Earlier this year, I was sent a copy of a small poetry book, Gie it Laldy, by friend, Sylvia Petter, who told me that she had met its author at the Geneva Writers Conference. 'Imagine a young Ponti in kilt with shoulder length hair', she said. Coincidentally, I was emailed by another friend, who insisted I had to contact him. 'Zoë,' she said, 'Sylvia and I have a brilliant new poet for you by the name of Cameron M Black.'
The man in question is rapidly making a name for himself as a performance poet. Born in Glasgow in 1965, he lived in London for several years before moving to Munich, where he is now 'indulging his twin needs of writing and acting'. Turn to any poem in Gie it Laldy and you find the flavour of Cameron M Black. He specialises in short poems, some just a line or two, but all offering something trenchant.
"I can't live without you," he said. So
she shot him, then wrote a note for the
milkman saying, "only one pint today please."
Cameron has always written. After leaving school, he mixed short stories with poetry, which he says was 'pretty conventional … heaps of teenage angst.
"I had all this stuff in a large folder which I gave the title Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Lunatic, which I think is still lying around in my parents' house somewhere."
Cameron Black uses the surreal for his effects, uses what he calls "tangential connections between words". Those familiar with Ivor Cutler will see parallels here.
"I was 18 when I first heard Ivor Cutler, and at the time I just thought, like most people, that he was very funny. I lost touch with the friend who had introduced him to me, and didn't think much more about him. Meanwhile, I had never stopped thinking about writing, how I could express some of the stuff clogging up my head. I had decided that what really mattered was the words themselves, that I wanted to demonstrate their inherent beauty. Clearly that meant poetry rather than prose. To me it implied abstraction, the removal of semantic meaning, so I started trying to find a way to write abstract poetry; if painters could concentrate solely on colour and texture, then why shouldn't a writer? But I never found a way to do this to my satisfaction. A colleague reintroduced me to Ivor Cutler and I gradually realised that this man was using words in ways I had never heard before, valuing them for themselves, highlighting them by using unexpected juxtapositions."
Cameron's poetry is full of these juxtapositions. In Poppies, he talks of how he and his sister went to a Remembrance Service:
… The poppies we
wore, saved from last year, came from the
sideboard, middle drawer, sharing its faint
musty aroma of small things which are slightly
older than they ought to be. At the given moment
we remembered according to instructions, then
went home for sausage egg and bacon.
When I suggested to him that food seems to be a recurring theme in his work, Cameron's first response was that I was mad. Then he looked again, and agreed, that certainly in this book, it does play a large part. We are also introduced to family via food.
I loved my gran's onion soup, despite being
confused that it had milk in it, while her
chicken soup had rice. But gran was old and
didn't know any better…
Cameron Black is reluctant to talk about his work because he considers it risky to do so. He prefers instead to let his poetry speak for itself.
''I often feel that whenever you start trying to talk about poetry, as opposed to doing it, you're almost inevitably going to end up sounding pretentious and pseudish… the central point for me is simply words: I love words, love the feeling of saying them, their aesthetics. And poetry is a way of getting right down to the level of individual words; it's about using them in such a way as to create a mood or an image directly in the mind, preferably without all that messy business of conscious interpretation. For me that means a lot of playing around with words, using double meaning, mixing figures of speech, any and every possible tool that the language offers. There are no rules in poetry, including this one about there being no rules… if you come across a double meaning and wonder which of the possible meanings I meant, I probably mean both simultaneously: I like to make my words earn their keep."
To illustrate the point, Cameron pointed to Glass:
She had been on a bus in Rotterdam, staring out of its
window as it crossed the silted industrial river. Now here
she was gazing through her drink in a pub in Paisley,
ten years later and twenty years older, with the same
cataract of disappointment…
Here, cataract is used both as a waterfall, and as a film across the eye. Reading his work, it's clear that Cameron Black sees language as something to be fully exploited.
"Basically, I feel that the English language is the greatest toy anyone can have. Anything goes: at any given moment you have the entire language to choose from, and in fact, even that needn't be a limitation. If you can't find what you need within the existing rules or vocabulary, invent it. A trivial example of that in Gie It Laldy is the word 'dodophobia'. A more serious example is in One. I had pretty much written the poem, but I wasn't happy. I reread it again and again but couldn't find anything to change to make it work. After a day or two, I decided what was wrong was the way reading it made the emphasis on the first sentence come out, and eventually worked out that I could get what I wanted by having a comma at the front. My poem started with the second half of a sentence, even if the first half wasn't there. With the comma added, it felt complete.'
Cameron was reluctant to say any more on the subject, but he did add that the greatest danger is over-analysis.
'I want people, including myself, to enjoy the poems for what they are, not as an academic exercise. I don't want to find myself doing something in order to fulfil the method, don't want to limit the spontaneity of what I write by turning it into a technical operation.'
Cameron Black's fame is spreading largely because of the extraordinary response to his performance poetry, although his work has appeared in various poetry journals, and on the web at: http://www.dublinwriters.org/ He is in the upcoming issue of Upstairs ar Duroc (based in Paris) and has been asked to submit to Verbocity and The Circle in the US.
For someone with so few paper publications, Cameron has an enviable performance record. He has just done a reading in Paris, and he appeared as a guest poet at Albright College in Pennsylvania. He also did public readings there, and at the Nuyorican Poets' Café in New York, a notorious 'Tough Audience' spot, where performers are used to being "heckled to death".
"This was particularly pleasing because I stood in front of an audience which could scarcely have been less hand picked for me - they were there to hear powerful politically radical rap poetry and got me in the middle of it, and I seemed to succeed in winning them over."
There is no doubt that Cameron M Black is a name to watch out for, and if you get the chance to watch the man himself, jump at it.
© Zoe King 2000