Report: The London Word Festival

18 May 2011

The London Word Festival
7th April to 5th May 2011

Max Liu

“Who wants to be a writer?” asks Stuart Evers and immediately the temperature drops in the Old Dalston Boys club. An audience who have hooted through the past two hours clam up, sinking into the art deco furniture. Stuffed animals and painted nudes stare from the shadows.

“Liars,” says Evers, “you’ve come to a literary event: who wants to be a writer?”

I’m here – among a capacity crowd – for Books v Cigarettes, part of the excellent London Word Festival, now in its fourth year. The event is based on an essay in which George Orwell considers the price of books and tonight Robin Ince, our brilliant, rambunctious compere, defends literature while four comedians, plus Evers, argue for less cerebral habits.

First there’s cake, made from Orwell’s recipes. “Dig in,” says poet/festival director Tom Chivers, “it might give you a heart attack,” which is in the spirit of this warm, irreverent – and great value at £8 – evening. I dread the cake for its kookiness and calories but it turns out baked plums complement lager on an empty stomach.

Comic Richard Sandley makes the case for videos (“All books could be films but not all films could be books”), John Luke Roberts argues for the comforts of being a dick (“Books never got you a presenting job on T4”) and Ben Moore provides an hilarious introduction to Frisby Tree Golf. Matt Crosby, my favourite performer tonight, eats at Nandos three times a week, reads the menu on the tube, buys loyalty cards on ebay and reaches ubiquitous yet somehow far flung corners of chain culture with exuberant wit.

“I’m not a comic, I’m a writer,” says Stuart Evers, who’s just published his debut collection of short stories. Dressed all in black, Evers reminds me of a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald about selling This Side of Paradise, paying off his debts and buying a new suit. “It’s not that all the great books have been written,” he says in another Lost Generation echo, “it’s more that we’re not smoking enough.” He may not be a comedian but I bet Evers’ fiction is very funny. I move to the back to buy Ten Stories About Smoking, along with Ben Moore’s monologues, but the bookseller’s gone, so I wheel into the night, lit up with the buzz of time and money well spent.

Couple of days later, I visit the Cybraphon at Shoreditch’s Richmix Café. This Bafta Award-winning emotional robot indie band comes with a mood swing-o-meter that ranges from desolation to delirium. It’s a metaphor for dwindling attention spans and the performance-anxiety of everyday life, encased in an antique cabinet, with, amongst other things, piano-organ, flashing lights, tobacco tin drum, communion goblet and a bottle of Famous Cybraphon Scotch. I only provoke a dip from contentment to mild dismay but the attendant says he’s witnessed dejection, which involved pounding drums and dirge bass, and he’s received reports of delirium. Struggling to hear the music – especially Aidan Moffat’s reading of a JG Ballard story – above the noise of the café, I risk the Cybraphon’s wrath, getting close enough to catch some inventive beats and melancholy keys. I swing towards under-whelmed.

That’s certainly not the case at Christian Bök’s poetry reading. There are three other performers tonight: avant-garde micro-lecturer Ben Gwalchmai gets things under way before Maria Fusco reads four disturbing, moving stories, including a sexy one about longing and Donald Sutherland. “Will we see the return of the Wolf?” Tom Chivers asks. The answer is yes, as Luke Kennard reads a long, politically-exercised prose poem which looses his sharp-toothed nemesis on the coalition. Profound, hilarious and punishing, Kennard consistently sets the standard in contemporary poetry performance. Who the hell could go on after him?

“If you’re here,” says compere Ross Sutherland, “you probably don’t need an introduction to Christian Bök.” This is true but during his extraordinary opener Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy, in which the Canadian poet shreds the darkness with his chainsaw roar, nobody seems sure how to respond. Bök makes sounds that we might occasionally try to utter in the privacy of our mouths, and rapidly disown because the Sturm und Drang of our internal rhythm sections is embarrassing and revealing. Kennard joked about the democratising of art and later Bök will read, “It does not love you/It does not care that you exist,” but his performance is warm, bracing and cathartic. I close my eyes, surrender, and when I look around everyone has relaxed, there’s no wrong moment to laugh or gasp, we’re all naturally absorbed.

Bök is rigorous, every word earned, freighted with music, meaning. He says audiences are often disappointed to find his work written in words, rather than notation, but his correlation between page and sound is de-familiarising in the best formal sense. Eunoia, the title of his previous collection, means Beautiful Thinking; he reads Dadaist dirges, discusses his book made of Lego, makes references to Super Mario Bros and William Burroughs, and explains how he engineered a bacterium to write poetry that could outlive us.

Occasionally, I wonder if his scientific experiments might camouflage some relatively conventional poetics, as in Extremofile, his closing manifesto about the badassness of poetry – “It dwells in a tide pool of battery acid… It does not die… It’s hotter than the nose cone of Concorde” – but that would be to miss the point. What fun, what commitment. “There aren‘t” he says, “many people my age or younger writing sound poetry.” Shame, because tonight there’s a large, enraptured audience.

I’m told by somebody who’s attended most of the festival that it’s hard to single out one event above the rest. It’s now three weeks since Books v Cigarettes and the spread of performances across a month has eliminated the risk of festival fatigue as audiences arrive refreshed and renewed, giving artists the attention they deserve. “Go on, say it,” Kennard‘s Wolf chided on the subject of government cuts, “‘we’ve all got to make sacrifices.’” Perhaps, but I expect that, along with Christian Bök’s genetic poems, the London Word Festival will be around for many years.