Poetry for All (#PfAFundraiser23)

Some personal anecdotes and a plea follow...

As quite a few of you know, I’ve been engaged in disability awareness and rights campaigning and other work since sometime in the 90s, so when I was given an opportunity to support and host an event dedicated to making performance poetry as accessible as possible in 2018, I jumped on it.

Logo designed by Fay Roberts, 2022

Poetry for All is the brainchild (and heartchild, and soulchild) of Rose Drew, who I first met through one of Richard Tyrone Jones’s Utter events in London. She’s an extraordinary writer and performer, and a powerhouse of an events host and organiser. Within about 30 seconds of watching her on stage, I knew I wanted to be like her when I grew up as an artist. When she got in touch three years later to ask if I’d like to help out with what turned out to be the inaugural event, I threw myself into providing as much support as possible with enthusiastic abandon, and we pulled together a line-up which included the extraordinary performers Raymond Antrobus and DL Williams (“DeafFirefly”), both of whom I’d performed with before and was keen to see again. 

Now, there’s a whole section on our new website about the history of the events where you can read the facts, but I want to say here that, personally, that first event in March 2018 (coincidentally on my birthday!) was an absolute eye-opener – seeing how poetry events could expand and develop the ideal of accessibility in ways I hadn’t considered. It was also extremely inspirational as I realised that, well, I was allowed to write about my disabilities. Seeing and hearing artist after artist sharing so much and so eloquently unlocked something in me that I didn’t even know I’d been repressing:

I’m allowed to be an openly disabled poet. I’m allowed to express my neurodivergence. I can tell my truth. 😱🤯

Bit of a culture-shock, but I owe so much to the poets and to Rose (and to Dave Wycherley, BSL interpreter extraordinaire – that’s a hard and physically/ mentally taxing job as it is, but to do that with poetry? on the fly?! breathtaking...) for helping me get to that starting point, knocking down the walls of my own internalised ableism.

So, apart from a paean to self-expression and why representation and finding tribe matters, and a screed of gratitude for new friends made and old friendships strengthened through the course of these events, why am I writing this? What’s with the hashtag? “Plea...?”

Well, so far, since you ask, all of our events have had local funding in York, where they’ve taken place exclusively so far. Rose applied for Arts Council England funding for this and next year for a tour comprising several venues and a host more disabled artists and BSL interpreters from various parts of the UK (all getting paid properly!), but we found out last week that we’d not got the money. Any of it. So our forthcoming event on 24th November in the gorgeous National Centre for Early Music is in jeopardy and, since the thought of Rose (herself a disabled artist on low wages) having to pay for this out of her own pocket was not to be supported, I threw myself at a plan of creating a (somewhat last-minute) Crowdfunder, so that we can at least pay for the venue, the artists’ and interpreters’ fees, the travel and accommodation expenses of those of us coming from out of town, and the costs of producing merchandise to sell. We’ll be producing an anthology in print and ebook form, as a joint publication between indie publishers Stairwell Books and Allographic Press. And, if we exceed our funding goal, there’ll be video and audio available of the event to boot!

We’ve created a frankly very exciting range of pledge rewards for people wanting to support us (all the way from £1 and £2 options, since money is tight, especially for disabled folk, right now, to more chunky ones like private mentoring, workshops, and a publishing package), and we’ve got three weeks(!) to raise our £1,500 to cover the shortfall from ticket and merch sales. Eeep! So, if you’re able to and would like to help us, we’d be ever so grateful. The campaign is here:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/poetry-for-all-2023-fundraiser

And if you have absolutely no funds to share with us at all, we’d be incredibly grateful if you shared on social media, with friends, on blogs, all of that!

Thanks for reading all this, and have a great day!

It's Finally Here…

I’ve been beavering away at this for a few days, committing to putting together a proper website at last, using the template the brilliant Hannah Chutzpah put together for me ages ago as a basis and then going ham. And I’ve done it! There’s an actual website with my name on it and you can find out all sorts of things about what I do right here: http://www.fayroberts.co.uk

Not sure about the colour yet – what do you think?

