the seats there. It was like being the barman out of Quantum Leap, in a way. Then the pub went out of business for some reason and I had to go up the road. They were dreadful times, and the poem reflected that with a certain amount of pathos I think. And it wasn't about Me, so you could call that a bit of a watershed. That should be in those top tips you were going through. Don't write about yourself all the time. It's boring.

So eventually I got round to producing stuff quite regularly, most of it about myself, and I bought a tweed suit that in retrospect made me look like Compo out of Last Of The Summer Wine, and I started reading my poems out then. Selfish, not funny poems with no shouting or music. Roll up in one hand, whiskey in the other.

Then I started working in a café at FACT and Ross Sutherland came in. Your friend and mine. I was going bald, although now I have a fine head/face of hair. Then we started Fiction @ FACT, poetry events with tunes and drinking and that. I definitely had in mind the sort of 'happening' vibe that you associate with the first readings of Ginsberg's Howl poem, which I still think was the last poem to actually change the world. And anyway I would perform there every month and see Ross perform his stuff which was much better than mine and every month I would try to top him by doing a pastiche of a different 'school' of writing… surrealism and imagism and that… Once a keyboard player fell off the back of the stage. That was great. And Nick wore a colander. And Ross would carry on being better than everyone just being himself and getting all the girls. And then I developed a faux-welsh accent, which worked kind of like the pseudonym, I guess. Then I was a performance poet for a while, because I had a poem called 'Too Hot For Love', which people could remember afterwards. Catchphrases are good. Refrains, so people know what you're on about even if they have started thinking about their mole for a minute. And a silly accent.

Although I've always thought that my links aren't really good enough for me to call myself a performance poet.

So yes, I blame it on Ross Sutherland. Great poet, great performer, bad gait. Awful gait. And all the Fiction poets really, Nick Holloway, Dave Bamford, Olly Grunner, and now you and Joe and the two Lukes [Kennard and Wright], who push you and make you feel part of something. Nick ran a performance night too, called Someone Is Watching, which in a way was a spooky premonition of our current nights Wave If You're Really There, perhaps we are religious poets! Anyway, yes, Nick's nights were every Sunday so that was a regular thing you had to write for too. That was a good way to learn, and 'be'.



How would you describe your work?

Sometimes it is lengthy and discursive, sort of bouncy and friendly, like someone who is having an excellent conversation with a good friend not letting them get a word in edgeways and really trying to get to the bottom of a subject I suppose. Although that is just my lastest poem.

Visceral realism, I do. Or what I would call visceral anyway, with some real raw feeling thrown in for good measure. 'Shit, I'm angry.' Or 'He was angry and sad. What is sadness anyway...' A poem by me might start. And it would probably end 'Washing chips up in a tree'.

Nina wrote that actually, skitting one of Ross's automatic poems. It's good isn't it? She writes songs too: www.myspace.com/ninajonesmusic. My poems are actually usually remarkably similar to whoever I'm reading at the time, but with more Me in them, and a bit of Nina.

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

I suppose performance poetry is funny. That's almost a guarantee, that if it isn't funny at all then it is a flop. Like all rules, this is a pretty rubbish one. Forget it. And you can take your idea of the fact that they have to be three minutes long, or even under five and shove it up your arse too. David Jay is the best performance poet I've ever seen, and he isn't really funny and he goes on for yonks. So there you go! Or do you?

I don't know. I suppose we all like to think that people will enjoy our poems written down, but actually we know that no-one would really actually ever read them. What are they going to do? Buy a book of poems and then read it?

I doubt it, Tim. At least not with the intensity and in the numbers you can achieve with performance. If you want people to know your poetry, you have to go out and read it to them, and then I think that out of this comes all the stylistic and quirky and dynamic things that are basically to do with audience development. You learn to work with crowds so that they will like you/your poems more and maybe more people will come and listen harder next time. And maybe one day someone will say 'I liked this bit' instead of asking you how you remembered the whole thing. No-one ever knows what to say to you after you have just been on stage, especially if you are still learning.

I am saying 'you' 'you' all the time here, but I mean 'me', 'I'. It has been fucking painful, sitting there and watching Ross take all the girls to his bedroom one by one.


But then I have a feeling that people like David Jay, and to a certain extent you, have performance as a medium in itself. That probably makes for a more satisfying experience. And where do people who are good and don't perform fit into my theory? Like, erm, Seamus Heaney.

What about this: the difference is the generosity of performed poetry – when it's good, it seems like such a generous thing to do for people, but when it's poo the poet just looks selfish. It's a generous risk to take, in itself. But sometimes you wish you hadn't bothered, and at those times everyone else wishes you hadn't too. Whereas page poetry is just quite good or brilliant, or it doesn't even exist.

