SAY OWT: A Night Celebrating Their 10th Year Anniversary

Though an advocate for all means of creative expression, I have reached the somewhat daunting age of 20 and, miraculously, never seen poetry performed live. This changed when Maia, head editor of the words section, and I were given two tickets to ‘The Big Say Owt 10th Birthday Bash’. Feeling like total VIPS, we arrived at the Crescent and our names were already on the list. Obtaining a cider and a moderate facade of confidence, we began our night with an interview. In the graffiti-filled, art-enthused and insanely cool back room of the venue, slam poet and artistic director of Say Owt, Henry Raby, told us about his life pursuing the creatives (which you can read at the end of this article). 

The show began at around 8pm. In a room abundant with artists, fabulous concoctions of clothing and rowdy friends and family, we took our seats in the midst of all the anticipation. It began with Henry proudly introducing the event and reading one of his poems aloud, with my favourite lines being: “rise like lions and snap like turtles / sticks and stones can hurt us but words can save us.” Something we both immediately noted was how much the performers engaged with the crowd, and how supportive, lively and most significantly, loud the audience were in return.

Henry Raby introducing the night

Next up was Chloe Hanks, a former York student. Her poetry delves into the dark, psychological and murderous thoughts of a woman (one of my personal favourite themes). She spoke of topics such as makeup and the need to be pretty, with rather poignant rhetorics questioning the difference between a mere existence and a life. 

Following her was Stu Freestone, who actually fell onto the stage in excitement; Crow Rudd, who created a wonderfully comedic word play poem on D&D called ‘D&Dating’ (Maia, a D&D player herself, absolutely adored this one), and then Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell. Everyone before her had memorised their work and recited it effortlessly on stage, though Elizabeth immediately admitted her inability to follow in their footsteps. At this, everyone laughed, and I don’t think they stopped throughout the entirety of her poem. In a similar vein to the writing of Dolly Alderton, she rather satirically listed everything she learned from ‘Just Seventeen’ as a young girl. She recounted the magazine in an astoundingly funny and unabashedly honest way, reciting its perhaps outdated wisdom that “Leonardo Dicaprio is the correct and only crush to have at this age” and exploring the struggles of growing up as an insecure teenager. 

Another former York student followed, who Maia spoke to later on in the evening over their begrudging affection for their shared town of origin, Weston-super-Mare. Sophie Shepherd, poet, and advocate of her often overlooked home town, used hilarious comedy and incited a great amount of crowd engagement to promote Weston and its flourishing poetry scene. 

Next was my absolute favourite poet of the whole night: Ruth Awolola. Her poetry was beautifully moving and I highly doubt anyone made it through without a single tear. Maia and I definitely didn’t. Her first poem explored the idea of being a “beautiful contradiction” and spoke of a struggle to place oneself into a set category. She covered themes such as identity, race, womanhood, death and her own process through grief in an incredibly poignant recital of her writing. 

The break came at the perfect time, with enough of a pause to dry eyes, refill drinks and browse the merch stand. Here, you could purchase the poets’ books, raffle tickets, cheese (of all things), with an opportunity to show your support and donate to Palestine as well. 

In the second part of the show, the rock band ‘Everything After Midnight’ performed and I’ve been listening to their music ever since. Similar to Wolf Alice, their music has roots of melodic indie rock with the intersection of fem-punk and grunge. Lead singer Stephanie Roberts has the perfect balance of feminine anger and bitterness alongside beautifully poetic lyrics (a line I particularly liked was “if I miss you, it’s only because my bones demand me to”). Accompanied by guitarist Jacob Cooper, in a significant moment for the duo, they performed their discography for the penultimate time. As a student drowning in rent payments for a house with seemingly never ending faults, I particularly enjoyed their satirical and rather bitter song addressed to a former landlord, ‘You’re Just a Tenant’.  

Everything After Midnight performing for the penultimate time

Moving from rock to rap, Testament came next. A performer with an unmatchable skill set and a notably impressive CV as a playwright and world record breaking beatboxer, the crowd watched his performance in amazement. He began by reciting a particularly moving poem about his experience growing up mixed-race, identifying with and immersed into two different cultures simultaneously. He then moved into beatboxing and rap (Maia and I questioned how it is humanly possible to create such sounds - and I still have no idea) and finished with a freestyle. He asked the audience to generate four words as follows: ‘epiphany’, ‘chemistry’, ‘trousers’ and ‘caesar salad’, all of which he managed to incorporate into the rap. I distinctly remember the line ‘I’m like a salad because I seize the day.’ Whether you can call that lyrical genius or something else entirely, I’m not quite sure.  

After the final interval came the Slam Poetry Competition. The competitors were Hannah Davies, Henry Raby, Bram Jarman and Stu Freestyle. Hannah went first with a ukulele and song; Henry next with a comedic pre-recorded message to himself; Bram confessed his “top 10 top 10s” in a hilariously clever list; then Stu ended with a moving rhyme, complimenting the other performers. Each was judged out of ten, with Maia as one of the five judges selected by Sophie Shepherd. Bram won with a collective score of 46.4. Heartfelt ‘Thank yous’ and ‘Goodbyes’ ensued, ending the night in the acknowledgement of the work Say Owt has done in the past ten years, and a promise that there will be ten more years to come.

