Poetry Unplugged:

So, the television is filled with images of rioting youth across the country. Gangs are raiding and looting shops. The Metropolitan Police have put three times as many officers on the street. Across London trouble is expected almost everywhere.

And me?

Well, it's Tuesday night and my last chance to visit Poetry Unplugged so I head off to Covent Garden to sign up for the best open mic in London. The streets are not exactly empty but they are certainly much less busy than usual. When I suggest to Niall, the organiser, that poets are made of sterner stuff he counters that we are just more needy, just more desperate for peer approval. And he's probably right.

Even so, it's a smaller audience than usual and there are only sixteen readers. On the positive side, at least I have the time and space to review the event properly, though of course it still needs to be brief and not everyone was introduced with a full name anyway.

So first up we had Nick who did a poem so new that the ink was still wet that was simultaneously about the riots and the fire in the cigarette bin outside the cafe.There were a couple of other humorous ones and rather grim, but very good, one about an abattoir from the cow's point of view.

Janice, who has been on at every performance I've attended started brightly with a poem about a pop-up Karma Sutra (which she had on hand to illustrate the verse), and followed it with a serial killer suburban housewife. Both were clever and funny.

Someone I hadn't seen before, Vanessa gave us a choice of two poems and went with the one that she'd described as a "fairy tale for grown-ups". She said later that she hadn't been happy with her choice but it was a fine recitation of a long and complex poem delivered in quick and confident style.

Brian Baker was next with a group of poems, some of which I'd heard him do before. The short Memory of a Conversation with a Jewish Girlfriend was especially pithy and amusing and Bob Rainey, who followed him, a Poetry Unplugged first-timer did a trio of very good poems that included a personal ad for an S&M magazine.

Paul Moore, making his second appearance, was also very good, but Just Because was a standout piece with each line making a contrast and the initial light-hearted tone gradually mutating into something much darker, a tone that was maintained by the next to the mic, Arthur Ray whose poems were a kind of anti-love song.

Next up was regular Donal Dempsey in a shirt that was louder than the sirens occasionally heard outside. He rattled through a cracking set of very funny short verses in a style that had the audience howling with laughter.

I opened the second half with a reprise of my Bilston Voices autobiographical set. People made the right noises in the right places and complimented me afterwards so it must have been OK. I. of course, am not best placed to make that judgement. I can judge Will Warren who came next - bravely announcing that he was opening with a poem about his favourite synthesizer. And that's what he gave us, a eulogy to a keyboard followed by a story of a strange chess game. His laid-back delivery perfectly complimented the pieces.

No one could accuse Stanley Neil of being "laid back". After a brief, but amusing pieced on the class system and a couple of haiku he shifted up a gear into a raging histrionic performance that saw him abandoning the mic and animatedly haranguing the audience. It was great stuff.

Anita was more subdued. She delivered a long and downbeat poem about death, apparently inspired by a random remark from the host at last week's group. It was a good piece, though a little confusing in places and the next poet, Yvone, to a degree, maintained the tone. She wasn't, I confess, to my taste. There was nothing wrong with either of her two poems and her delivery, though a little nervous, was fine. It's just the religious subject matter that leaves me rather cold. No matter how well done religious poetry just doesn't interest me.

Peter Doyle lifted things with a poem about how much he hated seagulls and the variety of ways in which he had fantasised about killing them. His description of their calls as "the pub singers of the avian world" was a gem in itself. His other piece, The Trees, was more serious but just as good.

The penultimate performer was Ray Blake who I enjoyed enough to buy his book. His opening piece about the Irish and the Scots was really very good but though the Irish in the audience may not have been so keen. His follow up, a piece about people who have half-hearted, wimpish tattoos, pleased everyone though.

