Better Than Starbucks!

BTS: Do you have any plans to come to America? Do you find as much acceptance here as in the U.K.? Or do you feel you aren't too accepted there, either.

SP: I’d love to visit the States, and have looked into it once or twice. It’s a question of finding both sufficient time, and setting up enough gigs or readings to justify it. I’ve toured there with a band (working as a roadie) and I’m well aware of the scale of the venture! I’m currently keeping myself busy here with my own gigs, with the small publishing company I run, and with ‘poets, prattlers, and pandemonialists’ a collaborative venture with two other Wolverhampton poets which is having a lot of fun doing our bit to popularize poetry and break down people’s expectations and prejudices about it. As for acceptance, I still get a huge buzz when someone tells me they don’t normally like poetry, but mine really touched them. I’m far more excited by opening up that kind of connection than I am about being accepted by the great and good of the poetry world. For some, I’ll always be too political, or too serious. I’m fine with that. What counts way and above anything else is being true to my own voice, to what I have to say, and saying it loudly and clearly and whenever I’m given the opportunity.

BTS: I note that you write a lot from an outsider's point of view, especially in England, but also in so much of your work. Pottinger sounds very English to my American ears. If your heritage isn’t English, what is it? (I do have some understanding of native alienation, as I am from the Deep South of the USA, but hardly fit there), but yours seems more truly "foreign."

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SP: I’m a mongrel, as so many of us are. The family name comes via my granddad, who was from Orkney, an archipelago off the north coast of Scotland which looks back as much to Scandinavia as it does to the UK. My grandma was born and raised in the Black Country, which is where I live now. And on my other’s side, I’m Irish. I’m the child of migrants and immigrants, but one lucky enough to have the camouflage of white skin. This meant I got to hear the casual bigotry and racism — so often directed at people like my mom – because people assumed I was one of their own and would agree with them. I wasn’t, and I didn’t. The parallels between the physical and verbal abuse dished out to black and Irish people in the 70s and 80s, and the hatred whipped up against Muslims now, is — to my mind — inescapable. We’re all human beings. We all share the same physiology, the same hopes, the same dreams. There is more that unites us than divides us. This should not be news, and yet it still needs repeating. Then there’s class. In the UK, that’s very often the elephant in the room. I grew up a middle-class kid (my dad was a general practitioner) in the heart of a very working-class town. I straddle both worlds, yet belong fully in neither. Traditionally, you’d find shopkeepers, professionals and middle-classes cheek-by-jowl in the same small towns, Now, I live in a world where these communities are increasingly hollowed out, leaving the working-class and poor behind — and increasingly voiceless — while the better-off flee to the suburbs. It’s an interesting place to be.

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BTS: How did you come to poetry? to write it? to be a performer?

SP: If we go right back to first beginnings, I can place the responsibility firmly on the shoulders of a girlfriend when I was 16-17. She introduced me to the work of the Liverpool poets (Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, and Roger McGough). I’d never read anything like it. Poetry at school had been dull, dry, written by dead men, and we’d spent all our time ripping it apart to find out how it worked, which was about as useful as shredding a butterfly to understand its beauty. But their poetry was vibrant, rich, and funny. It talked about life in a world I understood and recognised, held a mirror up to a society which was flawed, and had a glorious sense of humour. I was hooked. From then on, I kept a notebook about me, and wrote. Most of it was the usual teenage guff, but I was learning about poetry, about how and why it worked, and when it didn’t. I was learning about the magic and power of words. As for how I got into performing, that was either pure chance, or one of those moments of serendipity which slip into our lives from time to time, depending on how you read it. I’d come back to Leeds from travelling in Europe, was unemployed, and kicking around for something to engage me and take up my time. I learned the local poetry group met once a month in the pub at the end of my street, and thought — in a moment of bravado — what the hell, let’s give it a go. At this point, I’d never shared my poetry with anyone, and when I sat round the table in the back room of that pub on a Monday evening with four other people, all of whom knew each other, I was quietly terrified. I read one of my poems, and waited for them to put down their pints, look at me earnestly, and tell me that wasn’t poetry and I should never darken their doors again. They didn’t. I kept going back. I grew less nervous about reading my work out loud. One of the poets also ran Leeds Alternative Cabaret, which put on comedians, musicians, and poets, and he gave me a spot at the start of the evening where I could read one of my poems. It went well. Next time, he gave me five minutes. Then ten. Those were my first faltering steps into my craft.