As long as I am still allowed to think of myself as a direct artistic descendent of T.S. Eliot, I don't care.

Why should someone come to a performance poetry gig?

It's only a fiver, and we have music on too.

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

The Bell. It is nice and long and gathers in intensity. And it rhymes, so it has this quality that makes it seem like it existed before I wrote it. I have a link here to when I performed it in Tate with a load of artists, and Wave Machines…

http://liverpoolstories.blogspot.com/2008/12/mercyliverpool-tate.html

I also love this one because it is the first one I wrote specifically for a performance with Wave Machines.

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

Kenneth Koch, 'The Art Of Love'. He is so confident and human at this point in his career, and there is none of the pretension of poetry holding him back, although poetry is the perfect way to describe what he's doing. And it's nice and long so you can settle into it. And it's funny and clever and tall and everything that you want in a man.

What typifies bad performance poetry to you?

'Middle Class Girls'.

No! I'm joking. I love that one.

Basically, it's bad if it's not funny, and with nothing to replace that humour. I'm not usually funny, but when I'm not being funny you can be sure that I'll do a big shouty shouty bit with the stary eyes pretty soon. Even then it can be really bad. You can't get away with just doing a shouty shouty when there are only about four people watching you – although I have tried. My girlfriend nearly stopped loving me that night.

Like I said, you can tell bad performance poetry when there is no generosity in it. That's not something that you can add in to a performance, like you can add it into hosting, where you just have to remember to give people things – it just comes from the work and performance being good. As an audience member you think, Thanks very much for that. There are lots of variables though.

Actually. Maybe that is it. Me and Ross used to talk about 'giving' people stuff as a performer. Bad performance poetry just doesn't give you anything. Open Mic nights are generally a bad idea to go to, unless you want to try new material.

And I HATE it when people swap words about in a sentence just so the rhyme lands on the end of the line. It's not 'To the shop I was walking' you div! And nothing good ever came from rhyming with walking anyway, what are you going to say, 'And to my fingers I was talking'?

What do you think of the state of the UK performance poetry scene at the moment? Is it okay to talk about a 'scene', or is that a bit unhelpful?

I don't know. Ask Ross. Ask Roddy Lumsden. He will know, but he might not tell you. He is the best poet, I think, and he seems to act like a bit of a dad to everyone else, even though he's not old enough to be your dad.

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

A little girl came up after a recent performance and asked for my autograph. I nearly cried. It was this performance:

http://shootoutproject.blogspot.com/2008/06/013-lived-to-learn-language-nathan.html

Must have been the braces.

Actually, I think that was the only time I have not gone off and gotten completely leathered after being on stage, because it was in the afternoon. So it is the most memorable reaction by default more than anything else. Maybe there have been some really great anecdotal reactions I've had, but I can't remember any of them. I can do this, because I really perform quite rarely. You guys would probably turn all yellow if you got drunk after every single gig.

I'm not sure if you would count this as a "reaction to my work", but it might be a good opportunity to state some cold hard facts:

Ross once had everyone at a packed stage at Latitude call me a cunt, because I had fallen asleep in a ditch instead of taking to the stage after Patti Smith. Patti Smith was supporting ME. In a way. Anyway, that actually was potentially the biggest moment of my whole writerly career, and I spooned it. I was asleep in a ditch. Okay? Apologies to everyone involved in that particular booboo, except Salena Godden.

The Performance Poet Interviews - #3: Nathan Filer

Last week, I talked to Polarbear, the week before it was Dockers MC. Today, it's the turn of Nathan Filer.


GOTH vs EMO from nathan filer on Vimeo.

How did you get into performance poetry?

Ten years ago I was living in Greece and working as an hotel entertainer. I was utterly useless. One holidaymaker helpfully described me as the most pathetic bingo caller he'd ever seen (and this was a man who had his own dabbers, so I'm guessing he'd seen a few).

Part of my job involved putting on a cabaret. Again, I was useless. But somewhere along the way I started to write and perform poems about ineffectual mosquito repellents, lost luggage and other such pressing topical issues. They went down a treat. I quit the job, and kept up the poetry.

How would you describe your work?

Comedic. I tend to tell stories with a fictional me at the centre of them. I like creating convoluted narratives with tangential asides, all leading to a punch-line type reveal. Oh, and I rhyme. For me, writing shifting and well executed rhyme schemes is a big part of the process.



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

Definitely. There are certainly poets (Ross Sutherland, Luke Wright, Rosy Carrick to name a few) who are able to blur those edges. But I am not one of them. Page poetry should look nice; mine looks like I've vomited bitter chunks of verbosity into my notebook, and let it congeal.

Why should someone come to a performance poetry gig?