And so we come to the final performer, who billed  himself as Namanagra... er.. Granma Ana... er Ananagram. It's always best to save the completely bonkers ones till last and Ananagram was about as completely bonkers as you can get without becoming a villain in a Batman movie. His single long poem was an apparently extemporised piece about all the poets he'd seen in the preceding couple of hours. Everybody got name-checked as he strode about the room like a poetry stormtrooper, climbed on the furniture and enthused everyone with his manic energy. For a poem that couldn't possibly have existed two hours ago it was a tour-de-force and a brilliant way to end my short run of visits to what has very quickly become my favourite way to spend a Tuesday night. It's even better than rioting.

Poetry Unplugged takes place every Tuesday at the Poetry Place in Betterton Street in Covent Garden. It starts at 7:30 with a sign up between 6 and 7.

Poetry Unplugged at The Poetry Cafe: An Impressionistic Review

Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden, 12 July 2011

First of all let me tell you what this isn't. It isn't, in any real sense of the word, a review. It can't be. Thirty seven performers (plus the MC, Niall O'Sullivan) in three hours (minus the fifteen minute break) conspired with a room so crowded with poets and poetry-lovers that there wasn't space enough to make notes, to make a proper review impossible. Just the name-checks would use up the whole word-count!

I can tell you about the venue, downstairs in The Poetry Cafe, hidden away in a Covent Garden backstreet, below a vegetarian Cafe where the lampshades have Ralph Steadman cartoons, the walls are thickly plastered with posters for poetry events and the customers sit and discuss the relative merits of Kerouac and Ginsberg.

The performance room was filled to no more than about five times a comfortable capacity and every one of the extremely friendly and welcoming crowd was a bone fide poetry aficionado.

The performance reviews though are where it all gets a bit impressionistic.

We had...

... London accents, Irish accents, Liverpool accents and American accents:

...poetry that was prosaic and poetry that was profound

...straightforward, metaphorical and surreal:

...saintly, discrete, scurrilous and frankly obscene:

...rhyming verse and free verse:

...rapping styles, lyrical styles and singing:

...structured, unstructured and chaotic:

...confident performances and slightly nervous performances:

...poems about sex, god, poverty, celebrity, reality, fantasy, food,  fetishism, zombies, flat-sharing, travel, the Government viewed as a boyfriend, the Government viewed as a tyranny, Los Angeles and Chessington, science, art, mathematics:

...poems where I couldn't tell you what they were about if you gave me sixpence.

It was gloriously, wonderfully frantic and intense and what we didn't have - and it's really quite remarkable - was a single poor performance. I got up and did my bit half way through the first half and had a nicely warm response which pleased me given the company I was keeping.

Niall kept a necessarily tight rein on the proceedings and everything went splendidly. For  poets and poetry lovers  alike if you are in the region of Covent Garden on a Tuesday night I'd recommend it, but, if it's always so well-attended, dress in cool clothes and take your own oxygen supply.

Bilston Voices 23 June

Two weeks ago I did my final review of City Voices and last night came the time for my final review of Bilston Voices and it was a splendid one for me to finish on. The venue, Cafe Metro in Bilston, has always been a friendly place ideally suited to both new and experienced performers and last night gave us both.

To kick off the evening we had Jack Edwards making his Bilston début. Jack, as he told us before he started, has only been writing poetry since September and is still trying to develop his own style. He's doing a fine job of it too. His poems have strong descriptive quality that draws the listener in while describing commonplace, everyday things and events. His opener, The Red Bike was description of an abandoned bike. Clear Crossing was a short poem about a woman too nervous to cross the road. Fog-lights was exactly what it sounds like, a description of driving in fog. He has a fine turn of phrase that lends these descriptions a deeper metaphorical quality. It would be damning with faint praise to suggest that he did a great set for a newcomer because he did a fine set by any standards.

Jack was followed by Lucy Jeynes who described her set as "quite dark" but that was a bit misleading. Certainly bits of it were dark but it was a well structured and varied performance that started with The Invitation a poem about an invitation to a coffee morning in Hades; rattled through The Business of Waiting which perfectly captured the rhythmic boredom of office work; handed us a group of poems that gave a cynical feminist twist to familiar fairy tales; suggested in Den and Angie that we watch soap operas to learn how to behave in domestic situations; described the human heart in what was perhaps the only truly dark poem of the set and finished with a humourous pastiche of the Lord's Prayer in "A Prayer for World Facilities Management Day". It was confident and thoroughly entertaining.

