THE POET IN THE COMMUNITY: A LITTLE ADVENTURE

THE POET IN THE COMMUNITY: A LITTLE ADVENTURE


I’m sitting at Oakwell watching the mighty Barnsley play Stoke City, and there’s a bit of heckling from behind me: ‘Now then, McMillan, yer tosser!’ ‘Sing us a poem, McMillan, yer wanker!’ and I smile and think ‘Ah, the exalted position of the community poet!’ The hecklers weren’t so keen on me because I’d reported one of their mates for racist abuse the week before. As I reported it one of them shouted ‘That’s that poet, Ian McMillan!’ and I was identified to all and sundry. Oh well; they know me anyway. Poet in the community, you see.

A few years before, I’m sitting in an upstairs room in a terraced house in Doncaster; the terraced house has been converted into a drop-in centre for sex workers in Doncaster’s red light district, and the girls had expressed an interest in doing some poetry and some art and, as I was Words Worker at Doncaster Community Arts at the time, I was drafted in, along with my mate the artist Bernie Rutter. I’d better explain that term Words Worker, because it’ll be relevant throughout this piece. Originally I was called Literature Worker, but I didn’t like that: it suggested that I’d be creating jewelled sonnets and three-volume novels with our disadvantaged client group that would include, at any one time, homeless people, young people excluded from mainstream school, alcoholics, people suffering from mental health problems and elderly people in residential homes. A lot of them didn’t have good writing and reading skills so much of the work was done through talking. Words would fill a room and never get written down, which was, and is, fine by me.

Anyway, there I am in the upstairs room with Bernie. There are four young women sitting around us. Nobody is looking at anybody else. The two women who work at the centre are sitting downstairs because they didn’t want their presence to, as they put it, ‘stifle the girls.’ As Bernie and I walked up the stairs, they’d shouted ‘If they get lively, just bang on the floor with a brush!’ The silence grew and solidified. I stared at my flip chart. Bernie looked at her paper. I decided that I had to say something, anything. ‘I’m scared stiff!’ I said. It wasn’t meant to be funny but it got a laugh. I then turned to one of the young women and said one of the things I often do when I’m starting workshops with people who’ve not written anything before. ‘What have you been up to, lately, then ?’ She looked at me and said ‘If somebody drags me in the pub today I’ll shoot myself.’ I said ‘That sounds like the first line of a poem…’ and that’s how we started. It turned out to be three lines, almost a little haiku: ‘If someone drags me/in the pub today/I’ll shoot myself.’ Bernie asked her what sort of gun she’d use, and pulled a book of pictures of old guns out of her bag to be cut out and photocopied. Bernie was amazing: whatever you happened to be discussing, she was able to pull something relevant from her cavernous bag. We all got talking, the girls spoke and I wrote it out and they made images with Bernie and we took them back to our office and photocopied them and printed them and when we went back the next week the girls had books of their own work. Eventually we made a mobile library out of an old Silver Cross pram and pushed it through the streets, reclaiming the neighbourhood for verse.

Fast forward again a few years. I’m in Dublin at the Guinness Storehouse for a meeting of the International Business Network. The IBN is a kind of British Council in suits, and my connection with them is an odd and interesting one. I did an after-dinner turn for a business do, telling a few tales and reading a few poems. Afterwards the IBN people asked if there was any way we could work together. This intrigued me: I love it when worlds collide, like the hecklers at the match and the sex workers distributing their pamphlets around Doncaster. We eventually came up with the idea of me being the IBN Poet In Residence (a wonderful catch-all title, that Poet in Residence one; it covers all kinds of job descriptions, all kinds of settings) and that I would go to their bi-monthly networking meetings and introduce the speakers in verse, and then they’d get a framed, signed copy of the poem. To put on eBay the next morning. Only joking. Now, of all the poet-in-the-community things I’ve done, this is the most unusual. Even though the work with the prostitutes in Doncaster was a bit scary and I had to continually think on my feet or hope that Bernie had something in her bag, this meeting of the world of the suit and the world of the casual shirt is new territory.
If, like me, you’ve only ever worked in the area of the arts and education, then the world of business is a closed book, a locked door. Business people on trains, in their suits and ties and posh frocks, spouting an almost unfathomable language into their mobiles, were exotic creatures to me in the same that way that I, scribbling into my notebook and leafing through slim volumes of poetry, am an exotic creature to them. And yet, surprise surprise: beneath the suit beats the heart of a human being who perhaps likes poetry, who often likes music and sometimes plays it on a guitar or a piano and sometimes writes songs, who likes art, and who more often than not has an amazing story to tell. And who would never ever think of selling my deathless verse on eBay, signed or not.

Poetry in the community can be many things, of course, and the three examples I’ve given you are just from my own personal experience; I’ve been freelance now for a quarter of a century and I’ve always wanted to be a poet who works in the community, whatever that is and however we define it, partly because I’m not temperamentally suited to sitting in a room writing for too long.

Interestingly (to me, anyway) it’s meant that I’ve had to become three types of poet. There’s the Slim Volume Poet: the poet who writes what most people think of as Contemporary Poetry, (but which is often not very linguistically adventurous, and just sounds like gentle stand-up comedy chopped about a bit, and which I try to move away from when I can); there’s the Out Loud poet who is called upon to perform at events where they need a performer who can be a bit of a battering-ram, who can enthuse a crowd who weren’t expecting to like poetry, in the upstairs room of a pub, or in a draughty public hall at the edge of a windy estate, or on a train full of sweaty commuters, and there’s the Occasional Poet, the poet who can be called on to write something light and rhyming to liven up a public event, to introduce someone or open a new building, and then (in my case, with the aid of my trusty flipchart and a couple of felt-tip pens) create an Instant Poem with the audience to send them away happy.

My aim, as a poet in the community, is always the same: to make people go away thinking ‘Is that what poetry is ? I can do that!’ If you’re a poet in the community you can’t believe that poetry is a tiny precious vase that will break if you drop it; you have to believe that it’s a robust jug, the strongest of all the arts because it begins with the sounds we make with our bodies, and it belongs to everyone. What this means for me, of course, is that the subtleties drop away (maybe I was never that subtle anyway) and a lot of the verse I work with in the community wouldn’t make it into the Times Literary Supplement. Sometimes I think that’s a good thing, sometimes I think it’s a bad thing. Mostly I’m not sure. We’re all different, of course, and being heckled a football matches is just an optional extra. Invent your own way of being a Poet in the Community and it will be the right way!

© Ian McMillan
written for 57 Productioins
12.9.06

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