#Afterhours

"Inua Ellams is a phenomenal force of energy: I first came across him when I started organising National Poetry Day about five years ago. He was unofficially National Poetry Days’ Twitter poet, and what he did was a call-and-response via Twitter whereby he’d give whoever was following him little stimuli to their next lines of poetry, and then at the end of the day he’d pull them all together. So you’d find that, without really knowing that you’d written a poem, you had – Ellams had been midwifing it into existence. “Seamus Heaney wrote about finding a voice ‘adequate to our predicament’, and you have to do that again and again for every generation” He’s also famous in rather cooler circles than those I move in for organising something called the Midnight Run , which exists in lots of different cities now. “Participants” will basically stay up all night, going from place to place being insanely and enjoyably creative. It’s for people who drink a lot of coffee…. As you said, Ellams is also a playwright and he has a play on at the National Theatre, Barber Shop Chronicles – one of the National’s few hits this year. This poetry book, though, comes from a conversation with the Poetry Library on London’s SouthBank where he decided to find a poem in its stacks from every year of his life from zero to 18 and bounce off it, writing it again in his own words, including elements of his own life. The result is called #Afterhours: Anthology / Diary / Memoir / Poems and its from a small and brilliant publisher, Nine Arches . Poems are life enhancers to him and he recreates that feeling, inspiring other people through sheer enjoyment. So for a long time, as I’ve said, the poetry establishment were their own worst enemies because the image of ivory towers were very daunting. But Ellams makes it possible to walk up to any poem and have a conversation with it. Yes. I’ve been a magpie here, picking books that teach us new ways of making poetry connect. Ellam’s book could give birth to lots of other ways of reading, and, I hope, give way to more and more people coming to the Poetry Library. And indeed that’s already happened – the Poetry Librarian, Chris McCabe, says that since Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey became this runaway global bestseller, not just in terms of poetry books but among all books, he is seeing completely different kinds of people coming into the Poetry Library. So they organize shelves with Kaur’s books on them and signs saying ‘If you like that, you will like this…’ – so it’s all about creating that way in. An opening has been blown into the citadel of poetry, which can only be a good thing. Yes. Seamus Heaney wrote about finding a voice “adequate to our predicament”, and you have to do that again and again for every generation. It’s not something that can be done by, say, Sylvia Plath, and then: ‘okay, job done, everyone go home.’ We have to go on finding the voices adequate to our predicament day by day. And since our predicament is human and historical, they change."