Everyone's heard of the Liverpool Poets - Brian Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri making poetry new and exciting, but what ever happened to the once obvious poetry scene? Is there still a big appetite for a scouse verse or two - is poetry still alive in Liverpool?
To answer this question I spoke to Cath Nichols, Event Co-ordinator for the Dead Good Poets Society group about the different audiences that are out there and tips for first timers on the open mic! We all know a lot about Liverpool’s music scene, after the Merseybeat era it seems to have stayed in people’s knowledge, but is the poetry scene as lively as it used to be back in the Liverpool Poets days? Cath: “Yes, definitely, I think the scene is perhaps different in that there are more people doing more work, more women doing work and making a good reputation for themselves, more black writers, so there’s more diversity, and perhaps there’s less of a think about being big and famous, and suddenly creating something new which people associate with the 60s and so forth, but if you’re into language and you’re into stories and spoken word, hearing what people have to say then poetry’s still very exciting and still very interesting around Liverpool.” And what type of events are going on around Liverpool for people who might want to get involved? Cath: “There’s a lot of different nights, there’s a night that meets at The Egg and there’s a night called the Wirral Ode Show over the water. There’s a fairly new night called Fiction that used to be Fiction @ FACT, and they’ve left the FACT building now. That’s run by some twenty something young men who are making a bit of a wave for themselves, one of them is Ross Sutherland, he’s in something called a ‘Poetry Boy Band’ that’s done a bit of a national tour to a lot of applause from probably mostly young people as it’s that kind of satirical or humorous performance poetry based stuff. | "If someone is new to this I would suggest coming to the night first and seeing what it’s like, and then that gives you that bit more confidence..." | | Cath Nichols |
“There are several magazines such as Orbis which is published on the Wirral and Smoke magazine that’s published in the city…We run an open floor in the first Wednesday of the month, we’re starting a new open floor called JAWJAM. There’s lots of different atmospheres, so like (the FACT) night is quite a late night, it’s quite clubby, they have DJ’s in there, they use screen projections they’re quite in to that. Our nights can be quite loud and raucous but they’re not really driven by that late night vibe, it’s a different kind of thing, so you can still get on your bus and get home for half past ten!” Can anyone just get up on stage whether they’ve done poetry before or not? Cath: “Yes people are very welcome to do that, we start the night at about 8.30pm and suggest that people come down from about 8pm and speak to the compare and get their name on the list, because there are only 24 slots. We run 3 sets, there are like 8 people in each set, there’s 2 beer breaks or toilet breaks and we always fill them, so there are always at least 24 people wanting to read there’s usually a few more so sometimes people are disappointed! “If someone is new to this I would suggest coming to the night first and seeing what it’s like, and then that gives you that bit more confidence that the second time you come down you think ‘yeah I’m gonna read my stuff this time’. It is quite nerve wracking the first time you get up to do it, I think it puts a lot of pressure on somebody if they think ‘I haven’t been to this new night at all, I don’t know anybody there and I’m taking along my poetry that no body has ever heard me read before’ it’s quite a lot of stress!” And you’ve got the big names coming down on the Guest Nights, that tour around Europe! Cath: “Yeah we recently had Matthew Sweeny, he’s an Irish poet and he’s currently living and teaching in Berlin…He was great that was a combined gig for the Liverpool Irish Festival, we had two other Irish poets supporting him - it was a good night!” People who haven’t necessarily studied language, or haven’t been to university might have the misconception that it’s going to be intimidating, and everyone is going to be very posh and using all these long words - do you have to know everything about poetry to go along? Cath: “No, no you don’t (laughs) I’d actually say that the thing in poetry at the moment would be to avoid long words, or fancy words, or special poetry words - like ‘shard’ or ‘gossamer’ are no, no’s, you mustn’t have words like that in your poems at the moment! What is quite popular is quite robust down to earth language that sounds real, because event if you want to go way back, people like Shakespeare or Wordsworth, they weren’t deliberately writing to try and be fancy - that was more or less how people spoke, so if we’re writing now, we should be writing it in the way that people more or less speak. “The people that come to our nights have all kinds of different working experience, or not working experience, we have people who drive taxis and buses and work in hospitals, it’s across the board really what people might actually do or what level of education they’ve got, quite a few people left school at 14 or 16 depending on how old they are now.” What other events do you run? Cath: “We run a poetry reading group at Central Library and we’re starting one in January at Bebington Library. We have two facilitators and they choose four poems in advance of the group, two will be by male poets, two will be by female poets and they’ll be linked by a theme, we’ve had mothers and fathers, food…you find a theme because that helps people talk about the subject and how it’s been written about, and then the poems are different ways of exploring that subject. It’s a discussion based thing around published poets work.” There are also workshops aren’t there too? Cath: “Yeah, we have a strand of our work that’s called the Workshop Programme, we have guests across the year every month, three of those we’ll ask if they’ll stay over night and do a master class in the morning, so we have three master classes over the course of the year. We have four or five regular workshops that are facilitated by people that are members of the Dead Good Poets Society, and they might cover such things as how to get published in magazines, how to be a compare - once a year we train up new compares to compare the events that we run, how to get funding.” And you’ve got sign language at your new event?
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Cath: “At our new event (JAWJAM) we’re having an experiment with Common Ground who do signed dance, they were interested in trying out new stuff with a different audience and doing short slots, that’s the thing with short slots they’re only 5 minutes and people don’t usually dance for 5 minutes, and we were quite interested in seeing a different language that has a very physical side to it, because although we use a written language, part of when it’s live when you hear someone talking there is a lot of movement, a lot of facial movement and I think it might be quite interesting to see what things we learn from each other. We’ve booked a guy called Ken Butterfield who’s a really good sign interpreter who we’ve worked with before, so he going to be at these events which are going to be the 4th Wednesday of every month at the Head of Steam.” Liverpool’s new Black Writers Group Cath: “We’re starting a black writers group, which will start from January. It’s a group for writers of black origin, so Black, Asian, Chinese to meet together and discuss their writing in a safe place. It’s just one of the things we’ve noticed with the open floors, that there are very few people that aren’t white, and you might expect a few more given the demographic of Liverpool. “I think there is an issue when people have perhaps a very different experience from the majority of an audience, and it may be intimidating for that person to walk into a space to sort of bare their soul or whatever. There was work being done like that in the 80’s after the riots in Toxteth, there were Literary Development Officers appointed by the council who worked with the Asian, Afro-Caribbean and Chinese communities, but then the money for that ran out. Although there are writers around like Levi Tafari and and Dinesh Allirajah who are of some stature, they’ve kind of from that time and there needs to be something happening now I think, and there certainly are things like this in Manchester, so it’s trying to create something like that here.” Details To find out more about poetry events in Liverpool go to the Dead Good Poets Society website below.
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