John Hegley has described the poems in his first full collection as “ fired and inspiring”. He is a towering presence – in every sense – on the performance poetry scene. Tony Walsh – aka Longfella – tells Greg Freeman and Julian Jordon about deprived communities, his new book Sex & Love & Rock&Roll,  and his belief in the power of words to change lives. 

 

You appear to have become a full-time performance poet a little later in life than some. Before that you were working as a housing and community officer for many years. How big a decision was it to give up the day job? Was there a “lightbulb” moment when you decided to become a professional poet?

It was a huge decision but a gradual one.  My first appearance at a poetry open mic night was in autumn 2004 at the age of 39 when I had two small children, a terminally ill mother, a mortgage and a demanding professional job in the public sector.  I was hooked though, and lucky enough to progress quite quickly to local guest slots, before finding myself appearing at Glastonbury in 2005.  From there it was a case of “life begins at 40” and I took my day job down to four days in around 2008. This allowed me to build up my CV until I eventually took redundancy and went full-time in 2011.  For the final decision there was a push, a pull and some enablers.  The push was what is happening to our public services which I had no wish to be a part of; the pull was to see how far I can take this strange but exciting life of Wordslinger for Hire; and the enablers were a redundancy payment plus, crucially, the support of my wife and kids to give it a go at considerable cost to us as a family. Weirdly, at the precise moment that I pressed “send” on the email to my employer, my mobile phone buzzed and it was the message asking me if I’d like to be website poet in residence at Glastonbury festival in 2011. Yes, please!

 

Is it fair to say that your poetry reflects the situations and people you came across in your work? And why you now often work with prisoners and youth projects? 

That’s true up to a point, but I’m also a council house kid myself and lived in the inner city all my adult life up to my mid-30s, including 10 years living in the (then) officially most deprived ward in the country.  My job titles were all around housing/regeneration/neighbourhoods/communities and I worked with many of the most deprived communities in Manchester and Salford for nearly 20 years. In my twenties, in the 1980s, I also did a couple of years working in factories, plus four years serving on Post Office counters before being tied up at gunpoint in an armed robbery. It all percolates away in the background for me as a writer and comes out in different ways.  As someone from that background it’s now a thrill and a privilege for me to be able to help others to find their own talents and voices. It’s a really important part of what I do – financially as well as ethically. But I think that another important part of my reply is that not all of my poetry is about working-class issues, but also about universal themes such as family, loss, hope  and so on. About sex and love and rock and roll, in fact – the poems in the book were selected to fit those themes.  Sex not just in a nudge-nudge way, but mainly as an adult, beautiful, complex, difficult, messy, diverse and glorious thing. Love, not just in a romantic sense, but in a parent/child sense, in a communal and a global sense and as a force for change.  Plus rock & roll, poetry and art as the things that make life bearable and also as drivers for awakenings and social change.

 

Reading your manifesto at the start of your collection, Sex & Love & Rock&Roll, almost leaves an interviewer lost for questions, because you’ve answered a lot of them in advance. Rhyme or free verse?  “We live our life to rhythms and patterns, we’re hard-wired to receive them.” ‘Mainstream’ poetry? “Only mainstream if you mainly stream it from the private lakes and remote backwaters of our culture, causing barely a ripple outside of its own talent pool.” Page v stage? “It’s about poetry moving us to tears, not boring us to tears. It’s about entertainment value being admired, not sneered at.” Apologies if these quotes seem selective. But our follow-up questions to them would be:

Do you think there is a north-south divide in poetry, or is it a myth? What is the state of health of the poetry scene, as you see it? Are some of your best friends page poets?  

Ok, three very different questions there. Let’s see: 

I don’t think it’s as simple as a north/south divide or indeed a class divide – there are working-class academic poets and privately educated performance poets. Nor is it as simple as “page poets” and “stage” poets – presses like Burning Eye and Flapjack Press are putting the poetic likes of me onto the page and everyone from Carol Ann Duffy to Simon Armitage is turning up on stage in packed tents at Latitude festival.  

But, broadly speaking, poetry operates in a series of very different worlds from which there are only limited points of crossover. Poetry is as broad an art form as music, but music has the infrastructure, the “bandwidth” and the public understanding to allow all shades of say, jazz, to operate in parallel to all shades of, say, heavy metal. Metal bands don’t send their album to a jazz radio station and complain when they don’t like their music, but the equivalent happens between forms of poetry. My book’s “manifesto” sets all this out before calling for us to “never mind the bollocks”; to stop trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and to move on towards building a respected, thriving poetry scene in all its forms – including for those who seek to be accessible and to entertain.

