Ass & Accessibility

On poetry and me

May 15, 2022

This month, something inconceivable happened: I was part of the line-up for Nottingham Poetry Festival. It’s a big event; a two-week-long celebration of the art form presenting emerging talent alongside big names in the field. And I’d be performing a poem, for the first time ever in front of a live crowd. Well, for the first time in 18 years. (More on my sham debut later.)

This is all thanks to GOBS Collective, who put out a call for spoken word artists beginning their journey. Something about the catalytic nature of lockdown made me hit ‘submit’. All I had to hand was a rasher of creative non-fiction which I figured might be deemed “poetic”, whatever that means. To my astonishment, I was accepted. Over many weeks of workshops on Zoom, I and a dozen Midlands wordsmiths honed our skills. This resulted in a public showcase, again via Zoom because we were all still living our Purgatory era. The piece I’d created was a video poem, which handily excused me from performing live.

In the autumn of 2021, however, the UK was already abandoning any acknowledgment of Covid, and I was emboldened to apply for another opportunity with GOBS – this time, monthly workshops culminating in a performance at the Nottingham Poetry Festival. Again, I was accepted. And, outside of the lockdown fog, the land in which anything seemed possible, reality struck hard.

What was I thinking? I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t a poet. There was no place for me in the world of poetry.

I write. I’ve been writing all my life. My writing has even been published, by people who aren’t me (a detail I cling to in my Impostor Syndrome surges). But that writing has never been poetry. In Cyprus, poetry could be the funny rhymes people would improvise at wedding feasts (tsatista). In the UK, poetry seemed to be a thing you couldn’t comprehend – unless you could, in which case it was shit.

I would be performing in front of people who knew what ‘real’ poetry was. And they would know I was a fraud.

Conned

Washington, DC.

I was 19 and lying on the floor of a hotel room. My credit card had been rejected on arrival; it was brand new, I’d forgotten to activate it. I’d felt a surge of panic as I, alone in America, rang home for help. My sister transferred what little money she had to my debit account. Crisis averted. But now it all seemed mad.

What was I doing here?

We’d all thought it was worth it, my coming to America for a poetry convention. After submitting a poem online, I received an email inviting me to read it before a crowd. Talk about astonishment. What a response to words I’d scribbled in a notebook. Could I really be as good as the Fiona Apples I’d tried to emulate?

I quickly realised: no, I wasn’t.

I’d entered the enormous event space for the weekend-long convention. It swarmed with finalists like me. There were so many of us we had to be split into separate enormous spaces for our readings. As I finally took the lectern, having sat through a barrage of others’ forced rhymes and uninspired wisdoms, to read my piece. With every line the realisation dawned: I’d been conned. I wasn’t really a poet. I was an eager fool who’d been duped into believing he had talent.

I lay on that hotel floor, promising myself I’d never be so stupid as to waste money like that again. I’d treat the rest of my stay as nothing more than a lovely break to the US capital. Glimpses of early-20th-century architecture from the bus. Dinner with other cynical attendees. A cleansing bitching session by the Lincoln Memorial. Midges in my face, shirt dampened by the humidity.

So, I wasn’t a poet. I could live with that.

At 37, now unexpectedly living in Nottingham, I performed a new poem, one I was proud of, and people clapped. Afterwards, some of them even came up to tell me they enjoyed it. I felt vindicated. Silly for telling my younger self that poetry was beyond my reach.

After all, what is poetry, anyway? If I were to literally break down the Greek word, it’s a creation. That’s it.

Last weekend, I attended a panel discussion (again, a part of the Nottingham Poetry Festival) called What Does Accessible Mean? and heard three very different poets – Emteaz Hussain, Matt Welton and Casey Bailey – verbalise what I’d felt all those years. Poetry is generally seen as ‘inaccessible’, the product of Byronic figures sighing from one end of their estate to the other. As for the modern stuff: even David Lynch would scratch his head to decipher a meaning.

Of course, some - whether pompous asses or students alienated in the classroom by olde-world texts - think this is what poetry is supposed to be. By comparison, today’s Instapoets are shockingly accessible. Not only are they sharing work on a platform accessed by millions, but the casual reader wouldn’t need to crank out Enigma to decode them.

It’s easy to mock poets like Rupi Kaur, and I have. I’ve called the work infantile, basic, “I’m strong but I’m weak but I’m vulnerable but I’m fierce” poetry. But there’s no denying this genre of poetry (if it’s not too soon to define Instagram poetry as a genre) has done something all art, in my opinion, should aspire to: connect with its audience. But connection and accessibility don’t need to be married.

The panel spoke about impenetrable poetry, about struggling to discern meaning. Sometimes you have to work for it, other times the meaning of a poem reveals itself to you when you have read more widely, picked up a few more references, akin to gold coins in a Nintendo game. I didn’t disagree with any of this; of course, a work of art becomes richer when you understand its layers. But I’m also a great believer in not needing to understand art to appreciate it. I enjoy things being a little beyond me. Enigmatic, loaded, richly textured. I may spend a lifetime finding new “meanings” in them, whether the artist put them there or not. Going back to David Lynch: I’ve been pummelled by his films, and I don’t need to know what they’re about to feel that way. He can be purposely incomprehensible. He just wants you to give in to the power of image and sound.

To steal a quote from one of my ancestors (Aristotle, whatever):

“The purpose of art is to embody the secret essence of things, not copying their appearance.”

As far as I’m concerned, if something has touched you, spoken to you in some way, it’s done its job. You may not be able to verbalise its effect but you can’t deny it. It could be some intangible magic in a piece that’s simple on the surface. Perhaps every line in it, every image or thought, is totally comprehensible, and yet it appears to carry a whole other world within its dimensions.

I might even argue that in this way, perhaps this is what makes a creative piece great. Maybe there should be parts of it that are, and possibly remain, inaccessible. Secret rooms.

In the discussion, Casey Bailey made another great point: that what feels ‘inaccessible’ to some might make a work more accessible to others. This is particularly true of culture-specific vernacular. He gave the example of using ‘head-top’ in a poem, which is Caribbean slang for the top of your head. His white editor was baffled, and assumed he meant ‘Head [the brand] top’. But to Casey’s Caribbean friend with little knowledge of poetry, the meaning of this phrase was clear.

It made me think of how I’ve started referring to aspects of my culture and heritage in my work and left them unexplained for the non-Greek audience. If people get them, great. But I’m not going to be a tour guide in my work. Call me a pompous ass, but I feel explicitness and explanation would compromise what I’m doing in my work: ultimately, it’s my attempt to capture the essence of something.

Whether that’s ‘accessible’ or not is almost immaterial. Some poetry has to be ‘bad’ for other poetry to be ‘good’, but that’s a whole, huge other discussion. We are none of us ‘real’ poets or fake ones; merely people who’ve created something that we hope means something to someone. Even if that someone is ourselves.

Με αγάπη,

A Good Year is out now in paperback and e-book format. Click here to buy.

Hear me talk about it with Phoenix Alexander at Waterstones Gower Street, London. Tickets (including a book-bundle option) available here.