Anthony Anaxagorou - Crafting Poetry, Provoking Thought

Full transcript: Anthony Anaxagorou on London Real

14:37 Anthony, welcome to London Real Thank you very much Thanks for having me Thanks for being here Due to the beauty of Twitter We hooked up like 48 hours ago And here you are So it’s a crazy world I’d love to talk more about some of your poems But I want to talk about what it’s like to be a poet Because if I tell people I had a poet on my show I think a lot of people might say What is the place of a poet in our modern day And is a poet and anachronism in today And I want to get your thoughts about that Because I’m guessing people ask you that But maybe not I’ve had comedians on here before And somebody once said that was sitting in that chair That comedians, what they do is they see through the matrix And they see what’s really going on And then they tell the rest of us And that’s what the great comedians do And I’m guessing that’s a little bit what you do As your profession And maybe I’m not sure I’ve had spoken word artists on here We talked earlier about Sully Brace I have a funny feeling that Spoken word seems a little trendy to me some days And sometimes I see some guys on YouTube And they’re performing But I don’t know why they’re performing Or it feels like they’re performing just to perform And when I saw what you did It felt like what you say and do Comes from a real need to express As opposed to some of the things I see But these are some of my observations I was wondering if you could tell me what a poet is And is there a place for a poet in modern day?

16:02 Yeah, I think poets have always been an integral part Of a kind of social fabric In a sense of they offer commentary And they have the ability to capture in quite an articulate sense The more problematic and polemical issues That surround the society at any given time If you were to backtrack the last five, six hundred years You could definitely pull out poets from every epoch That have managed to kind of summarize And dissect and tackle a lot of the issues That were prevalent within the society That they were kind of embraced in So I think writers, poets, thinkers, philosophers They’re all kind of entwined You know, it’s just a stylistic endeavour In the fact that you use art as the medium To capture and respond to a society at a given moment And that’s what a lot of the stuff that I try and do is And I think that if we were to speak plainly We’d be agreed that the society that we live in today Is intellectually malnourished I run a night called Outspoken in Camden And it happens once a month And we get about 150 people that turn up there regularly To hear poetry being performed and being read And I think this is because of the lapse of the void Within our kind of social make-up That it doesn’t offer an alternative The alternative being a place where we can speak In a more sophisticated, in a more unique, artistic, creative way About the things that make us who we are And that’s why people go there Because they want to see part of themselves

17:41 Reflected and represented within the art form And so poetry becomes a place where that can happen And in my kind of personal opinion It’s also the most progressive The most left-wing socialist art form out of all the arts There is no, kind of the mainstream poetry circuit Misogyny is very, very small Homophobia is very small Racism is, in fact, they’re not even, they don’t exist I don’t know any poets who I can say are overtly misogynist Or racist Or even classist Like it aims, it’s really digging in To try and find ways to tackle and debunk A lot of the thinking that encompasses and engulfs Mainstream popular culture Why is poetry like that? Why does it self-select that way? I think a lot of it comes down to empathy I think that poets, from a psychological perspective Are incredibly sensitive And the poets that I know The poets that I work with, friends of mine Very intelligent and kind of articulate figures But also there is a deep amount of empathy And the ability to feel and understand And develop a sense of compassion for another human being As a human being, not as a gay person Or as a black person Or as a Muslim person Or as a female Or as a disabled person As a human And to be able to put yourself in that situation And see the direct injustice That is free of monetary gain That is free of class, of privilege, of status And to be able to just say, this is wrong And to hold that Put it in a cage of art Of form and shape

19:14 Which is what we do And preserve it Through YouTube, through a page Through a book, a collection of poetry It becomes preserved That documentation will then not move And I think that’s what people are looking for Because there’s a lot of empathetic people And there’s a lot of very astute Very tuned in, intelligent people Who get frustrated with mainstream media With reporting, with the way, you know, the patriarchy The sexism, the racism, the misogyny All the different things And they just want somewhere They can go and say, yes, you get it as well And when you connect with a poem Which is a very spiritual thing, you know Like it’s a very heightened language That is being used to evoke And to project, that is what people think Without being too didactic, without being too rhetorical It’s just there, and it sits in this ethereal space And that’s what people connect with And it moves you spiritually I cry reading poetry in the same way I would listen into a song It’s the same kind of dynamic, the same emotion That is being conveyed and expressed And it moves you into a place of humanism, I guess I was just listening to your This Is Not A Poem Which is a pretty powerful six-minute piece That you have And I was listening to it on YouTube, I guess With some video images And I was wondering, why is that so powerful to me?

20:36 You know, if that was a piece of music Would the other sounds get in the way? Would a repetitive verse not make it the same If I was reading it in a short story form? Why is that poem so powerful? Why is it so powerful? You know, I mean, as the person that wrote it I kind of, I’m always going to be at a different position From the reader and the listener I’m always going to be somewhere else But for me, I think that Art’s job is to evoke As opposed to instruct It shouldn’t be instructive It should be something that just sits And like I said, you should be able to find yourself in that And I think when you subvert the idea of a poem And what a poem should be Who should be writing it The form it should take What constitutes a poem When you kind of tackle these things Turn them on their head And create this really ironic piece of writing That is actually very poetic But claiming not to be People can kind of see The disparity between the should and the shouldn’t What the elites have said And everyone has an interpretation Or an idea of what constitutes a poem In their head from school You know, when we study at school We are given a very distinct kind of poem And told this is what consecrates The idea of a poem And so my thing is that There shouldn’t be a particular Style of poetry It should be whatever it wants to be Although I do think that there is a difference Between the spoken word, the written word And performance poetry

22:08 I think those three are Again, three distinct art forms But all fall under the rubric Of poetry So, you know, this is not a poem piece I speak from a genuine place And all artists do I don’t think that anyone Yeah, sure You get careerists You get people that are trying to Working from the sense of ego Working from a sense of arrogance A lot of the time But I try and write when I feel It’s what has to be done at that given moment So I won’t write all the time Because, you know, some days you just You don’t feel like writing You feel like talking And having a conversation and learning And just being part of life As opposed to always trying to make a comment on it And listening to other people’s stories And their experiences And I think it builds your sense of character And your sense of person That then will impact and inform The writing that you make Some of what I was saying earlier about Certain spoken word artists And I don’t consider them all But a few of them After I had Sully on I had a bunch of people approach me And I listened to him And a couple of things hit me with them But first of all They were younger than you And second of all They felt like they were trying to maybe Impress me with their words Or really try to project their thoughts on me So I would walk away and say Wow, that was impressive But with you I feel like you are trying to get me To think about something And that you have a bit more wisdom And that you’re 31

23:33 And you’ve been around a little bit And so I find that I’m engaging more In what you say Is this a reaction you hear a lot? Yeah, I think it’s definitely Discourse, conversation When you’re talking about things That involve these kind of issues They have to be approached With a certain level of seriousness Because they involve people’s lives And me as an individual I benefit from certain privileges That society will afford me But there’s other people that don’t And I think that When you’re talking on behalf of Or trying to speak objectively about society That we kind of commonly share It’s important that you take a back seat And your ego And your levels of articulacy And no matter how much of a sesquipedalian You might be You have to let all that go And just speak Plainly But intelligently It’s an important thing If politicians are up there talking all day Using lofty language and vocabulary To dissect and analyse And interpret things Then we on the ground level From a grassroots level Are entitled to do it as well And words are there to be discovered And used So I have no issues about The extent of somebody’s vocabulary My thing like you Quite rightly say If somebody’s using it To kind of boost up Their own status and positioning That’s when it becomes problematic And as humans We’re ultra sensitive to that And we can feel that vibe Especially in a live atmosphere I think within seconds You can feel If someone’s trying to do this

25:07 Or impress you with this Or perform in an overt way So you really notice that What is your relationship like With the city of London Because you are a Londoner All of your work is influenced by this city You could probably argue You wouldn’t have this work Unless you grew up in this city It’s probably your greatest nightmare And your biggest inspiration at the same time So what has your relationship been like in London? London will always be a catalyst for art Simply because of its diversity And there’s so much here When you have a city where You have houses that don’t even qualify As being houses They’re toilets And they’re being sold for £400,000 Because the area that they’re in It makes you wonder I mean, you know I live in Shoreditch And I see the disparity The divide between the rich and the poor Old hackney, new hackney And you can’t help but think I remember growing up in Stone-Newington As a young boy And I remember seeing It was a completely different You know Ethnic composition To what it has become now So London will always give you things Regardless of whether you’re looking for it or not It will throw things at you This morning I left my house And I saw a guy shooting heroin In a phone box outside And it was 8 o’clock in the morning That’s what you wake up to Then you turn the car And you see a guy driving a £60,000 Porsche The BMW down the street It’s that kind of disparity And the juxtaposition, I guess Of living in such a divided

