Local Boys Done Good is a documentary/live show about five poets (all from the poetry collective Aisle16) going back to their home towns and putting on crap gigs. It was written by myself, Chris Hicks, John Osborne, Joe Dunthorne, and Tim Clare (pictured here, reading a poem to 5 people in a town hall in Quarley).

We’ve only performed it twice: once at our scratch night Homework (of which you can watch most of here), and at Norwich Arts Centre at the end of last year. Hopefully it will happen again sometime.

Catherine Woodward has written an amazing in-depth piece about it for the Scottish Poetry Review, in which she  examines the methodology behind Aisle16’s shows, and how the way we approach live poetry differs from other examples of live literature. My favourite quote: “the charm of Aisle 16’s unique style lies somewhere in that it is brilliantly, ingeniously shit.”

Read it here.

I made this for my upcoming run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August. For full details, check here.

Thanks to my mum and dad for being such a competent and professional film crew. It was a tough set to work on but they came through with the goods in the end. Mum is Urusevsky to my Kalatozov. Dad is, I don’t know, probably composer Moisei Vaynberg, someone like that. I think I just crashed this metaphor.

My first poetry collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, got a lovely review recently on Todd Swift’s Eyewear blog, courtesy of Mr Chris Horton. Eyewear is a great online journal and I thoroughly recommend it. Always new & interesting poems, reviews, opinion pieces. Its a good place for poets to go and argue. Also saw this rather nice piece by Cori Winrock on there the other day.

Even for those with only the faintest interest in performance poetry, Ross Sutherland will probably need little introduction. A member of performance collective Aisle 16 and omnipotent download provocateur, Sutherland has, more recently, even found time to write and perform his own plays. What will surprise some, perhaps, is the range and depth evident in his first book, Things To Do Before You Leave Town. I say ‘surprise’ here only because Sutherland is, for the most part, better known for his grandstanding readings and recitals at performance venues across the UK than he is for his page poetry. As someone who has tracked Sutherland’s poetry career over the last few years – in small magazines such as Tears in the Fence and Rising – there is, in fact, from this reader at least, little surprise that this is a book of wit, linguistic endeavour and intellectual merit.

The problematic tag ‘performance poet’ does Sutherland a disservice if taken in isolation, for while many of these poems work on one level as performance pieces, they also reward rereading. Take for example the long poem ‘Log-on’, which possesses a deftly conveyed sense of tenderness and loss through a computer-centric conceit. The last few lines are particularly illustrative of this, ‘Having been hacked since before I was born,/ can you be sure who’s behind those eyes,/ shoulder surfing for those opening keystrokes/ as I stoop to kiss your neck?’.

Whilst it can appear voguish to frequently drop computer-speak into poetry, for Sutherland, computers have imprinted deeply on how he thinks and writes and as such are integral to much of his expression. Here, it may be too easy for this reader to reference his background as a lecturer in electronic literature but the influences of this on his work are clear.

It is also apparent that it is not just linguistic references to computer technology that interests Sutherland but the specific and multi-various vernaculars of the mathematical, scientific and filmic worlds. In ‘Jean-Claude Van Damme’ for instance, the poet’s father is the villain in an action movie and it is the energetic Van-Damme who is called upon to save the day. The poet’s father, finally defeated, ‘stands alone on his secret island’ his eyes dribbling ‘scarlet plasma’. Through these familiar filmic images, Sutherland provides insight into every son’s fear and inevitable realisation – that fathers are indeed fallible.

If Sutherland is, on occasion, guilty of bathos – ‘The Family Blessing’ and ‘Something Detonates’ – his observations on the absurdities concealed beneath the surface of our humdrum modern lives work to best effect. The poem, ‘Things To Do Before You Leave Town’, to which the book lends its title, is a good example of this. Sutherland, using his favoured address of ‘You’, ensures that the reader is complicit in the acts that should be enacted before graduating from small town life. The poem reads like an inventory where, oddly liberated by imminent departure, the speaker makes a mental note to ‘tell Steve to go fuck himself’ and to ‘meet Claire but fail to notice’. The list also includes things not to do and this particular sequence ends with a prophetic mental note to not ‘stare longingly up at the clocktower’.

For all his bravado, Sutherland is also a romantic in the purest sense. When he writes about love, his poems are tinged with an Audenesque sense of incorporeal separation and loss. This is best exemplified in ‘A Second Opinion’, when he states, ‘And I knew/ that to the untrained eye,/ the September evening in my chest looked mild./ But I trusted you, implicitly,/ to take your coat with you/ on the way out’. True contentment is not a state that can ever last for a sustained period of time for this poet, whether wrapped within the conceit of an experiment or medical examination, it will inevitably escape his grasp, leaving behind merely traces, ‘Each day we spent together had a distinct tone or shape’ (‘Critical Praise for My Last Relationship’).

