I join a full house at Exeter Library for Spork!’s night of spoken word and music

The event is billed as ‘vibrant and uplifting’, and as it turns out, it’s both of these things. But, as is characteristic of Spork!, it’s comically dark, thoughtful, and subversive too.

It’s one of those in a run of sticky, sultry evenings of cloud cover and humidity that June brought to the city, along with the shimmering satin and slimfit suits of prom season. In Gandy Street, music and light spilled from bars onto the pavement, where drinkers unwound, and a sign outside Zizzi’s read: This is summer!

Upstairs at the library, the Rougemont Room is curtained and humming with chatter and sealed heat. Someone wrestles with a fan, while the beep of the PDQ machine taking last-minute bar sales comes from the foyer. It’s exciting to be in the library at night in the green light and surrounded by books, drinks in hand, music playing. 

An audience of sixty – poetry aficionados drawn by the award-winning line up together with devotees of all things Spork! – is waiting in anticipation. On the front row, newcomers are here for Caroline Bird after discovering her work at the library’s new Not Dead Poets Club – just one of the reasons Chris White, Spork! founder and Exeter Library Senior Supervisor, has earned accolades for his culture and creativity – and credit from his employers for transforming Exeter Library into a ‘cultural powerhouse’.

But he’s also a bit sweary and rude. His is an energy that makes the night even more exciting – this tension between the library’s formality and hush and Spork’s irreverence. He slides on to the stage, pink from multi-tasking: “Sorry for the delay,” he says, “Belinda demanded to have some wine!”

Behind him a huge orange backdrop, painted by Spork! sister Ceri Baker, floats with cartoon open mouths on speech bubbles. Chris begins his customary call and respond: “When I say oggy – you say oi!”, and then, “Now, appropriate for this moist temple, when I say soggy – you say moist!” 

Malaika Kegode

One of the first things Malaika Kegode says when she comes to the stage is, “Make sure you take photos of me with this backdrop, I want them for my insta – it’ll eat them up.” A writer, performer, producer and mentor, she has the easy familiarity that comes from years of experience of being in front of an audience. “There’s loads of you,” she says, looking slightly incredulous, “it’s hot out there”, she gestures beyond the tall curtained windows, “and it’s hot in here!” 

She grew up in Ashburton and has history with a capital H with Exeter. There are parts of the city and buildings that she rushes past to duck memories – “I had a lover who died of too much of himself/a friend who died from not enough” – but there are happy memories too, of hosting a long-running spoken word night at the now-lost Bike Shed Theatre on Fore Street. In ‘Outlier’, her autobiographical, genre-defying spoken word show, she draws on her experience of navigating teenhood in rural Devon. It’s powerful, innovative work.  

She begins with Blue Mountains, because “it encompasses a lot of what I bring to the world and the stage.” Her voice is soft, intimate and true: “There’s a gap in the sky where the words trickle out,” she says. It’s poetry you can relate to – about friendships, love and loss, drugs, mix tapes, big beautiful skies and landscapes that press down on you. It’s the poetry of the questioning millennial, characterised by self-awareness and melancholy: “Who am I now with my buttoned down alibis?/Who are you?/Some mixed up metaphor about the moon? A good person? A person? How can I be better?”

But there’s humour too as she reflects on the pros and cons of the smartphone, the cult of wellness, including a list of approaches including sage and crystals – “You tried breathwork – it gave you a panic attack/Maybe crystals can’t save you now” – and on bringing ‘main character energy’ to her social media.

Turning 30 has marked a period of acceptance: “It’s noticing a new stretch mark and the world not ending/It’s sitting round the table with your friends and realising how much you love them/It’s this moment. And this one. And this.” She has come home to herself: “I am a person I never thought I’d be/quiet, tired, tough/I find a home in a city outside of myself.”

“Beautiful, thank you – I feel so seen!” says Chris afterwards, and the audience hums agreement.

Lizzy Lidster

We shift gear slightly with singer-songwriter Lizzy Lidster. Smart, funny and affable, she plays guitar and riffs with the audience about Googling people she went to school with and making up songs about what they might be doing now. In Clare, she imagines iterations of her friend making fine wine in Utah, “being in Greece in trouble with the police.” She’s wonderfully deadpan: “Clare, I don’t remember your face being that long,” she sings.