They shouldn't. It's far better to get into sport. But one good thing about going to see performance poetry for the first time is that it will probably be less shit than you were expecting.

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

I'm really enjoying performing my newer material. It has more of a stand-up feel to it, with the focus on the overall narrative arc of the set, rather than individual poems.

But if I had to pick a single poem that I am most proud of it would probably be Oedipus. In 2005 I made it into a short film, which won tons of awards all around the world. It isn't my best piece of writing, but it definitely opened the most doors. Here is a link.

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

Ha. Who says I don't? Beowulf has done okay. Perhaps I'd claim that. Actually that would be a good choice because we don't know who wrote it. Perhaps it was me? It was long time ago, so I might have just forgotten.

Or maybe I should steal one of yours Timothy. I've always been rather envious of Middle Class Girls. Tell me, does your bruschetta taste better with feta or brie?

What typifies bad performance poetry to you?

It's fun to be asked all these questions. It makes me feel important. I'm going to close my eyes and imagine that you're Parky (... and I'm Rod Hull). Anyway, I'm not going to answer that one because I'm no expert and I'll just end up offending someone.

What do you think of the state of the UK performance poetry scene at the moment? Is it okay to talk about a 'scene', or is that a bit unhelpful?

I think it's okay to call it a scene. Unless you think that makes it sound exclusive, perhaps? But performance poetry is too accessible to be exclusive. All you have to do is write a poem and go to an open mic night. Hey presto, you are the scene!

Anyway, when I'm getting lots of gigs I consider the scene to be healthy. When I'm not I start mumbling discontentedly about glass ceilings and an imbalance of supply and demand. Basically I'm far too shrink wrapped in my own little world to be able to offer an objective appraisal. I'll go with... (flips mental coin)... it's all gone to shit. God help us.

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

After gigs the same thing usually happens. Sweet people come up to me wishing to express their gratitude and say some nice words. Then we get chatting, and after about ten minutes they realise that the actual me is nowhere near as quick-witted, charming or sympathetic as the stage me. On departing, we all feel a bit dead inside.

But I have a better story. A couple of years ago I was on holiday in Berlin. I was heading back to my hostel on the U-Bahn at about 2am and a young German guy on the seats opposite looked at me and asked if I'd be making any more poetry films soon. It turns out he'd seen Oedipus there at a festival a few months before. It wasn't even fifteen minutes. But fuck me, did I feel famous!

In your sets it's often ambiguous where the preamble ends and the poem begins; you've also got sections where you drop out of the poem midway to extemporise, or where you reincorporate a refrain from an earlier piece - techniques that are fairly commonplace in stand-up but almost unheard of in performance poetry. They'll doubtless spread like buckshot through the work of everybody else on the scene, but for now, do you think of your work as experimental? Or is the scene at large just not very innovative?

On the contrary it is precisely because the scene is so innovative that I do it. There are so many unique and compelling voices lifting from the cacophony (Dockers MC, Scroobius Pip vs Dan Le Sac, Aisle16 et al) that it is no longer enough to just be funny or just be able to write a half decent rhyme. So I suppose what you've described is my attempt at a 'signature'.

And I have another motivation, to wit: I am a total audience whore!! It can't just be me who has suffered that horrendous sinking feeling of being stuck in a monumentally long poem, and the crowd just aren't feeling it, and there is nothing to do but stoically cough the thing out 'til completion, and swallow your shame. But if your audience don't know when the poetry has started, then how can they possibly know when to stop listening? Ba dum chhh.

Rhymes Against Humanity

In contemporary page poetry, rhyme occupies an uncertain position in the technique hierarchy. If you're a performance poet, it's pretty much indispensible.

That's not to say that every poem you write need be in pat, metrically-tight couplets, but even if you're delivering a prosey monologue, if you want it to flow satisfyingly you'll need to be aware of internal rhymes and half-rhymes. I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy performance poetry a lot more than page poetry - there's a greater appreciation of rhyme in performance poetry, and, as a writer, you've got far more latitude when it comes to using both subtle rhymes and big, audacious, multisyllabic hip-hop style rhymes.

But when it comes to choosing rhymes, performance poets tread a narrow and oftentimes smudgy line. On the one hand, there's little point in trotting out the hackneyed usual suspects like night/light, love/above, heart/fart, but on the other, one man's witty, original feminine rhyme is another's 'what the fuck that is the shittiest piece of poetry ever'. Elaborate, unusual rhymes can be like farts - you enjoy your own, and wrinkle your nose at other people's.

