Suchir SalhanJasmine Gardosi, Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, feels the need to defend her craft. Gardosi weaponises spoken word as a tool to address society’s most pressing issues, from deconstructing the divisive view of gender identity shaped by Culture Wars to calling for climate justice.
Spoken word has long been a cuckoo stuck in the nest of the British poetic establishment. The culture-shifting polemics of a long-line of popular British spoken poets, including Kae Tempest and Gardosi, herself– all capable of reeling a large Glastonbury crowd, or equally rendering the masses silent to a single spoken voice– has done little to change the perception of the genre in the literary world in recent years.
But, the spirit of subversion flows thick in the veins of Gardosi. Changing this narrative, and using spoken word as a tool to shape narratives about social issues– like queer identity and climate optimism, is one lasting legacy Gardosi hopes to have, as her tenure as Poet Laureate of Britain’s second city concludes later this year.
It is, perhaps, a hallmark of spoken word in the West Midlands. Zephaniah in 1987, tipped for a post at Cambridge University, was faced with a scathing tabloid response. “Would you let this man near your daughter? He is black. He is Rastafarian. And, oh yes, he is a poet. Here is an example of the standard of his work: The day dat I met Lady Di, I what happy no tell a lie”, wrote Kelvin MacKenzie in The Sun (April 27, 1987). Zephaniah used those same newspaper cuttings in a short TV film, the Dread Poets Society, which imagined him travelling on a Birmingham-Cambridge Train clashing with a snobby Lord Byron and bonding with a radical Shelley.
“Pushing the conventions of poetry, using spoken word as a tool for social inclusion, and bringing communities together through art – this is the kind of work that might often go without formal recognition when it occurs outside of an academic context,” said Gardosi upon receiving her Honorary Doctorate of Letters for her contributions to literature.
Self-expression is at the heart of Gardosi’s spoken word, with her boundary-blurring and radically bold and celebratory work, deftly meshing Celtic dubstep against themes of queer identity, mental health and women’s health.
“I want to show people that you can still be that same shy kid in school and be someone that makes their living as a regional and national symbol for the Arts and poetry”, Gardosi tells me. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern and is regularly enjoyed by audiences at Glastonbury Festival, Symphony Hall and across BBC Radio.
“Spoken poetry is a legitimate art form– it has rigour, discipline and quality”, Gardosi maintains. “It is the oldest art form in the world– it feels molten and definable, yet small and intimate: it takes only person to come along and change the scene”.
Historically, the dynamic and revolutionary quality of Britain’s Spoken Word poets has often stood at odds with the establishment. Kae Tempest– one of Gardosi’s contemporaries, someone Gardosi views as a major influence of her craft– was recently celebrated by Vogue as “revolutionary in their own right”. “Tents full of thousands stand silently to Tempest’s words put to music”, Gardosi tells me.
The genre “interrogates language, delves into the stitches of poetry”. Gardosi characterises the work of spoken poets like Hannah Silva as the work of a “musician as much as a poet, chopping vowels and consonants and layering sounds against a loop pedal”. Alluding to the molten nature of the spoken word genre, Gardosi is clear that “you don’t have to perform super intense, emotional or theatrical poetry”. She admires the “rigour, discipline and quality” of spoken word poets like Bohdan Piasecki, who are “a breath of fresh air” with their “very intentional and naturalised poetry– that is still performance”.
Much of Gardosi’s work is a product of reckoning with gender identity. Gender Euphoria, a poem that challenges how “gender identity and exploration should not just be an issue for trans people, or non-binary people”, was a product of the pandemic. Self-isolating, Gardosi – like many of us– felt that “I did not have to mask myself. I was discovering myself in an unfiltered way”. Inspired by queer authors like Alok Vaid-Menon, author of Beyond The Gender Binary, Gardosi found herself questioning “maybe there are as many types of men as there are men? What if there are as many right ways of being a Woman as there are Women?”.
