Viva Brighton Issue #65 July 2018

SPOKEN WORD
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Penguin Pride
Poetry-slam champ Toby Campion
Toby Campion is a
UK National Poetry
Slam Champion
and a World Poetry
Slam finalist. He is
director of UniSlam;
a resident artist at the
Roundhouse in Camden,
and was one of
the first resident poets
of the River Thames.
This month he hosts
Penguin Pride, a
showcase of the
best contemporary
LGBTQ+ writers, poets, musicians and activists.
I saw my first poetry slam in North Carolina
when I was visiting friends there. I’d never
even heard of a slam before but as I was watching
it I realised this was what I was meant to do.
It was the opportunity to interact so directly
with an audience that I liked: in the States people
make noises and click their fingers when poets
are performing. There’s immediate feedback.
The spoken word scene there has its roots in
the civil rights movement so a lot of the work
is political. Here in the UK it’s a bit broader.
That suits me because it means I’ve been able to
use humour more: there’s no way you could win a
poetry slam in America with a humorous poem.
I think that being able to make an audience
laugh is as important as being able to make
them cry. Humour can be a good way of getting
people to see things differently. I work hard at
what I do and I have important things to say.
But getting up on a soapbox isn’t the only way to
make a point.
As soon as something
challenges me, makes
me laugh, makes me
think again – I want
to write about it.
At the moment I’m
looking at the history
of queer culture, at the
ways in which queer
people have been
oppressed in the past
and the way in which
that still affects the
scene now.
People seem to think
that now we have gay marriage, everything is
sorted. It’s not. Even when I was resident artist
for the River Thames I found myself coming
back to stories about queer people who’d died on
the river in homophobic attacks or been killed by
someone they met on Grindr.
My sexuality has had a big impact on my work
as a poet. I grew up in Leicester going to an
all-boys school and I was in the closet until I was
21. I definitely struggled when I was younger and
it’s only recently I’ve started to unpack those feelings.
Poetry has helped me articulate things I find
hard to explain in normal conversation.
Through Your Blood is my debut poetry
collection. I describe it as coming-of-age stories
about growing up in a place where you feel you
don’t belong. It’s about masculinity, sexuality and
repression of feelings.
Writing is an emotional process for me. If one
of my poems makes someone cry, I’ll usually have
cried when writing it. As told to Nione Meakin
Komedia, July 25th
Photo by www.willfahy.co.uk
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