StAnza 2014: Q&A with Michael Pedersen

As the 2014 festival of poetry continues, poet and Neu! Reekie! host Michael Pedersen talks exclusively to The Skinny about his StAnza debut, and weighs in on the debate over 'page versus stage'

Feature by Bram E. Gieben | 06 Mar 2014

As this year's StAnza Festival begins, we follow up our feature taking a look at this year's highlights with a series of exclusive Q&As with the performers, writers and organisers of Scotland's only international festival of poetry. We continue today, presenting our full interview with Michael Pedersen, celebrated performance poet and co-runner of dynamic spoken word and cross-platform multi-media cabaret Neu! Reekie! He discusses his choice of readings for StAnza 2014, his feelings about making his debut there, and weighs in on the 'page versus stage' debate.

The Skinny: Have you ever performed at StAnza before?
Michael Pedersen: It's my first time. It's such a phenomenal thing that there's a festival happening in Scotland entirely dedicated to poetry – that's a big plaudit in itself. But the other thing is the scale of it, the number and the calibre of the poets they have. I'd gotten to this point in my life, and I'd never been to StAnza. I'd held off, and I thought I'd try and go for the first time as a performer – not in a braggart way, but to incentivise myself. Saying that, if I'd hit 30 and still not been, I might have reconsidered, because I'd be missing out on so much! So my knowledge of StAnza is entirely academic.

What's your show about this year?
The show will focus mainly on poems from my books. It's another joint show – the last one I did was with Luke Wright, at the Edinburgh Book Festival. That implored me, having been familiar with Luke's work, to do more performance-oriented poems. I relish opportunities to do something different – I almost always get booked for performance nights, because I have more performance-based poems.

At StAnza, I'm reading alongside Hannah Lowe – I'm always reluctant to use the term 'page poetry', but Hannah does have a more academic reading manner, although still a very engaging one. So I chose the poem for my author profile as a testament to the type of poems I'm going to read. Flowers and Cream is about a girl who loses her father. It's perhaps my most accomplished poem on the page, and it's a bit trickier to read in front of a live audience, so I've been trying to develop an equally effervescent reading style for the more page-based poems. I've been pushing myself in that direction.

The notion of a difference between so-called 'page poets' and 'performance poets' – or 'page versus stage' - is one that StAnza seems to want to engage with, and perhaps help to break down barriers. Where do you stand on this – do you think 'page versus stage' is a useful concept?
I hope it's a duality, because I am equally enamoured with both parts of it. I find it an interesting challenge to step up to the slam nights and develop content from that perspective, but I also find it a challenge to develop a set of poems that perhaps will be met by a more considered or academic audience. You can see the temperature in an event change, and you have to change your expectations – I guess at the more performance-oriented nights, you get a kind of lauding applause in between each poem, and you learn to feed off it, and feed off the audience.

At the more traditional nights, audiences take your set as more of an entirety. That's equally interesting, but it's also kind of perturbing, because you're going through this journey, and the entire time you are delivering the set without really knowing what is being well-received. It's a different preparation, and it's a different output – ome of the best page poets are also incredible performers, and I think the mingling of them at events like StAnza is a great thing. Traditionally, other literary festivals have kept them very separate. Now that they are coming together, it's the halcyon days. It's a great happening, and I for one am empowered by it. The boundaries are becoming a lot more fluid, they're blurring.

You had Gerry Cambridge as an editor on your collection Play With Me. What was it like working with him?
He's a very erudite editor who has only really worked with page poems before. I wanted us to clash in terms of our styles, because I wanted the book to be a clash of styles, to some degree. I think that is happening quite a lot, throughout literature, at the moment. A lot of erudite, experienced page poets are working with young performance poets, and I guess it's a two-way edification. You see that in the output of the events, as well.

Michael Pedersen's StAnza picks

Ross Sutherland, 7 March, 1pm, The Byre Theatre
King Creosote, 9 March, 10pm, The Byre Theatre
John Burnside, 10 March, all day, The Town Hall 

From the archive

Michael Pedersen on Play With Me and Neu! Reekie!: "If Neu! Reekie! itself was a penis it’d be starting to expand and twitch a little, a semi at a push..." 

Michael Pedersen's joint show with Hannah Lowe takes place today at The Twon Hall, St. Andrews, at 11.30am.

StAnza Festival runs from 5-9 March at various venues throughout St. Andrews. For a run-down of the events, workshops and performances at StAnza 2014, have a look at the full programme on the StAnza website. The Skinny has more exclusive interviews with poets and performers coming this week.

http://stanzapoetry.org