26:43 But also intimate city There’s 8, 9 million people here That are constantly on top of each other So you’re in each other’s face all day But there’s the conservatism That is attributed to England as a whole No one talks to each other You’re on the train And you’ve got your face in someone’s armpit But you won’t speak And that, for me, I’ve always found A very fascinating thing And I’ve inherited that I’ve become as conservative And as quiet And kind of reticent as everyone else On the underground On the street But you’re studying people all the time Because they’re in your face You’re surrounded with them And I guess if you look at poets like Dylan Thomas And Thomas Hardy And whatever else You’ll find that these guys Spoke a lot about nature That was their stimulus That’s what they were surrounded by Whereas when you’re a city guy A city boy like myself Always born and raised in the city People become the muse They become the objective behind everything So the poetry takes a different A different voice, I guess A more gritty, urban-like feel And London is changing at a rapid pace Like you live in Hackney I mean, you know The old street station has changed In the last 12 months Yeah I mean, it’s gone from You know, a heroin shooting place To now that the start-ups Are doing pop-up stores there I mean, you know This city is changing in front of our eyes In five or ten years You know, it will be like Manhattan now It will be an emerald island

28:08 Or you must be wealthy to live in the center It’s fascinating Fascinating, it’s scary as well Because you can’t help but think Where did the poor people go? And I was in Manhattan over Christmas And you can’t live there unless you’ve got 400,000 in the bank You can’t even get a coffee So I think in the next five to ten years London will definitely become overpriced And zones, between zones one to four Will be that It will be a financial playground For rich kids from the city And people that kind of live on the lower echelons Where would they go to And how would they make a living And how would they sustain themselves And it’s very worrying And I think that you will get the ring That you find in Bangkok Is known for that kind of The slums that circle a city And then as you go more central You get the richer And then on the outskirts You get all the poor folk that work within the city But it takes them an hour to get in And they live in Shantytown And that’s capitalism And that’s the nature of money And an unequal monetary system Which is what we have at the moment Which is all the occupied movements Socialists all over the place Are trying to tackle and reanalyze And redistribute the wealth But it’s a very complex and multifaceted issue You said that every artist needs a community In an interview that I saw you Where every artist needs a sense of community What did you mean by that And do you find that in London Is it constantly changing

29:45 Do you find that, say example With the publisher of your more recent book Is your community changing And your fan base changing I think all the time I gig a lot I do a lot of talks I teach So you’re constantly meeting people From all different walks of the social spectrum You’re always going to be getting And meeting and engaging with people You say a lot of my work Speaks of what it is to be a human being And the different and the complexities And the contradictions within that kind of edifice So that’s what I’m always drawn to People always have discussions with me About these kind of things And I learn a lot I learn from people and believe it Or not A lot of the time you just need to shut up And you need to listen And hear somebody’s story And within that there’s inspiration Within that there’s an idea There’s like a little Something that can germinate into a story Or a poem or something And that’s how everything begins Everything begins with a tiny little clip of something Be it a word that somebody said And that will just bloom within the mind Over a period of time Into a piece of art A full blown work So a community for me Is what I kind of spar with And in an indirect way Some people don’t know it But you are constantly trying to extract information from them In order to build on something else And when the artist can’t I think that’s when you refer And you revert back to suffering The personal suffering The personal torment that you live with

31:16 The dissatisfaction That constantly makes you want to keep making more art Because there is a very dark I don’t know A very distant place that the artist lives with And it’s in that place Where that’s your, I guess, your lab Your working place You go in there And you really have a voice that dominates that place And that’s where everything kind of projects outwardly From there Does your best art come from suffering? Absolutely, yeah Philip Larkin A friend of Philip Larkin once Wrote that happiness writes white And it’s very difficult to write When you’re in a happy place I don’t actually know what happiness is I think it’s a very broad subjective term That marketeers use to sell self-help books But I think that if we were to A better word for me would be joy Contentment These words are a lot more closer to actually That sense of elation That peace that we kind of fill within When I don’t have that It definitely is the antithesis So you go into that place And you pull things out And you wrestle Your art You have to have something to put against all the time And that’s what keeps you kind of motivated And you’re trying to assuage it That’s actually what it is You think if I write this poem And if I just tell this one story This thing inside will die Once and for all And you’re dead certain And so you commit yourself And you write And you’re honest And you become vulnerable And you’re insecure And you tell the truth And it’s done

32:49 And for half an hour You feel reborn And you have the shower You kind of re-look at it again You think, cool You go to sleep You wake up It’s back And so you look at the piece I don’t like this anymore I’ve got to do something else So it’s a constant chase Of trying to assuage that And it’s ineffable You don’t know what it is Where it comes from How it manifests And how it consecrates itself within your being It’s just there It’s not depression It’s more sadness Depression, you become immobilized I’m very active I constantly create I constantly work I teach all the different things I do It’s a sadness And it’s like lamenting And it just sits in the back of your spirit And it just taps you on the shoulder Every now and then and says Do something about this So you do And in the hope of being able to make peace With whatever it is that’s inside When you look back to that book 2009 Do you see a completely different guy?

33:48 Do you still perform those pieces Or is that a book that’s kind of closed And it’s been published? Yeah, it’s definitely closed I self-published it So it was at a time where I was redundant I had no money It was 6 months prior to that book being made I said I want to be a writer I want to be a poet I didn’t know what that meant You can’t go to the job centre and say Hi man, I want to be a poet If you want anything from me So it was basically cool I’ve got to read I know that much I’ve got to learn I’ve got to think And I was doing all these things But it just wasn’t fully established yet I didn’t actually say to myself This is what I want to do So Card Not Accepted is an exercise book In fact everything is an exercise book That you just sell You’re always going to be as good as your last thing And at the time that’s where I was And there are people The reason why I still sell it on my website Is because there’s people that are at an age That that is for them They’re at a level of understanding on a journey That that is where they’re at And they can relate to it So who am I to turn around For my own egotistical reasons And say I’m going to pull it Because I don’t like it Nothing to do with me You make it for people Leave it for the people And you just move on And you grow And people can document that journey If they want They can see Alright this is how people actually This is the transition You start here And then when I die Eventually you have

35:08 That’s where you finished And that would be my journey My diary That you’ve just kind of Put on display And all artists do that From musicians To painters To novelists It’s all there So Card Not Accepted Card Not Accepted I have a It was my entry point And looking back on it I can be very critical And think it’s very rudimentary It’s very kind of I don’t know Sophomore in that sense But then Like I say That was five, six years ago And I knew very little In comparison to what I know now And then same can apply for 20 years time So that’s the beauty of life I guess Is that kind of Non-linear projection that you take What issues are you Trending towards these days I know you cover a lot of things And right before we tape We were talking About some issues with women In the self-image they see But you’ve covered everything The war machine The prison system America All sorts of things Do you find lately You’re gravitating one way or the other?

36:14 I think a lot about feminism Sexism and racism Are the two things that dominate my thinking A lot And that’s how I kind of have to gauge it I went through quite a concentrated phase of my life Where I was thinking about economy and capitalism And things like this And obviously everything is interlinked Nothing lives in a vacuum Everything’s dependent on the other one to exist All the different isms But yeah, racism and sexism Are the two things that I’ve been thinking about the most Lately the last maybe two years It’s been sexism and the female experience I’ve become a lot more entombed From how I was five years ago To what it is to be a woman In the 21st century in the Western world With such focus on the Middle East all the time And the oppression that women face there As if we are the paragon of equality over here And it’s something that has kind of troubled My thinking, domestic violence The figures that I put out in the beginning of the poem Of This Is Not A Poem It was in 2012 48 people in Great Britain were killed by guns And 120 women killed by the hands of their beloved partners So when you say that stuff People come up to you often and say Is that actually true?

37:35 More women in the UK die from domestic violence Than people from gun crimes Absolutely And even the thing with this dapper laughs character And how normalized misogyny is One of the discussions I have with young men in schools Because it’s funny, we live in a time where If young women want to be spoken to about rape It’s don’t wear this, don’t provoke Don’t go down that at this time of night Whereas the conversation that says to the man Don’t rape, doesn’t actually exist No one ever has the conversation with the men And say, fellas, you can’t just do what you want to a woman You don’t own her, you have no right over her You can’t harass her, catcall, whatever it might be You can’t do that Those conversations are non-existent So when I go into classes And into schools And I speak to the young guys there Who are just becoming misogynists Through the music they listen to Through the images they see of women Via the media Again, they’re all owned by men And run by men It’s absolutely horrible And there is a hierarchy of permissible denigration In the sense of if you use the n-word in a class The teacher will say Get out, get out of the school Get out of the town You’re not welcome here If you are homophobic The teacher will say Go and see the headmistress Go and see the headmaster You’re in serious, serious trouble But if you use the word slag Whatever it might be The teacher will say Adrian, stop it That’s it It doesn’t go further

39:02 And I’ve seen it with my own eyes And teachers are just not strict enough And firm enough When it comes to sexism And the women The girls have just accepted The young girls just think This is just a word, isn’t it? It’s not just a word Women have been raped and persecuted Because of this word They’ve been killed in their thousands Because of these words In the same way as what The transatlantic slave trade Resulted in 60 million Africans Being killed because of that word They’re so closely interlinked Yet the discourse is completely separate And then you’ve got kind of the Intersectional feminism and the different elements of How a black woman will experience womanhood In comparison to a white woman And a lesbian to a Muslim And transgender And all these different kinds of sexual preferences In the way that they’re impacted And responded to by a heteropatriarchal system So that dominates my thinking You teach, what age group do you teach?

