Chapter 1: What insights does Jem Rolls share about the page/stage debate?
In my backstage poem, which isn't really a poem, yes it is, no it's not, yes it is, no it's not, in my backstage poem, the author is going to have an old-fashioned, artsy-fancy fit of beat, join the writer's block, and go on strike.
You're listening to a Scottish Poetry Library podcast.
Hello, this is Jennifer Williams, Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library, and it is my pleasure to be sitting in the library with Jem Rolls.
Jem Rolls is someone who I feel like has been a great teacher for me in many ways because he's one of the first poets and at the time and he still is he was very much also a poetry promoter and someone putting on poetry events when I first came to Edinburgh in 2001 and he was very encouraging and supportive to me and gave me some of the first platforms for reading my own poems in public and
I feel like helped teach me a lot about how to put on poetry events and promote them and ran a wonderful festival years ago in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Rush. And that involved all sorts of spoken word events that were on in Edinburgh at the time. And Jem was also running first with Anita Govan and then with Jenny and Lindsay.
Big word. Big word, yes. So first I ran it with Anita Govan, then I ran it briefly with Rob G and then I ran it with Jenny and Lindsay.
Oh, I forgot about the Rob G bit. Yes. General's is also known as the godfather of, what is it, the godfather of spoken word?
The godfather of Scottish performance poetry, according to the Scotsman, and they do know what they're talking about. Well, in a sense, apart from that it's not true, but, you know, it is the Scotsman.
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Chapter 2: How does Jem Rolls make a living from performing poetry?
So, yes, that's their line, and, well, there was only so much going on in about 2001, and about 2001 I arrived, and I just had a really, really good time
going around running poetry shows and fighting acts and just being, really I went on a three-year pub crawl around the city, which is a fabulous place to go for a pub crawl, one of the best cities on earth for a pub crawl, and I went for a three-year one, ladies and gentlemen, and it was really not bad. I didn't talk, I was totally on message.
I mean, I was dementedly monomaniac, didn't talk about anything apart from performance poetry. It was kind of inevitable if you hung around in the same spot for very long sooner or later. I would be performing a poem to and the upshot of this fun fun process was that at the end there were quite a good bunch of performance parts around in town.
I mean I had loads and loads of press and lots of fun was had by various people until I left in 2006 because I actually discovered a way of making a living. as a performance poet. So I don't actually make a living as a poet, I don't make a living as a, only through door sales.
So I don't sell anything, no one books me, no one hires me, no one's curated anything that they put me on, so I have no real truck with, accomplishments or institutions or books or merchandise or anything whatsoever. It's just human beings who come to the show and pay something like $10 and that's my entire living.
So it's a really nice situation to be in because I don't have to make any compromises whatsoever apart from the fact that the audience have to like what I do. So I have to work on the ideas and frequently invert them, invert them and invert them again trying to find a way to make big ideas
kind of appealing so that people um will want them really and um so yeah so i do make a living doing the hour show so it's a 60 minute show and i have to write a new one every year and i mean i think i have some quite some you know some big numbers knocking around the history i've done you know 2600 shows and i've promoted well over a thousand and i've had
35 five-star reviews and they've got 150 at least by miles four star reviews but the big number the big number is the number 10 i've written 10 poetry shows but i think at some point in the future i don't think that how on earth do they write that 10 years straight another poetry show and i like them all yeah i mean some of them are more keen on others you know my 2006 show i didn't know it was in my 2006 show you know all my records have gone
I can't account for 20 minutes of the hour. I really like that show.
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Chapter 3: What role does rhyme play in poetry according to Jem Rolls?
And, you know, that doesn't always work. It's a tough one. Nothing's guaranteed, you know. Just because they like you one day doesn't mean they're not going to hate you the next. Just because they hate you in one sitting doesn't mean they're going to love you in the next, you know, and so on.
So it's, you know, it fries your nerves and it's an up-down crash band wallet, but when it works, it's, you know, and I have to sweat blood on the shows for months, maybe years, so, you know, there is a sense of when it finally pays off, you know, there's a kind of culmination, a consummation in all this, you know, and that's what I...
Yeah, that is the best thing, and I don't really know that many other people have quite the same relationship with audience or with media, because it's just about the audience.
Well, the best way to experience Gem is in person, but a very special treat we've got for you is that he's going to read some, well, perform? Read? Perform? some poems for you here today and we'll talk a little bit about them as well. So I'll let you start with your first poem.
So this piece is about my ever-growing, more popular global pastime known to some as spectator queuing but to the rest of us as tourism. So this is called The Day Died Very Old. I was only five hours into the day and I was already into my fifth palace, abbey, museum or gallery. I was slack-jawed and loose-limbed, gaga, aghast and agog.
Amongst all the shineless faces and the samified logo, Gore-Tex torsos, the self-narrowed limits on the rubbernecking guidebook minds, the bone-dry drone buys and the sing-song tour guide parotry, the digitalised instance and the slow-mo camcord no-time. I was too many lifetimes into today and it was still refusing to die. Why am I here? Because I came. Whose fault is this? Mine or mine?
