Foyle's article from Sunday London Times
The Sunday Times - Style
May 15, 2005
Feature
Boys & girls aloud
Poetry and prose have leapt off the page and into the hands of the people, says Johnny Davis. Welcome to the spoken-word slam of bards and bands
Samantha Morton ferrets through her Kiehl’s goodie bag. Marianne Faithfull holds court on the front row. And Madonna, we’re reliably informed, is on her way. We’re not at a fashion show or the opening of a new boutique, club or restaurant, but the rather more prosaic Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London. It’s Monday teatime.
Luring the A list from their walled gardens to the bit behind the non-fiction is the author JT LeRoy, a former rent boy turned US literary sensation. Friends and fans read excerpts from his novels, LeRoy says a few words and the capacity crowd strain forward on their plastic chairs, eager not to miss a sentence. Later, LeRoy admits nerves. “I don’t much like giving readings,” he says. “The first time I did one, I was so anxious I threw up all over the front row.”
LeRoy might have his doubts about these events, but he will have to get used them. “Spoken word” — prose and poetry read aloud, in front of an audience — is on the rise. From Pete Doherty reciting his poems in Irish pubs and Ralph Fiennes tackling WH Auden at the British Library this summer to club nights organised by the author and “urban realist” Courttia Newland, spoken word is out of its academic garret and on the streets. “It’s incredibly democratic,” says Patrick Neate, the Whitbread-winning novelist who, with Everything but the Girl’s Ben Watt, runs Book Slam, a monthly club in west London. “Anyone can get up on the mike and perform.”
Book Slam regularly features literary heavyweights — Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are both upcoming — alongside new, often unpublished voices. “The scene’s getting bigger because there’s no counterculture any more,” says Neate. “These are people who have no interest in engaging with mainstream industry, who don’t want to be journalists or write a book or deal with a record company, who are saying, ‘You know what? I’m a good writer. I’ll write spoken-word stuff and go and perform it.’”
The music reference is apt, because Neate has built his night not just around authors and poets, but DJs and musicians. “I call it clubbing for grown-ups,” he says. “You get a bit of intellectual stimulation, but you do so over a bottle of white wine. It’s not rarefied. Some people have been surprised to hear Public Enemy records blaring out. But what I’m trying to do is create a hip night, something that allows funky people to access books and book people to access funk. God, I sound like my dad.”
While hardly the first to put literature into a more social environment — we’d need an appendix that took in Jack Kerouac, Hedwig Gorski, John Cooper Clarke, The Last Poets, Apples & Snakes and so on for that — Book Slam is one of a growing number of nights all over the country that are winning new fans. You will find similar events at, for example, the Green Rooms, in Manchester, or The Drum, in Birmingham.
Or the authors can come to you. Newland took his Tell Tales posse — “a collective of short-prose writers” — on the road last year, performing 35 dates. “Publishers say that collections of short stories don’t sell,” he says. “So I was well aware that we would have to go on tour and raise our profile.” It seems to have paid off. A first collection of Tell Tales stories ranked number four on the Amazon anthologies list, and there is a second due out this month.
In terms of finding new audiences, spoken-word nights are “absolutely essential”, says Matt Thorne, a Man Booker-longlisted writer and a veteran of Tell Tales and Book Slam. “Writers are thrown into the mix with patois poets, soul singers and DJs. It’s a really useful way to meet a new audience. There are so many books published these days: how else are people supposed to know what they might like to buy?”
Charlie Dark, the man behind Blacktronica, a London-based collective of writers, DJs and musicians, is also convinced about the increasing hipness of spoken word. “Going to a poetry night is cutting-edge,” he says. “Clubs have become like supermarkets: they’re not underground or rebellious any more. Clubbing is what the bloke next to you in the office does.” The increased popularity of spoken-word nights is because “we’re all part of the iMac generation”, reckons Dark. That is, we no longer have to wait for someone else to publish, record or film us; we can do it ourselves, using our home computers. Dark spends much of his time with schoolchildren, helping them see that poetry can be relevant. “If you’re a 15-year-old kid from Hackney going through some strife at home, you don’t want to be sitting in class learning about Wordsworth and daffodils,” he says. “You probably haven’t even got a window box.” Even the BBC agrees.
The Verb, Radio 3’s Saturday-night programme was established as a direct response to the new wave of spoken-word events. “Literary programmes tend to be rather high-end and po-faced,” says The Verb’s editor, Mohit Bakaya. “We wanted to do something to acknowledge the new audience. Something that wasn’t fusty.”
This might mean featuring Philip Larkin’s poetry set to a jazz score. Or Dark reading a poem that he’s written about James Brown’s drummer.
“There’s a real appetite for it,” says Bakaya. “People don’t just want a diet of Big Brother. I really think there’s a new seriousness.”
That’s as may be. But Dark has found a more practical application. “The thing about Shakespeare is, I never really felt appreciation for him until I got into women,” he says.
Surely he hasn’t stooped to using “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” as a chat-up line?