40:02 Predominantly, from year 8 Which is 12 Up to GCSE Which is about 15, 16 So it’s an age where they’ve just become Politicized, racialized, sexualized And class is not a thing Like a lot of the state schools I don’t teach in private schools I teach in state schools So class isn’t an issue at all Because no one has any money A lot of them do come from working class backgrounds And parents are of working class So money isn’t a thing Obviously working class aspirations Such as owning a car, big house Going on a holiday 15 times a year These are things that are constantly permeating their thinking And whenever you try and speak to them It’s always there And how do you address the feminism issue? How do you address the sexism issue? What is the best way in these days We’re almost being hit with so many different video images And all of this kind of new media How do you battle with that?

41:08 If I hear, for instance This is a kind of example A few weeks ago, one of the schools that I was in One of the guys called another girl Luce Just said, ah, you’re Luce, man You’re Luce And I heard it And I said, what does that mean? And he said to me, what do you mean? I said, what does it mean? What do you mean you’re Luce? She goes, you know, like, she’s Luce, innit?

41:33 And I said, no, no, I’m asking you this serious question What does it actually mean? And so he broke it down And I said to him, okay, so Would it be right in saying If you were to behave like this Luce-ness What was to happen to you if you were to be promiscuous And sleep with who you wanted to sleep And have complete control over your own body And the way that it functions And the pleasures that it receives How would you be received? Yeah, he’d be the man He’d be cool And it was just that I said, right, so why is it different Because she’s a woman And where did you get this idea from?

42:05 At what point Have you got a book that kind of that you read That gives you this That tells you it’s informative like this And when I asked him where he got the idea from He didn’t know And that was And when you kind of The idiosyncrasy of this stuff Like how completely illogical These prejudices are When you kind of go into them And they just feel stupid And you haven’t undermined them You’ve just openly said Let’s backtrack to the point when you were five You never had these thoughts Because your mother was a woman And your mother was the first person That you came out of Sustained you for nine months And held you The very same people who you are now saying Women are like this Women are like that And when you flip it in that kind of way Without being aggressive Without being belligerent Kids listen And they say you know what You’ve got a point Even with the Kim Kardashian thing today The kids will say yeah man She’s loose She’s a this She’s a that Maybe she’s a product of a condition Maybe she’s inherited that Maybe the problem is The people who you really should be having a go at Are the guys that own the cameras And the guys that own the magazines And the guys that create that Maybe she’s the end With dapper laughs Maybe Just maybe The people who we should be having a go at At a 1.2 million That subscribe to his Facebook book Facebook page No one has a go at them John Terry Yeah, John Terry’s a racist Is he the root cause of racism?

43:32 No, he’s inherited something That comes from A conservative government That comes from an education system You want to tackle these things Go to the top But it’s much easier to set a paper When you can isolate someone And say this is the problem Her Him The misogynist The promiscuous woman The nudist The exhibitionist They’re the problems No, they’re not That’s the end That’s the end of the line But it’s difficult To look at the broader context In most things And not people don’t have the capacity To do it either So You want to set a paper Take your clothes off No one wants to look at why What’s the state of the union Of racism now in London And how does that compare To America Or to your limited travels You’ve seen in America Yeah London’s very conservative The racism And this is just in London I know that if you go to other parts of the UK The racism is a lot more overt They let you know about it But whereas in London It’s conservative It’s nuanced It’s there And you see it in the glare It’s in the way someone looks at you It’s in the way that someone says Oh, did you write that poem?

44:38 Did you write that story? Yeah, yeah, I did You? Yeah, me The guy that looks like this With the beard And the skin And the hair And me I wrote the book Wow, that’s impressive And you know That’s the kind of racism It’s so subtle And they For the life of them Would never, ever say That that is racist But when you become attuned And you are sensitive to something You pick up on things they don’t And that’s the really, really interesting part It’s what’s accepted What is Someone thinks that if I was to use the n-word That is what constitutes racism They don’t regard it How it can live in any other context And anything else You’re being too sensitive now Just calm down Oh, you’re just trying to Exasperate a situation in order to be like I’m not I’m telling you that This is actually racist And when you break it down to people They’re embarrassed They’re ashamed I don’t think People know that racism is a horrible thing They know that it’s illogical And it’s associated and attributed to people Who are not as well educated Not as well cultured And not as well rounded Or haven’t got that critical faculty That can break down And go into the thinking Why do I think like this?

45:45 That’s a very fundamental question I mean if everybody actually asked themselves for a second Why do I actually think like this? I think half the world Would be a much better place You know Socrates The unexamined life is not worth living And it rings true Because the ability to think And to think critically Is I thought Everyone could do that I thought that faculty existed And they do But we get boxed in Via the media Via the suggestive thinking Into perceiving each other A certain way And when your point of reference is the Daily Mirror And the Sun newspaper Which are the two most consumed newspapers In the whole of the Britain It’s going to reflect on the people And the way they engage and regard each other We have this kind of shame culture And it’s as much in America As with the publications you said Where, like you said, they’ll be the overt piece Of racism, sexism, whatever Shame, shame, shame The person gets ostracized And then we all feel better And we’ve done our role But And this seems to be just a never-ending cycle now And it’s exacerbated by the social media And by things taken out of context Where are we going with this?

46:51 Or do you notice this? All the time And it sells papers But it’s also It’s the status quo It’s what Consecrates culture And thinking How do you affect the person’s thoughts If you control the media And you control their reference point They’re not reading an interdisciplinary analysis Of the history of racism and slavery They’re not interested in that They just want to see a very simplified article That is full of conjecture most of the time Projected outwardly Looked into and say Yeah, this is true I believe this It’s written in a way that appeals to me To my kind of person And I believe it Most of the people in these right-wing tabloid papers That try to comment on Islam Have never read the Quran How And the priests that comment on it Have never read it either So my thing is that How are you supposed to have a system That is That feels Correct in commenting on an entire culture A thousand year old culture Without actually having read the very thing That they’re trying to critique It makes You wouldn’t apply that to a book You wouldn’t get a critic I’m going to Dan Brown His latest book I’m going to review it I haven’t read it But I’m going to review it Just from the title And just from the blurb I’m going to write a few little bits and bobs on it And then people say Yeah, he’s a great, great review Fantastic review And it’s horrible And I’m not a religious person myself I kind of regard myself as agnostic But I do know that within all philosophical beliefs

48:23 There is definitely an element of peace And of unity And of humanism That, yep, is exasperated by media Is exasperated by fundamentalists And they take certain parts But that can be said for the KKK Yet they don’t ever get marketed They’re still functioning The EDL The BMP UKIP There, the way they incite violence And racial hatred Is definitely a criminal act There’s people on Twitter All day long Who incite racial hatred And it falls under a criminal act Yet they’re allowed to get away with it Yet if somebody of colour Or if somebody of a certain belief system Does the same thing The media will clamp down on it And they’ll spin it in a sensational way And say Haha, the terrorist Is saying Fight back It happened with Palestine It happens with All across the board Where you get something That doesn’t quite fit the status quo of a system You’ll get that And the sad part is I don’t even care for that What I care for is the fact people buy it That’s the upsetting thing People want to sell papers They’ve got a job to do If they can go to bed at night Knowing that they’ve just created That complete chaos And delusionment Then that’s their thing But for someone to read it And say Yeah, this is factual This is good stuff This is empirical evidence That says The Quran is definitely Something that should be burnt And left Then that’s more worrying Than those people How do you consume media?

49:50 Is that something that you’re very careful Like you said You don’t fault the people that print the stuff But I mean these days If you took the tube here Or transportation I mean that literally The free papers are everywhere And sometimes I conduct a test on myself As I go in And I just I make myself not look at it But you know They’re good at their jobs And so that front page You know The princess did what You know Kim did what Are you very careful what you consume What you watch What you read Or is it your job to read everything Because you need to comment on it I’ve been through this And I’ve wondered why I’m just not interested in the Metro newspaper I look at it And it’s like the same way If you meet a seven year old And you say Tim Do you want to discuss US foreign policy And a seven year old looks at you I’m not going to have this discussion just yet I’m going to go and have it with somebody else It’s that kind of relationship I see the Metro And I think I know what you’re doing I might as well read the B note And try and If I want to entertain myself I’ll read a comic I’ll read a graphic novel If I’m looking for entertainment Because most people that read that Just looking to pass the time From stop A to stop B They’re not actually concerned But like you know What we were saying is The subliminal messaging The things that are being ingrained Within the thinking Is completely perverse And that’s what needs to be That’s what’s damaging