More generally, the transitory nature of experience acts as one of the main threads of the collection. Sutherland is a veritable journeyman, compelled to move on, to seek comfort in the ephemeral. As such his poetry is frequently delivered in the form of snapshots, recorded as if from the perspective of a passer-by. In ‘When Paperboys Roamed the Earth’, his voice is at its strongest as he flits between the lives of others, observing their idiosyncrasies acutely. This is typified in two lines that sum-up Englishness better than Larkin ever did, ‘A thousand bald patches begin to itch. An egg boils. Here is the news’.

Christopher Horton was born in 1978 and grew up in Oxfordshire. He studied English Literature and American Studies at Swansea University. He has lived in the United States and China, where he taught English. His poetry has been published in City Lighthouse Anthology (Tall Lighthouse) and New London Poetry (Penned in the Margins) and magazines, including Poetry London, Ambit, The Wolf and Magma. He has also reviewed for The London Magazine and Horizon (Salt) among others. In 2008, he was commended in the National Poetry Competition and in 2009 he was a runner up in the Bridport Prize. Horton currently lives in South East London. He co-ordinates literature events for the Museum of London Docklands.

Hello. These photos are taken from a couple of events I did recently in London.  The first one is Tongue-Fu at Rich Mix cinema on Bethnal Green Road, where I’m performing alongside the incredible Tongue-Fu band. The extremely red room is PoeJazzi at Last Days of Decadence on Shoreditch High Street. These two venues are about a minute away from each other, and are two of my favourite places to read in the big smoke.

Usually in photographs of me reading onstage, I  look like i) a constipated boglin ii) a bear who has just been hot across the face with a cricket bat or iii) Shane Ritchie, so the fact that I look relatively normal in these shots should be credited to the skill and patience of photographer Craig Thomas. Check out his portfolio at CraigThomas 83.

The other book I have coming out in September is an e-book, which I will be publishing myself through this site (and selling free through iTunes as well).

It’s a collection of twelve sonnets, each one inspired by a different character from Street Fighter 2. Each sonnet is being illustrated by a different artist, including work from Vogue illustrator Erin Petson, Canadian vector-artist Shingo Shimizu, Manga artist Sonia Leong, poet and graphic artist Inua Ellams, and my long-time animation collaborator A Line and a Dot.

The book is called HYAKURETSU KYAKU after Chun-Li’s ass-whuppin’ special.

Here’s a rather gruesome extract- this sonnet focuses on nimble jazz-ninja Vega, the second of the four boss- characters. Here’s what the SNES manual has to say:

“Of noble blood, Vega has successfully blended the Japanese art of Ninjitsu with the skills he learned as a matador. Vain and egotistical, Vega lives by the philosophy that beauty is strength. Despising anything ugly, Vega views himself as “perfect” and uses a mask to prevent his face from becoming scarred in battle. Used by M. Bison primarily as an assassin, Vega often dispatches his opponents using his claw.”

A reflection can cut a man in two:
A guillotine straight through one’s anima.
It reveals to the bullfighter, the bull.
The victim, the killer. The Spaniard
looks at these eyes and sees only beauty.
The blood-soaked towel still in his hands. The brute
pinned to the wall like a calendar. Truly
these eyes could never pierce a breast. And truth
is beauty; beauty, truth. The porcelain
man plucks an eyebrow like a master craftsman.
Finished, the priceless artwork is re-caged.
The claw retrieved, the metal mask refastened.
The murderer rejoins the noonday shift.
Each passing gaze, hollowed to the tip.

The amazing illustration is by James McGregor. For more of his work, look here.

That’s right. The first is a pamphlet of approximately 15 poems, coming in a limited edition cardboard box (genuine cardboard) with a series of snazzy postcards. This is part of a new series of pamphlets published by Penned in the Margins, the first of which (Bonjour Tetris by Simon Barraclough) is released today.

The title is still a bit up in the air, and I’m hard at work getting the content polished-off too. I’ll have more to say in a couple of weeks, but I can 100% definitely confirm  that this poem might be in it.

Nude III

Our architect is famed for identical buildings:
The School of Broken Necks in Toronto,
The Yahtzee Institute in Bethlehem,
One bleached white, the other grey,
Ours famously fluctuating between the two,
With Hockey teams slamming their ochre girlfriends against its dim corridors,
Its basements humming with password-protected short stories.
Young minds so deep inside the library that the very act of standing up
would be like unplugging the lake.

