We’re absolutely spoilt for literature here in the NG. Just when you think there can’t possibly be anything more that can be crammed into the calendar, Henry Normal treats us to the inaugural Nottingham Poetry Festival. The main events happened over the last weekend of November which is where I caught Kev Fegan, Luke Wright and Attila the Stockbroker.
Normal introduced the event and immediately took the piss out of the poets who had opted to sit in the V.I.P area of Antenna. He warned the audience ‘don’t keep your laughter in. You’ll get cancer’. The tone was set. This was going to be a very different poetry event than normal.
Kev Fegan was first up. Fegan studied philosophy at Manchester University and in between knocking out over 50 plays was also a storyline writer for Coronation Street. We can thank him for the Save Deirdre Rachid campaign that gripped Coro fans in 1998 and even led to Prime Minister Tony Blair announcing that he would order the Home Secretary to investigate Deirdre's case. Utterly bonkers. Utterly brilliant - the storyline, not TB.
Fegan started off with a series of vignettes that he described as being ‘poems about people that aren’t me’. This included a poet called Orbit from Madchester’s early rave scene: ‘You can't hold down a weekday job when you're buzzing to fuck’.
When Fegan was commissioned for the Olympic Games it was clear he wasn’t going to get all patriotic and instead wrote about footballers who like to dance. It was at this point he introduced some real people into his poetry, producing a ring rap for the boxer Frazer Clarke that captured the real motivations behind his desire to succeed: ‘I box for my family and the people who train me'. The poem revisits the wisdom of the charismatic Muhammad Ali but with a working class twist: ‘Fly like a falcon, sting like a taser’.
Elsewhere Fegan took a pop at God ‘it took you seven days to get into this mess’ and ended with an extract from his novella poem ‘Let Your Left Hand Sing’ about why Irish Catholics end up in the East Midlands. This was touchingly dedicated to his son.
Each act had a twenty minute interval so punters could get some pop into their guts. Then it was Essex lad Luke Wright, the reason I was here. Wright is a phenomenal poet, armed with a caustic wit and self-depreciating humour. He’s a proper smart arse, playing about with form and wordplay, but intensely likeable.
At first glance he looks like a bit of a ponce with his skinny fit jeans, red DMs and eyeliner – imagine a cross between Russell Brand and Chucky Doll from Child’s Play – but don’t be fooled. He’s an absolute genius who can entrance any audience, as his recently successful Edinburgh Fringe Tour proved.
Wright loves to prod his audience, warning ‘you lot think ivory comes from elephants’ and spent so much time giving context to his poems it felt like a stand-up comedy act. He attended an all boys religious school with absolute values and so a lot of his set explored masculinity, or rather the performativity of masculinity. Other topics included finding beauty in estate culture and a (univocalism) poem about Ian Duncan Smith that only used one vowel ‘I’. This gave the poem a real hard sound, suitable for a minister charged with sorting out our benefits system.
The highlight of the night, indeed of the whole poetry festival, was Wright’s rendition of the Essex Lion. I don’t know how to describe this other than to say it was like watching someone self-combust on stage. It was insane, torturous, beautiful, funny and utterly ludicrous, and meant half the audience had to change their pants during the interval.
Last up was Attila the Stockbroker, a punk poet who is a personal hero of Henry Normal. Attila entered public consciousness thanks to John Peel in 1982 and has since toured the world doing over 3,000 gigs in 24 countries, and has 40 odd C.Ds and seven books of poetry to his name. He mixed his poetry with extracts from his recently published autobiography.
Undoubtedly Attila has played a vital role in bringing poetry to the masses and his unique blend of surreal social commentary means his words are intended to have a direct political effect. But to be perfectly honest I didn’t enjoy his set. It was a bit too earnest for my liking and I think this is simply because he was given the impossible task of following on from that facking Essex Lion…
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