51:07 So I flick through the front page Within two, three Like the big headline sensations And I just think You can’t be bothered I’ve been here for too long I’ll read The Guardian I’ll read The Independent And then the rest of it is stuff on Twitter And Facebook And The Daily Mirror will put something up And I’ll have a little flick through And it just reaffirms What I already believe So I won’t actually think Oh yeah The Daily Mirror have got a point I don’t think I’ve ever thought that Since I was probably about Fourteen Right And my dad said to me That The Daily Mirror Is quite a bad newspaper Maybe better off Getting something a little bit more sophisticated Someone said it’s like Working in a newsroom Is like working on Halloween every day They just want to scare you Scare you Scare you And once you see the pattern Then you start to pick up on everything And then everything Is a global catastrophe Absolutely And it’s most events That will never have anything to do to you Most likely including Ebola The Ukrainian war A lot of these things Which will never affect your life In a single way But yet they are brought into your life For crisis And maybe you want that A little bit of dopamine Yeah, yeah, yeah For sure Or not I think there is There is a disconnect Between the way that we consume news We’re obviously in one of the most privileged sectors Of the world So yeah Like the Ebola The Palestine War It feels like you’re reading a book Like you’re reading a fantasy novel

52:27 This stuff is never going to happen here And you can read it And you people get Ah, that’s really sad Yeah, oh, do you see But everything is very instant And then it goes Just like that It’s ephemeral It just lives for a moment And then by the time Stop B comes Put the paper down Right, I’ve got to send an email to him I’ve got to fax this person back I’ve got to meet him And that’s it Ebola’s gone The 200 girls that are missing have gone The 1,700 Palestinians that have been killed That’s gone You’re completely immersed In your reality now So That’s why it takes That’s why we go back to that sensitive issue That there are definitely things that I read That affect me Like they actually affect my health Like I can’t sleep Because it bothers me that much And this isn’t something that’s new When I was young I would watch someone get beaten up at school As you do Everyone sees a fight And that would stay with me for weeks Absolute weeks And I used to think You know, stay up at night Remembering having the flashback Of the knuckle on the face And the sound of the bone crunching These different things that It’s just a standard schoolboy fight But it bothered me And it bothered me in quite a profound way And I have quite a slow recovery rate to these things So they stayed with me for a long time And I think that’s why you end up turning to art Because it’s a way of, you know, it’s a catharsis You’re trying to expel something And I guess understand it

53:51 Temporarily Temporarily It doesn’t work It doesn’t But you keep going Because it’s almost like It’s a really rough day I’ll have a few drinks and just unwind And you know that Tomorrow you’re going to have another rough day But it’s just for that moment It’s such a great sensation And I think that’s what we live for It’s just that half an hour window Between the time that the sadness comes back And taps you on the shoulder again When are we getting a novel out of you? I’m not too sure I think novels require a certain level of discipline A certain level of vision And at the moment I do a lot of teaching In different schools And my diary is, you know, seven days a week I work And the short story collection took me a year to write And that was, a lot of the time It was, you know, seven to ten hour writing sessions a day And it was absolutely exhausting Completely not what I thought it was going to be I thought you’d just sit down and write a story You know, do a second draft and you’re done But the amount of kind of consideration And thought that went into every single element Of those stories In that kind of philosophical sense From character building To continuity To settings To objective To all these different And I’m not trained I haven’t been to any kind of institution Where they teach you how to write A technically mastered short story I was just, it was I guess self-taught if there is such a thing You know, just reading what other people have written

55:17 And working out, right, cool And it’s the same I did with poetry as well So just picking out the things that Really impress you And why do they impress you Why is that, why has she written it like that Why has he written it like this And just trying to have that I guess what you would have in a university That conversation with yourself So yeah, it was definitely a very taxing endeavour I heard it’s very isolating Completely The most lonely, solitary thing Which is nice because I like to live in my head And I think writers have to have an inwardness An aloofness to them That they create this inner world Where they’re able to sit and create And imagine scenarios And piece things together The most difficult thing is what happens next You can have an idea I’m going to have a story where the guy Walks down the road Pops into his car Starts the engine Full stop Cool What happens next Anything can happen A bus could hit him And that would change the whole So it’s the trajectory that the story takes That’s what is very impressive In novels that are like 900 pages long And the simmering takes place And the secondary story lines Absolutely And the multi-facetedness of the story How things are overlaid and lapped And characters impact each other And all these kind of things It’s such a…

56:36 Which is why novels take years to write You don’t knock them out in a few months So yeah, I mean I think at some point Maybe I’ll do another collection of poetry I’ll just have a break I’ve been putting stuff out in the world Since 2009 Every year it’s been You know A book A collection of poetry Some theatre A spoken word EP Short stories I want a bit of time To just let things crystallise in my head And like we say Just live a little bit Be part of this place Rather than constantly working things out in my head Right What about other mediums? Obviously you perform the poetry You write it You have your short stories Some of the pieces on YouTube You or other people have put to images It’s still images Most of it is still images And sometimes there’s a musical track on there Is that something that you see as a different form of artistic expression Do you see that changing?

57:32 Do you see you ever evolving to any video component? Yeah I’m quite an impulsive person By nature I have an idea I write the idea out I draft in quite a vigorous, intense way And then I want to get it out I want people to hear it And I need validation And it’s something that I don’t know if artists speak about it often But I make art for people I make art to be received And to connect and to resonate And all these different things Not all artists admit that Absolutely And that’s fine Maybe they genuinely don’t care what people think And what people say But the things that I don’t put out in public spaces I would say yeah For that, that’s completely written for me Whereas performance pieces Things that you write for an audience Things that you write to be performed Definitely do have a different stylistic element So I kind of figured How do I get YouTube is obviously like a massive platform For this kind of stuff And I realised that A lot of the people That when I first started putting out There was no images It was just me talking And I wasn’t getting that connection I wanted something more I wanted like You’ve got this language You’ve got this density But how do you evoke a little bit more How do you really get into people And I just thought A little piece of music To kind of compliment it If you haven’t got a person In front of you Performing with their hands Justiculating, pushing forward There’s no stage presence It’s just a screen

59:02 It has to have something underneath it To kind of Almost like a tie Just to push the poem along I thought of music And then I thought of the images I’m going to just add some Real abstract things as prompts To keep them engaged Because you’re watching something for five minutes And this is a bloke’s face in front of a camera Or someone actually doing something physical A recording of a poem Can be quite tiresome So I thought I’m just going to put these Quite abstract images on top Just as prompts For people that might not necessarily be used to Reading poetry And dealing with language That is kind of that heightened So That’s how it began And the response was amazing I was connecting I wasn’t Sacrificing or substituting The language In order so people could Make it more accessible I was keeping that language In a way that I wanted to For that particular poem But just having these prompts underneath Just people Guys I was working with as a security guard At the time Were reading it And they were listening to it And I was like Man I listened to it four or five times I really loved it I loved the way about it And they’d taken time with it If I hadn’t done it in that way Maybe they would just thought I got bored after a minute and a half Right so you probably got A hundred times engagement When you put in Yeah Music track and images Yeah and people have had a go at me And they’ve said Well I had a go But they’ve kind of said Like a little dig

1:00:23 And said oh yeah You just put some kind of Hollywood cinematic thing underneath it And just create all this emotional response But if you took away the images And the music The poetry’s actually crap Fair enough If that’s what people think That’s what people think I can’t dispute that But I’ve got the stuff written in books So it does exist on the page And predominantly I write for the page first And then work out a way in which this can be performed In quite an engaging way W.H. Auden did it Nobody said anything to him Charles Bukowski did it No one said anything to him The great artists know how to sell their art The extreme example is probably Andy Warhol Or maybe Damien Hirst Where they manufacture their art But the smart ones know how to do it And if you don’t embrace the best in social media etc Then you could be that guy You could be the artist that refuses to engage But in a way that you’re not doing your job And I’m a product of the time I’m not living in 1807 Where everyone just had a quill And then you go to a reading in some ivory tower somewhere Like this is now And we communicate via text We use WhatsApp We have Instagram We have YouTube And that’s where we get our information from So I’m just being true to the time period That I’m the technology that we have at our disposal I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with that But like I say Purists will turn around and say You’re manipulating the audience through these different techniques

1:01:50 That aren’t actually to do with your poetry Fine Right, guilty And the question is Would you ever go full then into a video production Where you create the video Because that really does take the That’s a completely different step That’s into a different form of art But it could also Well it’s a different piece of art I mean we’ve made two Poetry videos now And that’s with the production team And they’re like short films One is for the Masters Revenge And the other one was for a poem called For the Girl Who Asked What I Was Thinking Both with a very good friend of mine Esther Brax She’s fantastic visual artists And kind of She makes some really beautiful things And they are more abstract They are more kind of I guess artsy If you want to use that word But yeah they do again They just try and pitch the poem at a different angle And give it a different context Or a different kind of nuance And that’s all you’re doing Like I say it’s not about Force feeding somebody an idea Or force feeding somebody this rhetoric Or an opinion Although all art I think is a Way of subtly bullying someone Into your own way of thinking Just using very manipulative You know even if it is on a page Very emotive language And certain word combinations Worked up with each other Will definitely elicit some kind of A response from a reader Or a listener Same way as what when you listen to John Fruscianti from The Chilly Peppers When he plays his you know The scar tissue solo

