12th February 2005
Tristan Bates Theatre,
1a Tower Street,
WC2 (near Leicester Square tube)
Check out www.london.epoets.net/index.shtml for more Farrago events
Rating 4/5
My birthday, the 31st of January I was chucked by a sexy and wonderful but hard and cruel woman. As I am of a romantic bent I tried several flamboyant ruses in order to win her back, the most unsuccessful of which was bedding another woman immediately and then telling her in order to make her jealous. It was when I realised the game was up that I received an email about the Farrago love Slam. “Got a broken heart?” Ran the blurb, “Need a spare? Poets can win a new one
tonight. Every poet wins a new heart.”
Being a believer in magic I thought this maybe exactly what I needed. So I invited the second woman along and wrote a poem, quite good I think, entitled “What would Jesus do if he was alive to day and got chucked.” I wore black and didn’t shave so as to look like a suffering poet and turned up as close to 730 as I could bear.
I had my poem written on a sheet of A4 and another one which was a remnant of another failed gesture. I managed to get my name on the reserve list. The first 7 poets are guaranteed a slot and the next 5 are chosen out of the hat. I was 8th. I was a poet now among poets and had come wearing my broken heart on my sleeve so had none of the shamefulness of being alone.
I eyed the other poets as we waited in the bar to be called into the theatre. Although there were all ages and races and sexes, there was a kind of homogeneity in the shabby deliberateness of the outfits. We got called into the theatre, my date hadn’t turned up and I was resigning myself to experiencing the grim yet intoxicating public loneliness that Valentine weekend always heightens.
The Compare John-Paul, a blond South Londoner, asked us to look around the small theatre and make friends with someone. I looked around obediently and saw a couple of dashing young men who I had noticed coming in. They had a kind of Peter Cook and Dudley More vibe going on with their shabby yet detailed outfits. One of them I complimented on his hat. He wondered if I was trying to chat him up in a confusing joking way. Internally I considered asking him if he was calling me a pouf and then imagined a fight starting which was the exact opposite of what the compare intended.
The show then started properly, and it is organised and compared by John Paul O’Niell. Organisationally he is good. There was a good crowd, a few celebrity poets, a packed programme, and it is obvious that he loves poetry and is very supportive of people who want to write poetry. As a compere though he is quite irritating. He talks quite a lot and cajoles the crowd into applauding loudly in quite an unpleasant manner. This constant pressure on the audience has quite a negative effect, because the applause becomes irrelevant to the poem and is just out of obedience to the compere. Also all his time wasting chat means that there is less time for the actual poetry, and more importantly less time for having a break where you can go into the bar. From 8 o’clock to 11 we had just one break, and the final poet who was supposed to be the big finale was just a source of irritation at keeping us from the bar and keeping our bums numbed up and sore.
The first poet on was the featured Lennie St Luce, a large black woman in a sequined dress that looked like the Thames Barrier stopping her breasts from flooding the city. Out of the whole evening she was the poet who really gave me the kind of teary epiphany feeling when you hear the truth said in a way that you have never thought of before but recognise instantly and deeply. Brilliant. It was a poem about how she hated being young and loved aging because when she was
young she was angry at the world and angry because she was fat and black and angry at god, but she reached a point where she forgave god and went back to the earth goddess (or something) and accepted love. What was unusual about her style was that it was so musical, she would quite often break into song and click a rhythm with her fingers.
Another good featured act was Irish poet Donal Dempsey. He really had the shabby detailed look down to a tea, all black and grey with the most dreadful stringy greasy hair. His poetry was very masculine in comparison to Luce, shorter, sharper, funnier and more bitter. His character was larger than his poetry and his presence was always there throughout the evening. He had a lovely girl on stage with him who gave a sign-language interpretation his poetry and there was a real loving vibe between them.
His poetry is about bitter love and he seemed to have a kind of love relationship with the 90 year old SLAM winner. He really seemed to be that lovely rare thing, a womaniser and a gentleman. A kind of down beat Irish David Niven. His poetry was full of that painful remorse of failing to make woman love him. One Haiku I can remember was –
Damn damn damn damn damn
damn damn damn damn damn damn damn
damn damn damn damn damn.
In the interval I talked to the Dudley More and Peter Cook types, and they turned out to be Luigi and Oliver, and fine fellows. Some friends of mine turned up and I was beginning to get excited about the evening.
