FROM PLAYER TO POET – THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GRANNIE
The year is 2016.
Gavin approaches the stage in a state of nervousness. He has never done anything like this before. As his eyes take a moment to adjust to the bright stage lights, he flinches against the glare. Shaky, knees weak, heart thrashing on the inside; he balls his fists, doing everything in his power to keep a cool, collected exterior. Squinting out towards the audience he asks himself, how many people are in this crowd I wonder—
“How should we introduce you?”
The stage manager interjects, suspending his thoughts in mid-air. The poem that Gavin is about to perform concerns his sister. It contains sensitive, complicated subject matter; it’s personal and deals with her involvement in an abusive relationship. However, Gavin doesn’t want to expose his sister in a public forum. He can still shelter and provide her with some level of anonymity.
“Grannie,” he blurts out in a moment of panic. “Call me Grannie.”
Grannie reluctantly wills his legs forward, seeking to ignore the fact that they might give way at any moment. Defenceless in the stage light, there is nowhere to hide. He steps forward, takes a deep breath, and begins:
“For the mornings when washing my own face feels like an invasion of privacy,
when the word potential sounds a lot like sarcasm,
and the distance between my mind and body is anything but an oasis.
When writing prose embodies free will and all advice a depressive shade of determinism,
I recite my ode aloud.
Even if the voice in my head has barely the strength to whisper.
Though the sound of my own voice sends a shiver down my spine, I face myself in the bathroom mirror and deliver these words:
I am human, I am hurting and that's okay.”
As the performance slips along, the crowd clicks their fingers with each new utterance of words from Grannie. This is how the spoken word poetry community expresses their appreciation, their alliance with the performer. Instead of claps, it is the click-click of fingers, quiet and alone when acted out by one, but a steadily building and powerful, loud allegiance when acted out by many.
Despite the shake in his voice, his words command. Gavin offers his tenderly gardened soliloquy to the audience. It floats out, hoping to find a willing receiver of his toil. The words have thorns, a maturity to them of lived experience beyond his twenty-six years. They sting, they bleed, they burn our eyes. And yet the audience seems to reach for them, taking every opportunity to click and embrace the red rawness of his hurt and pain.
As I continue to attend further spoken word performances, I can’t help but notice the sense of community that it seems to foster. The art form is distinctively lyrical in nature, containing textual and extra-textual elements. It is a shared experience of the audience acting as both the elixir and the antidote needed to combat internal pain and a sense of solitude that is all too familiar with this generation.
The snaps continue. The tale is cast out towards the audience, where the words float with free terrain to roam. Finally, they lay rested and the audience sings back with a crescendo of clicking beats, the sound undulating about the room. As the simmering snaps diffuse, Gavin takes a deep breath and skulks back to seat, exhausted by the ordeal.
“I remember seeing and making eye contact with a couple of people who were crying, full blown tears, and then I just couldn't contain myself,” says Gavin. “I left the room. I let everything out that I had been stewing over.” Sobbing in the car, “probably for about two hours, just outside where I had performed. I guess it’s not uncommon for a poet, for someone writing poetry to end up in tears,” he laughs. "But for me, it was not normal.”
And as each tear fell, so too did the burden of every weighty word and verbalisation.
“In that time, people were coming out of other performances to check on me and say, ‘hey,' and that they liked what I did,” he says. “It was probably the best possible start to doing something that I felt was so foreign to me.”
Gavin ended up winning the prize for best poem that night.
"I haven't really been very expressive prior to this,” says Gavin. “Anyone that knows me from my teens that sees what I'm doing at the moment—I mean, there's 1000 questions.”
Poets are often wordy and broody by nature, and this is how Gavin appears to be as he sits on the grass in a Newtown park before me during an interview. The words don’t stop, even in casual conversation and just as the name Grannie suggests, there is more to him than meets the eye.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he says, gesturing to a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He lies on his side on the grass, completely unfazed by the wind kicking up dust and dirt about the park. Grannie wasn’t always a poet, and the vision wasn’t always as clear as it is now.
“The stereotype that I would have fitted into would have been, ‘jock.’ Just focused on sport,” Gavin says. He was, “very, very competitive,” and “shut off any emotion other than anger. Like a cliché version of determination,” he says, referencing one of his poems.
The year is 2017.
Gavin competes in cross country and plays soccer at a high level.
“It was easy for me to have that outlet,” he says. “I didn’t have to dwell on anything, because I would go out there and let it all out.”
Gavin’s efforts resulted in him receiving a youth contract from a professional team in Australia.
“Within a week of receiving that letter, I snapped a ligament in my knee. And then a year later, I snapped the same ligament in my other knee and it was torn up immediately,” he says. “It was all gone. I had to redefine me.”
“When that stopped, I didn't know how to express myself in any other way. It just so happened that I just was drawn to pen and paper.”
Gavin poured his thoughts out in his journals, adding to his repertoire of words and his newfound passion, even going so far as to sleep with his dictionary.
“What a wanker,” he says about himself, chuckling and drawing another puff from his cigarette. The red fire of the tobacco burns, and the ashes fall, landing softly on the blades of grass below.
The year is 2019.
Appropriately titled, the Red Rattler Bar is cloaked in a red, incandescent haze on this Tuesday night spoken word poetry reading. Red. The colour of danger. The one that tells predators to run. The colour of a stop sign. The colour of blood. Despite the Red Rattler being known as a safe space, I feel anything but. It’s too late to leave now, though. That would be rude. And so I stay plastered to my seat, feeling as if I am trapped in the scarlet belly of a dragon. I look out and the contrast of gaudy olden day plush couches against the golden foldout garden chairs is unsettling. The host of the spoken word poetry saunters up the ramp with an unparalleled confidence, making her ascent towards the black stage. It is framed with heavy ruched curtains. Also red. It takes on a circus-like quality, and the whole room feels as if it is pulsating. The host wildly gesticulates and introduces the first act, Grannie.
Gavin proudly presses forward. Only three years ago, he stood here in a profoundly different state. Today he relishes in the shock factor, the element of surprise when they announce that Grannie will take the stage, and a young man in his 20s strolls up. Oddly enough, the name is somewhat fitting. Do people tell you that? I ask.
“That I’m an old soul? Yeah, I’ve been told that.”
Instead of a walker, grey hair and glasses, Grannie dons a baby blue trucker cap. RayBan style, John Lennon-esque sunglasses hang on the tip of his nose, and a denim wash jacket and a t-shirt in a slightly lighter hue is nestled just beneath it. Camel brown chinos melt into this cerulean ensemble. Basking in the glow of the stage light, there is nowhere to hide, and he welcomes this. Gavin looks again to the crowd and begins:
“…Instead of planning your demise,
each morning I will plant you like a seed and watch you reach the skies,
gather your leaves and bury them in the soil,
I’ll show you that it's okay to bend break and fall and that your wounds won't heal if you hold on to it all.
That your roots don't forget so be kind to your forest floor…”
Each word carefully considered and plucked, the story is cyclical in nature. It comes back, it ebbs, it flows. It bends, it turns, it bleeds red. Finally the words lay rested, planted deeply in rich soil, watered by the audience’s clicking beats. The journey is complete and the story is told. The faint clicking of thumb and index fingers snapping together hums about the room. Suddenly, I am at ease. The red is no longer alarming. It is warm, glowing like an ember.
“I hope from my poems that it connects with somebody. I suppose I'm not looking for anything other than that, really,” he says. “The goal is just to hit home, strike a chord, get other people to think about something that maybe they've been avoiding. A lot of people say that about writing in general, I suppose, or art in general,” he says. “But it is cathartic. I guess it was, and it still is.”