Doing this because it's done. Ticking off a list of must-sees like the best of British bureaucrats. Because here I am, stood in front of a large case of piss yellow 15th century porcelain. And maybe if you're into piss yellow 15th century porcelain,
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Chapter 4: How does Jem describe the relationship between performance poetry and the audience?
then you're in the right place. But if you're not, and I'm not, and they're not, then you're not. You're really not. If there is a verb to not, then the present tense ending is nothing. And we, my friends, are nothing. The stewedness, the skewedness, the sourness, slowness, and scowlingness. The real is made ersatz. History is dimmed by the lighting, is merged yet divorced from itself.
I know less than I did an hour ago. It's in one ear and out the other, taking your knowledge, memory, personality and zest with it. Outside is life, teeming, local, as streets and squares and markets and bars and cafes. But we are ghettoised, out of the locals' hair, to give them a chance of normal life. We are a universal blandness, a one-race blandness.
born of airports have submitted ourselves to this sausage machine pushing slack flesh from space after
this thing from Surrey, yet mere more of this crinoline-charactered, all-nations slurry amidst the glazed eyes of this many-headed, mushy National Hydra, straggled, limp, lame, lumpen and lax, this Deadpool of the minds of many, reduced to their lowest common dumb nominator, and moving slow-flight through chamber after chamber after chamber after chamber, because there is no conceivable urgency
No anywhere needing now to go, and over the hours the spirit has slowly, surrenderedly, succumbed to numb-dumbly, waiting for nil, naught, nothing. Now, simultaneously, aware and unaware, life is elsewhere, there, anywhere, but why am I here? Because I came. Whose fault is this? Mine or mine? This is eternity, getting further away.
This is time, prostrate and swollen, expanding helplessly, inflated to valuelessness. This is every stage of a long old age felt in a few eternal minutes. This is like lining up purely in order to get into another line-up.
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Chapter 5: What unique challenges does Jem face as a performance poet?
Which sounds the quintessential English trait. It makes TV snooker seem like a good idea. It's not good. It's not fine. It's not dandy. It would bring the savage misanthrope out in both Christ and Gandhi. It's a holiday in other people's misery, surrounded by a sleepy flock of indysmalated all-nation sheep. This is like suffering for the sake of suffering, so I've something to complain about.
Which also sounds a suspiciously English trait, though I bet it's universal. I was watching the lozenges. That is, myself moved slowly, as one of many, on a slow conveyor belt. But now I'm watching myself watch the lozenges.
that is myself move slowly as one of many on a slow conveyor belt the squash fly flapping the last leaf of autumn the odourless decomposition is this how the universe ends not with a bang but with the fading memory of a barely heard far away whimper
Thank you.
So, very appropriate in this town, which makes a substantial amount of living from tourism. Well, I've always been good at machine-gunning myself from young feet, you know. Let's just make it as hard as possible to make a living, and then make one.
And you are very well-travelled, and something else about you is, and part of the amazing thing about your career is that you found a way to work for half the year and travel for half the year, really, haven't you?
Yeah, so, well, it's just a thing, you know, basically you can write anywhere, and I think the other thing is you can write anywhere, so I've written things in thousands of internet cafes, But I'm basically, I'm nailed to the trend across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, from June to September.
Because you do this sort of, there's a Canadian festival, series of festivals that happen over the summer. Whereas in Edinburgh, we just had the Fringe Festival in August. These happen in cities all across Montreal, I mean, all across Canada. So performers can actually travel from one to the next throughout the summer.
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Chapter 6: How does Jem approach the writing process for his poetry shows?
But they're theatre festivals. So, you know, for a long time, I was the only poet. And now there's a few more that have done it. They're only Rob G's, really. But yes, it's a great bunch of people, you know, it's a bunch of clowns, a bunch of monologuists, a bunch of straight theatre, wild theatre, dancers, musicians. And it's a really, really great gang.
They're kind of mildly Canadian, but they are from all over. Nothing else exists like it on earth. And like I say, for a long time, I was the only poet that found it. And it does free me up the rest of the year. And the summer is shattering. I will do 65 shows this year. I'm actually doing three different shows at points across the summer. I've never done more than one.
But it's the new show that's the tough bit. So I start in Montreal in 10 weeks time. And that is the tough bit. So a show I've done before. I do a Greatest Hits show in Orlando. and I do last year's show from Santa Catriona onwards and that's fine in a sense, it's work, you've got to get up to speed, but the new stuff, that's a tough bit.
I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you write the poems, where they come from, are you thinking even when the ideas first come into your head about where they might fit into a show further down the line or is there a much more kind of
free generative process where you're i mean my impression of you knowing you for a long time is that you are like super well read you're always interested in politics and history and literature and all sorts of things and and what's going on day to day in the world around you and that that all seems to be feeding into your work so but i'm just curious about whether i mean the writing of the poems is that different from the creating of the
the hour-long show, or is that all part of the same person?