In terms of the scene’s state of health, I think that performance poetry and spoken word in all its variant forms is in very exciting times. We’ve got thriving professional and open mic nights all around the country, Kate Tempest recently won the Ted Hughes prize, there are poetry shows touring with the production values of theatre shows and music gigs, our momentum has earned our own listings pages in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival guide, we’ve got poets going viral on YouTube, there’s poetry at more and more of the music festivals and, crucially, the education work which many of us have been doing in schools and youth settings will continue to generate a stream of new, young, internet-savvy poets who can only take the scene onwards and upwards.  I also think that audiences are looking for a social commentary which is very hard to find from both music and comedy but which the spoken word scene excels at. 

Further interesting twists come with technology and the way that digital publishing, e-publishing and all the other ways to get our words and performances “out there” are allowing spoken word poets to simply dance past those gatekeepers whose gates have remained closed to us. A breakthrough into television and thereby into wider public consciousness remains elusive but I know that good people are working on both cracking that and getting around it.  As I say, exciting times!

Are some of my best friends page poets? Absolutely! Traditional page poets; poets who span both the page and stage scenes; and hitherto stage poets, like myself, who are also committing their work to the page.  I think that the different sides of the art form have lots to learn from each other but ultimately it’s all about communication, it’s all about truth and beauty, it’s about moving on and raising our collective game. And it’s about time.

 

Many of the poems in Sex & Love & Rock&Roll are about society’s fallen, or walking wounded. And a majority of those subjects in your poems are women. Why do you think that is? 

I was delighted when my friend, the amazing north west-based playwright Cathy Crabb, picked up on this point and said: “… Northern souls - he knows us. The women in his poems have been sketched with empathy and celebration, their faltering described with emphatic passion, helplessness and love.” They say “write what you know” and I’ve been surrounded by women all my life. We were overcrowded at home and I lived alternate weeks between our house and my Nan’s little terrace house for years when I was a kid, surrounded by sisters, neighbours, aunties and “aunties”. I’ve been with my partner since we were 19 and nearly all my bosses over the years have been women. But, crucially, doing the sort of jobs that I’ve done, I’ve been there to help a lot of women having to deal with a lot of shit off a lot of men. Plus, very, very often, it’s women who are the main voices, activists and leaders in their communities – whilst often dealing with many of the issues that I’m talking about – single parenthood, debt, poverty, bad housing, domestic and other violence, isolation, ill-health, addiction and so on. I’ve been privileged to work with some incredible women.

The book is in sections though and only a percentage of my poems are about such scenarios. There’s comedic stuff in there, love poems, sonnets, haiku, poems about music and festivals, plus poems calling for collectivism and change. Something for everyone, I’d hope. 

 

The subjects of your poems often seem to be the victims of other people, rather than of “society” or any political party. Do you try to keep politics out of your poetry? On the other hand, your poem, It’s All Going Down Posh Down The Precinct, - “If my life doesn’t fit with this lifestyle / how has it got any better?” - reads like a criticism of the values of New Labour. I see it was written in 2004, during the Blair years? 

It was, and I was working in the frontline of Labour’s social policies at that time, and a great many people were helped in many ways.  The poem itself isn’t a criticism, rather – as the book’s notes explain – it’s written in the voice of an old man who is very uncomfortable, as many people were, with the pace and direction of the social and physical changes happening to his neighbourhood. It’s important that we give voice to those opinions because not everything was got right – domestically or internationally. But, if not always political, then most of my poetry, I’d argue, is socially engaged. Some of it, not necessarily in this book, is expressly political however, including my anti-cuts poem, For The People, which is a nine-minute demolition of this Tory-led coalition government and their abhorrent policies. It was commissioned by my former trade union, Unison, and can be seen here in performance outside St Paul’s cathedral during the Occupy protest on New Year’s Eve 2011-12: As one guy was kind enough to comment: “Now that’s a PROPER telling off!”

 

You’ve appeared at an eclectic variety of venues.  What was your favourite / oddest / most surprising gig?

One memorable story is about performing for the British Council in the towering Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw, Poland.  The building is controversial locally as it presented a phallic, middle-finger salute to the local populace from the Stalinist regime straight after a world war in which the city was flattened and wronged in so many ways.  The building has a nickname which allows me to say that I’ve performed inside Stalin’s Penis! The gig itself was “challenging” and “eventful”, shall we say, but the story is a good one.

