The Poets: A Story by Ilaria Passeri
I have never collected things because they just add clutter, but I do collect people. Generally I collect them for an hour at the most, on trains and trams and in pubs - an hour is about long enough to listen to their bizarre life stories, thrill with horror at their chicken porn or answer their weird questions. It’s all filed under ‘material’.
So when I heard a bloke swearing imaginatively at a self-service checkout in Tesco I had to look. He certainly seemed like my kind of person because he was wearing a Frank Sidebottom jumper. He was saying things like: “You soulless piece of capitalist crap/You Tory redundancy robot…” He caught my eye and asked me to help him. He hadn’t grasped scanning.
It turned out that he was a poet, called Brian, and he asked if I’d have coffee with him. So I did. I had been writing short stories for a while but didn’t know what to do with them. Brian told me about his poetry and his passion for spoken word. Chatting to Brian opened up a new door to me and I realised there was a community of people that would want to hear my stories. I immediately christened them THE POETS.
My experience of poetry was mainly from my school days when our English teacher would hand out anthologies. The poems all seemed to be from the distant past and used funny words.The teacher looked dead behind the eyes, and we’d all just stare at the clock, waiting for the bell to ring.
Brian invited me to come and perform one of my stories at an atheist service. Now this was a bit of a shock. An atheist service? Surely the two words didn’t belong together? It sounded like a vegan hog roast. Was it code for Satanism? Did they want me as the sacrifice? Then I realised they only sacrificed virgins.
But it sounded like an adventure, and I could tell one of my stories, so I agreed. And then went into agonies of indecision about what to wear. What would be poetic, atheist and also flattering? In the end I went for dungarees with pictures of Frida Kahlo. She was bohemian, she had a monobrow. Did I have tine to grow one? Not really.
“Nice outfit:”, Brian said when I arrived, so that was one test passed.
The service was in a hall that had once been a cinema, and smelled musty. There were red plush seats, some with springs poking through, and peeling gilt on the walls. It was very atmospheric. The people all looked vaguely arty, pretty scruffy, and strangers to a good bath. There were a lot of beards, and the women had dyed their hair in bright colours or wore big hoop earrings and wooden jewellery that rattled when they moved. Quite a few were knitting. It was all exciting.
The host, or compere, or MC - I didn’t know what the atheist term was - announced that the theme of the day was Don’t worry, be happy, because we only have one life. He did a few minutes on that, and then invited the first participant on stage. This was a woman in a multi-coloured knitted hat who ran on to the stage and gave a spirited rendition of Hey Big Spender, with instrumental breaks on a kazoo. It was pretty wild, and got wilder when she started handing out books that had been gifts from her ex-boyfriend’s parents. They all seemed to be about quantum physics, so I took mine, said thank you, and hid it under my seat.
After the woman there was a procession of poets. They didn’t seem to worry about the theme, they just seemed glad to have an audience. This was so different to the poetry at school. This was exciting! They were passionate, they gave it their all. Spit was flying everywhere. People didn’t applaud, instead they clicked their fingers.
I had felt a bit nervous when I arrived, but as time went by I had an odd feeling of being at ease, that these were somehow my people. They were happy, they were at ease with themselves, they had dug into themselves, they knew who they were, and they celebrated their uniqueness. Admittedly some of the poems were more like rants, some of them had no sense of rhythm, and some I didn’t understand at all. But with the shabby outfits and piercings and tattoos they seemed like people I wanted to get to know.
I whispered to Brian that I thought poems had to rhyme, and he said they didn’t. Then he told me I was up next.
Suddenly I was very nervous. The Frida Kahlo dungarees were possibly the smartest outfit in the room. I own a bean to cup machine. I drink strange cocktails and talk about hair and make-up with the Cocks and Curtains. By most standards I had a bohemian upbringing thanks to my Mum, but would THE POETS think I was just some kind of interloper and accept me into their world? Or drive me from the building with poetic curses?
“We have a newcomer today” the MC said. “She’s a storyteller from Salford, so everyone, give a warm welcome to Ilaria.”
And then I was on.
I started to perform my Flamingo Land story, the one about the J-cloth and my sister and confronting death, and Albert the monkey, and it suddenly dawned on me how out of place I was and how silly my story was. I had a sausage roll before the gig and my Doc Martens were real leather. Bugger. It was time to think on my feet.
“Of course,” I said, “Flamingo Land is a metaphor for Hell!”
The women atheists put down their knitting needles and stared at me.
I began to jabber. “Albert the monkey is Phillip Green from Topshop and the J-Cloth represents the fragility of right wing policies and how they are starting to unravel… and my little sister piling up her hair to get on the rides is sticking it to the man!”
There was a moment of silence. People exchanged confused looks. Then a bloke in a tie-dye bandana said: “She’s conceptual!” “Conceptual, conceptual” said people around the room. Then everyone cheered.
“Jesus Christ, I was worried you’d hate me” I said, and then remembered it was an atheist service. But nobody seemed to mind.
After the performances there was tea, coffee and biscuits. That allowed me to do one of my favourite things, eavesdrop. I overheard conversations about Veganism, pronouns, the cotton trade, Freeganism. It was all so new and exciting. People were being kind and telling me how powerful my story was and asking if I was purely conceptual and had I thought about adding a dance element to my work?
Then I overheard a couple of the poets talking about an app that helped them find rhyming words. I remembered what Brian had told me about rhyming, so I joined in and said: “Oh, I thought poems don’t actually have to rhyme.”
The two poets giggled and said that all decent poets rhyme and ask where I heard that. I gestured over towards Brian, who was deep in conversation with a green-haired person about the many uses for chickpeas. They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. Brian clocked this, marched over, was told what we were discussing and said that emotion and expression doesn’t require rhyme. The rhymers said he was showing no discipline. It was all getting a bit fraught.
“Well,” I said, “at least he’s not a Tory.”
Brian jokingly said he had never even shagged a Tory.
Everyone laughed.
I said: “I did once, but by accident.”
Everyone went quiet.
“But he was rubbish. And he kept calling me Maggie.”
The tie-dye bandana bloke had wandered over, and was delighted.
“You’re so conceptual,” he said. “Your persona is just amazingly cutting edge. Highly political stuff delivered in silly dungarees.”
Silly dungarees? Arsehole! But I wasn’t going to pick a fight. And it seemed like a good time to leave before they asked if my DMs were real leather.
Everyone said I must come back, and Brian said I had done him proud. But it was a near thing.
I wondered on the way home whether I should tell the Cocks and Curtains about it. In the end, I decided not. The worlds were so different, and it was better to keep them separate. And that’s the way it still is, girly stuff with the girls, stories with the poets. Being conceptual was really too big an ask, so I just worked more on my stories. And I’ve never really shagged a Tory. It just taught me that The Poets, although they are funny, don’t really do jokes.
Ilaria Passeri is a Scottish-Italian writer-performer living in south Manchester. She works as a family storyteller in art centres, libraries and theatres. She hosts Just Stories and Verbose in Manchester. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post UK and BBC Radio Manchester. Her debut book, Tales of a Confused Life is a collection of short stories for an adult audience. The book has been published by Bentkey Publishing.