But if legend is correct
and the higher functions of a university
are built around an ancient reptilian brain
Then surely this is it— a closed burger van,
chronicling the evening’s takings.
The last member of an improv group
Selecting Iron Maiden for the journey home.
Trainee nurses, swinging their arms
under the sepia of the streetlights;
the hold music of the sky.

My one-man show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman, picked up some great reviews during its London run in January. I’m chuffed to say that the show is now being revived north of the border, for a four week run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. I am CRAZY STOKED.

Here’s the press release:
ROSS SUTHERLAND: THE THREE STIGMATA OF PACMAN

The Times’ Top Ten Literary Star presents his battle with self-fulfilling prophecy on a journey from tabloid hack to timeline altering saboteur.

Underbelly (Venue 61)
Cowgate, Edinburgh EH1 1EG
Show: 4.40pm (55mins)
Dates: Aug 5-15, 17-29
Tickets: £6-10
Tel: 08445 458 252 | www.underbelly.co.uk

‘the verbal urgency of rap, the wry self-mockery of stand-up and a linguistic inquisitiveness all of its own’ – Time Out Critic’s Choice

Working for a national daily newspaper, Ross spends his days surrounded by people speculating on Britain’s imminent collapse. As far as his office is concerned, The Future is already written, and it doesn’t look good.

Each night, in an attempt to repair the damage he’s done to the timeline, Ross trawls cabaret club stages, asking audiences to help fill a time capsule, sending objects, stories and poems to help out their future selves.

But when the recession hits, Ross finds himself out of a job and back in Essex living with his parents. Trapped in his own past, warring with his old enemy – the local Spar – Ross must use his Time Capsule as a means of escape. But how?

Walking familiar streets, walled into a world with no future at all; where every day is the same as the last, only slightly faster, Ross realises, this is the first stigmata of Pac-man, a character he is fast becoming; and one whom he recasts as the tragic hero of the final fairytale he posts into his time capsule.

Could the secret to understanding the future lie in a yellow pill-munching character from his past?

‘Thoughtful, articulate and very funny’– Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard

Sutherland’s debut solo show mixes a darkly comic narrative with stark animation and dexterous verse. A performance which uncannily combines intimacy and humour with a bleak otherworldliness.

Ross Sutherland is an award-winning stand-up poet and journalist and a member of poetry collective Aisle 16 (Time Out Critic’s Choice Award Winners). His work has appeared on Radio 1’s Colin Murray Show and performed by actor Damien Lewis on BBC2’s Newsnight Review.

Ross Sutherland: The Three Stigmata of Pacman has been selected for Escalator East To Edinburgh 2010. Each year Escalator, East to Edinburgh helps artists and arts organisations to raise their profile and perform to new audiences as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. High-resolution images are available to download at www.easttoedinburgh.co.uk

This month sees the return of a new season of Homework: our regular night of literary miscellany at Bethnal Green Workingmen’s Club. Featuring resident writers Tim Clare, John Osborne, Luke Wright, Chris Hicks, Joe Dunthorne and myself.

Our first event is this Wednesday, 26th of May, 8:00, £5 in. For directions to the venue, check BGWMC’s website here

For our opening event, we have a reading from John Osborne’s brand new book, Newsagent’s Window, in which John goes in search of people who have forsaken internet noticeboards in favour of a more traditional ways of swapping goods. So begins a year of self-discovery and a wild obsession with newsagents’ windows, which take John to a shoe-exhibition, to an Alan Ayckbourn play, to a wrestling match. He finds himself the owner of a man’s entire video collection, a second-hand bike, a clapped-out Ford Escort – and discovers a community of a bygone age.

Along with support from the other residents, we have extra special support in the form of comedian Kevin Eldon (Jam, Big Train, lots of things with Stuart Lee in)

Here he is, under the guise of the heavyweight poet Paul Hamilton:

In addition to that, here’s a couple of my favourite  recordings from last season:

I was on BBC Radio 3 on Friday night, for a live edition of The Verb with Ian McMillan, Sophie Hannah, Attila the Stockbroker and poet/afrobeat collective Benin City. Despite having lost my voice two days before, I managed to claw back 80% of it with the aid of Sanderson’s Throat Specific Mixture- recommended to me by Dr Mcmillan himself. It’s disgustingly miraculous stuff. I have already bought several bottles for the Sunday night of this years Latitude festival.

You can listen to my extract here: TheVerb_12thMar2010

However, I really recommend listening in to the whole show on iPlayer. Everyone was on great form, I think. And if you like Benin City (and you will), then you should definitely buy their new EP, out at the end of the month. I’m currently planning a grizzly chip-tune remix of one of the tracks, hoho.