Showing posts with label one and other. Show all posts
Showing posts with label one and other. Show all posts

Friday, 2 October 2009

I know what I'm HERE for

Currently watching Clive Andersen, Sandi Toksvig and the always-good-value curmudgeon Brian Sewell discussing - or in the case of Sewell, roundly slating - the work of people who've been on the giant white lego brick. And I'm dreading it because, for Satan's sake, I don't want to see myself on television.

What this experience did for me was to crystallise why I write and why I perform, and it isn't because I want the validation of fame. The crystallising experience was having to deal with an irritating, bigoted heckler early on in the set, and the fact that I got such a charge out of it. Afterward, what I remembered wasn't the many poems which went off without a hitch - or, indeed, the fact that the writing experiment failed completely. No, what stuck with me was that my words - the choice of subject matter about which I write - had pissed this guy off to the extent that he felt compelled to come over and verbally abuse me, to the point where he had to be ushered away by one of his more sensible friends (who, fair play to him, also contributed a line to the EPIC WRITING FAIL, so thanks for that). Words. That's all.

My three-line profile on the One and Other site was: ARE WORDS ENOUGH? And at that moment, I proved that they are. In a performance designed to show how freedom of expression is fragile even in a society such as ours, I was lucky enough to have an objective correlative of that notion thrown to me, and went with it.

Words ARE enough to piss off the bigots of this world, wherever and whoever they may be, and whether or not they think of themselves as bigoted. And that is why I write. Because I just love winding up the ignorant.

It's not about fame. It's not about being a bad rockstar or stand-up and getting laughs or applause. It's about creating space. It's about showing that we can shout down the bigots, that we can show them up for the idiots they are, in being frightened of something as small and fragile as a sentence.

In the welcome centre afterwards, talking it over with a plinther-to-be, I agreed that anger in an audience is better than polite applause or mere indifference, but that isn't quite true. It is, on a tactical level. As long as wankers like that guy or Nick Griffin or Richard Littlejohn exist, then reducing them to spluttering incoherent messes serves a purpose in showing how pathetic they are. But on a strategic level it's not what I'm writing, and fighting, for. I write and perform for the day when I can go out anywhere in the world and be greeted with complete indifference to the things I write - because then I'll know we won, and the human race finally grew up and got over this shit. But until then, while we still live in a time when the mere mention of something as inconsequential as boys wearing nail varnish can reduce some ignorant idiots to homophobic apoplexy, then I will continue to write and to perform and to campaign to wind up and expose those very idiots. And I will continue to try and build more and more space in which those idiots aren't welcome, and we're free to express what we feel without them trying to make us feel like we don't belong, and that we're somehow less than human for daring to want to share our humanity with others.

And, when the ignorant armies have finished their clashing by night, I'll go back home without a word and cultivate my garden. But until then, I'm in it 'til it's over.

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

Zero Hour Looms

This time tomorrow night I'll be at a Poetry Cafe gig. Five hours after that ends I'll be on the plinth.

If you aren't already doing it, watch my twitter feed. At some point tomorrow I'll reveal the anonymous twitter id and password that will allow people to tweet me the things they're afraid to say without fear of being found out. Look for the hashtags #imafraidtosayitbut and #account/password .

Sunday, 27 September 2009

How you can help

A campaign is afoot on twitter to get people to sponsor me for my plinth gig. We've already raised quite a bit of cash collecting in Borders Gateshead, but if you're further afield there are ways you can help too.
The best way is to donate to International PEN directly, and tell them I sent you. You can contact them via email at executivedirector@internationalpen.org.uk , or phone on 0207 405 0338 to make a donation. You can also get their postal address from the link in the post below.
Thanks for reading, and go give them lots of money!

Edit at 19:04, Sunday 27/09 - English PEN, the founding chapter of International PEN, have a link to an online donation form at their website. If you want to donate online, this is another way in which you can do so. Please tell them I sent you at the top of the form, though - I'm not making any money out of this, but getting some props would give me a happy. Thanks.