1:03:18 Something happens When he listens to Jimi Hendrix Something happens You know there’s this You can’t Thought that Or you can’t try and take that away That’s what art is It’s a human connection A human experience Whereas there are some people That completely think it should be This kind of rigid stiff Non-calculative way of Giving somebody something But without all the Emotional stuff that comes with it And that’s fine That’s their interpretation Of what art should be I like to feel I like to connect I like to feel that somebody else Is also feeling What I’m feeling at the same time And the human experience Is not exclusive to A singular person We share collectively And we experience collectively So I think that That art in that sense If it’s going to be made for a collective Should be made with that collective And their sentiments in mind What would be the pinnacle for you When it would come to a performance piece Would it be like a poetry reading In front of 50,000 people Or would it be a full length film Based on your novel That you know that was done What would What do you think would be Something that you would strive to Or would be like That would be the pinnacle of my expression I like when A 14 year old kid comes up to me And says I live in a council estate I haven’t seen my dad For nine years The other day I picked up a poem By whoever I read it at night And it moved me It moved me into a place I’d never even know existed Within me

1:04:43 Those tiny What a lot of you might say Completely insignificant Like in From that grandiose perspective Of That’s what really really resonates with me And it’s that moment That connection that you feel With somebody that Could never find themselves Or see themselves in a poem Or in a piece of art Like you know A genuine piece of Be it a painting Be it a dance Be it a film Like just something within that That has moved them The reason why I’m I guess I’m more precious with poetry Is because it’s so elitist And it’s still marketed As a very elitist Kind of White middle class Male thing Whereas Thousands of kids that I’ve taught Over the last five years And they write to this day They might not grow up To be professional writers Or professional poets Or performers But they are definitely Going to have a relationship With language And an entitlement That says For the rest of your days You will document your life Through this prism Through this medium Of language and artistry And that is your thing That’s your personal relationship with it That moves me And inspires me More than anything else I like performing And I like big crowds And obviously People saying really nice things About your work But It’s just It’s difficult to explain When a young person comes up to you And just says like Thanks man Thanks for like Showing me this stuff Because I think you just saved my life Well not me personally But the poem Like you know What poetry can do What art can do

1:06:14 Rather than going and smashing someone’s face I’m going to write I’m going to write about this This and that In quite a beautiful And intelligent way Rather than just writing I’m actually going to go and smash someone’s face Full stop saying that That’s the poem You know Talk about your rage Talk about your anger Talk about your dissatisfaction About the way that you feel But be smart with it Swear if you want But be smart with it And When you can kind of get them into that sense And validate And ignite their stories It’s a beautiful thing And I definitely I know for a fact How it will impact And And benefit someone’s life Further down the line That begets the next question Why not Go the music route I’m sure you’ve been asked Why you’re not a hip hop artist Why not sell tracks We teach the youth That is one of the main ways That artists can survive in this world As you become A musician Or a hip hop artist I’m not a rapper I’m a writer I’m a poet I can’t rap I love music Music is my second Kind of biggest passion I love listening I’m a connoisseur of music I love listening to music Appreciating it in all its different dynamics And forms and intentions But As a musician No And I think that you have to You have to know You have to draw the line And just say, you know Like, yeah I like Tai Chi But that doesn’t mean that I can run a marathon I’m not a marathon runner I’m a martial artist It’s that Or I’m a footballer I’m not a basketball player It’s that kind of thing

1:07:43 You can play within the rubric Or within the condition of poetry And music definitely falls into that As there’s dance As there’s paintings And there’s photography Like, all these different things fall into the category of a poem Because essentially there is poetry in all of those things But I think it takes a certain level of arrogance and ego To feel that you’re able to do all of those things I can dance I can sing I can play the trumpet I can write books I can do It takes a certain amount Without actually appreciating the amount of time and effort That goes into developing that craft I would never go to a hip hop cipher And start rapping You know, any old thing that I just wrote on the bus there Whereas the other way around Sometimes you do get people that feel that they are entitled And I know artists that think I can do this I can do that What’s his name?

1:08:35 James Franco guy You know, one minute he’s a poet And then he’s an actor And then he’s a musician And then he’s a listener Without actually taking any real time to think The people that do this stuff devote their entire life To working something out That is very sophisticated and substantial Whereas a lot of people think their own ego looks good on my CV To say I’ve done it all I won’t do that I know my place in Shaw I know where I stand in all this And music doesn’t feel to play an instrument Doesn’t feel as natural, I think, as writing does for me Can I ask you about some of your pieces? Sure You’ve got one called The Master’s Revenge Which starts out There will be revenge But will be different from yours And most of your pieces are pretty powerful What is that about?

1:09:27 The Master’s Revenge was inspired by a conversation I had with a guy after a show one night I did some pieces And he said to me, man, I really like what you do But I have a problem with this kind of poetry With political poetry With polemical poetry I said, what is it? You just highlight all the problems You never offer a solution So I said to him, alright, cool I’m actually a poet, dude I’m not here to write theses and dissertations And opinionated essays on the ills of the world I’m just trying to capture a very poignant moment within our living And he went, oh yeah, I get that So I kind of went home And I thought about it for a long time I thought, maybe I should write something And then I thought of education, Eurocentricity The way that things are always focused around Europe How other peoples of the world get completely negated in the education system that we’re under So I thought I’m going to write a piece I’m going to write a piece that highlights the problems where we are And then offers the solution Kind of like, you want to empower yourself Go through knowledge Go through reading Go through history Go through philosophy And a fact of things that have happened Of how things are interlinked And how stuff impacts something else And that’s why that was my main motivation That’s what I’m trying to say in all that Is that equip yourself Arm yourself with this knowledge With this understanding of humanity And you don’t get angry

1:11:03 When you find peace with something You feel, I don’t need to punch you anymore I can just explain to you how your bigoted ways Are actually damaging the whole of us here I don’t need to get angry or even swear at you I’m just going to break it down How your stupidity is actually the problem In a very kind of calm and objective and composed way And that is a lot more conducive than swearing, shouting, ranting And just fighting fire with fire Have you ever had a moment where you’ve been confronted with someone That maybe hated you for a reason Or was it bigoted or racist or something And you’ve dropped a poem on them And you’ve seen their face change Or you’ve seen someone just… Yeah, I think people have preconceptions Especially like the literati, like big literature circles You go there And sometimes you get introduced to the spoken word I’m a poet, I don’t like the term spoken word And so everyone’s like, oh, here we go I know he’s going to do some really basic A, B, rhyme schemes And usually some political rhetoric that he’s going to be espousing And that’s going to be what constitutes his poem And then when you do say the poems, recite them, perform them, whatever I wasn’t expecting that from you And I’ve had that so many times How did someone like you write something like that Based on what you look like or your background My background, my name, my aesthetic, all these kind of things They have a very clear idea of what…

1:12:28 And this is usually people that are in their 50s, white people Quite well spoken, middle classes, these kind of things This is the poetry market though, right? Exactly, these are the people that consume poetry But it’s not, that’s the funny thing Is that working as a performance poet You see the amount of working class And people from ethnic backgrounds People who aren’t straight, who are gay Who are bisexual, who are transgender Who are disabled and doing poems And very kind of profound, sophisticated things And they’re being received, that’s the beauty of it No one’s saying, no, no, no, we can’t be having that They are received, without the misogyny and the racism And the sexism that you’ll get in comedy Which is almost like you can’t make a joke That doesn’t have one of those three things running through it So, yeah…

1:13:14 Why is that? Why is it that a stand-up comedy art form That requires no verse and no video But that’s expected in that art form And then something poetry, which is the same thing Someone reciting words in front of a group of people Has so much purity to it And has a lack of that I think the joke and the poem They share some similarities in the subtext Which is essentially what people are looking for In any form of performance You’re tuned into the subtext of what’s going on I think with comedy One thing that I’ve noticed I actually have a massive disdain for comedy now Because it’s completely loaded with Like we said, with racism, with misogyny With homophobia, pedophilia All these things just run through it And I came to a thought a few months back And I thought, I think people are cruel I think people are cruel And they want to go somewhere Where this cruelty is permissible Looking at somebody through this very Look at you, you poor bastard You marginalised, ostracised, underdog Look at you And they want someone to just say that for them Because out there, you can’t Because you get arrested, you get beaten up You can’t say that And the inside, they feel all these things So they go there And the comedian Yeah, a lot of the time The comedian is being ironic But the fact that they’re laughing Is something that I haven’t quite worked out Are they laughing through guilt?