I have not yet added in any of the info I need to about being a storyteller, or a musician, or someone who draws stuff too, but I figured that I’ve delayed putting this out there long enough, and better done than perfect, as they say… I can always add those other bits later.

Please let me know your thoughts. Are there other things you’d like to see? How easy is it to navigate? Should I ditch the colour scheme in favour of something a bit more conventional? (Not all the images have image descriptions yet, but I’m working on it!)

Self-Promo!

(Or: I made an ebook of Spectral, the “concept album but it’s poetry” book I produced, published by Burning Eye Books earlier this year, and I should actually tell people about it...)

All content is almost exactly the same as the paperback (except where I explicitly talk about it being an ebook); the QR codes are interactive links straight from the interface; all the images (yes, including every content warning symbol) have relevant image descriptions; and my accidental test user seems delighted at the functionality (I think she quite liked the poems as well!), so I should probably tell y’all where to get hold of one!

It’ll be out on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, B&N, etc. soon, but for now you can order an ePub file direct from Lulu, the distributor, here. (Also I get a bigger chunk of the money, if I’m brutally honest.)

And yes, the audiobook is on its way (audio editing remains my slowest skill).

Okay, I’m going to shuffle away, feeling slightly awkward now, because telling people I’ve made something I’m proud of always does this...

Whimsical Pantomimes

The final section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Whimsy. More than straight-up funny, whimsy is surrealism, arbitrariness, and contrariness. At least, it is in my book. Literally. Huh. Okay, anyway, like many British people, my first exposures to Proper Poetry were all humorous, surreal, often dark, sometimes salutary. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, Pam Ayres, Liz Lochhead, Roger McGough, John Hegley, and, almost certainly formatively at such a young age, Hilaire Belloc (in my parents’ defence, I rarely slam doors, don’t chew string, and haven’t waved a gun at family members, so: lesson learned?). Some of my favourite performance poets excel at humour, and there’s something wonderful about sharing laughter in a poetry space, especially since we also use it for the catharsis, previously discussed, of the bad and scary and difficult.

And, while the discovery that comic poetry isn’t my main strength and that that doesn’t matter was a real turning point (and I can remember exactly where I was when I had this revelation, and I can tell you that being halfway through performing a poem is an odd place for a pivotal personal realisation), I still indulge in writing odd flights of fancy. And sometimes even sharing them with people! And maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to say that comic performance is something that other folk do, much to my delight and relief... I once won a competition to be the worst poet in the room, though, in fairness, the man who apparently literally injured himself laughing at the line about gluten-free breadcrumbs is better now.

Appropriately enough, this section is the least autobiographical of them, with half of the pieces being closer to microfiction (with rhymes) than anything else Most of them are short and all of them are pretty snacky. And I found myself relishing the opportunity to just throw some real silliness around and not worry about whether they were good enough. (We should probably all consider ourselves lucky that it isn’t 20 pages of clerihews, quite frankly!)

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

My main challenge was finding a static pose for such a dynamic and unpredictable notion. But imagine a head between the two hands, tongue sticking out, and hopefully you get the inspiration. Another challenge was learning enough about the software to allow me to perpetrate this. Yet again, it’s imperfect, but I’ve both completed the task and learned a bunch of interesting things, so it feels like a win.

At the time of writing this, it’s early January. By the time you see this, we’ll have a week to go before the current, official launch date. Good luck, Future Fay – you’ve got this!

Philosophical Shrugs

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Philosophy & Mysticism. And oh boy is this a difficult one to define! But then, when asked “What kind of poetry do you do, then?” I’ve struggled with that definition as well, so this section is for all the stuff about which I tend to shrug and say: “I guess it’s a bit... metaphysical? metaphorical? meta-something, anyway. Um…” And I know I’m not alone – plenty of poets out there getting to grips with the form beyond forms, or attempting to pin the liminal to the printed page. You might say.