Saturday, 26 September 2009

New Readers Start Here

If you're here because I gave you a slip at the store today, then the first thing I have to say is thank you. Because if I gave you one of those slips, it's because you donated money to International PEN, to whom I am dedicating my hour on the Fourth Plinth as part of Antony Gormley's One and Other project. Not only that, it means you bothered to follow the link on the slip, which probably makes you quite a rare person indeed. I'm under no illusions that most of those slips won't end up in peoples' wastepaper baskets but, at least in your case, they didn't. You're generous, you listen to people when they talk to you, and you're curious enough to follow up information when it's given to you. You're exactly the sort of person I want reading this blog, in fact. Welcome aboard.

And now, orientation. First a little about me, then a little - probably a lot - about my plans for One and Other, and how I want you to take part.

*** Important Brevityfail Warning - Extremely Long Post ***
Due to my own crippling verbosity and the sheer amount of information I'm trying to get across to you here, this post has turned out to be, in specialised posting terminology, VFL or Very Flippin' Long. If you're busy, but still want to know what my plans are for the plinth, I recommend you skip to the section helpfully formatted in bold towards the bottom of this entry. Thank you.

*** We now return you to the rest of the post ***

What do you need to know about me? I've been writing and performing poetry for ten years. I've been published by a variety of magazines and I've performed in Liverpool, Hastings, Edinburgh, Baltimore and just about every place you can mention in the North East. I've had a long hiatus from writing on a serious basis while I've been working on my psychology degree, but I've returned to it now that I'm done with that. During the summer, I applied, almost on a whim, to take part in One and Other, never expecting that I'd be one of the people selected. Having made an application, I promptly forgot all about it. I still watched the plinth, but the thought of being on it had clean left my mind.

Until the message arrived in my inbox, telling me I had been chosen. As you can imagine, my first thought was 'oh f**k.' My second thought was that I should immediately hit the reject button. I wasn't confident. I wasn't prepared, and I didn't have a great deal of time in which to prepare. I wasn't ready. Wasn't good enough. Not worthy.

My third thought, fortunately, was that I should stop being so bloody stupid. And that instead of repeating all the reasons why I couldn't do it, I should click accept and start thinking instead about what I could do.

As a poet I knew that I could perform some work on the plinth. But I wanted to do something more. I hit on the idea of writing something with the audience: with that thought in place, it was a question of what to write and how to go about writing it. Having joined Twitter recently, I was interested in the potential for using it as a creative space. Plus, I realised, by asking people to help on Twitter, I could expand my potential temporary writing collective beyond whoever happened to be in Trafalgar Square at the time.

But what to write? That was the question. And it was one I decided to back-burner for a while, while I looked into finding a charity to represent.

I chose International PEN because, as a writer and a bookseller, as someone who trafficks with the written word almost every hour of the day, their role as defenders of free expression was something that resonated with me. I also knew they were a less well-known charity, and so I felt that by dedicating my plinth time to them, I could have a more positive effect in raising awareness of them, their work, and the threats which are faced by writers, journalists and librarians around the world today who dare to criticise repressive regimes. Money-wise, I couldn't match the donations they receive from their corporate sponsors; but if I could at least say that, because of me, people who wouldn't otherwise have heard of PEN now had, that would be an achievement. And I've managed that. And raised quite a bit of money too, though how much I don't know, yet - in my stupidity I purchased a receptacle for the money which I can only open by destroying it. It's pretty damn heavy now, and I know there's a lot of £1 and £2 coins in there, so we'll just have to see. Wednesday night's when it gets opened and counted. Stay tuned for the big reveal!

So - what do I do with the hour? I toyed with various ideas, but finally, at about two in the morning one night, I hit on the idea that had been staring me in the face all along.