 

You’re written a very uplifting poem about Glastonbury. Can you say any more about what if felt like to be there?

The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts is quite simply one of the most incredible things that happens on this planet. The main stage that dominates the telly coverage is but a tiny fraction of the experience which has a perimeter fence (excluding the car parking) which measures eight miles around! The best thing would be to read my blog from my time there, and watch a video there of the poem that you’ve mentioned. Ultimately, and despite pressures and compromises, it’s a festival built from hippy and green ideals, not from ruthless commercial imperatives. Maybe we should run the world that way? Only with better toilets.  And fewer bongos.

 

Is it Tony Walsh, or Longfella, or both / either? Which do you prefer? We’re a bit confused.

So am I! My book is credited to Tony Walsh, with Longfella serving as my nickname - a bit like Frank Sinatra and Ol’ Blue Eyes, only without the millions. Or the mafia connections. I answer to either or both, just please don’t call me Tony ‘Longfella’ Walsh which always makes me think of Freddie ‘Parrot Face’ Davies. It’s a combined reference to my lanky frame, my Irish heritage and an irreverent take on the classical poet Longfellow and his ilk. My friend Dave Kirkwood did the witty and pretty-damn-cool logo for me which I’m delighted with; the double L presented as two long legs. My website is www.longfella.co.uk but be careful how you type it. Longfella.com is a very different website!

 

You continue to be very generous in mentioning Write Out Loud as a contributing factor in getting you started as a performance poet. What would your advice to wannabe performers making their first open mic appearance?

I run workshops for new and emerging poets and so I could drone on for hours, but the main advice is to enjoy it, watch other poets closely, pay to see the professionals and – as with anything – work hard at it if you want to become better.  A strong, animated reading from the page can be better than a bad performance from memory, but do try to look people in the eye as much as you can – it’s all about connection.  Most of us, these days, have the means to record audio and/or video of our performances on our phones or laptops. Play them back, study them, and you’ll learn a lot about yourself and where you can improve. Then it’s about giving yourself permission to “adjust your dials" around pacing, volume, movement and emotional range.  That, in turn, starts to allow you to write for the full breadth and depth of what you’re capable of.

 

Your manifesto reveals a deep and eloquent commitment to helping to promote the “vibrant, exciting” live poetry movement – “a folk poetry, all of it”. Where does this passion of yours come from?

I’ll put my full manifesto online at some point. The book aims to serve as a rallying call for our amazing scene, a scene that has quite literally changed my life to an incredible degree and which deserves a much bigger audience.  After the manifesto, the book starts and ends with poems that call for poetry to be accessible and exciting, to reclaim the place in our culture which it rightly deserves; to be “inclusive, not exclusive; fun, not funereal; sexy not sexless.  Intelligent not unintelligible.”  A poetry that shouts “Oi, Emperor! We can see your arse, mate! We Have Come. To Spread. The Word!” At the end of the book I provide some weblinks and list about 200 UK and international poets for readers to check out. It’s my tiny way of trying to give something back to this incredible scene.

 

A number of poems in your collection, such as Someone Warm To Hold and Let’s Make A Love, take a positive view of relationships, and are more about love than lust. Is that your message: that, in the end, love is all you need?

There are several love poems in the book. Those are two, but there are a lot of poems also about unrequited love and when relationships go wrong. But if there’s a central theme to the book then it is love.  The word “love” is at the centre of the cover design for that reason, love in all its forms including humanity and compassion. The strapline for the book is “Sex & Love & Rock&Roll: It’s all about coming together / and changing the world.” There’s always the danger of that sounding corny but it’s easy to be cynical and, to quote my own poem: “I believe that spreading love should win awards for daring.” If I drop dead tomorrow then I can be happy that I’ve left a book that tells a few truths, tries to inspire a few people and leaves a message that I believe in.  The feedback for the book so far has been excellent, and I’ve had a couple of standing ovations at launch events so, yeah, it’s been great to feel that people are loving the book’s message.

 

Tony Walsh is a former housing and community officer and now a leading performance poet based in Manchester. He was Glastonbury festival’s poet in residence in 2011, has been a multiple winner and finalist in top slam competitions, and is involved in workshop, youth and community projects. His first full collection, Sex & Love & Rock&Roll, Burning Eye, £10, is available here  

 

PHOTOGRAPH: BOHDAN PIASECKI