Maia as Judge of the Slam Poetry Competition (left) and Testament’s performance (right)  

An Interview With Henry Raby 

Why does poetry matter to you?

For me, poetry is one of those ways of storytelling that is live and is sharing something about yourself - whether that is the personal or the political - and you’re putting that into the world and sharing it with other people. That doesn’t mean that they have to agree with it, because therein lies the egotism of thinking that everyone has to agree with what you’ve got to say, but it is one of the ways that we keep connecting with one another, saying “I’m a human and you’re a human”. Especially in this fog we have at the moment of being online - the social media, the echo chambers - all of that is here to stay, but nothing beats someone just saying “Hello, this is my story”. Poetry is the way that I do that, and theatre as well. 

Do you think AI will have a big impact on the creative industry?

It already is. Maybe it’s happening more in America - I’ve been listening to podcasts (I’m a millennial, of course I’ve been listening to podcasts!) talking about SAG-AFTRA and the animation union. You know, this is already the new norm. I don’t know enough about AI, I don’t want to outright dismiss it - it is a tool that’s here to stay and I want to learn more. But what I certainly do know is that you shouldn’t use AI when you can pay an artist, and you certainly shouldn’t be using AI to scrape through people’s existing writing to create something which may seem new but is really just the dregs of what other people have already written. I’d be curious to see what AI written poetry is - I mean, people have played with it for years, it’s not new. Tim Clare used Google translate to make poetry like ten, fifteen years ago. I’m all up for experimenting, we just have to keep a sense of who benefits. 

How do we get young people interested in poetry?

All the young people I’ve worked with in whatever capacity have stories to tell. I just did a project doing some podcasting with a couple of seventeen year olds - young people now are digital natives, you know, growing up in this online world with vast amounts of knowledge that humans have never had access to before - but we’re all still humans that have something to say, especially that generation that went through COVID during their very formative years. Yesterday in a theatre and creative writing workshop at a school, a young person told my colleague that they’d found a voice through the work they were doing. I guess you just have to think that, just because young people understand more about the internet, doesn’t mean there’s not more challenges to explore. 

How would you define the poetry you do?

The handy label is spoken word - it’s anything where people are literally speaking words, you know? I think I can get hung up on genres - is it influenced by rap, for example. Or, I come from a punk poetry background, or is it more literature based, you know? It’s all sort of semantics really. You can get nerdy about it. But that’s what I like about the poetry scene, it’s that sense of having a go and everything coming from different places. Some of the exciting stuff for me is seeing a poet who isn’t necessarily within my genre or background. Maybe that’s why me and Stu [Freestone] work well - he came from more hip hop, I came from listening to punk lyrics, and we just came to meet in this lovely place. 

Is there an image or idea that you keep returning to in your poetry?

At the moment I’m working a lot on hope and anger, and how right now they’re sort of two sides of the same coin - you need both. Anger is important but we also need hope. Where does hope exist when it feels like the world is falling apart? I’m trying to write a collection around that. And a voice keeps appearing throughout, representing everything I hate. It’s this snarky voice that puts people down. I invite them into the poetry a bit, give them space, and then tear them down. And that character, even if they just appear as a voice, you can play with that on stage, how it’s presented, where you’re looking. That’s quite fun - to bring it in and then dismiss it. 

Do you ever get nervous performing?

I’m really nervous tonight! I mean, you’ve got to be a bit nervous because you want it to matter. Tonight there are a lot of different elements that we don’t do as much, music for example. Because it’s the birthday gig, there’s some things I want to say. I want to make it right, you know? But it will be amazing. Once we step out there and welcome everyone, it will be spot on. 

There’s a huge writing scene in and around York,

what do you think it is about York that makes people want to write?

Yeah! It’s a real literary city, for its size, and a real art city. It’s always been that way, but especially post-COVID there've been so many poetry nights. Maybe it’s a class thing? Because there’s a big service industry you can always find a bit of work and have some expendable income to come to gigs? But I think its real strength is that it’s got a lot of pubs! There’s a lot of back rooms in pubs that you can book for gigs. I used to think with York that you could come here and live here for years and not know what’s going on - we’re not good at shouting about it and, as I say, all the gigs are in backrooms of pubs. People sometimes say there’s no punk scene but there is, it’s just the people who run it put it on Facebook and it’s only their friends that see it. And venues come and go all the time, we’ve used so many spaces over the years. Hopefully we’ll stay with The Crescent for a while, though. But there is that DIY feel, that you can pick it up and move along and find something else and crack on. And if you want to do it, you can do it - I live in east Leeds now and people ask me why I don’t do gigs there but there’s already loads of gigs in Leeds, I don’t want to step on toes. But in York, if you want to make something happen, just crack on with it really.