Gardosi’s own self-described “gender epiphany” confronts the “Culture Wars” head on. “Trans discussion is normally associated with shoulds and shouldn’ts, and other forms of self-censorship”, she tells me. Transness is viewed as a “dysphoric” experience and “rigidity”, but “transness is about gender euphoria” and “freeness”. “I was guided by my joy, not my sadness”, Gardosi reflects pensively about when she came to the realisation that “I channel much more masculine energy than feminine energy”.
Gardosi’s own roots share uncanny similarities to Birmingham-raised Zephaniah, who she speaks highly of– “I truly hope to emulate his gentle bravery” and how “he compassionately spoke about anarchy”. Zephaniah fused poetry with dub reggae– much like Gardosi, herself– just as John Cooper Clarke crossed it with punk.
“The making of Art is the bravery of difference […] it is a vehicle of celebrating difference”, Gardosi tells me. “It is about “questioning hard binaries– not only gender, but ‘them and us’ and ‘right and wrong’. When I express myself authentically, it is going to be different to you”.
Often, readers and listeners can become all too distracted by the performative style of spoken word poetry, neglecting its engagement with the literary canon. Zephaniah’s 2001 collection Too Black, Too Strong oscillates between the pastiches of Larkin and Kipling to Bob Marley, as a response to the flaws in our justice system. “If people in European seats of learning want to debate what ‘oral poetry’ is, let them do it,” Zephaniah said to The Telegraph’s Tristam Fane Saunders.
Gardosi was a writer-in-residence of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, commissioned to mark the bicentenary of Anne Brontë. Gardosi realised that after “all this time– after thinking I’d read the full voice of Anne– I realised that I, too, had ignorantly been reading the voice of Anne’s editors, rather than purely Anne’s voice herself. ‘Complete and unabridged’? Like hell it was. What else had I missed of Anne, without realising?”.
Gardosi penned Say it Anyway. Though conceived as a subversion of the timidity of the youngest member of the Brontë family, it represents in equal capacity the story of Gardosi’s own poetic origins.
“I’ve formed my story from the years of my life // and they could call it an entire mistake. // I could come out, and they might stuff me back in”.
Gardosi recollects how she struggled to read aloud in class. “It set me up in sweats, with my heart thumping. I could not speak to people in normal life. I stammered when reading things out”. But, “I started to unlock reading poetry aloud as a strength. It was my own words […] Performing your own poetry is democratic as hell”. Every term towards the end of her time in secondary school, Gardosi would read at the RBSA in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. “It was a chance to find my voice and find myself, by practising my own words over and over again.” Traversing the open mic scene across the West Midlands post-university, Gardosi unlocked a unique mode of self-expression. “Things started snowballing. I wasn’t just an ok, or manageable performer– it was something that was my strength, something that I became known for”.
“Now, I love revelling in the irony of my roots”, Gardosi quips.
The liberating quality of spoken word has freed generations of spoken word poets from the dusty covers of poetry anthologies, and the Spoken Word scene across Britain shows early signs of shifting to a wider acceptance among the poetry establishment.
Joelle Taylor won the TS Eliot poetry prize in 2022 for her perspective on butch lesbian counterculture in the 1990s, succeeding 2020’s TS Eliot winner, British-Trinidadian dub poet Roger Robinson. Taylor’s book, C+nto & Othered Poems, was praised by critics as “a blazing book of rage and light”. Gardosi, too, shares a similar fiery spirit, turning her attention to changing the narrative for climate optimism as part of We Feed the UK in association with The Hot Poets and The Gaia Foundation.
Birmingham’s spoken word artists, with all their personal charm, have never lost their sense of anger, or their political edge, and the political battles that become the heart of spoken poet’s work are certainly a product of their times. In her remaining tenure as the second city’s Poet Laureate, Gardosi hopes to “blend and combine music with poetry in communities in Birmingham, and beyond”, and “keep championing causes I believe in through performance and poetry”.
Images shared by Jasmine Gardosi. Cover Image from Andreea Popa.
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