The following act was an old favourite, Ray Jones, who always manages to please the audience with his well-crafted and superbly read short stories. Last night's Thick Barry, a tale of childhood trauma told by an adult who had never learned to read and write kept the whole venue in rapt silence. You could hear the scratching of my pen, so intense was the concentration he was given. The voice of the character was perfectly realised as he recollected the bullying of his history teacher and the taunts of his classmates. Excellent stuff.

After the break Madge Gilbey took us into the realms of Black Country dialect poetry. It's the kind of stuff that can be tricky to pull off but the great secret is that the poems have to be strong enough to work without the dialect element which then just adds a new layer to them. Madge's certainly were. She started strongly with Man Boobs, a funny piece suggesting that men are gradually changing sex. Bare Facts described how shaken her husband was at the sight of someone's naked backside. Other poems took us through the trauma of washing cricket whites with coloureds, a state brothel for pensioners, receiving a first ever Valentine's card in later life and even closed with a farewell to the audience in rhyme. All the poems were clever and funny and thoroughly appreciated by everyone there.

The final act of the night was the remarkable Richard Tyrone-Jones. He gave us a very polished twenty minutes in lively style with wonderful poetry and witty intelligent introductions. His opener was a short and very pithy piece about receiving an odd party invitation. Most of his pieces were similarly short and clever, delivered as the poetry equivalent of fast paced one-liners from a top comedian. He even gave us a few fast and funny limericks. 

There were a couple of forays into more serious territory as he described having a heart attack in his thirties and they were intense and powerful and every bit as good as the humour that made up the bulk of his set before he returned to making us laugh for the finish. He is a truly original and excellent performer.

And then it was all over. Before the next Bilston Voices I shall have left the area and before the one after that I shall have left the country. I'll be back eventually and when I am I look forward to visiting it again. For the moment, I couldn't have hoped for a better line-up to send me off.

A review

From "Behind The Arras"

Spoken Worlds

 Old Cottage Inn, Burton upon Trent

This was the third event at this new venue, which I suspect means that it is no longer new, and should no longer be described as such.

A first time performer at Spoken Worlds, but a seasoned veteran of the Birmingham/Black Country circuit was Bob Hale. An English Teacher by profession, Bob was making his first and last ( for a year) appearance as he is soon to teach summer school at Harrow and then English in China, so any victory speeches in Black Country English from the Chinese Olympic Team in London next year are down to Bob.

Wisely his first two poems, “On Being Joined in the Pub by Two Female Colleagues whose limited range of Conversational Gambits had Previously Been Remarked Upon” (“I forgot you’re not a girl Bob”) and “Dave” were set in a pub, unsurprisingly they matched the audience’s mood perfectly. “Other Childhoods” reminded of those in other countries less fortunate than ourselves whilst “Waiting for a Holiday to Begin” was a short, sharp reminder of the perils of embarking upon any holiday.

But he left his most impressive poem till last, ”Chaos Theory”, from the eponymous second collection of his work, “The smallest of lies betrays the greatest of truths. . .  ”, a poem of love and loss, taut, anguished and well executed. A fine set, and well worth the three slots, he will be missed, but equally welcomed back in a year’s time with, no doubt a rickshaw full of new poetry.

 The review of the full event can be found here.

