May
21

Sarah Kay & Phil Kaye: Review of Slam Performance

Sarah Kay & Phil Kaye

I’d never heard of Phil Kaye, but I did discover Sarah Kay some weeks before receiving word that she was in Australia touring PROJECT VOICE. Having been taken by the way she translates stories into spoken word and small moments into significance, I instantly booked tickets for myself and a friend. Dumbo Feather (a magazine about productive people) kindly hosted Sarah and Phil, who brought their semi-collaborative show Project Voice to the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. The project was founded in 2004 and is an acronym for “Vocal Outreach into Creative Expression” which supports teens, encourages spoken word as a way of self-expression which, they believe is the key in understanding the world and the self. Sarah and Phil employ theatre, storytelling, slam poetry, song and humour in their performances.

I had happened upon Sarah’s work BROTHER and ASTRONAUT but was particularly enamoured by FOREST FIRES. She performed ‘Brother’ but adjusted the story to how old her brother is, current time. I love how she carefully weaves imagery with the same accuracy as you’d hold a conversation. So, it felt like such a blessing to receive that email that one of my best made discoveries was actually going to do a show in my city. My poetry blood-beat hopscotched against skin. Read more…

May
17

Poetry Reading: Notes on the Mosquito

The Bookworm–half library, half cafe, half cultural hub and all better at maths than I am–is the heart of literary happenings in Beijing. It’s home to the Bookworm International Literary Festival, regular booktalks and film events, and my friend Hannah’s Story Time sessions for children. (One day I will show up in pigtails and scare the crap out of her.) But last Thursday, it was home to something particularly special: a reading of Chinese poet Xi Chuan’s work with the man himself and his translator, Lucas Klein.

Xi Chuan.

Xi Chuan is one of contemporary China’s most celebrated poets, a recipient of the prestigious Lu Xun Prize for Literature and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize, a professor at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing, and an all-round cool dude.  A new collection of his work, NOTES ON THE MOSQUITO, has just been released by New Directions, and Thursday’s event was as much a celebration of this fact as anything else. It was an intimate gathering; most of the audience knew each other, and many knew Xi Chuan or Lucas personally. It felt less like a formal event and more like a group of people sitting together in someone’s living room sharing something they love. The atmosphere suited the writing perfectly.

Xi Chuan began the reading by thanking Lucas Klein, who translated all the poems that appear in NOTES ON THE MOSQUITO.  He said that all the times he’d thanked Lucas before via email didn’t count, because they were secret. (Lucas’ response was: “Should I not have told people about all those times, then?”) I mention all this because it was disgustingly heartwarming–as both a poet and a translator who hopes to translate poets, their close working relationship was a wonderful thing to see.

“Autumn, always autumn
those who throw themselves into the flames leave all sorts of questions
when the majority have stepped from autumn into winter
some old lady will still be wearing a flower in her hair
we live together on this planet of deserts and seas”

“This Minute”, Xi Chuan

The reading began with “This Minute”, an early work with a haunting refrain: the line “we live together on this planet of deserts and seas” is repeated, with a growing momentum, throughout the piece. Xi Chuan kicked things off with the Chinese, and then Lucas read the English translation. Most people in the room were bilingual, and could appreciate the poem both ways; my listening skills are still not at the stage where I can understand a poem delivered aloud, but nevertheless I caught enough tantalising glimpses of meaning to make the English reading, when it came, even more fulfilling. It was rather like looking at the sky through a thin headscarf, or a thick cloud of Beijing pollution, understanding just enough of what I saw out there to know that it was a sky and that when the moment came for me to see it clearly, it would be beautiful.

Nowhere was this truer than the opening two lines of “Discoveries”, one of my favourite poems of the night. I only picked up a few fragments of the opening when it was read in Chinese, and wasn’t sure what I’d heard–but then Lucas read the opening in English, and I swooned. “even ants are afraid of the dark / even stones suffer from insomnia”. There’s some deliciously off-kilter in those lines, a willingness to tip the world up forty-five degrees and see what you can make out from that angle. Personification, when done right, is one of my favourite poetic devices. It’s done right there.

The reading continued with “Answering Venus”, a collection of poems which are ‘like haiku but not haiku’, in Xi Chuan’s words, and “Plains”, a stark, poignant piece which practically has the wind running through it. Particularly striking was the book’s titular poem, “Notes on the Mosquito”:

Yet the lifespan of a mosquito is fixed somewhere between sunup and
sundown, or between two sunups and sundowns, and thus its whole
life a mosquito might only meet an average of four or five people, or
twenty or thirty pigs, or one horse. This suggests that mosquitoes have
established no views on good and evil.