Okay, fine, this section’s potentially a touch pretentious in places, okay? Good, we addressed the horse in the corner. This is the section for me to revel in the mythological stuff I love to play with, along with streams of consciousness and the more dream-like musings that I try not to indulge in too often. It ends with some puns that are incredibly obscure, even for me, with perfect timing for the next section...

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

You know what’s salutary about drawing your own hands this much? Discovering a quite extraordinary number of imperfections (like how off-centre my index fingers actually are). But it’s also been a real pleasure getting to know them better again, and to use this opportunity to celebrate their uniqueness instead of taking their utility for granted or bemoaning the pain they’re often in. And this pose, in particular, allowed me to revisit adolescent preoccupations with palmistry, among other things.

Melancholic Intimations

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Melancholy. As I take pains to point out to anyone who’ll stop still long enough, melancholy isn’t an unremittingly negative state (but you’ve already noticed how I brought bitterness into joy and fun into anger, so you’re probably not entirely surprised by this statement). Melancholy is contemplative, quiet, and has a range of nuances attached, from deep-seated grief through to relief, and plenty between. Sadness is a natural – and useful – part of the sentient condition, which is probably why it features in so much art. Someone very dear to me once told me her theory that, past a certain level of perspicacity, some depression is inevitable. For my own part, I think the world contains as many things to be sad over as to be angry over, hence even the luckiest people should feel sad, at least for the plight of others Besides, we understand that depression is the final, vital stage before acceptance in the classic Grief Cycle. Compassion and empathy naturally have us feeling sorrowful at tragedy, and I think that can only be a good thing.

Some of the pieces in here are straight-up depressing, no two ways about it, and the themes range from touch starvation, though relationship break-ups (a classic for poetry, let’s face it!), to dealing with chronic pain and illness. They are also, I hope, as cathartic/ hopeful (in seeing that you are not alone) to read as they were to write. 🤞.

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

This was another one that defied easy gestural categorisation, and was yet again a reminder that I’d chosen an interesting approach in going for hands alone rather than, for example, hands-and-face, and finding one posture that would say melancholy by itself came after a lot of vacillation. Here it is, though, complete with a lot more detail on the accessories. (This is deliberate, incidentally.)

Natural Waves

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Nature/ The Sea. This, to my mind, is a perfect progression from Joy (although I don’t get out in nature anything like as much as I used to – or should – these days and, while this isn’t the furthest I’ve ever lived from the sea, it’s still a lot further than I was for most of the first three decades of my life. Very few sounds strike right into my chest on a curl of homesickness and I’m-in-my-right-place-ness as the sound of gulls, let alone the crash of surf. Nature poetry isn’t something that I thought I did, right up until I started compiling this and realising that there was a lot less sea and a lot more nature in my back catalogue than I’d assumed. I blame my Fenland poetry pals for this...! There is a fine and long tradition of poets writing about both – as lovely, terrifying, wonderful, immense, tiny, untouchable, intimate things of themselves and also, of course, as allegory.

As if I’d do something like that...!

As with Joy, these poems are generally quite short, so you get more of them in this section, I think, than any other except the last. You think I’d know by now! As with the previous sections, the poems run through a range of vibes, in order to transport you from the previous to the next theme. How well this works for every reader is yet to be seen, obviously!

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

Unlike the others, I had a fair idea of what I wanted to depict here. Although it, too, has shifted away from the hands holding a verdant island in the sea to the above – less fanciful, but still quite fantastical. This image also marks the first where I was drawing things I could not see to copy, which made for an interesting initial panic, slowly overcome when I realised how much fun I was having. Is the image perfect? By no means. Does it convey what I want it to? Well enough. Did I learn anything making it? Loads, my friend. Loads. Including some fascinating facts about the mechanics of climbing plants…