Spoken Worlds

I finally made it up to the Spoken Worlds event at the Old Cottage Tavern in Burton Upon Trent last night. I've been promising to go for months but things have always cropped up to prevent it but as last night was my last possible chance I made special effort.
My last experience of an open mic poetry event was so bad that I didn't post my review of it. It was a truly depressing experience of listening to some of the worst poetry and prose I've heard in my life. So I was approaching Spoken Worlds with caution.
The signs were good. It was in a comfortable private room in a pub with eight real ales and the people were friendly, welcoming and - unlike that last one - normal.
The format was, in the words of the organiser, in "three halves". You could sign up to appear in any or all of them, getting about five minutes a time. I signed up for all three and am pleased to say that the mix of poems I read went down very well with a crowd that are obviously all regulars at the event.
What of them, though? What of the regulars? I didn't take any notes or even write down the names so I can't review them individually but I'd say there wasn't a poor turn among them. Whether it was poetry, prose, a song or even a short play it was all well written and well performed. At least one of the poets was truly outstanding. I left a little before the end to get my train and I was sorry to have to do it as it meant missing a few performances.
A couple of excellent pints, a whole bunch of great writers and readers and the chance to try out my own material to an unfamiliar audience. What could be better?

A review

Many thanks to Gary Longden for these kind words.

Closing the first half was Bob Hale, teacher, travel writer and poet. Bob is very good at assembling a set thematically. Previously I have seen him do a Travel Set. This time he opted for an autobiographical collection.

He combines easy, accessible language with sharp observation and a dry wit. His Games trilogy was funny, “Bangkok” amusingly accurate. His well known Bears poem about a collection of teddy bears was as popular as ever but “A Secret Place” stood out for me.

Poignant and evocative it told, of the secret place he had as a child to escape the hurly burly of an adult world. It succeeded because it conjured up the desire most of us experienced as a child of wanting a secret retreat and spoke touchingly of a childhood we all lose. We are soon to lose Bob for a year or so, first to Harrow, and then to China – what tales he will have to tell upon his return.

His review of the full set can be found on Behind the Arras , a site which manages to review almost every poetry event running anywhere in the Midlands. Well worth a read even when it isn't reviewing me.

City Voices: four fifths of a review

Well, I finally made it to the top of the bill at City Voices and all I had to do to get there was promise to leave the country. I can't really review myself so I'll restrict this to the other four performers from last night at City Voices.

It started with Susan Fearn who warned us before she started that she liked experimental poetry. Now the term "experimental poetry" means different things to different people. It can encompass experimental techniques of creation, experimental verse forms, experimental use of language, experimental topics. Almost anything. In Susan's case her introduction made it clear that she uses experimental creation techniques - making links between randomly chosen postcards for example - and the poems themselves demonstrated the use of language and verse forms. So, was it any good? Well yes and no. Many years ago I saw a concert by Phil Collins side-project Brand-X. It was all technically well done but at the end of the evening I couldn't say if they had played eight ten minute songs or one eighty minute song. I felt more or less the same way about Susan's performance. She announced the title of each poem and told us little about it. Even so I found that I was listening to the words with very little understanding of their meanings. There were a couple of more traditional pieces but on the whole experimental poetry isn't really to my taste.

Nick Pearson followed with rather more traditional fare which, consequently, I enjoyed more. Whether he is talking about  how towns have changed during his lifetime, television talent shows or memories of his step-mother his poems are sharp and perceptive and often both funny and painful at the same time. Aided by his confident delivery he gave us a very pleasing and entertaining set.

The first half was rounded out by Hazel Malcolm who gave us two long prose pieces rather than poetry. The first was a reminiscence from her childhood  about people visiting her mother who was acting as a banker in an informal financial club. She painted the picture authentically and confidently. The second piece was about hairdressing, not a topic that I am greatly enthused about, but the same comments applied. Her great skill is in drawing the listener into an unfamiliar world in a convincing way.

The second half started with Iris Rhodes whose poems were mostly about strong women, real and mythical: Ariadne, Cleopatra, Boudicca. The poems were assuredly structured and well-delivered and, though I personally prefer descriptive poetry to narrative poetry, well-received. When she moved away from the strong women theme she nevertheless continued in a feminist vein for most of the set which demonstrated her undoubted ability. The only real problem was in the length of her introductions which were often much longer than the poems themselves. Shorter introductions and more poetry would have made the set even better.