“Notes on the Mosquito”, Xi Chuan

The reading wound up with “On Wang Ximeng’s Blue-green Landscape Scroll, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains”. Xi Chuan told us, straightfaced, that many people complain he doesn’t write poetry like the great poets of China’s past–Li Bai, Du Fu and so on–and that this poem was written to prove he too can write something beautiful. Strangely, although the poem is indeed beautiful, the lines rolling over each other like the rivers and mountains they describe, it didn’t suck at me as powerfully as the others had. I think I like Xi Chuan best when he’s being his own beautiful, not someone else’s.

Lucas Klein.

This question came up again during the discussion after the reading, with translator Canaan Morse asking Xi Chuan how he feels when people expect him, as a Chinese writer, to be writing the same sorts of things the Tang poets were writing a thousand years ago. His answer was short and to the point: “I hate it!” Another memorable moment came when he was asked if he thought one had to get angry or upset to write good poetry: he replied to the effect that it’s hard work that creates good poetry, not emotion, and at that point I’m sure I heard millions of emo voices cry out in terror, and be suddenly silenced.

Lucas also discussed at some length the processes that went into creating the book, his own attitudes to translation, and translating Xi Chuan in particular. Once again I was struck by the sheer amount of time and love which had gone into these poems, both in their original language and in their English form. The role of the translator is so often relegated to that of mouthpiece, a faceless channel for the poet’s vision, but in good translation–and in good literature–there is always a sense of partnership. After the talk, I asked both poet and translator to sign my book, and Lucas’ signature sitting neatly below  Xi Chuan’s on the title page seems to me a perfect symbol of everything they’re doing right.

Lucas Klein maintains a blog about Xi Chuan’s poetry, which you can find at xichuanpoetry.com. There are a number of links on the right hand side to Xi Chuan’s work in various magazines, but for the full experience I do recommend purchasing NOTES ON THE MOSQUITO. Neither of them have asked me to do this. I’m doing it all on my own.

 

May
09

Performance Poetry / Nautical Textiles

My new vocation as a performance poet is going stonkingly. Two gigs in, I’ve already achieved three lifelong dreams:

1) Make someone laugh.
2) Get nominated for Poet Laureate.
3) Get over 100 youtube views.

A Good Old Yarn

Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham
Hay Brunsdon in her natural condition

Hay Brunsdon in her natural condition

Hosted by outrageously drunk and bawdy poetrix Hay Brunsdon, ‘A Good Old Yarn’ makes the obvious link between spoken word and nautical textiles.

I’m pretty nervous. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to think about what to wear or how messed up my hair is, which makes me feel a fraud since in my experience all performance poets don outrageous outfits and hairstyles. I just want to fit in.

I get to the venue – one of those tiny rooms up lots of stairs,  its walls draped in ropes and boat-patterned material – with just enough time to grab something alcoholic. Only I can’t find anyone to serve me alcohol, anywhere, in the whole theatre, and I feel like weeping in a corner as I realise I’m going onstage stone cold sober. Instead I squash myself onto a seafaring beanbag at the side of the stage and quake.

Dan Holloway looking eccentric and bookish

Dan Holloway looking eccentric and bookish

The first poet is Dan Holloway. He’s a big guy with ringlets, trouser-braces and fingerless gloves, and he beats me hands down in the ‘outrageous clothes’ competition going on in my head. Dan pulses out metrical tales of love under Hungerford Bridge and lonely people locked in houses waiting to Let go. What I particularly like about Dan is the way, in the interval, he so quickly corners me and asks me to perform at events he hosts in Oxford. That’s the sort of networking I like – especially from talented poets.

I’m second. The audience is right there, and there’s no mic to hide behind. I do a spiel about emails that I don’t think comes out too rehearsed and launch into:

And it works! I fly through Thing in the Kitchen with only one glitch on ‘gobbling’, my five minutes are up and I retreat to my beanbag.

Lucinda Murray, a co-conspirator in the Writing Circus project reads a funny-sad poem about sorting through her hoarder grandmother’s possessions. Wrongly, she is all self-deprecating and angsty and stuff. She is also beating me clothes-wise, henna-haired and leather-jacketed.

Then it’s the interval.

It’s the interval. There is still no one at the bar and no alcohol to be found anywhere. I linger so long waiting for someone, anyone, to serve me a drink I miss half of the next poet’s act.

