A discussion at Aldeburgh poetry festival that was billed as examining “the confines of form” and the “shortfalls of free verse” developed into a focus on the use of rhyme after Hollie McNish – “I resist being called a performance poet” – declared: “I never realised it was a dirty word. I just thought poetry rhymed.” Her remarks came after the chair of the discussion, Poetry Society director Judith Palmer, asked the panel of McNish, Kei Miller and Helen Mort, if rhyme was “a guilty pleasure”. McNish said: “I’ve been told that I need to get out of rhyme, and I can’t.” She has a new collection coming out next year, and revealed that the publishers “gave me some books to read, to learn more about poetry”.  But she added: “I find it really hard to read a poetry book by people who have crafted it mainly for the page.”

This kind of talk might be regarded as almost blasphemous at Aldeburgh, which specialises in talks and discussions about the intricacies and analysis of poetry, with some events looking closely at individual poems. But the audience on Saturday night didn’t seem to turn a hair at Hollie’s confessions. I happened to be there on Sunday morning, as Hollie played dominoes with her daughter, when a festivalgoer stopped by to congratulate her on what she had said the previous evening.

McNish, who studied languages at Cambridge, as well as excelling at lacrosse and football, and has a master’s degree in development economics, told the discussion audience at the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings: “I’ve been ashamed to say this, but I’m fine with it now. I don’t sweat a lot over poetry – poetry has been my way of simplifying my thoughts about things. I feel the idea of editing and polishing and thinking about form is difficult … I like poetry that I can understand quite simply.”

Helen Mort, on the other hand, certainly does sweat over her poetry – to the extent of working out  rhythms in her head while out running. She said: “Sometimes I get home and the rhythm of the poem isn’t finished. So I have to run round the block one more time.”  

She said that she once went on a course with Don Paterson, who argued that as two people became more heated in argument, “they tend to speak more and more in iambic pentameter”. Like Hollie McNish, she started writing poems when young, “dictating them to my mum”. She became involved with the Foyle Young Poets scheme: “My first poem was in quatrains, though I didn’t know what a quatrain was then.” She went on Arvon courses, and started experimenting with free verse. Now “rhyme is coming back into my work”.  

Kei Miller believes that “you have to sweat over a poem, then you have to wipe its brow, so that the readers doesn’t see the sweat. Good craft has to be there, but the last bit of the sweat is to hide all that effort.”

He added: “A teacher once told us that the heart beats in iambic pentameters. What the hell? It clearly doesn’t.” He said that in his Forward prize-winning collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, “the cartographer is always, always a metaphor for poetry and for meter.  I wanted to put together iambic pentameter rhythm and Rastafarian rhythm, how they meet, and how they clash … I wanted to implicate the iambic pentameter in the terrible [colonial] history … I was interested in trying to break out from it, and in writing against it.”    

Back to McNish, who said: “I don’t know if I do anything intentionally. Talking about rules and restrictions kind of makes me nervous. I’m thinking, I don’t do this. I don’t know what a sestina is, I don’t know what a ballad form is. At Cambridge I was studying other things.” On the other hand, she does have to contend with certain restrictions when writing: “My partner is an MC. And I sometimes have to listen to drum and bass when I write – we have a very small flat.”  

She resists being called a performance poet, because she reads out her poems on stage. “I can’t take on that title, because it’s a craft. People turn it into a stage show, like acting. I can’t even walk across a stage while reading a poem.”   

So if she isn’t a performance or a page poet, what is she? Just a very successful and popular spoken word artist, who notches millions of hits for her poetry on YouTube, and wowed her audience at her own show the following day at Aldeburgh, receiving a rousing reception at the end. Many festivalgoers may have been seeing and hearing her poetry for the first time.

She introduced her poem about playing lacrosse at Cambridge by saying she was “doing this one because it doesn’t rhyme, and I’ve never done it live before”. McNish added that she was “quite nervous after doing the debate yesterday, and hearing that rhyme is a dirty word in poetry”.  

She began the poem, and then stopped: “Oh, sorry, it does rhyme. Why did I think it didn’t?”

 

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