1:14:42 Are they laughing through embarrassment? Are they laughing because it’s true? It’s true I feel like that And so That’s why I have It’s a very I get upset when I watch comedy Because it’s depressing It’s like No one can actually be original And you can definitely tell jokes That don’t involve harming or hurting Or that play to the detriment Of somebody who’s already at a social disadvantage I don’t need a comedian Because what comedy does Is it waters something that is very grave And very serious It waters it down So people no longer think This is a serious thing When Sacha Baron Cohen Started doing the whole In it Booyakushan What that was doing is It was consecrating an image That was actually mimicking an entire culture And I don’t care about his justifications About he was taking the piss out of certain people That speak like that But the fact is Is that people attributed that to Caribbean culture And white people from suburbia Who had no clue about Caribbean culture Used that as their reference point So every Jamaican person was Ali G So that again And he had Booyak Then he had the gay guy Picks underdogs all the time Why not If you really wanted to get out there with it If you look at pedophilia In the UK Or child abuse Predominantly the people that get involved in these things All seem to be white middle class men Why not You want to do a parody Parody that But they won’t Because that’s the establishment That’s the people that pay the way

1:16:12 But let’s go for the underdogs Because they’re not as powerful They’re not really going to do anything to us And everyone’s going to laugh at the underdog Everyone likes to laugh at the underdog And so that’s part of the problems that I have With the way that comedy is created And marketed, packaged And the formula that comedians follow It’s almost like those jokes are rewarded by the most laughs Which is the most money So it’s almost like it flows to the lowest point in the room And those are the ones that then become mainstream Absolutely And so you almost get the worst And the philosophical comedians that really make you think about something I guess those are more philosophers And those aren’t considered to be comedians But there’s still comedy But the comedy is a lot more I guess a lot more sophisticated And Stuart Lee’s marketed as the intellectuals’ comedian As opposed to somebody who’s just like Dapper Laughs Who’s just what the working class bloke from Essex Who just goes around and tries to make jokes about raping people But again, the people that laugh That’s what I think is a lot more warped and disturbing Yeah, sure, the comedian is playing a role And a lot of them are playing a character But the fact that people are laughing And nothing actually gets done about that laughter And that you’re finding this funny Is something that I haven’t quite understood You know, why we haven’t looked at that Rather than continue to point at comedians

1:17:32 Good, that’s why we need artists like you to remind us of these things Why don’t you like the term spoken word? Spoken word is a very broad term It’s oratory It usually involves rhetoric It usually involves something political Hitler was a spoken word artist Martin Luther King Malcolm X David Cameron Barack Obama Tony Blair They’re spoken word artists They’re using rhetoric And they’re using very sophisticated language devices To manipulate and push an agenda That spoken word Whereas that’s not poetry Performance poetry is very different And that is a lot more conducive and closer To what is actually being done as an art form It’s a poem that is being performed Using theatrics Using the voice Using the body Using, you know, gesticulation As a way to communicate What is being written on this page That’s a performance poem Spoken word Can mean a whole heap of different things Okay, is there more effort put in the poem?

1:18:27 Is there more Is it Is that a generalization? Yeah, yeah Is there more thought? Does it stand alone as a piece Whereas a performance spoken word piece Might not stand alone on paper? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that a lot of Spoken word pieces wouldn’t translate as well On paper They don’t even need to be on paper They’re instantaneous You get them straight away Why would you need to revisit something? Usually things that work on paper The subtext is quite weighted So you might have to revisit it and revisit it And also poets like to play with aesthetic And form and style So you have a haiku You know, like you have a sonnet Saying it and seeing it are two different experiences And sometimes the reader wants to see the text They’re not interested in the subtext They want to see the actual text So they’ll go and they want to read it Rather than listen to it or see it performed So there’s definitely Again, it’s a stylistic choice And I don’t like to undermine the spoken word profession Because it is a profession And it is a craft And there’s some people that execute it absolutely brilliantly But to conflate the two I think is a very inaccurate And dangerous thing to do Quite classist too If I can be so bold as to say that Because W.H. Auden memorized all his poems And performed them Yet nobody ever said Have you just spoken word artist?

1:19:44 Prokofsky Prokofsky Ginsburg All these guys definitely memorized poetry Performed it in front of three, four hundred people In the same way that we do But the term spoken word Was actually invented by journalists To help sell the slam poetry That was emerging from the states in like the late eighties Is something that is now kind of used To categorize a whole heap of different things That they’re different in stylistic form Okay, so it’s a nice word for low class poets Yeah, exactly And that’s why I don’t like it That’s why, yeah Because you’ll never get someone from Cambridge Say, no, he’s a poet Because he’s from X background But this guy from the estate And he uses kind of what can be looked at As a hip-hop kind of formula In the sense of the iambics And the way that things are put together He’s spoken word artist You have very good diction Where’d you get it from?

1:20:35 I don’t know I think reading books plays a big part Anyone that tells you that their vocabulary Hasn’t been enhanced from the reading books Is completely talking out of their backside But it’s the writing as well Because writing makes you I think about language a lot I think, I definitely do And I think that you get a lot of Very kind of verbose people That won’t admit that they spend their entire day Thinking of words And reminding themselves of the definition of words How I can use it in different and interesting ways How I can manipulate the grammatical category of something So it can fit around something else And you’re in the word business It’s what you do You should be thinking about A musician is thinking about Chord progressions About scales About sounds About phonics That’s their job When you’re a writer You have to involve yourself with language And the way it can be used to communicate And express Right It’s your business at the end of the day That’s the business The word business But you’re very good at it And I host this show But I still struggle to have the right word I must say writing helps me And probably reading would help me more A couple more of your pieces I just want to get your thoughts on This is not a poem Which continues I am not a poet What is that piece about?

1:21:51 You know, like we said at the beginning It’s kind of like a declaration It’s me trying to subvert the idea of a poem To play on what it should entail What it shouldn’t entail The themes I had somebody say to me once Is a professor At a university About two, three years ago Said that my poetry is very tangential And even on the page as well You go off in tangents all the time And a good poem should stick to one form Should stick to one kind of theme And follow it through Be it through metaphor Be it through, you know However you want to play it But it should stick to that And it really bugged me Because I thought I’ve read so many poems That are definitely tangential And the references that they use One minute you’re talking about a forest And the way a forest can be used The next minute you’re bringing in an island Or the name of a country Like you’re definitely using images And metaphors that are completely polarised In that sense So I didn’t agree with it And that’s always stuck with me Which is why I deliberately like doing tangential poetry And what could be regarded as interdisciplinary You know, like this is not a poem Masters revenge, if I told you They’re all poems that deal with vast extensive subjects But they’re all journeys And I do that very deliberately Because I don’t agree with that kind So we can thank that guy for your poem Yeah, because it just made me realise I don’t agree with all my work But I’m going to do it

1:23:17 I’m going to make it as tangential as possible It’s interesting to see the feedback, Luke, you have Because if I was to look outside at your work You might think that that’s done in a vacuum But it’s interesting to hear that it’s not And I guess that comes back to your community Your comment that an artist needs a community Wanting for other pieces, This Is Us Which I don’t know if you describe that as tangential But you go from one word to the next word To a completely unexpected next word I don’t know how many words are in that poem How did that happen and tell me about that piece I wrote that in Thailand in 2010 I think it was, 2010, yeah And it was just the idea And I mean it’s quite a common word association exercise That you use in workshops at the time I didn’t know that I had never taught a workshop in 2010 So it was something that I just thought I want to link like words can trigger something off You know, I like the idea of triggering I’ve just shoot The mind darts off into these random little corners A bit like a firework You know, like everything explodes at the same time So I wanted to create a piece like that But it explores, it journeys again But it journeys through very clear themes From the philosophical to the more kind of sentimental To the history, to the monetary, to the economy To the religion Like it deals with all these big themes That are common throughout our experience And going to places where I thought

1:24:43 The average mind would not go there The average mind would not link Life is now Now is everything Everything is but And then just keep going off into these And funnily enough the response that I got I don’t perform it anymore Because I’ve got newer things that I want to try out But at the beginning it was that It was like the way you linked all these things together Like it was I just couldn’t see the next one coming And that’s what I wanted to do So I was happy That’s what I was trying to do And just constantly keep people engaged Any kind of performance art involves A level of mental concentration You’re asking the audience to stay with you And to indulge you for 15, 20 minutes It’s a massive ask So you want to try and make that as easy as possible So to do that you’ve got to make poetry that is engaging And art that can sustain them and keep them captivated Because people come into poetry shows at 8, 9 o’clock at night They’re tired, they’ve had a long day They might have had 2, 3 drinks They’re completely relaxed They don’t have the discipline and the focus they would have had at 9 o’clock that morning So you have to take all that into account when making this stuff Can you tell me about your relationship with Akala Kingsley I didn’t know that was what his friends called him And what you’ve learned from him I think he originally read one of your poems at a moment Yeah, on News Night Four years, five years ago Five years ago, yeah

1:26:10 I mean I knew Kingsley before I was doing poetry So he went to school with a very good friend of mine And so we were kind of in that social circle I think in 2007, 2008 But we became good friends We had a lot of common interests And he’s been the only guy And I don’t see him as much anymore Last year and a half, two years I work in the demands of both the things that we do We don’t get to spend as much time But for about two years, every night, me and him would sit up At 4, 5, sometimes 6 o’clock in the morning Just politicking, just talking I can imagine the conversations you two guys would have And it was literally indefatigable People on the sofa like that And it was just me and him We were just left And we would just keep going And it wasn’t an egotistical thing There was no one else there It was just me and him But it was like I think we were both learning from each other in that sense I learned a lot about the way that things were And then in return, it would trigger things off in my head That he hadn’t thought about So we would kind of just vibe off each other And we were sparse We used to go book shopping together We’d go into black gold books We’d go to Wartstones And we’d spend 50, 60 quid on books And read them at the same time And then, hey, man, you finish it Yeah, that chapter, that section And we’d discuss So we kind of went for, I guess, an education system That we both created together He had a very strong knowledge of African history

1:27:40 And I had an interest, a massive interest That he was able to kind of appease So he was recommending me books And I was like, what? And I was reading them I mean, he recommends every one of them But I don’t know how many people actually go off and read them Whereas for me, it was a serious thing I had a big interest And someone was actually saying, hey, read it, man The stuff’s there And I was throwing poetry his way He hadn’t read as much poetry I was more learned in poetry than I was And so it was that kind of really beautiful And I look back on it now And it was a very beautiful relationship That I learned a lot from And I think he did as well So, and then we did the tour He invited me to come over And that was frightening Because, you know, I hadn’t performed For about seven years, since 18 I hadn’t done anything And his peace people basically said, Do you want to come and support?