Freedom of expression is what PEN are all about. It's also something important to me as a poet. In my poetry, I get to express, in a lyrical manner, truths about myself and my world which would fall flat if I had to describe them prosaically in my halting, stumbling everyday voice, but which gain a higher truth and meaning from being said in the controlled form of poetry. Furthermore, I've always seen part of my role as giving voice to people who are denied a voice in the culture, or people whose voice doesn't get heard because of the endless thumping drone of bigotry, ignorance and lies to which we are daily subjected by the media. This, I realised, had to play a part in the collective writing part of the hour. So here are the details of the exercise:

The Fourth Plinth Piece - all you need to know

1. It will be titled 'I'm afraid to say this, but...'
2. It will have a rough sonnet form - 14 lines in all.
3. Every line will be a contribution from a member of the public, whether shouted out or tweeted.
4. Every line will be a continuation of the first sentence, e.g. 'I'm afraid to say this but...I don't believe in God/I'm in love with my best friend/I have disturbing thoughts about Anne Robinson etc etc'
5. I will work on it with the audience as I perform my other work. When we have a fallow period, I'll get on with performing, and check in with people periodically to see how we're doing.
6.At the end of the hour, I will perform the poem as the closing number of my set.

What I want people to contribute are things they fear to say. What I'm exploring here is the idea that, in this culture, we curtail freedom of expression, but in more subtle ways than imprisonment or assassination. By the end of the hour we'll have a poem which represents a record of the kind of things people felt they couldn't say in Britain and around the world in the year 2009. More information on what I'm trying to say with this here.

This has been a long post, and you're busy, but if you've read this far it's time for me to say thank you again for taking the time. I hope you'll help me out by contributing your thoughts to this piece of work, and I hope you stick around. Stay tuned.

Thursday, 24 September 2009

Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news...

I really must stop over-using that Teardrop Explodes quotation, but it's damn hard not to today. My plinth appearance has been reported in an actually rather wonderful piece in the local newspaper, the Sunderland Echo. I'm on page ten of the print edition - can't find any reference on the website, though, but I'm not too worried about that. They'll probably get it on there eventually, and if they don't at least the thing I feared happening - getting bumped to the website but not making it into print - didn't occur. It feels good seeing myself in the paper. Print gives things some kind of validation.

Despite my Sontag-esque musings yesterday, the accompanying photo came out rather well too, I think. I mean I've only glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, but it seems to make me look like a normal and respectable human being, so the photographer, Corrina, has done an extremely good job there.

News also arrives from the excellent Streetcake magazine, who have accepted a poem of mine for publication in their next issue. I was turned on to Streetcake - which sounds vaguely like a line you might hear in a Chris Morris spoof - by the blindingly fabulous Angela Readman, who suggested I send them some material when I was casting about for places to submit to as part of my clumsy, faltering attempts to get back on the poetry horse. And I'd be glad that she put me on to them even if they hadn't accepted my work, because theirs is a genuinely interesting publication, a poetry online mag that shows a commendable interest in using the fact that they publish to screen rather than page to take a more adventurous approach to the visual appearance of the work they publish. My poem, 'The Mechanics of the Scissorhold', will be published in issue 7, due soon, but there's a lot of interesting stuff to peruse at their site while you wait for it. Go read.

In other news, a Blackberry owner is now me. I finally took the decision to get me one of those new-fangled smartypants-phones after concluding that lugging a laptop down to London to receive peoples' tweets for my collaborative plinth poem would be just too much hassle - especially given that I have a Roland Microcube to lug down there too - and that, while I needed something small and portable which could quickly process tweets, my dislike of touchscreens precluded me buying an iPhone. Yes, I know, I'm a keyboard-loving dinosaur doomed to never fit in with the coolest kids when we all live in some Minority Report world where we write everything by grabbing floaty letters out of the air. So what? A Blackberry is tremendously ahead of the curve for me. Remember, I still genuinely feel aggreived at the demise of the 3 1/4" floppy (it was the noise; that satisfying thump-click as you slid the bad boy in and got ready for business. You don't get that action from one of yer weeny little USB sticks.).

And so, with the amp here and working, the comms taken care of, and the media informed, it's all just down on me now to rehearse this thing and try to make it the best that I can. Having completed my first full rehearsal I can say that initial impressions are good. Maybe it's just that Fish Manor has better acoustics for practicing in, but I really feel now that I'm finding my voice again, and looking forward to running my dirty little mouth off in public again for all you beautiful little monsters. More updates as and when...

