I’m typing this sat in a very familiar front room. It’s a gloriously sunny December day outside, and the crispness and cloudlessness makes me want to sit on the flat-where-I-pay-rent’s small balcony and read a book. Like I did in the late spring and summer earlier this year. My reference point is Lockdown #1, when I was fully furloughed and generally divided my time between scrolling, reading on the balcony and playing hordes of board games with my flatmate. And a bit of writing.
I say a bit of writing, and that’s pretty generous. Last year, 13 years after I wrote my first performance poems, I feel like I wrote some of my best pieces ever. They became part of a show called Apps and Austerity. But in 2020, I didn’t write anything new for months. And months. I told myself, and other people, you can’t guilt yourself into writing. And yet everyone else in the Entire World seemed to be getting commissions, or writing responses, working on a new play or novel or poem or song. “Obviously that’s not true” I often reprimand my anxious brain.
How can we dare to articulate this difficult time? I’d tell other artists; as we move through a dark tunnel, it’s only on the other side that we can wrestle the experience into a communicable form. But we’re never properly on the other side of a neat metaphor. All these experiences will stay with us, and have changed us. I am not the same person who sat on the balcony back in the summer, and nor am I the same person who performed at live gigs back in January, February and March 2020, and I will never return to being the person who wrote Apps and Austerity in 2019. So if I want to find comfort and pride, I need to look at modern Henry’s achievements in these circumstances.
I’ve started writing a book about the protest music of the 2010s, tentatively titled Austerity Anthems, with a few extracts on my blog here and here. I’ve sent submissions to a few publishers, but nothing is concrete beyond a rough manuscript and some hope in my heart.
I used Bandcamp Fridays as a handy excuse to record my solo shows from across the decade. You can download them as albums for £3 off my Bandcamp (even though I’m not a band obvs). This was an interesting process, because I thought a lot of these poems were confined to the pages of history, or at least the pages of my 2018 debut collection, and were done and dusted. I wanted to make sure the recordings were solid for posterity, but also had the rough, spluttery, I-can’t-quite-remember-this-line on-tip-toes energy summoned when I perform on stage.
With Say Owt, I am so proud that we managed to hold an actual gig at the Crescent in early December. Sitting here in late December, I am worried that facilitating people coming together in a space during a pandemic was dangerous and ethically dubious, no matter how amazing the Crescent staff were at making the event socially distanced. But making something happen is a herculean effort and the vital energy of performance poetry was potent. That will stay with me all my life.
I’ve been listening to an album every day since July. I’ve been applying for jobs, sadly unsuccessfully. I’ve been reflecting deeply about my career and work. It’s felt like the arts have moved at breakneck speed and I feel left behind. I’ve felt isolated, doomscrolling deep into the night. But also occasionally inspired by the advocacy and activism I see on my social media, and inspired by my friends.
Thank you everyone. See you on the digital barricades.
(here's a photo from February taken by Henry Steel at Say Owt Slam. Look how close we are. Weird.)
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