May 15, 2005
Feature
Boys & girls aloud
Poetry and prose have leapt off the page and into the hands of the people, says Johnny Davis. Welcome to the spoken-word slam of bards and bands
Samantha Morton ferrets through her Kiehl’s goodie bag. Marianne Faithfull holds court on the front row. And Madonna, we’re reliably informed, is on her way. We’re not at a fashion show or the opening of a new boutique, club or restaurant, but the rather more prosaic Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London. It’s Monday teatime.
Luring the A list from their walled gardens to the bit behind the non-fiction is the author JT LeRoy, a former rent boy turned US literary sensation. Friends and fans read excerpts from his novels, LeRoy says a few words and the capacity crowd strain forward on their plastic chairs, eager not to miss a sentence. Later, LeRoy admits nerves. “I don’t much like giving readings,” he says. “The first time I did one, I was so anxious I threw up all over the front row.”
LeRoy might have his doubts about these events, but he will have to get used them. “Spoken word” — prose and poetry read aloud, in front of an audience — is on the rise. From Pete Doherty reciting his poems in Irish pubs and Ralph Fiennes tackling WH Auden at the British Library this summer to club nights organised by the author and “urban realist” Courttia Newland, spoken word is out of its academic garret and on the streets. “It’s incredibly democratic,” says Patrick Neate, the Whitbread-winning novelist who, with Everything but the Girl’s Ben Watt, runs Book Slam, a monthly club in west London. “Anyone can get up on the mike and perform.”
Book Slam regularly features literary heavyweights — Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are both upcoming — alongside new, often unpublished voices. “The scene’s getting bigger because there’s no counterculture any more,” says Neate. “These are people who have no interest in engaging with mainstream industry, who don’t want to be journalists or write a book or deal with a record company, who are saying, ‘You know what? I’m a good writer. I’ll write spoken-word stuff and go and perform it.’”
The music reference is apt, because Neate has built his night not just around authors and poets, but DJs and musicians. “I call it clubbing for grown-ups,” he says. “You get a bit of intellectual stimulation, but you do so over a bottle of white wine. It’s not rarefied. Some people have been surprised to hear Public Enemy records blaring out. But what I’m trying to do is create a hip night, something that allows funky people to access books and book people to access funk. God, I sound like my dad.”
While hardly the first to put literature into a more social environment — we’d need an appendix that took in Jack Kerouac, Hedwig Gorski, John Cooper Clarke, The Last Poets, Apples & Snakes and so on for that — Book Slam is one of a growing number of nights all over the country that are winning new fans. You will find similar events at, for example, the Green Rooms, in Manchester, or The Drum, in Birmingham.
Or the authors can come to you. Newland took his Tell Tales posse — “a collective of short-prose writers” — on the road last year, performing 35 dates. “Publishers say that collections of short stories don’t sell,” he says. “So I was well aware that we would have to go on tour and raise our profile.” It seems to have paid off. A first collection of Tell Tales stories ranked number four on the Amazon anthologies list, and there is a second due out this month.
In terms of finding new audiences, spoken-word nights are “absolutely essential”, says Matt Thorne, a Man Booker-longlisted writer and a veteran of Tell Tales and Book Slam. “Writers are thrown into the mix with patois poets, soul singers and DJs. It’s a really useful way to meet a new audience. There are so many books published these days: how else are people supposed to know what they might like to buy?”
Charlie Dark, the man behind Blacktronica, a London-based collective of writers, DJs and musicians, is also convinced about the increasing hipness of spoken word. “Going to a poetry night is cutting-edge,” he says. “Clubs have become like supermarkets: they’re not underground or rebellious any more. Clubbing is what the bloke next to you in the office does.” The increased popularity of spoken-word nights is because “we’re all part of the iMac generation”, reckons Dark. That is, we no longer have to wait for someone else to publish, record or film us; we can do it ourselves, using our home computers. Dark spends much of his time with schoolchildren, helping them see that poetry can be relevant. “If you’re a 15-year-old kid from Hackney going through some strife at home, you don’t want to be sitting in class learning about Wordsworth and daffodils,” he says. “You probably haven’t even got a window box.” Even the BBC agrees.
The Verb, Radio 3’s Saturday-night programme was established as a direct response to the new wave of spoken-word events. “Literary programmes tend to be rather high-end and po-faced,” says The Verb’s editor, Mohit Bakaya. “We wanted to do something to acknowledge the new audience. Something that wasn’t fusty.”
This might mean featuring Philip Larkin’s poetry set to a jazz score. Or Dark reading a poem that he’s written about James Brown’s drummer.
“There’s a real appetite for it,” says Bakaya. “People don’t just want a diet of Big Brother. I really think there’s a new seriousness.”
That’s as may be. But Dark has found a more practical application. “The thing about Shakespeare is, I never really felt appreciation for him until I got into women,” he says.
Surely he hasn’t stooped to using “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” as a chat-up line?
posted by JT LeRoy at 12:34 PM
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