Biography

Scott Devon is one of the first in a new generation of performers who call themselves street poets and has been published in numerous magazines, websites and anthologies all over the UK and beyond. His words reflect the modern world and the life changing facts that are sometimes overlooked, using his metaphor of the ‘Word army’ to illustrate what he’s about. He has performed and toured the UK for over two years, standing on many stages, as well as going into schools and libraries, winning slams and earning respect along the way. Bringing street poetry to the word army battlefields of the country. His poems cover drug culture, war, modern world injustice and politics. All the topics most people shy away from, but Scott Devon carries his poems with an energy and a subtle charm which means you never feel like he is just shouting at you. He aims to create empathy with any crowd to change minds not just make people walk out because they are offended, and to do that you have to have faith in a crowd. To quote Scott ‘performing is a test of the listener as well as the speaker.’ Scott feels it’s more important to share the message the words carry rather than simply give a list of what you have won and where you’ve performed. The word army is about thought and free expression the cornerstones of human culture. Nothing has ever been achieved through ignorance, and we cannot win this war by force, we must understand our way out of modern world madness.

"Scott Devon is definitely one to watch. A keen student of The Masters - he's busy adding graft to his craft and aiming, kung-fu style, to one day defeat them. I wouldn't bet against him! "

Tony Walsh - Manchester based slam champion.


“Scott Devon is a persistent poet. The sort of poet every poet should aspire to be. He doesn’t give up, he doesn’t give in and he doesn’t take prisoners.”

Jeff Price – fearless leader of the Poetry Vandals.


“Scott Devon is one of the most inventive and committed new poets on the Northern performance scene.”

Kate Fox – UK Slam Championship Finalist 2006.


"Scott Devon has injected a new dimension to the readings at Write Out Loud. His performances have opened windows on the new urban poetry landscape for old fogeys brought up on Palgrave's Golden Treasury, The Mersey Sound, Spike Milligan and the best of Wendy Cope. Not only that he's proved a great ambassador
for WOL, and shows a great commitment to a community voice in poetry,
irrespective of age or style."

Dave Morgan – Write Out Loud Founder.

I first knew Scott Devon when he was knee high to a grasshopper, and a shivering wreck of a performance poet. That was only a year ago, and my has he grown! Scott is one of the most dedicated and committed performers I know, a pleasure to watch and to work with, and if you think he's big now- keep watching. He's only gonna get bigger.

Karl Thompson – Poetry Vandals of Newcastle

'Scott Devon is explosive, dynamic and courageous, goes where few poets dare to tread.'

Lucia Cox – co-founder of Citizen 32.

Samples

See the boats coming, zoom in and see only one boat, zoom in again and see the men crouched low, now see only one man, now see what he sees the beach up ahead, a Normandy beach, D-day beach. Yes, now you see it, and in this soon to explode cocktail of beach head and Nazi ideals the man still waiting, with stomach knotted, heart garrotted he sits and rides the waves. Above the black flack is heart pounding, palpitating the back beat to this making of history. Pounding in a way none of us can ever imagine. The man feels the tide of fear swell up through him and so he begins to mumble his words, he fumbles with verbs, he tumbles tongue tied over a semantic beat that lays down a flat rhythm and falls on the only ones he can remember, the only ones he knows, they're automatic, they're ingrained in his brain and so he begins, Our Father, who art in, and BANG.

Metal punches sand as the front drops away and the man wakes up to a nightmare that screams blue black through the daylight. The shots come in waves, sweeping strafing, piercing, life taking lung fulls of gunfire, bursts of hot lead squeezed out of the chests of men maddened into a frenzy. And the shots keep coming, keep coming , and the men drop away never to move again, never to move again, dead eyed, empty men with empty lungs. Gun turrets shooting straight, cruel and deadly causing a fear, a new fear which is hot, hot, hot against the day. But our man is still on his feet, it's a miracle, it's miracle of prayer that in this explosion of bayonets and swastikas, still on his feet, still moving with the thumping, thumping, punching of the ground pounders boot he goes on. Moving faster, overtaking slower, moving past one, moving past two and another and another as his feet begin to obey. The bullets ping ping pinging round his form, snipping veins and killing dreams and the background melts into a cocktail of foreground static. The sound muted by our man, cause he doesn't want to hear, he can't hear, he just moves. Keep going man, keep going man someone screams to him, step over the body, keep moving, don't think, keep moving, keep moving. The wet pack is smack smacking against our mans back, sweat sticking gun to palm, blood sticking hair to face. Almost there, almost there, keep going, one more, just one more, he's gonna make, gonna make it, he's so close.

And then it happens, a grenade curls into his running path but his feet won't stop, can't stop, won't stop, so he counts and each count is like a prayer one, two, three, four and nothing happens, five, six, seven, eight, still nothing and the hope flares up inside our man. It's a dud, someone screams, dud, dud, it's a dud, feet pounding, heart singing, it's a dud, it must be, it must be, but it's not. The explosion ripples through the air moving outwards at a lazy pace as if to say, why should l hurry, you've got nowhere to go. The slow motion lazy blast hits our man in the face, white light implodes into red and fades to black and our man gets puled down, down, down into the Nazi night.

See, this is how my Grandfather lost his sight and sometimes when he drank he remembered and when he remembered he would talk. A man who came home a hero to homes for heroes but never worked again. It seems that veterans are only useful if they’re photogenic. So he took his pock marked hands and deep scarred face to interviews and come home with nothing. Again and again he went into the peace time breach, went fumbling along corridors but couldn’t make eye contact, so no, eventually eeking it out on benefits. But he was never angry with his fate, never, always tomorrow he would say, always tomorrow, always a new day and he was right there is always a new day on every day except one, the day you die. His came in ‘92 when his heart failed, l suppose it’d been broken for so long. We clustered around him like gravestones, nana spoke softly into his ear, ‘don't be angry’. He answered with last breath squeezed from an empty lung, ‘l'm always angry when l'm dying’.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.

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