And of course the final performer was me. For obvious reasons I can't review it but, for the record, I read two extracts from my book about travels in North And South America and two poems: Bangkok Hustle and Sunset On The African Plains.

As a short postscript, I will be at the May City Voices where Scribblers are launching a new anthology and I should be able to attend, though not perform at the June one but after that City Voices and I will be, at least for the time being, parting company as I go to work away for a couple of years. As it usually clashes with Scribblers I probably won't be able to find a substitute guest reviewer but if anyone wants to provide guest reviews for this blog, please contact me.

The 4th Bilston Love Slam

I guess somebody has to be first.
I just wish that on my first proper slam, it hadn't been me!
Yes, the random draw for the running order put me on as contestant one of heat one of round one. At least it means that I get the awkwardness of reviewing myself out of the way quickly. So what about this Bob Hale fellow? Any good? Well I think my poems were pretty good and they were certainly well rehearsed but  I'm coming to the opinion that they are fundamentally unsuited to slams. It was noticeable, as it often is, that the few people who, like myself, did serious pieces (i.e. not funny) consistently scored lower than the people who made the audience laugh.
The other poets in my heat were Heather Wastie and Steve Rooney. Heather, who I have seen quite often, did a longish piece about eating her partner's bread pudding in her usual accomplished style. Steve's piece, about a girlfriend being unimpressed with his new shirt was also very funny but suffered slightly from being a little too slight for its length. Unsurprisingly, Heather got through and I came last.
The second heat also went as it should. Tom Jenkins seemed a little less confident in his material than usual, though his very clever piece constructing a love poem from terms used in chemistry  was very well received. Simon Lee followed with a poem about being in love with his dentist, which he assured us was OK as his dentist is also his wife. And Peter Wyton who concluded, and won, the round gave us a poem that started slowly but built very well into a lively and animated performance, an unlikely outcome for something that was about updating the messages printed on Love Hearts.
Heat three had Hazel Malcolm, an old friend of mine Donna Scott and Roy McFarlane: not a good draw for Hazel or Donna given that Roy is the Birmingham Poet Laureate. Hazel's poem comparing love to molasses was the first properly romantic poem of the evening, though perhaps a little gloomy in tone. As one of the more serious pieces it again suffered from the audience predilection for humour. Donna's poem fell nicely half way between the serious and humorous camps and was a good piece about love in the 1990's, filled with popular culture references and performed well. It inevitably suffered from being followed by Roy who did the two love poems that he had practised last week at City Voices. His greatest asset is his rich, deep voice and combined with his passionate performance it saw him through to round two.
Marion Cockin, Louise Stokes and Theo Theobald were up next. Marion, a seasoned performer but taking part in her first slam, gave the best introduction of the night - describing her poem with the words "there can be no greater love than a woman who puts her husband's severed head on the mantlepiece". And that's what she delivered, a poem called Sir Walter Raleigh's Head. Louise, like Roy, gave a poem which she had performed earlier this week, this time at Hit The Ode. I liked it better this time round but, clever and accomplished though it was, it seemed to be more suited to a shorter work and was a little stretched at three minutes. Still, she is the first to admit that her normal poetry runs to the pessimistic rather than the romantic. Theo followed and though the three minute format limits him - he is much funnier when he has the space to meander around his poetry with long and often hilarious introductions - his "I'm In Love With The Girl from H&M" is an old favourite and went down very well, sending him through in fine style.
The final round one heat saw Yvette Rose give a couple of slight poems - one similar in content to Tom's Chemistry, used mathematical terms as love metaphors and the other was a very traditional romantic poem. Once again more serious and once again suffering in the marking because of it. She was followed by Jo Bell who began by announcing that she didn't do romance and would we mind if she did filth instead. And that's what she gave us, two hilarious and very dirty poems about former boyfriends and how men make love. Eileen Ward-Birch, accompanied by a pillow and a bad case of nerves, completed the first round, explaining in verse about losing sleep trying to write a love poem. It was a good poem but her nervous performance let her down slightly. Jo ran out the worthy winner of that heat.

