An article about the one single time I felt like a rock star

AKA - When a poem goes down a storm

I love performing poetry. I love watching poetry performances. I love it when the crowd is silent. A single tear wells in an eye. A collective laugh. The nods. The interactions, from the clicks of appreciation for a specific turn of phrase to an intake of breath for a twist no one saw coming. When the audience is thanking the poet for saying a universal truth in one powerful line. When you can see the poet is so proud of their work. And rightly so. The frisson of connection is a beautiful snapshot of what makes humanity in poetry, in life so special.

I have a poem I bring out of my back pocket when I know I want to bring a non poetry crowd on side. Recently I cracked it out in some school assemblies I was lucky enough to be presenting. It is a poem I have always got a good reaction. It was one of my earliest poems written specifically with the intention of performing it. I first performed it early March 2020. Just weeks before the word lockdown was even mentioned. The laughter I got from performing that one poem was the biggest dopamine hit I have ever experienced. All my own work, on a stage in a brilliant bar in the Northern Quarter in Manchester. I was ready to tour that poem around every open mic in town until a bat in a different part of the world decided to change the direction of all our lives.

Me: March 2020

Instead, I toured the poem online. I even put a video of it on instagram and found some followers there through it, that I since got to meet and perform with in real life. I have performed it in pubs, football social clubs, libraries, cafes, festival fields and theatres. But only in 2025 did I think to perform it to my toughest crowd to date. Teenagers. They will always tell you if the poem is genuinely as funny as the adults seem to find it. They cannot and will not fake enthusiasm. Especially in front of all of their friends. All of them had to be on board or soon it could be the most humbling performance of my life.