Auckland Writers & Readers Festival
May 26 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

STEPHANIE JOHNSON introduced Shane Koyczan to the several hundred strong audience as “the best poet in the world!” Quite a promise. My first cruel impression as Koyczan took the stage was that he could possibly be the biggest poet in the world; his large stomach and loose chin reminded me of a bullfrog. He’d brought his own bottle of coke with him, which sent a small flock of festival helpers into a flurry of clearing the Pellegrino water and glasses off the stage table.

“Can I get them to do anything else?” Koyczan asked pleasantly. He lowered himself into one of the tight leather arm chairs and wriggled about slightly. “If I were in better shape, I could cross my legs,” Koyczan said, working the crowd like a stand-up comedian rather than a poet. “Is everyone doing okay, out there? Let me just check my set list.” No, he wasn’t like any poet I’ve seen in New Zealand before. He didn’t have a pile of slim volumes with him, just a crumpled corner of paper, which he referred to only three times during the hour.

This was not a reading, but a performance. Koyczan stood in the centre of the stage, flexed his hands a couple of times then stared out into the crowd and began his first number, ‘Visiting Hours’, the title poem of his collection. I was initially repelled; this wasn’t poetry as I knew it, this was rap. Where was the familiar lack of eye contact, polite inhibition and predictable flicking of pages? What was this large, loud, strangely magnetic, young Canadian man doing on stage, modulating like a preacher or a hypnotist or Eminem? He was entertaining us. I stared about the crowd and expected to see a few faces twitching with discomfort. All I found were delighted, entranced eyes firmly fixed on Koyczan.

Despite my prejudice I tried to listen to Koyczan’s poetry on its own terms, comparing it to how Homer must have sounded, or Ginsberg or Kerouac. Eventually I made it past the humour of his words (he really could be described as a particularly sophisticated stand-up comedian) and noticed the rhythmic precision, tragedy, absurdity and intelligence of his poetry. His stream of similes and metaphors from “fisher price xylophone bones reminding me of childhood” to “let’s go slow, like a turtle with a purpose” could reasonably be compared to James Tate. The energy in Koyczan’s work is not generated just by his impressive delivery but by his intense, quick-fire progression of images, quirky as a Tim Burton film, yet controlled as metered verse must be.

“I just want to do as much for you as I can”, Koyczan said after his first poem with an unfashionable sincerity. “You have such a beautiful country, everyone here is so nice and helpful.” Being an unpleasant, cynical person at times like this, I was cringing a little inside. Shane Koyczan, I felt like saying, we’re here to listen to your writing – you don’t have to be kind to us! But perhaps he did – perhaps it was the unforced response of a genuinely nice guy: a nice guy who uses such tooth-achingly sentimental things as love, God, hearts, rainbows, unicorns, hope, kisses, devotion, melody, angels, goodness, haloes and miracles to describe sex. The point in the hour when the crowd’s New Zealand resistance to sentimentality began to show through was a poem Koyczan read about a nine-year-old boy with terminal cancer whom he met in hospital. “Do you believe in angels” was in fact a line. At the end of the poem Koyczan turned his back on the audience, took off his glasses and wiped away a tear. I wanted to believe that such a depth of feeling displayed without inhibition was sincere, but instead I felt uncomfortably sceptical. I certainly believe that the emotion Koyczan was displaying was real – it was just so foreign at a poetry reading. He must have been aware of the audience’s discomfort, because Koyczan’s next piece was ridiculously light.

     If I were a cow
     Mooo
     If I were a cow on the road to the slaughter house
     Mooo?
     I would try to kiss you one last time
     before my lips are mulched for wieners

“Man, why did I do that? I must have a brain parasite or something!” Koyczan said afterwards, reading my thoughts. It was this self-awareness and habit of qualifying his most outrageous moments that warmed me to Koyczan. He wasn’t merely a sop who wrote about rainbows and had a talent for rhyme – he was intelligent, observant and sensitive to the medium in which he worked. I respected him for that.

His haikus were simply comedy to me.

     I’m Shane Koyczan
     I like women and free food
     Running makes me sad

     Sixty-eight yes yes yes
     That’s when you go down on me
     And I owe you one

But they hit upon the habit poetry sometimes has of mirroring jokes in structure. Ultimate lines turn into punch lines and gain their resonance that way. This was the case in every single poem Koyczan performed during the hour and worked better for some than for others. His poem about the death row chef, who makes criminals’ last meals, crammed much of its political weight into its final line: “most of them still choose apple pie”.

At the end of the session Koyczan received an almost unanimous standing ovation. One woman was even weeping. “Oh, don’t cry!” Koyczan said in a voice verging on Michael Jackson’s, “It looks like God forgot to water his prettiest flower”. Just as I was planning to vomit discreetly in the corner, he redeemed himself: “Man, I’m lame.” This anecdote sums up my reaction to his poetry, I think. Whenever I thought, dear God what a shocking line (for example: “Ctrl Alt S, save the world!”) Koyczan would undercut it, change its tone, strip away its sweetness or give it some necessary weight.

I wouldn’t say that Shane Koyczan is the best poet in the world, but I will say that he is the most impressive that I’ve ever seen. New Zealand has no one like him, or if we do, we’re not encouraging them. Poetry in New Zealand is far less about performance than about pages in journals, restrained readings at galleries and the occasional musical-literary collaborations. Tusiata Avia is the closest thing we have to a performance poet, as far as I know. I’m not saying that poets need to perform – they are, after all, writers. Their job is to make words work on the page. However, part of “working on the page” includes dealing with metre, rhyme, assonance, repetition – aural features that make the medium so memorable. It then follows that if a poem is working on the page, it is sounding good in the reader’s head and should, accordingly, sound even better coming from the poet’s mouth. This is the part of the art of poetry that Koyczan has mastered, this is what makes him popular, and this is why he was such a refreshing – if bizarre – surprise at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.