After that we broke for the highlight of any night at the Imperial, the curry: - and very nice it was too. Reflecting on the first half I felt that in every heat the correct result had come from the judges. All the performances had been good but the right people had, ultimately, gone through.

The format for round two saw all six performers - the five winners and the highest scoring loser, Peter Wyton, compete in one big round.
Their poems reflected their first round performances. Jo gave us an alphabetical list of words from her phone's custom dictionary which sounds as if it couldn't possibly be any good when described like that but which was in fact very cleverly done and really rather good. Theo followed with a poem listing the possible illnesses and symptoms to claim to have when "throwing a sickie". It got a good audience reaction though, as with his first round, I felt that the three-minute slot doesn't really do his kind of performance the justice it deserves. Peter's poem, like the Love Hearts poem from round one, started slowly and built well as he compared the people on holiday in modern Greece to the ancient Greek Gods.  For me it seemed to lack a proper climax though which may have let him down. Heather, in multiple voices, became the various icons and symbols that we see on our computer screens talking to a frustrated user. First the spinning symbol when something is loading, and then, by turns, the hour glass, the hand and the arrow. It was clever though maybe a little repetitive, though that was probably the point. Roy followed with a poem about his wife's lack of sympathy with him when he is sitting writing and waiting for inspiration. Though his performance was as powerful as ever he badly misjudged the time and became the only person of the night to actually be "whistled" off before completing his recital. Simon, the highest scoring runner up concluded the round with a better piece than his previous one, an elegy to the late Richard Whitely, of Countdown fame.

When everything was counted and the dust had settled our two finalists, and it must have been a tough decision, were Jo and Theo.

Jo opened with a nicely observed poem comparing real life to facebook and real relationships and interactions to computer ones. Her description of someone having only eight friends, but one's she'd actually met, echoed my own sentiments on the subject.
Theo put on a fisherman's hat and proceeded to give us a cleverly constructed poem based around the names of the places in the Radio Four shipping forecast. It played to his strengths of humorous one-liner gags building a very funny and very well written piece from what was essentially a series of jokes. (Though, of course, the Rockall joke is an old one!)

And so to the result. It was a close run thing but overall Jo's material had been funnier and better received and she ran out a worthy winner with Theo only a whisker behind in the scoring a very worthy second place.

A truly excellent night's entertainment with one of the finest collections of poets I have seen in one place. Of course I also need to mention the excellent organisation and splendid MC duties of Marcus Moore and Sara-Jane Arbury who made everything go so smoothly and led us through a perfect evening, perfectly.

And me? Well just as somebody has to go first, somebody has to come last. C'est la vie.

Hit the Ode

Last night I went along again to the Hit the Ode performance at the Victoria pub in Birmingham. I had been hoping to get one of the open mic slots to give some of my material for tomorrow's slam a bit of a test run but it was not to be. The performance slots had all been taken before I got there and by a very talented group poets including many of the usual suspects and a few I hadn't come across before. Matt Windle, Louise Stokes and Jodi-Ann Blickley gave their usual assured performances with their usual stage personas,strongly to the fore. I was particularly taken with the feat of memory required for Matt to get through his long and impressive "Outstanding". The poets I hadn't seen before included a brief but funny set from Fergus McGonigal, a début appearance from the talented James Burnette and a set from Al Hutchins. The final slot was taken up by four members of the Birmingham University slam team, including Sean Colletti  and Andy Cook who I have seen before and Sam Murphy and James Bunton who I haven't. There were also two brief rapping guest spots but rap isn't really my thing and I didn't manage to get their names.

Of course it's the three headline acts that we actually pay to see so what about them? Well the second half contained both Fatima Al Matar and Joshua Bennet. Fatima's poetry is quiet and rather intense. It needs - and deserves - serious attention and the audience gave it that, falling quiet as they listened to her thoughtful set but applauding loudly at its end. Joshua, who has performed for the Obamas, also has a fairly restrained and relaxed style but the content of his work is very good indeed and his final piece about his deaf sister was especially well done.

