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Mud wrestling with words

Faye Lipson celebrates National Poetry Day by getting down and dirty with spoken-word supremos Bang Said The Gun

For the uninitiated I should explain that Bang Said The Gun is not merely the title of a new poetry compilation, it's also a long-running, anarchistic and hilarious poetry night aimed at "people who don't like poetry."

So if you have never heard of Bang Said The Gun - or any of the poets therein - you are in the target audience for maximum enjoyment of this book.

The Bang team have developed a fearsome reputation. Their events are the complete anathema of all the nicey-nicey, terribly Oxbridge poetry of the status quo which is stifling the scene - poetry that is all form and no feeling, that says nothing and threatens nobody.

Bang poets are, by contrast, jubilantly nonconformist and political. Like Clint Eastwood in a shootout, this collection is cool, slick and incredibly quick.

Martin Galton, one of the brains behind Bang events, is also one of the stand-out poets in the book. His poem Why tackles a raw subject head-on, the learning difficulties of his autistic teenage son Stanley. Because "Stanley never asks why," Galton himself is forced into circles of self-doubt and questioning: "Why him?/Why does he have to struggle so much?/Why won't the fog lift/so he can see more clearly?/Why?"

The poem reflects on the touching, oblique thought that Stanley's sheer disinterestedness - and his ignorance of money, lying and winning - is perhaps "the answer to a better way of being."

John Osborne explores a fuller spectrum of human existence too with his eulogy for the life of a waitress, Our Waitress is Employee of the Month. The poem is replete with earthy details, from "the Twenty Pound High Street Voucher" she wins as employee of the month and spends on a maxi dress at River Island, to the earnestly imagined dialogue between the waitress and a diner: "Our waitress would have asked if he'd like a dessert,/and first he'd have said no/but she'd have said 'oh go on!'/because she knows it's important to appreciate the small things./She'd have smiled as he scooped up the last of his custard."

Her daily grind contrasts with the narrator's venerating gaze at the staff photo on the wall as he waits to be seated and his lateral connection between this awarded waitress and the lauded Judi Dench, who he once met and called out to in the street.

The confluence of commonplace details and celebrity allusions present a rounded and rich portrait of the waitress, making her an intensely believable human character.

It is refreshing to see Osborne write attentively about a fully fleshed-out female character when too many poets continue to use women as rhetorical devices or simple proxies for their own concerns.

Jo Bell, whose Urban Mermaid has just been published in this paper's Well Versed column, has an assortment of fine poems in the book. The darkest is Oiks, a sinister conceit in which the neighbourhood yobs Bell observes from her houseboat are slowly revealed as a population of ducks with a penchant for gang rape.

Bell's images are precise and exquisite, with the "shop-bought stripe of colour on each wing" perfectly straddling the duality of yobs and birds. Even better, she walks the line between horror and dark humour. Her ducks' walk is comically "Churchillian, chin in and belly first."

Other highlights in the book are provided by Rob Auton, winner of Edinburgh Fringe 2013's Funniest Joke award, who does an unsurprisingly witty line in wordplay. In GCSE Emma Jones's gift for vernaculars is paralysingly funny and Peter Hayhoe's (below left) Bus Stop is full of astute observations on modern mores.

What most of these poets have in common is a golden combination of intelligence, flair and simple common touch. This is poetry with the potential to speak to many people rather than a small and stuffy elite. I hope the self-appointed Establishment gets the message - Bang Said The Gun: Mud Wrestling With Words is a book that shoots from the hip and never misses a beat.

 

Bang Said The Gun: Mud Wrestling With Words is published by Burning Eye, price £15, and its spoken-word poetry evenings are on Thursdays at 8pm in The Roebuck, 50 Great Dover Street, London SE1. For more information visit: www.bangsaidthegun.com

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