Simone Yasmin on the catharsis, and trauma, of performing poetry
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I still remember the first poem I wrote and performed outside of a school setting. It was at a Saturday morning poetry session at Leeds Playhouse, then called West Yorkshire Playhouse. Michelle Scally Clarke, a well-known local poet, was the lead artist. I remember not having much exposure to poetry, besides that which came regurgitated in sonnets and haikus. The session released me from the constraints of form and structure; I free-wrote. Michelle encouraged us to dig deep, to tap into weighty emotion and to let it all out on what she called her best friend ‘Tracy Paper’. I’ve not looked back since.
I love writing and have always loved writing. I owe a lot of that to my English teachers and to my Dad, who constantly took me to open mic events, read poetry to me as a child and always found the time to read over my work. But my love for it doesn’t stop me being acutely aware that I have a kind of insuppressible urge to write. Especially when I’m hurting. I suppose it’s my therapy.
Add it to the list of other tragic things I must somehow turn to art to make somewhat bearable.
– ‘How can I write about the weather?’ by Simone Yasmin, commissioned by Metal Culture for In Other Words (2022)
I write a lot about race, about womanhood – Black womanhood, specifically – with misogynoir and intersectional feminism tightly bound to this. I write about social issues: poverty, the climate crisis, human rights violations, the things in between. Taking inspiration from the things happening around me means the themes of my work can be limitless. Despite this, I often find the work I return to – the work that feels most cathartic – is written from my own lived experiences.
I used to say I felt most content when creating. I didn’t mean that in a sunshine-and-rainbows way, but instead that writing releases all the pent-up emotion and places it somewhere more manageable, somewhere more digestible. The link between the personal and the emotion it carries is quite a funny line to flirt with. ‘Funny’ is maybe not the right word – maybe interesting. I’ve always said my goal as a poet is to make people feel. You want the audience to feel the words you’re saying and all the charged emotions behind them. But how do you deliver that emotion without succumbing to it yourself?
Sometimes I write poems so deeply personal that re-reading my work is akin to reliving the experience. I’ve sat in the mirror countless times reading and re-reading my poems until I can strike the balance: just enough emotion for the audience, just enough emotion for me, and, even then, it can all still unravel on stage. I guess you have to detach a little from some of the moments in your writing to be able to perform them – just a little though. If you were touched, moved, hurt enough to pen the piece, I’m not sure the trauma of it stays locked in the fibres of the page on which you first penned it. In fact, I’m sure it doesn’t.
As cathartic as the writing process is, you reopen the wound when saying the words aloud to an audience. It’s impossible not to. And it’s the same with relaying most trauma. The pain doesn’t stop just because you’ve let it breathe; each time you retell it, it takes a little bit of you with it. For me, the self often determines the work. The emotions and experiences I’m wading through tend to manifest on the page. Some of the most personal pieces I’ve written relay my experiences of racism, sexual violence, and misogynoir. They were always the poems that got stuck in my throat on stage. I started to get comfortable with some. Others I stopped performing altogether.
Last year, when I lost my granny and then, very suddenly, my uncle, that all shifted. I began to write about thick and heavy grief. I’m struggling to write about anything else. I’ve only performed one poem from this new work; when I did, I had to grip a chair next to me to stop my legs from giving way. I let the tears fall once I made it back to my seat. I felt sick for an hour after.
I suppose approval has become synonymous with applause. Once you say ‘thank you’ you want the applause to flood the room. Maybe you expect it to erupt and ricochet in echoes. As a performance poet – or a performer of any kind – you want to come off stage and hear praise. You might even hang around backstage to see if anyone shouts for an encore. You try not to look too keen. You want that dopamine hit. You need that buzz. But when you’re performing the personal – when you’ve just broken down, stripped off, stood naked on stage, allowing the audience to feast on your most intimate moments – maybe the response you once wanted is no longer the same.
Maybe the applause becomes muffled and audience faces blur.
Maybe ‘that was amazing’ starts to double back on you as you find yourself reliving a moment that was far from amazing.
Maybe you feel jealousy as people tell you ‘your imagery was so vivid’ and you wish you could have formed imagery from metaphors and similes, not from the events burned on the insides of your skull.
Maybe when they tell you ‘I loved that’ you want to scream because you didn’t.
As audiences, we often want to feel things outside ourselves, or through the feelings of people outside ourselves. To get close to it but not too close. I guess poets, performers, writers, and artists are often not given that grace. We lay it all out and audiences relish in our pain, rarely pausing between the applause to ask if we’re okay.
One evening, listening to the audiobook of Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface as I stood making my dinner, I heard the lines ‘Only she never cared that once the art was made, once the personal became spectacle, the pain was still there.’ Putting the personal out there in poems, paintings, memoirs, whatever medium doesn’t rid the creator of the pain. It still remains past the claps, the clicks, the pats on the back. That’s not to say those brave enough to get up on stage and share some of those personal moments with an audience don’t deserve the praise. They absolutely do – us poets love the clicks. Maybe as audiences we just need to think more about balancing praise with care. Especially when we can see the performer is hurting.
I often reflect with one of my writer-friends on how we met. It was about five years ago and I was watching her perform for the first- time. Mid-poem, she fled from the stage with tears streaming down her face and apologised to the audience. I followed her instinctively to the bathroom, moved by the poem she’d been unable to finish. We hugged, cried, laughed. She opened up to me about her experiences, about how tough it was to share that particular piece in the spotlight. I listened. I didn’t tell her how beautiful the poem was, or that I wanted to hear the rest of it. I didn’t speak about the imagery she’d woven through, or how I loved her use of different languages. She needed the space to talk about the experience, not to celebrate the form in which we’d received it.
I know quite a few writers who craft truly powerful and personal poetry but refuse to perform it. Digging into feelings again isn’t easy. It takes a lot to heal, and sometimes you have to question for whose benefit you’re unearthing it all. Who does it serve? When a performer is brave enough to give you even a fraction of insight into the personal, hold that, hold them. They could have left it on the page.
I want to leave you with an extract from a poem I wrote in 2019. I’d just shared an extremely personal piece on stage, one that I’ve not performed since. This poem made its way out of me soon afterwards:
And the audience clicks clicks clicks. ‘You’ve got this,’ they say, offering words of comfort. Clicking while they encourage you, not trying to discourage you eyes pleading you to carry on. They think you’ve lost your place in your poem, confused your lines, but you’re lost in the moment, confusing flashbacks with reality, tripping over trauma, until you’re back, there, again. – ‘Healing and feeling’ by Simone Yasmin, unpublished but alive and well in the Notes app of her phone.
Simone Yasmin is a writer and spoken word artist born and based in Leeds. Her poetry has been published in Metal’s ‘In Other Words 2’, BALTIC’S ‘S.P.A.M Spreads #1’, ‘Exiled Writers Ink’s ‘RESISTANCE’ and Unicef Next Generation’s ‘Words By’. She is a former judge on the panel of the Leeds Poetry Festival competition and Simone recently worked with the National Literacy Trust to select West Yorkshire’s first young Poet Laureate’s. She is currently writing her debut collection of poetry.
Photo credit: Michael Godsall
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