After the interval came the SLAM. Now this is just my opinion, but I just don’t like the structure, and this is where John Paul becomes the most irritating. Each poet is allotted 3 mins, and three members of the audience are given score cards numbering one to ten. The audience are then made to practice cheering when they see a ten and booing when they see a 1. The special feature of this evening was that if your poem was perceived as about love you would get a Cupid which doubled your score. If it was not perceived to be about love you would get a toad and your score would be unchanged. The cupids and the toads were allotted my this wizened hippy woman who we later realised was as thick as two short planks of ply wood all glued together with congealed spunk from myriad lazy conceited sexual encounters with sixties poets. She seemed to have slept with several of the older members of the audience and numerous named poets. There was a kind of bickering bitchy arrogance about her. What was annoying about her was that she had too much power and she meted out the toads and cupids completely at random, giving a toad to poems that were clearly about love, and a cupid to a poem about wanting an I Pod. The competition element I don’t like anyway because I don’t think poems from different poets can be compared numerically. The edginess of the competition creates jealousy and resentment, where none is necessary. It creates a judgemental atmosphere in the audience which I think detracts from the appreciation of the poem. However, this says as much about me as it does about the SLAM and I suppose it is good that someone can win a prize, even if it is kind of arbitrary. However the judging and the scoring take up quite a lot of time which would have been better spent in the bar.
The first girl on was a very good looking black girl from Luton, she wanted to go on first so she could get her train, but then forgot the first line of her poem. I can remember one rhyme I liked which was The ambiance of a walk in France.
The next few poets didn’t really stick in my mind as I was absorbed in my own forth coming performance. All I can say is that the standard was good, the demographic varied, and John Paul showed himself to be very supportive. Also the spunk riddled hippy gave a toad to some very
gentle love poem and a row broke out as to whether too much power had been invested in that one woman.
I came up, hands shaking and gave some shtick about thinking I am Jesus and that I’d been chucked, and I got into a bit of banter with Donal about whether he was Jesus and that we were all Jesus. I went into my poem and got a good reaction, lots of laughter at the funny lines. It was very personal for me and my hand was shaking the A4 enough to counteract my shaky handwriting. I wasn’t too interested in the scores for reasons above, but I think I got 8 8 6, the 6 coming from a Hackney teenager who said he didn’t like the blasphemy. The Devils whore gave me a toad, which
actually did upset me since it is much more personal to have someone judge that my heartbreak love poem was not about love, than just to be given a low number. It made me feel that perhaps I don’t know what love was and that I was utterly worthless. Even though I knew that the bitch was just playing some kind of drug addled power game.
Anyway it meant I was out of the contest and so could relax about the rest of the scores. I got given a lovely wooden sequined heart and Donal touched the hem of my coat as I went back to my
seat, I shook him warmly by the hand and he really gave me the feeling that he liked my poem, which meant a lot to me. He is a very charming man.
Both Oliver and Luigi were very slick. Witty and sophisticated and a little tongue in cheek. Olivers poem was about an Ipod and how he would stab out his eyes if he couldn’t get an ipod like Oedipus who also didn’t have an ipod. His stage presence mixed with the bizarre content made for good entertainment. I forget his scores but there seemed to be a trend where the
scores were getting higher.
Luigi’s was about the boys love for his snowman, who turned out to be a cross dressing snowman. The ryhmes were very witty, and the delivery very slick and charming. He got a very high score.
I can remember one other poet who stood out as being good. He had a sardonic style and did a poem, about a toothless old man being in love with a wrinkly old lady who now caught the bus with another old man. It was funny and piss taking at first, but actually got quite tender and deep.
The final poet was the winner and she was a ninety year old woman who had to be helped up on stage by Gentle Donal. Her poems were beautiful appreciations of a deep and special love. Kissing the mirror with lipstick knowing that you will kiss that kiss. The night sky like a blanket or something wrapping her up in your tender loving whispers, or something. Although the green-eyed monster in me will want to say that she scored so highly because of the wheel chair and everything, her poems did transport me into a world of love that I can only ever hope to achieve.
It was at this point that John Paul became the most irritating. He promised us a break, and then cancelled the break because there was not enough time. He rushed through a translator who read a poem in Spanish and then English, then gave a long boring introduction to the final hippy poet, who then seemed to think that this was a platform for him to bore every one with his lame and uninteresting campaign to improve the post office. He spent so long droning on and selling his wares that he had only time to read a couple of poems. When he performed poetry it was very good, but this seemed to constitute only about 10% of his act. This rest was self promotion, it was a bit like watching a street performer in Covent garden. And the self promotion was delivered in an old mans monotonous drone. If I wanted to see some old codger moaning on about the post
office, I wouldn’t need to pay £6 pounds in some west end theatre. I could just knock on any door on the street. What was sad was that this negative attitude on my part was really a result of all the time wasting created by the slam.
Anyway we practically ran out of there while the old hippy was still talking and ran to the nearest pub for last orders. We all ended up going back to Oliver’s house in Brixton, and he kindly invited some beautiful Scandinavians around to entertain us. I had my beautiful new heart that I had won by reading a poem. We sang songs and danced to live guitar until 6 in the morning and I woke up this morning with the pain gone from my heart.
The Farrago Love Slam had worked its magic.
Reviewed by Jonny Blamey