For me though, all of this, wonderful though it was, was overshadowed by the first half headliner, Byron Vincent who was quite simply brilliant. He was worth far more than the tiny entrance fee on his own. I have paid much more to see professional comedians who were no more than on a par with this young man. It's debatable whether much in his twenty minutes could actually be called poetry but as a piece of stand up comedy/theatre it was spectacular. His delivery was breathtaking and his material had me laughing out loud so much hat I kept missing the next joke. He's substantially better than a lot of the stuff we get on TV and worth looking out for. He managed the trick of making something very, very difficult look very, very easy. His style is to make it all look as if he's making it up as he goes along while a moment's thought makes it apparent that no one could be that good without a lot of effort and practice.  I shall certainly be keeping a look out for future performances from him.

Forthcoming

As you know by now, I am leaving my job shortly and hope to be leaving the country to work overseas from August or September. This means that I am keen to get in as much performing as possible before I go. My Summer contract means that realistically I have up to mid-June to do this.

So I am hoping to appear at City Voices in April where I will be reading a specially written piece of travel prose, and at Bilston Voices in May where I will be doing a selection of my own favourites from among my poetry.

My appearance at the Bilston Love Slam on Saturday 12th of February has now been confirmed and though you might only see me for the three minutes that it takes to get knocked out in round one (or six minutes if I make round two or nine if, by some miracle, I make round three) the evening is worth the money just for the curry.

I shall probably also go along to the next couple of Hit The Ode nights at the Victoria and try to get an open mic slot.

More details will follow later.

Hit The Ode

When I decided to take one of the open mic slots at last night's second Hit The Ode poetry event, in the Victoria pub in Birmingham, it's probably just as well that I hadn't been to the first one at the end of last year. Had I seen the standard of performance I would probably have felt too intimidated to join in. As it is I was asked as I entered if I wanted to perform or just watch and I said, "perform", which at least got me in without paying.

They started with four open mic slots, of which I was third. The two performers before me were both terrific and I must admit to feeling a bit of fraud following them. As I watched them, I contemplated switching my planned poems for something else a bit more challenging but I wasn’t all that sure I’d be able to remember anything else well enough so I stuck with the plan and did On Being Joined In The Pub By Two Female Colleagues Whose Limited Range Of Conversational Gambits Had Previously Been Remarked Upon and its companion piece Dave. It went down well enough but next time I’ll be raising my game a bit. The poet after me lifted the bar again for the open mics and then we were into the actual featured performers with Italian poet Sergio Garau. It was a stunning performance ,in multiple languages, with computer presentations and music and was delivered with breathtaking style and energy. It was more like watching a rock star than a poet and the poem that was performed in German (luckily in easy enough German for me to understand it all) reminded me of listening to some of Rammstein’s lyrics. (It had some stylistic similarities, for example, to one of my favourite Rammstein songs Los.) An excellent performance which was greatly appreciated by the packed audience and must have terrified the open mic poets who were to open up the second half.

If it did, they didn’t show it putting in another group of fine performances to the delight of the audience – though Gary Longdon’s choice of performance piece was definitely brave, being a lengthy poem about why women like crap music.

Then we were back to the featured acts for Emma Purshouse’s excellent set. She is an entertaining poet and performer, always a treat to watch and never disappoints. Last night was no exception. A couple of poems I hadn’t heard before were mixed in with a bunch of old favourites and very good it was too.

The evening finished with Ross Sutherland, whose quirky performance was hilarious. He featured a lengthy and bizarre retelling of Little Red Riding Hood – complete with a cartoon of the story running behind him, an equally bizarre poem dedicated to a random member of the audience and the same trivial anecdote about shopping in Spa repeated multiple times in different styles. Unusual and vastly entertaining.

I should also add a note that, while not appearing as a performer, Bohdan Piasecki did an absolutely marvellous job as the MC with an easy going style that was as entertaining as the acts and that made the whole evening seem a very friendly affair.

A great night out.