Jem Rolls

Even though teenagers do Hamlet, you think how big a part Hamlet is, and they do actually...

learn all that stuff so I do sometimes wonder what privilege is poetry not to try and I think you know because there's supposedly there's a great on-running debate between page and stage that I have to say that I've never really encountered that debate and I've never really had it with anyone and no one ever really asked me and virtually all the people these debates do go on it's people who want to have bridges between the two because most of these people want to sell books I've got no interest in selling books at all

So I'd say that the way that I think a bit about it is what advantages are there?

If you get on stage and read from a book, what advantages are there in terms of audience over standing there with a book and standing there performing?

And I think that I'm, you know, and I'd like anyone listening to this to think about that question because I think the answer is none.

There aren't any.

There are no advantages whatsoever to standing there reading from your book unless it's some kind of product placement.

But in terms of the audience, what the audience gets, and let's face it, that's who it's for.

It's for the audience.

There is nothing that someone can do with the book that somebody who's performing can't do.

So really, because I created this big contretemps and things in Edinburgh,

and sort of poetry, and where I felt like, you know, Ian Morrison said to me, Jen, you spent the entire week under siege.

And I thought, well, actually, really, it's been like I've been some kind of parasite or pathogen, and they were a bunch of white blood cells that sort of clung to me.

Anyway, and I think maybe if I overrate myself enough, I'll think that I threw them off.

But anyway, there are no advantages whatsoever to the

page against the stage and really people saying, oh, they want to celebrate the diversity, there's this way of doing it and that way of doing it.

But really, if there's nothing that the one can do that the other one can't do, they're not different.

One is a lesser version of the other.

It's a subset.

It's the least interesting, the greatest, the most monochrome of the subset of this fantastic thing, which is performance poetry, which is getting on stage and performing stuff.