INTERVIEW with Tim Turnbull

Jane Holland interviews Tim Turnbull for POETS ON FIRE.

‘On Thursday 26th January 2006, at Pentagram in London's Notting Hill, it was announced that Tim Turnbull had been awarded the first Performance Poetry Fellowship by the Arts Foundation.

Tim Turnbull has been performing his poetry, at home and abroad, for over ten years. A full collection, 'Stranded in Sub-Atomica', was published by from Donut Press on November 11th 2005.

Turnbull's first poetry performance was in a Slam at Chat's Palace in Homerton, East London in 1994. Since then he has slammed, read and performed his work throughout Britain and abroad. Cussedly maintaining that he makes no distinction between writing for stage and page, he has also been widely published in magazines and on the web.’


JH: Greetings, Tim, and thanks for agreeing to spare the time for this POETS ON FIRE interview. First off, I know you did your first Slam in East London in 1994, but is that when you first started writing poetry or was there an earlier genesis before you stood up on stage?

TT: There was a series of genesii, I suppose. I did start writing poetry at school. I had a couple of poems published in a student paper at Newcastle Poly in 1979 where I spent a term and a bit before I ran away to the woods. There were several other false starts in the eighties but I had no idea where poetry was published or how to present it to people or who would be interested in it. Anyway I burnt everything I’d written in 1988 before I went to forestry school.

All this time I was playing in a series of beat combos so I got very used to being on stage. It just seems logical to me that if you write something and you want to find an audience you get up and do it live. When slam came along I was made up. It gave me the opportunity to dip my toe in the water and try my work out.

JH: There's been quite a fevered debate going on for some years now about the differences between page and performance poetry. You famously claim there is no difference, but perhaps you could elaborate on that opinion for those who disagree - like me, for instance - and maybe comment on the fact that so few poems written to be performed seem to make it into established poetry publications like Poetry Review etc.

TT: I’m allergic to fevered debates. They’re a waste of energy. It usually means gangs circling up the wagons and defending their little plots. I try to be like Shane and stay out of it. If that’s not a shit metaphor. Which it probably is.

What I have found is there are ways to communicate your intentions in performance, however approximately, on the page using conventional poetic technique, line length, white space or whatever.

There are poems and then there are books and performance and I try to take account of both the latter when I’m writing the former. I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t.

JH: Now, you recently won the £10,000 Arts Foundation Fellowship for Performance Poetry. Congratulations on that! Mine's a Southern Comfort.

TT: Is that a glass or a bottle, Jane?

JH: Oh, definitely a bottle. The more Southern one has, the more comfortable it becomes. So can you tell me how the Arts Foundation nomination came about, and what you plan to do with your well-gotten gains?

TT: I was one of a number of poets nominated. We all had to submit a proposal saying what we’d do with the money (artistically that is, bogging off to the Seychelles wasn’t an option), five of us were short-listed, we took part in a performance at the South Bank, the judges judged and, praise be, awarded it to me.

I’ve started by buying some audio equipment and software to develop new ideas with and I’m trying to work out how to produce a stage show to go with my next collection, ‘Caligula on Ice’. I want to use some of the money to get help from theatre type people; folks who know what they’re doing. I want to put more work into the staging of events, to raise the standards for myself.

Last week by way of experiment I was recording poems at home to see how they sound, reading a few books about British Music Hall performers, sampling Spike Jones and his City Slickers and trying to reproduce the sound of the Cramps electronically. I have no idea where this will all lead. It’s nice to be cut a bit of slack to try new ideas though.

JH: Yes, I’ve just managed to put my hands on an MP3 recorder and I’m using it to record a bit of King Lear, believe it or not, for a memorising project I’m doing in Birmingham called Charade (www.charade.org.uk). I’m going to record some of my poetry at the same time. That sort of thing does make you think about new ways of presenting your poetry, about the possibilities of music and sampling and maybe other voices too. Which leads me neatly into the inevitable 'influence' question. Do you feel you’ve been influenced by any other poets, writers or performers, and if so, who are these people and why do you think their work has spoken to you so particularly?

TT: Lots and lots and all sorts of different people. Tony Harrison, August Kleinzahler, Frankie Howard, Rochester, Rob Gee, Shelley, Joe Cairo, Joe Asser, Patience Agbabi, Vic Lambrusco, Les Dawson, some bloke who supported Anti-Pasti at York and did a poem about social security spies and on and on. And loads of friends I’ve made doing this stuff.

Oh and John Cooper Clark of course. I saw him with the Invisible Girls a couple of times as well as reading on his own. Fantastic. He stopped me walking under a bus outside the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park one night. That probably had some influence on how my life’s turned out.

JH: I thought Frankie Howard was amazing in ‘Up Pompei’ - superb timing, faultless delivery, a true comic genius. And yes, John Cooper Clark. My favourite JCC moment has to be his infamous haiku, which seems to be quoted in many different forms on the net, though all meaning roughly the same thing:

Getting everything
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic

In this fast-moving multi-media age, what sort of role do you see poetry playing for younger readers and audiences more used to film and tv entertainment? And do you think poetry itself is changing in the face of such commercial pressures?

TT: I think that the spread of relatively cheap technologies, DV, audio, the interweb and such-like open up opportunities for doing new things with poetry. They’re versatile little monkeys, poems. You can set them to music (Beethoven and the Invisible Girls done that), you can make films or videos to go with them (Tony Harrison, Mark Gwynne Jones), you can recite them as performance and still at the end a long day you can curl up with a mug of Sherry and a book of them and these activities are not mutually exclusive.

Interestingly, Hugo Williams in the introduction to his Faber selection of Betjeman poems says “good films mimic the traditional techniques of poetry.” Maybe films just pick better subjects these days.

I don’t think the yout’ are turned off poetry by the multiplicity of new media. In fact if you count rap as poetry the yout’ are probably more tuned in to it than at any time in history. I suspect what distracts them from reading books is the usual – booze, fornication and team sports. And quite right, too. People will come to poetry in their own time. We’ve just got to have some good material ready for them when they do.

JH: As I recall, Ted Hughes’ book-length poem sequence GAUDETE came out of notes towards a film treatment he was working on, so Hugo may have something there. It would probably make a good film, if a little mad. So now you’ve got the good material ready, and you're clearly at the top of your game, what are your ambitions for your future? What do you envisage yourself doing in, say, five years from now?

TT: You’re very kind. I now find to my bewilderment that my income comes exclusively from poetry related activity. I am confused and delighted with this turn up. If I’m still doing the same in five years I’ll be happy. More and better would be the thing, though.

I’m going to use the Arts Foundation money to put a really good show together by the end of 2006 and, hopefully, tour it.

Inspired by Hugo, how about selling the film rights to a poem? That’s a barmy ambition but it would be good, wouldn’t it?

JH: I think anything’s possible. That’s always been my downfall. Now, in spite of my confident typing and air of derring-do, I'm roughly at the bottom of the performance ladder myself. What words of wisdom can you rustle up to help me improve my skills and my chances of making it to the feature act level?

TT: Is there a hierarchy then? I thought we were all on the bottom rung of somebody else’s ladder.

Watch comedians, actors, monologuists, lecturers – anyone who stands up in front of people for a living. Take notes and use anything that looks good from however unlikely a source.

And if you think you’ll have just one drink to settle the nerves before you go on – don’t. The nerves are your friends.

JH: What, not even a very small glass of Southern? Well, thanks for that advice, Tim, and thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed for POETS ON FIRE, I wish you all the best for the future ...