1:28:31 I was like, are you sure? Like, this is a hip-hop audience And I don’t rap Like, there’s nothing rhymes with what I do Like, are you sure? Yeah, yeah, it’ll be fine It’ll be fine And it was a three-week tour The first two shows were horrendous Like, I was petrified I couldn’t look at the audience I was shaking I was soft I was complete I was a wreck And I went home And this is before he goes on To perform his hip-hop tracks Yeah, yeah You go on to shoot For half an hour For half an hour Was there a warm-up band before that?

1:29:00 No, no, it was just me You’re the warm-up Yeah, I was the warm-up Yeah, yeah It was definitely like the trepidation That was kind of created In those weeks But it was a beautiful time for me I did the first two shows They went terribly wrong And LaVar, which is LaVar Bullard Which is his sound guy Said to me, after the second show What do you like doing? I don’t know, man I like drinking tea Yeah, yeah, you like green tea, isn’t it? Yeah, I love green tea Cool When you go We’re doing Glasgow tomorrow Go on there with the green tea Dude, you want me to go on stage In front of 100 people With a cup of green tea Yeah Just do it Try it See what happens Couldn’t be any worse, right?

1:29:43 Couldn’t be any worse Nothing to lose These guys have been doing it With them what I have So I’m going to listen So took the green tea up And psychologically, it was ridiculous At the transformation I was cracking jokes They were laughing Like they were absolutely laughing I was reading the poems I was getting standing evasions The rapturous applause It was just because I had the cup of green tea I had a mug And I was doing it Cheers I let everyone know that I had the green tea That made me feel even more comfortable And it is about ownership Performance is definitely about owning the space And you hear people say that all the time But what that actually means Is that you need to feel that this is yours And my way of breaking into that Was by taking something that was my little sanctum It was my little ritualistic thing That I completely loved and immersed myself in And all the history of tea And where it came from And the different kinds And the brewing techniques And whatever else And just having it there really made me feel at home And from that point onwards Every performance was absolutely fantastic And it was a great tour I gained confidence I gained I learned a lot about performing And engaging people And building stage presence How do you turn on How do you turn on in front of 150 people Who are expecting you to entertain them It’s a big demand How do you turn on?

1:31:04 I don’t know I think you just go there And you just think You’re my friends I’m you Let’s have a conversation Although I’m going to be most of the talking Let’s have a conversation And that psychological dynamic of I like you I already like you And I hope you like me as well Like that for me I come from quite a warm, genuine place When I meet an audience And it just stays It molds itself in your thinking And all audiences are lovely They’re my friends How big they are Or how even standoffish they might be And you get some very conservative audiences And the writing isn’t exactly Kind of capital FM friendly It’s not exactly touchy for you Yeah, exactly It’s warm and cuddly Yeah, yeah Well, some of it is But the things that we’ve spoken about tonight Are a lot more towards the hard-hitting Political kind of commentary So And I think audiences pick up on you They pick up on your vibe On your personality And they decide there and then if they like you or not So that tour Performance, that’s where I began On that three-week tour with Kingsley and his team And I learned how to Help an audience And then after that people were booking me To do more and more stuff outside As a poet On the poetry scene And then it escalated Start featuring and headlining shows And it becomes your job So he kind of kicked your curve Yeah, yeah, yeah He gave me a big helping hand And I’ll always be indebted to him for that And a whole heap of other people as well

1:32:43 Nothing happens in isolation A career A confidence A personality A maid And Confidence is given to you By people You know, there’s a poet, Joelle Taylor Who She’s I’m a huge fan A great friend of mine But I’m also a huge fan of her work And her admiration and her determination In schools And with young people Irish travellers To people that are gay Or whatever it might be Transgender This, this, and that She works with absolutely everyone As a poet As an educator And for me Those kind of people are heroes They are the genuine heroes Because there’s no accolades There’s no awards There’s no big lights And publications That are going to do covers on these They are on the ground Every single day Going into places Nobody else wants to go Dealing with some really difficult kids You know, I work in a PRU And it’s very tough Teachers that are in there I work an hour and a half A week And I’m drained Those teachers are in there Five days a week And silent heroes, you know What’s the advice you give to people That want to perform?

1:33:53 Owning the space, that’s good advice Owning the space But there’s a lot of young men And hopefully women that are listening to this That are thinking I want to at least try to perform some poetry You know I mean, yeah It starts off The two great fears that humans have Is performing And being in front of an audience And dying Those are two massive fears That we share collectively I’ve seen the most confident The most wittiest, intelligent men and women Be put in front of an audience Even if it’s friends I’d make a toast I don’t know And they get scared You can see they start And then they get up And their face is all stiff Because it’s a natural fear that we have Being exposed, I guess, is where it comes from It’s the exposure We don’t like to be Felt like everyone is watching us So I would say keep at it I would say keep at it But there’s a very thin line Between ownership Owning a stage Being at one with an audience And arrogance Right Or trying to dominate Trying to dominate, yeah And I think that that will completely Be counterproductive And you will The audience will just be like Get off the stage, man Right And I’m guessing with Poet with Not spoken word I won’t call that Poetry If you’re not congruent Absolutely congruent With who you are They sense it And if they sense incongruency They turn off Absolutely I mean it’s the same You know, we We go out for a drink Guy comes in Sits down with us And he’s an asshole We’ll just be like I don’t really want to stay in

1:35:18 You know, what You’re gonna go anytime soon And it’s that kind of thing And the audience will always Be as comfortable As what the performer is You know, if the performer’s Really nervous The audience That is reciprocated And the audience feels nervous too So, yeah, it is really about creating a condition A comfortable place where You’re having a conversation Regardless of if you’re giving an intellectual talk If you’re giving a presentation A poem You’re performing a song It’s about Seeing a songwriter is a very hermetical They’re very inward They have this aversion to performance And they say very little in the preamble Whereas poets The great poets that I know Are able to They almost have like The charisma And the guts of a comedian And the wit of a comedian But the sensitivity And the delicacy And the touch of a poet And those two things combined Are fantastic attributes Because the audience feels that they are Actually having an experience Where you’re not Bombing them down with all this Really heavy Kind of, you know Dark, lamenting stuff You’re giving them a bit of both You’re showing them I can laugh I’ll laugh at myself if I have to And then we can get into the heavy stuff And that’s what The balance is what’s needed But that takes years I think years to be able to master that And to feel comfortable in front of an audience That’s essentially what it is Yeah, I’d like to see that sometime I ask everyone who comes here A few questions at the end

1:36:45 I’m going to ask you If you could pick up your phone And make a phone call To the 20-year-old Anthony And give that young man a bit of advice What would you tell him? Stay in the library Stay in the library Were you not in the library? I did I liked it But I didn’t think it was the place I should be I liked the library I liked books I liked what the things that books did to you And the way that they kind of helped And the conversation that you could have after reading a book And I used to go in there But I just felt, nah, it’s not cool I need to be out there with my friends And smoking this and doing that And whatever So it never felt I never told anyone It was something I did very privately Just to go to the library And it sounds really weird Everyone’s got a secret My energy I used to go to the library And I think where I came from And the background that I used to have It’s something that isn’t promoted Amongst working class And even Cypriot Young Cypriot kids It’s not something that we talk about a lot In fact I hardly know any Cypriot artists Never mind poets Artists in general From London I know very few So yeah, I would definitely say stay in the library That’s good advice Yeah What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

1:38:04 You can That’s it Somebody just I remember him I was 16, 17 years old And I sat It was with a Sufi poet A gentleman He was I forgot his name I met him once So I was about 17 And I sent him my poetry And he said He wrote me back It wasn’t an email I don’t know what we had then He must have been a phone call to my mum He asked to see me So I went and met him And he was much older And he just said I like, you know, I like your writing But condense it And I said, all right, cool, cool But I can’t I can’t do this And I don’t know if I can do that And then he just stopped And he goes to me And to me You can And the way that he said it It surpassed what we were actually talking about It was For me it was the go ahead And get life It was that It was you can And that I never forgot I never forgot that In all my years The way that he just Looked beyond me And said Forget the writing Stop this whole I can’t And it sounds really kind of Cliched And superficial But It definitely had a profound effect And people have said that to me before And I’ve been like You’re all right, mate That’s the motivational Ted talk Over there You can go and do it Whereas I’m not really buying it But I think Within that moment When you’re that vulnerable And you’re that in need Of hearing that validation From somebody who you admire Who you look up to And who’s a lot more established And experienced And they used to say You can Fantastic piece of advice Because then Anything’s possible