Well, it's a long one. Very few things happen quickly, but one I just did, that actually happened within, probably within two days in France. I'd just been in Mont-Saint-Michel and hated it. So, but that's not normal. And also, there are lots of lines in it that I've had for...
years and years which i finally found a way of using you know so that's not normal most things take a lot longer and i frequent them just putting ideas together and taking them apart putting ideas together until they actually start making something you know so um they um they kind of achieve a whole maybe then i find that what they're about and again other ideas i've had so i'm always writing down zillions of ideas i have a vast bucket
of unused ideas which never gets any empty no matter how much i take things out of it so basically i do and i have effectively i have a list of one liners and you know my favorite you know and it's 30 pages of one liners and effectively the first the first five pages i like them all i like all of them so that's a good 100 120 one liners and i mean in this year's show i will probably use up 25 30 of them yeah and um but you're just kind of looking for a home for good ideas because
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Chapter 7: What advice does Jem offer for aspiring performance poets?
It's a performance poetry show, and I think in a sense, it's really about, you want to keep the audience ready for the moment. If your lines are good enough, keep the audience for the moment. So in a sense, I think in a sense, narrative isn't necessarily so important, or theme maybe, narrative not necessarily, story not necessarily, as long as your idea's good enough.
So it doesn't mean that there's a form that you're adhering to, any poetic form whatsoever. Though I am having quite a good fun with cheap and nasty rhymes at the moment. A little cheap and nasty rhymes, which I have to say are much easier to learn, folks. Anyway, and so it's a lengthy process. Some of these things take years.
The backstage part, which I'll do at some point fairly soon, that took a long time. And I frequently write something silly for a couple of years.
decided it was rubbish, same when I buy shirts, or somebody buys me shirts, I always hate them at first, so I hang them up, putting them out two years later, oh that's a nice shirt, and then I say, oh what a nice shirt that is, you know, so yeah, it's a bit like that with poems really, so.
And do you find that there, as you do pull some of them out and read them or perform them, I mean before you read this, you said to me already that this poem that's on the page, is a different version than the one you would be performing if you were performing it now. Do you find that as you perform them, they change and that's part of editing them almost? Absolutely.
It's essentially A before you start the tour and B on the tour, everything gets better. Nothing really, really gets worse. I don't think I've ever known a piece decline from it. It's just in the brute basic moment. You just get a sense of what line's working. And you know, you can have a great idea, but you just haven't expressed it.
a couple of words in the wrong order and you just find the right order and that kind of thing. And also it gets a lot of fat out of the systems. And most things, most poems get shorter. Most pictures are more like comedy routines, get longer. And so you have to, yeah, kind of watch out for them really. But yes, generally there's just generally a lot of fat in there.
And yet frequently, only until you perform the thing, you've got something blindly obvious. You're basically on the verge of something much better than what you had.
Frequently happens yeah, and you know you only find that in the moment and how you could have not when you read things through a hundred times you cannot realize the blind and the obvious but yeah, you're frequently do or people say things but generally it's just you're aware in the moment there's something that's not quite there you know you're being 95% and 95% isn't enough.
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Chapter 8: What are Jem's thoughts on the importance of live performance versus reading from a page?
It is in and of itself a totally great focus and, you know, for someone like yourself, you've made a whole career out of it. But I think even for people for whom that isn't their ultimate goal, it's a really invaluable technique.
Well, I doubt there's ever been a poem published that wouldn't be better if they performed it a hundred times before it got to the page. And I mean the most obscure non-performative types, you know, I still think... It would actually help if they had to communicate their idea over to people. I don't think aesthetically it would do their pieces any harm at all.
I've heard people say that Paradise Lost should be much shorter and it would be a better poem, and I wonder if he'd been performing it, what would have happened to him?
Right, okay, yeah. Right. Because, oh, he's just stuck at home all night, you know, I'm a genius, I'll just write another... I'll just write another couple pages of that. No one's going to complain because I'm a genius, yeah. Yeah, that's a plan.
Do you have... favourite poets or poems that you feel like inspire you?
Basically I get no inspiration whatsoever I think from poetry and I can't think of any really that's inspired me apart from John Cooper Clarke when I was a teenager you never get enough of the Daily Express it's enormous fun with rhyme really and I listen to a lot of song lyrics and old musicals And novels really, particularly American novels, just upbeat, banging prose.
So I'm big on Tom Wolfe, you know, don't like politics, talk marvellous, right? Thomas Wolfe, who seems to be one of the great lost geniuses. And, you know, Henry Miller, Martin Amis for that matter, and then, you know, Tony Morrison. Anyway, in a sense, that's extremely well-done language. In fact, that's basically language done as well as, you know, translation you can never tell.
So I think that's language done pretty much as well as you're going to find it, Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellows. It's a stupendous, stupendous book, really. So yeah, just when words on the page seem to actually have a self-generating energy. which you don't find very often, and a lot of writers say, no, I did this not remotely, or they're planning to do.
And again, I'm song lyrics, you know, just cheesy song lyrics, and Bob Dylan, you know, and just lots of, A, sort of messing around with rhyme, and just lines that say a lot quite quickly.
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