This ‘poet’ wears a grey v-neck and a shirt. That is all you need to know.

Joel Denno is Joel Denno.

And last Joel Denno, a guy I first saw flying his way through the Cheltenham Literature Festival Slam with poems about suited businessmen emerging from the mouth of hell for their lunch break. Joel sports a mohawk, blazer and fabulous green eyeshadow; ladies and gents, we have a winner. His first poem is political, pleading, movingly, for the humane euthanasia of farm crops and weeds. He finishes with a love poem to, well…

 

 

 

 

 

Mar
23

Performance Review: SLAM!

2Kolegas is a small live music venue hidden inside the grounds of the Beijing drive-in movie theatre. (Yes, we really have one.) When considering how to describe it to you, the word grungy didn’t so much spring to my mind as catapult vigorously in its direction; it is the type of place which serves cheap drinks and big dreams and where every square inch of the walls is covered in graffiti. I dropped in for the first time last Saturday night, to attend a slam poetry performance sponsored by the Bookworm International Literary Festival and the Jue Festival. The event featured performances from Luka Lesson, the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion, and Tim Clare, British stand-up poet and author of WE CAN’T ALL BE ASTRONAUTS; Montreal based musician Courtney Wing opened the night, but since you came here to read about poetry, I will with the utmost respect gloss over his part in the proceedings.

First up after the music, then, was Tim Clare. Clare talks like a poet but takes the stage like a comedian; in his T-shirt and scraggly hair, he exudes a very powerful, and oddly endearing sense of self-deprecation. This is reflected in the nature of his writing: his set began with Pub Stuntman, a poem which opens with a vivid description of banging an old lady for a bet. In this poem, and indeed throughout the set, Clare’s choice of rhymes is integral to the comic effect; lines like ‘Her lips are dry, her legs are splayed / She switches off her hearing aid’ are nothing so much as the poetic equivalent of carrot and stick. And yet this poem, when it comes full circle, highlights what is perhaps the most powerful part of Tim Clare’s work, which is the pathos behind the joking.

Clare’s set also included Down With The Kids, a poem so deftly inserted into a comic monologue that we were five lines into it before anybody had noticed; a song entitled Nice And Gentle, Jesus which takes a chance moment witnessed on the River Cam and turns it into the Passion of the Christ; and finally, what was possibly the most impressive rap I’ve ever seen from a man attempting to impersonate famous women throughout history while rhyming at the same time. His set was short, but it packed a punch, blurring the boundaries between poet, musician and stand-up comedian and doing it well. I missed Clare’s solo show Death Drive while he was in Beijing, but I’ll be picking up his book as soon as I can.

Then it was Luka Lesson’s turn. By this point, I have to confess, I was a little the worse for wear: it was St. Patrick’s Day, I had come straight from a bout of heavy drinking, and I had the sort of headache which makes a bear to the face seem like  a cheeky massage. Lesson’s performance cut through all that; by The Confluence, a simple yet incredibly powerful portrayal of the coming together and parting of two lovers, I was on the edge of my seat despite the haze. ‘Half a bird seemed to chirp half a song in half a tree’; he said he wanted to get this poem over and done early so he wouldn’t have the chance to cry, and I believed him. Other highlights included A to Z, a glorious rollercoaster of a journey through the alphabet complete with audience participation, and Athena, my favourite poem of the night, for which I can conceive no higher compliment than that it made me think I was Greek too.

Lesson’s poetry is a heady mix of mythology, political commentary (immigration and racism are two issues which are frequently referenced) and stylistic influences from rap and hip-hop. In fact he performed a number of hip-hop pieces in addition to his standard spoken-word, but I won’t discuss them here because hip-hop might as well be moon opera for all it makes sense to me. But that just emphasises my point: Lesson’s work is a very far cry from the sort of poetry I usually engage with, it was battling the twin forces of exhaustion and alcohol, and yet it moved me. It opened me up and invited itself in.

SLAM! was the first spoken word event I have ever attended. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person, but I have to say I couldn’t have chosen two better poets to take my slam cherry if I’d tried. Between Tim and his ukelele and Luka and his hair–I’m convinced it’s a sentient being that just happens to live on him–I was introduced to the big wide world of performance poetry with a maximum of magic and a minimum of mess. If either of them ever comes back to China, I’ll be in the first row at their shows. And I learnt another important lesson that night too, one just as important as the literature: don’t challenge the Australian Slam Poetry Champion at foosball. He will rock your socks every time.