1:39:41 Yeah When’s your Ted talk coming? I’ve done a Ted talk You did? Yeah, I did a Ted talk On the importance of poetry I couldn’t find it In education Yeah, it’s this TEDx It’s on my website Are you happy with it? Yeah, it was cool It was good I think it’s very niche I don’t think you’re going to get 80,000 views on it Because not everyone really cares For poetry and education Unless you’re a poet or a teacher So, I mean, it’s good A lot of teachers watch it And they use it in schools To how you can teach But the importance of poetry And the importance of art And of communication And articulacy In general, the creative mind These are things that We all have But for some reason We’re scared of That we get taught To be afraid of these It’s a very sophisticated part Of our consciousness Of our human mind But, you know, without it Nothing would be here These cameras The lights The building The imagination Has created everything that we see And that kind of, you know, Interlinks with intelligence And the different forms of intelligence And the way intelligence is measured And kind of gauged These are all The imagination The sophisticated human mind The last bit of my advice Questions are What is the advice you give to the 20-year-old That’s listening to us now From somewhere around the world That, you know, maybe lives in a small village And doesn’t even know where to begin As far as how to create Or how to perform Or what they should do Or if they should do this

1:41:10 I’m sure you get young people asking All the time what to do What do you tell them? Just go ahead and do it Like, you know, We lose so much of ourselves to fear And without wanting to go down that kind of, you know, Motivational speaker road It’s true We lose a lot to fear We lose a lot to self-doubt And there’s a lot of beautiful things that are murdered Because of We don’t believe in ourselves And sometimes you just need to say I’m only here for a very short amount of time Even if it is just feeling what it’s like To do one thing that I really, really love And just to think about that sensation That feeling of having it just sit with me And doing it Some people say, I just want to ride a lawnmower Around my back garden Fifteen times If that’s your thing Go ahead and do it If it doesn’t hurt somebody else If it doesn’t impact someone’s life in a detrimental way I don’t understand why we hold back But we do things every day That we clearly don’t like You know, we work for people we don’t like We live in areas we don’t like Everything is just living in this kind of This bubble of misery And that’s why there’s so much depression Alcoholism Drug abuse All these things We just want to escape the self And like we come back Poets and artists are definitely troubled people But I think that that sensation That feeling That happens within that very short time frame Be it at the end of a show Be it at the full stop of a poem That’s what you’re chasing

1:42:41 And some people have never felt that That’s what’s sad Just that moment of clarity Or that moment of grace Absolutely Yeah, yeah Everything just feels like a sunset Everything feels like that inside And you’re just left to kick back And I know that in half an hour this is going to go But it’s cool Like I know that a holiday is going to end But within that moment You enjoy it You enjoy the sun Right What’s next for you in the next calendar year? Five years What are you going to be doing in ten years? I don’t know You’re going to take a break from creating I mean you look at your website There’s so many books I mean you create a lot of work Yeah, I’ve written a lot I think next year I am going to have a break I think it’s very exhausting putting stuff out all the time And the demand and the thought that goes into it They’re big things They don’t just happen overnight So I think I’m just going to take a year out Maybe you’re always working on something No one’s ever not working Right now in my mind After this conversation when I walk back home I’m going to be thinking about stuff And you’re making notes constantly But when people say, how did it take you to write a certain piece?

1:43:48 You say your entire life Because everything led up to that one writing moment The writing moment is not just you sitting down to write It’s everything that happened before that That inspired and influenced that writing So you’re always working on stuff all the time I just think maybe we want guys to put in a product out Or put in a book or a collection I’ll give it a rest for next year And you’re working on a play right now Will there be more performance pieces? Yeah, yeah, I mean I’ll be doing performances But I’m still going to be teaching I’m working on a little play for the Bush Theatre Theatre is a completely new space for me Playwriting, all that kind of stuff So I’m kind of taking it very slowly So you wrote this play Yeah, I wrote the play We’re going to do a little scratch on the weekend As part of their radar festival That explores kind of new writing And commissions like emerging artists To do pieces about particular things So this one’s about the Bush market And the gentrification about development All these kinds of things So it’s making a comment on that But like I say, it’s something I’m taking very, very slowly Because it’s the craft that I’m very respectful towards And I know that you can’t just dive in and say Yeah, I’ve got this It’s one of them ones Before we leave, I encourage everyone to go online I guess YouTube is probably the best way to experience your spoken word But for people that are going to be lazy and not do that

1:45:11 Is there anything that you feel like you might be able to drop on us right now? I mean, I could do I might need to get another little bit of water But I could definitely I can arrange that I could definitely I could do this as not a poem That would be it As you know what, the water’s fine You sure? Yeah, that was fine I’m going to just move back a little bit And I’ll do a recital So this is the poem This is not a poem This is not a poem And I’m not a poet When I’m unable to find a better way Of saying in 2012, 48 people in Great Britain were killed by guns And 120 women killed by the hands of their beloved partners I am not a poet But I can’t find a more beautiful way to say That no nation in the world Imprisons as many members of its population as America does The more black men in the US are incarcerated today Than what they were during the peak of South Africa’s apartheid No, I am not a poet When I can’t find clever words to illustrate the fact that before 2008 Nelson Mandela had been on America’s list of most dangerous terrorists for over 60 years That Cameron is a liar That Cameron was a key member of the Federation of Conservative Students in 89 And not hoped to hang Mandela Forgive me because today I am not a poet And this is not a poem When eloquent words fail me And I can’t capture the struggle of the poor Through the metaphysics of language That by the time Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990 The annual incomes of the richest 0.01% of British society

1:46:39 Had climbed to 70 times the national mean And I don’t know how I feel about the fact that key policy makers And leading civil servants have never had a job outside of their politics The same men who set the minimum wage With only 4% ever having worked in manual trades Of which 68% went to private schools That is why this is not a poem And I am not a poet Because everything I’ve ever written suffers the weight of its own futility When another mother comes to a workshop with a fresh black eye When there’s another empty seat in the place that James sat in last week And when asked the group where he is Their young eyes open wet As if his coffin in that moment was being lowered into them But you see I can understand all this more When they cut funding to schemes That aimed at inspiring people Previously inspired by crime And the insufferable dross of mainstream culture Private prison systems and prisons for profit When young women are given more options Than just be someone’s girl Be someone’s mother Be someone’s silence But you see I’ve done it again I’ve crossed themes I’ve not followed traditional poetic form And so I’m a terrible poet Because how do I speak words in prison Then tell a young black person That they were once kings and queens of land Whose names fall dead on their tongue How do I return their history?

1:47:54 How do I mention the Marie excavation Chicana diop And the skin cell sampling of 300 mummies How do I show them pictures of skyscrapers Before skyscrapers even existed? How do I do all this And then Have them ask what part of the world I am from Why I don’t write poetry about 1974 Elga and Kissinger Until I tell them That I am not a poet And nothing I can write Will help dismantle this idea of race That we’ve become so attached to Nothing I can write Will include the importance of mitochondrial DNA And the 99.99% of us That is identical That a BMP member Most probably has more Asian and Arab in them Than the mosque that they conspire to blow up That immigration isn’t a choice That people don’t come to the UK for great weather Hospitality and quality of life How do I explain all this And still retain artistic merit I spent days looking for a metaphor To put the Palestinian Nakba in Until I found a home that once looked beautiful and prim And then I opened the door And saw its contents ransacked Its family massacred And its garden on fire From that day I abandoned any hope of metaphor And accepted that I could not write poetry about this That everything I tried to imagine Had already slit its own stomach Like the afternoon I spent with a woman who had been raped And asked her to capture it in verse Asked her to use simile and alliteration Until she looked at me and said I don’t know what those things mean But I can tell you in a few simple words

1:49:17 What it feels like to live with the satan Of your own heart, poetry Isn’t for me It’s for people who can use words Like odoriferous while putting red wine To the lips of their white skin And applaud the technical endeavour of a poem Its wit, its ingenuity Its meter on form Not its helping Not the ambulance siren that screeches From the height of its title That is why this is not a poem And I am not a poet Because I cried reading Douglas Dunn Aaron Kalaka Borges and Neruda I cried when I went looking for female poets And found few I cried when asked how many black poets Penguin Had ever published And was told too When my English teacher told me that language Wasn’t my strength That my anger crushed my intelligence That I should think about going and learning A trade And I cried then too When I spoke to a group of young men About what it was to be a man How we inherit this cancerous culture How we inherit misogyny Objectification And the glory of violence While silently suppressing the sensual These Were all the hardest things to write about To talk about and to live with That is why I keep saying That this is not a poem And I am not a poet Because all of the above digress And ignore the rules set by the establishment But all that doesn’t matter Because it’s done now You’ve come this far in listening Endings are always the hardest things to write Because the author knows that’s the last impression The reader will be left with And so I chose the following wisely