Stand Up Poetry

Poetry, like most intoxicants, can be an enchanting flow of colour, flavour and texture. It’s not all to everybody’s taste, it frequently accompanies heartache and too much of it can leave you regretting that you ever sought its fruits.

Aside from a brief dabble into Ben Okri’s Mental Fight (a spirit lifting offering from a friend), poetry has always tended to leave a lingering bitter taste in my mouth. At school, when we weren’t being force fed Shakespeare (a questionable teaching technique), we were all bombarded with the likes of Wilfred Owen and Andre Breton. Fine poets, yes, but to a group of hormonal teenagers whose interest in poetry goes along the lines of “tell us how Sylvia Plath did herself in again!” It wasn’t really inspiring stuff. We turned to the likes of Kurt Cobain or Michael Stipe for our rhythm and rhyme.

But there is hope for me yet. Ash Dickinson is a performance poet with a rock ‘n’ roll kind of appeal. He’s hitting Edinburgh in June and could do the same thing for poetry as Bill Hicks did for comedy.

“I've always been a music junkie and have always loved lyrics”, Ash says. “I'm probably a frustrated frontman – I describe myself as the thinking man's Axl Rose”.

Instead of fronting a band though, Ash took to poetry. How did all of this come about? “I got into writing poetry in my early twenties – I had a late teenage angst phase! I joined a writer's club where I was a good four decades younger than any other writer and read some of my stuff out but the real change came when I lived in Australia for a spell. A cafe in town were having a Talent Night and a friend of mine persuaded me to read out some of my poems. I was in no way as confident as I am now, needed umpteen beers, knees knocking, birdcage-mouthed, but the reaction was incredible.”

Since then, he has gained worldwide acclaim, performing in such countries as the United States, Canada, Australia as well as throughout the UK. But what is the difference between poetry being read from a book and performance poetry? “Once you take poetry from the page to the stage it becomes entertainment and my writing has changed over the years to reflect this. It also must be accessible immediately – on a page you have ample time to read and re-read the poem, to take in everything; as a listener you only get one chance. It also becomes visual, and I never wanted my shows to be me just reading from a book for an hour.”

Being such a different kind of performer and playing different kinds of venues, it’s never certain how the audience are going to react, as Ash explains, “....comedy clubs are a mixed bag... some people love it, others are just waiting for a knob gag and are too many sherbets past the point of enjoying clever wordplay! At poetry shows I generally go down very well and at poetry readings (a different thing altogether) if the whole night could be classed as 'dry', I'm generally the one soaked to the skin, combing barnacles out of my hair. I also go into a lot of schools and the reactions from kids can be superb. I've lost count of the amount of subsequent emails and postings to my Facebook Group from students saying how they never thought poetry could be like this”.

Sounds like somebody such as Ash would have done a great deal of good at my school. As well as being educational, thought provoking and poignant, the performances also offer a great deal of laughs. “The majority of my poetry is comedic though their intros – essentially, in the beginning the opportunity for me to take a breather away from some of the breakneck stuff – have since become living, breathing things in themselves, and the "stand-up" might be longer than the "stand-up poem," he says. “That said, there's real emotional scope in the show. A poem about my fridge falling in love with me, for example, is almost unbearably poignant.”

A fridge falling in love? Sounds fascinating. What else can we expect at the Edinburgh show? “Greatest Hits, I suppose, in the sense that some Edinburgh audiences might know, for instance, my takes on office temping or overpopulation or me swapping places with the sea for a week but there's also a host of new material ranging from Facebook to the media's obsession with body image to knitwear for apes. As themes go I guess it's pretty broad!”

Sounds like my kind of intoxicant. You can sample Ash Dickenson at the Roxy Art House on Sunday, June 13th.