I still feel rather pleased with some of the rhymes from one of my oldest poems, Cameo Hundesser: Style Consultant To The Wicked, particularly incognito/Hirohito, virtuoso/oh-so, and trifle/rifle/stifle, but it's precisely this sort of palpable smugness at one's own ingenuity that puts people off tricksy techniques in the first place. It's really hard to pull off a decent run of feminine rhymes or a big multisyllabic couplet without jettisoning most of your content in service of the form - your poem ends up as Macbeth's 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' Of course, if you're going for sound and fury, or trying to tell an idiotic tale, then dense rhyme patterns may be exactly what the physician prescribed. They can help you impress an audience with scattergun lyrical showboating, emphatically hammer home a broad emotion like anger, or make people laugh with goofily convoluted sentences.

Context is key. Take this example from John Cooper Clarke's Psycle Sluts:

on a bsa with two bald tires
you drove a million miles
you cut your hair with rusty pliers
and you suffer with the pillion piles

Admittedly, the metre looks a bit fudgey on the page (that's why it's a performance piece - it needs JCC as an intermediary) but, for my money, that triple rhyme of 'million miles' and 'pillion piles' is a classic. It combines an elaborate, original rhyme (where both phrases are alliterative) with a funny, specific image, and doesn't require any 'dead' lines to set it up or finish it off.

The great thing about using rhymes is that they often force you to discard your first and second choices for a next line, and present a totally different set of words for your perusal. Your brain is then left to work out how one of those words might logically fit into the story you're trying to tell - often the result is a progression of surprising, entertaining images that keep the audience on their toes.

However, if you're not going for humour, feminine rhymes can be perilous. This couplet, from John Clare's Song: 'She Tied Up Her Few Things', is borderline, for me:

'Twas Michaelmas Season;
They'd got corn and peas in

It's not just the ever-so-slightly forced feel of 'peas in' that makes this, for me, unintentionally funny - I think it's also the disconnect between the 'high' tone of 'twas Michaelmas' and the mundanity of 'corn and peas'. For some reason, it reminds me of Florence Page Jacques' poem There Once Was A Puffin, which has some lovely, intentionally funny feminine rhymes:

But this poor little Puffin,
He couldn't play nothin',
For he hadn't anybody
To play with at all.

So he sat on his island,
And he cried for awhile, and
He felt very lonely,
And he felt very small.

Ah bless.

Since we're on the subject of bad rhymes and tragic birds, I might as well crowbar in an extract from a poem by John Skelton called Philip Sparrow. The dexterous wordsmith Paul McJoyce first alerted me to this lament over a sparrow killed by a cat. It's written in a form known as Skeltonic Verse, which uses short, irregular lines and multiple rhymes. In many ways, Skelton's sixteenth century work prefigures contemporary hip-hop rhyme patterns, which - as Paul McJoyce pointed out - is rather appropriate for someone who hailed from Diss. However, before we get too carried away with hailing him as a visionary, it's worth noting that John Skelton is fucking awful. Here's an excerpt from Philip Sparrow, where the narrator shares fond memories of the pet bird:

Sometime he would gasp
When he saw a wasp;
A fly or a gnat,
He would fly at that;
And prettily he would pant
When he saw an ant.
Lord, how he would pry
After the butterfly!
Lord, how he would hop
After the gressop!
And when I said, ‘Phip, Phip!’
Then he would leap and skip,
And take me by the lip.
Alas, it will me slo
That Philip is gone me fro!

But for all his inadequacies as a tragedian, there's something to be said for John Skelton's line in scabrous barbs. Take his pithily-titled How the Doughty Duke of Albany like a Coward Knight ran away shamefully with an Hundred Thousand Tratling Scots and Fainthearted Frenchmen, beside the Water of Tweed. What he lacks in nuance, he makes up for in gusto:

We shall break thy bones
And hang you upon poles
And burn you all to coals,
With twit, Scot, twit, Scot, twit.
Walk, Scot, go beg a bit

Skelton's godawful rhymes matter less when his tone is one of crowing triumphalism - it's almost as if the very crapness of the rhyme serves to rub in his contempt, like back in 2001 when Derby County fans used to sing: 'We've got Fabrizio / You've got fuck all-io' to this tune.

But when it comes to truly miserable rhymes, one man takes the crown... then attempts to rhyme it with 'gone'.

Here's the opening couplet from Andrew Motion's bitingly satiritical 2005 piece, Regime Change:

Advancing down the road from Nineveh
Death paused a while and said 'Now listen here.

I mean, sweet creeping Jesus. The man's just life support for an anus. He's so criminally poor that criticising him feels akin to strapping on a pair of steel toecapped boots and kicking an aged, disease-ridden shirehorse to death - i.e. necessary and satisfying. People talk about abolishing the laureateship after his disasterous tenure, but I fear even abolishing the monarchy won't be enough to contain the infection. Let's nuke Great Britain from space - it's the only way to be sure.