Performance poet Dr. John Cooper Clarke masters the art of wordplay

Once known as the wild-haired poet laureate for Great Britain’s punk rock scene in the 1970s, fast-talking, public speaker Dr. John Cooper Clarke has now become the UK’s most caustically comic social critic, fanciful storyteller and performance poet.

Rhyming in rhythm, astutely alliterative and salaciously satirical in the sometimes silliest of ways, Cooper Clarke has released seven studio albums, four live DVDs, one prose-centric autobiography (‘I Wanna Be Yours‘) and four volumes of poetry, included his just-published book, ‘What’.

And this month, Cooper Clarke is mounting his American tour with stops at New York City on Sept. 18, and Philadelphia’s City Winery on Sept. 20. 

Cooper Clarke spoke with Metro from Dublin before flying to the U.S.

You have a new poem, ‘Things are Gonna Get Worse,’ that seems to revolve around aging, but could also be a take down on social, cultural ills and how we treat the planet.

If there’s something wrong with the planet, there’s nothing that I can do about it. That is a completely subjective piece of work about the creeping decrepitude of age… the connections to the senior life. Nothing more. Although isn’t that enough? (*laughs*)

Is ‘Things are Gonna Get Worse’ an observation about your own aging process?

You got it right. Let’s face it: we’re all under the clock. But let’s not get too miserable about things. I’ve never been sprightlier. Wait. I hate that word. It sounds like you’re talking about an old person. 75 years-young, folks. Anyway, I’m in the best of health at the moment. Somebody up there likes me.

What piques your curiosity to put your pen to paper – because my guess is that you’re not using laptops.

I’m not a top guy. Or a laptop guy, at all. I can’t have a computer. It’s about whether you want a computer or do you want a life. Also, I can’t tear myself away from television – I don’t need anymore of these marvelous distractions. TV has never been better.

So, what tears you away from television in order to write?

Well, you have to do something for a living. Especially as idleness has always been my goal. If you write poetry, idleness is really your only ally. So, I think that I got what I wanted: idleness. You don’t have that term in America, do you: ‘Skiving.” That’s what buys me the time to write poetry. That my work, very often, looks like idleness, but I’m really going through some stuff. It’s the greatest job, really. When I found out in school that I could write, I figured that I would play to my strengths.

You figured that you could find some place in show business for professional poetry?

I did. Because to best be affected by poetry, you have to hear poetry. Poetry is no good just reading it in a library. It is a live, phonetic medium, in my opinion. So, I looked to the Edwardian era and London music halls. There were always monologue artists involved, people who evolved into variety and beyond that, into Hollywood. It’s called sprechgesang in German – sing-speaking. The best known among these monologue artists was Stanley Holloway who people know from ‘My Fair Lady’. His live monologue poetry was his diving board into the public’s imagination. Also, there were American monologue artists such as Phil Harris (famous for Disney’s original animated ‘The Jungle Book’ from 1967) … If Stanley Holloway, Phil Harris and sexy Rexy Harrison could do it, why not me?

So many years and so many different rhythms after the fact, where do you hold punk rock’s esteem at this point?

I could hardly be considered a punk at my age (*laughs*). The word ‘punk’ belongs to snot-nosed, teenaged kids, doesn’t it? But it is part of my mythology, isn’t it, the punk poet so why try to shake it off now? It would be a waste of energy to even kvetch about it, so punk rock it is.

The collection of work that makes up ‘What’ holds great empathy, whether it is you or other characters. How do you attribute that?

I’m writing more now in the first person. It’s a stylistic thing, so that I don’t sound like it’s about ‘him,’ ‘her,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘it.’ It’s a bit accusatory. Whenever I use the word ‘I,” I am an adopter of positions in an imaginative way. I try to inhabit the brain of a citizen who is very different than myself. If I’m ever contentious in a way that anyone disagrees with, I’m not copping out, but it’s not really my voice. I don’t think that it is healthy for any artist to have their worldview entirely known. It’s not helpful in the enjoyment of everything that I do.

Dr. John Cooper Clarke will perform at City Winery, 990 Filbert Street, on Friday, Sept. 20, at 6 p.m. For information and tickets, visit citywinery.com/philadelphia