THEN.

I am a writer and performer because of YouTube.

Not the most scholarly or refined of teachers, but a pivotal one for me nonetheless. On there was, and is, countless hours of poetry delivered by a motley scramble of orators, punk poets, rappers and storytellers whose voices and bodies were as much a part of the poem as the words they spoke. At the age of 18, I decided I wanted to give it a go.

With some (God awful) poems I’d scribbled on printer paper, I spent almost all my wages from working at Paperchase on train tickets to London and threw myself into the spoken word scene. I came of age in the hearty and shambolic world of open mic and slams, a place full of emigrants from the stoic lands of ‘proper poetry’, ‘proper performance’ and ‘proper society’. If this sounds rather romanticised, it’s because falling into that world was very much like falling in love. 

I got to listen to some of the best writers and performers in the country and learn my stagecraft through observing them. I won some slams and lost others, made lifelong friends and spent many nights drinking, soliloquising and scribbling lines of poems into a notebook on the last train home. 

I built a career from this, going from doing the rounds at any and every open mic night, to doing headline sets all over England, then the UK and then internationally. I still can’t believe I got away with it, and still do. I owe so much to the consistent generosity and support of hosts, arts venues and my fellow artists. I am the grateful progeny of poets like Salena Godden, Kae Tempest, Polarbear, David J, Joelle Taylor, Hollie McNish, Mark Grist and Patricia Smith. From them I learnt how to command a stage, how to wield humour and candour and the power of saying the ostensibly unsayable.

All the lessons I learnt in those first few years remain with me. I aim for anything I write to spark that same kinetic fizz as stepping in front of a mic for the first time did. I will always take pleasure in negotiating the strange and addictive contract between audience and performer. No matter where my writing career takes me, I will always pay my dues to the spoken word world that embraced and encouraged me.