Tuesday, 22 September 2009

I Know What I'm (t)Here For

Well now. There are ten days left before I'm on the plinth. It's about time I decided what I'm doing.

And I have.

I'm doing this to raise money for International PEN. They defend peoples' right to freedom of expression. It follows, then, that that should be the theme of my performance. And it will be.

In countries like Cuba and Mexico, people are kept quiet by fear of imprisonment or disappearance. We're cleverer, here. In the UK, in the US, in the quote-unquote 'civilised' world, we keep quiet because we don't want to look weird. We don't want to offend the 'Values Voters', and their UK avatars. We want to keep our jobs.

The punishment we face is less extreme: the end result is still the same. We keep schtum, afraid of punishment. But we don't have to.

As part of my time on the plinth, I want to write a sonnet. 14 lines. Doesn't have to be Petrarchan, or Spenserian. Doesn't even have to rhyme. But I want each line to be a genuine expression from someone - maybe in the crowd, maybe on the net, wherever. And I want each line to be something you're afraid to say. Something you'd like to say, but which you keep quiet for fear of the consequences. Those consequences might be ostracision, or prison, or a beating, or being called names on the schoolyard, or unemployment, or just an indefinable fear that folk will think less of you - but as part of my hour on the plinth, I want you to shout what you're afraid to say, and I will shout it with you. Call out, or tweet, your line, and I will read it for you.

If you want anonymity, then fine. Before I go down to London, I'll set up a collective twitter ID, give out the password, and if you really don't want to admit to what you fear to express, then you can tweet using that. A caveat though. Log out when you're finished, and let others have a go.

However you do it - whether you want to shout at me in public or send me a message over the ether - I hope you take part. For an hour, in a way I never imagined, I get the chance to express myself - to put my psyche on the line and let the world know who I am. And, for good or ill, I want to bring you with me.

October 2nd. 0400-0500 AM. 'I'm afraid to say it, but...' let's do this thing.

Thursday, 10 September 2009

The Plan Mutates

So I've been thinking about my plans for the One and Other appearance. Thinking, and simplifying. The idea of using a projector is out. The idea of taking a laptop down and working on the piece using that is out. Simplify, simplify, simplify. There's only so much space, there's only so much power, there's only so much time to faff around. I do still intend to take a mike and PA down, and still need to get that sorted out. But as far as writing the thing I'm going old-school: pen and paper. Read it out as we go.

I will still be eliciting lines for the poem from the audience, via both the tried-and-trusted method of asking them to shout, and also taking tweets from people, but instead of lugging my laptop onto the plinth I plan to just use an iPhone or similar to stay in touch with the tweetstream, either borrowed from someone else, or I may actually use this event as an excuse to catch up with everyone else and buy one.

Tickets have been bought, travelling down and back on the National Express from Newcastle. Reminds me of the Hastings Poetry Festival ten years ago, when I did the same thing. No accommodation booked as yet, because it's an odd time to book - the coach back from London departs at about half nine, and rather than go back to a hotel I'm toying with staying up mainlining coffee, walking the streets of London at dawn and grabbing a massive greasy spoon breakfast, then sleeping on the bus.

Sunday, 6 September 2009

I'm gonna be on telly!*

I received an email late yesterday to say that I have been selected to be art for an hour (specifically, 0400-0500) as part of One and Other in Trafalgar Square on the 2nd of October.

I know what I want to do, and will be providing more details later. For now, though, I want to beg shamelessly for equipment. To help me with this, you will need:

* a projector which I can hook up to my laptop

* a mike and PA system which can fit on the plinth (or a megaphone, possibly)

* a flask of weak lemon drink.

If you can provide any of these things, or any other skills/equipment you think will be useful, please mention it below. More detailed updates later, once I've worked out transport to and accommodation in the Great Wen. Laters, yeah?

Oh, almost forgot - drink your weak lemon drink NOW!

* well, streaming internet anyway. It's almost like telly.