In Love is a Verb, she reminds us, “Love is something we do, an action word,” before introducing us to Timid Linda, “the quietest person I ever met/though I didn’t realise because I met her in the library.” Timid Linda is an ambitious introvert, a superhero librarian, “inspiring children with a book in which someone feels seen./Timid Linda saves a life every day with a book.” 

Introducing her final number, Potholes, she tells us, “I’ve always wanted to put the word Tarmacadam in a song,” inviting us to whoop when we hear it, which we do, because we live in Devon and are no strangers to potholes.

Caroline Bird

Now in her 30s, headliner Caroline Bird is also a millennial, one of the first generation to grow up with the Internet. A perennially popular poet and exceptional storyteller, she’s been publishing poetry since she was a teenager, and last summer published her seventh collection, Ambush at Still Lake. She’s a deft and agile wordplayer, her work shot through with the shock of the unexpected. She turns subjects upside down and inside out, examining them with astonishing acuity and a playful disrespect for the rules. Her poem, Dive Bar, makes me think of a piece of origami folding in on itself before fanning back out, or an Escher graphic where you can’t see where the end and beginning lie, “and you find/yourself imagining a tiny tiny/woman walking straight/into her mouth/through a red breath down a dark/thought into a swallowed sense.”

“Your Secret is Yourself,” she says.

Introducing Last Rites, a prose poem, she gleefully remembers people’s annoyance at its prose form. “It’s a formal trick,” she tells us conspiratorially, “it looks like a paragraph with no line breaks, but it’s an upside down joke – it starts funny and ends up in a dark place.” We begin by laughing and end in gasped silence. “I use a poetic structure, and keep writing until it stops being funny,” she says. It’s devastatingly effective.

“Baby teddy only sleeps in dirty water,” her toddler son told her recently, and in Dream Job she explores the humour and obscurity of toddler logic and language through an imaginary game in which he is her boss, “and the boss is so calm poking playdoh in his office/like he’s been fudging discrepancies/in the books for some time/watching his Ponzi scheme crash.” When the toddler tyrant notices a discrepancy in the stocktake and the mother makes a call to the wholesaler he points out, ‘‘That’s not the phone, that’s your hand.” It’s this switch back and forth, this playing with rules and dynamics, the sense of surprise, that is the driving energy of the poem, managing to be touching, funny and disturbing: “wasn’t it great/while it lasted though/Mum?/Didn’t we want/for nothing?” 

Her language is honed for impact and cuts to the quick. In Ants, she describes them as she hoovers them up from the cereal cupboard as “alive/with errant mannerisms/ like droplets of coffee in space.” She picks them off, their “shrunken comet tails”, describing them in the hoover bag as “Upside down, hysterical in the roaring dark. Cold with relief.” 

She laughingly describes her set as having the characteristic bleakness of a Sarah Kane play. In, We’ve all been there, a game of truth or dare unravels like a Julia Davis comedy, as its players one up each other with increasingly horrible confessions. She showed a draft to her mother: “‘Oh Caroline,’ she said, ‘it’s awful!’”

“I knew then that I’d nailed it,” says Caroline.

As she closes, she questions her work being billed as ‘uplifting’ on the promo for the event: “I’ve always written about love and longing,” she says, “and now that I’ve found love I write about the risk of losing it.” Nevertheless, she closes with Mid Air, a poem about a ‘what if?’ moment dedicated to her partner, “the love of my life” on the front row: “There is a corner of the city where the air is/soft resin. Step in and it hardens/around you. We made/the mistake of kissing there. I mean, here./Our mouths midway/across the same/inhalation like robbers mid-leap between/rooftops.”

Well, I’m uplifted,” says Chris, coming on to close the evening and thank Caroline – “She’s not dead and she is uplifting,” he says, two things on which we can all agree.

The Spork! Summer Special with headliner Lily Redwood is on Thursday 7th August at Rougemont Gardens, 6-7.15pm