“Just write, write, write, into the void. You have your unique way of telling that story. Your way of telling that story is important.”  … “I’m a slow writer. I’m reluctant to let drafts go out into the world before they’re ready.”  That was a taste of the advice handed out to student writers by two leading poets, Roy McFarlane and Jo Clement, during a Q&A session conducted by Tara Bergin, poet and senior lecturer in writing poetry, at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab on Thursday.

The event showcased the poetry of McFarlane and Clement, two selectors for the Newcastle-based Poetry Book Society, which sends out quarterly selections of books of subscribers.

Roy McFarlane, who was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage – “I grew up as the son of a minister” - said he started writing 25 years ago, when he wanted to be a novelist and short story writer. “But I was working with young people who were into rap … I said, That’s poetry! I think poetry found me.”

Darlington-born Jo Clement’s debut collection Outlandish, published in Bloodaxe in 2022, confronts a Gypsy, Roma and Traveller legacy. She said: “I was the first person in my family to finish school, let alone go to university.” Both poets’ CVs include Newcastle academic credentials. Roy McFarlane is an MA graduate in writing poetry at Newcastle University, while Jo Clement gained a creative writing PhD at Newcastle, and now lectures in creative writing at Northumbria University.

Clement said that “when a poem is well-honed, it’s a weapon. But it can also be a wound … written from, perhaps a trauma, perhaps a joy”. “Can it also be a salve?” Tara Bergin wondered.   

Roy McFarlane delivers his poetry with passion and resonance, compelling a normally more sedate Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts audience to burst into applause after every poem. His cento about Gaza – “Gaza, Gaza, burning bright” -contains elements from William Blake, Langston Hughes, spiritual words, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, among a number of others.

‘The Weight of Silence’ includes the instance when veteran Black Labour MP Diana Abbott tried to speak “46 times” in the Commons, without being called by the Speaker, during a debate about remarks aimed at her.   

‘The Passion of the Enslaved / On the Body of a Negro’, from McFarlane’s latest, third collection, Living by Troubled Waters, also published in 2022, focuses on the strange death verdicts given by Caribbean coroners about often runaway slaves, who died “of excess passion in herself … died by the Visitation of God at the Asylum”. He told the audience that slaves sometimes swapped “coded” songs about runaways, and indeed burst into song himself – and McFarlane is a fine singer. Talking of singers, and in a change of mood, he also delivered a sensual “love poem” to Janet Jackson.

Jo Clement’s ekphrastic poem ‘Manes’ examines the Winged Victory figure outside Newcastle’s Haymarket that commemorates the men in Northumbrian regiments that lost their lives in the Second Boer War (1899-1902).  Clement’s poem is about the horses that carried the men – “And yet, not a soul / of them have names here // as men do, in stone.”

Before reading ‘Tinker’s Tea’ she asked the audience: “Who’s the ‘tinker’ in this tale, and what does the word ‘tinker’ mean to you?”

‘Crown’ is set on the borders, and at a village where Gypsy and Roma people were granted self-governance at one time. She told her audience of the “great gift and great curse of Traveller culture – “you weren’t allowed to talk about it to outsiders.”  Meanwhile ‘Le Bucher’ celebrates Joan of Arc, and notes that in Rouen

 

               They gave her twice to fire

                       where Flaubert saw the smoking

 

                 Gypsy camp. Hated, he wrote,

                       is the bedouin, the heretic, the poet.

 

Cautionary words, perhaps, for all those creative writing students out there in the Culture Lab audience.