What the hell is Gonzo Poetry?

If Hunter S. Thompson pioneered gonzo journalism, Eliza Fiver is pioneering gonzo poetry.

A rising star and darling of the London poetry scene, she’s been making the rounds through various open mics and readings around the city. I found myself as a passenger on her maiden voyage hosting her own poetry reading.

Tradestars is a co-working space in Islington that rents out offices to the type of small businesses that find the shipping container and exposed concrete aesthetic cool. In a spacious and dimly lit room, chairs and floor cushions were arranged before the “stage” where a microphone lay on the floor, plugged into a small guitar amp under the light of a sunset lamp. My eyes went straight to the drinks table where Eliza had fulfilled her promise of free booze with beer and wine.

Eliza sauntered up the floor in a purple velvet slip dress and black sandals, as bejewelled as ever. She warmly welcomed a gradually increasing audience with the cool candour of a cucumber. I often find myself in the eye of niche little communities whenever I’m hanging out with Eliza. I’m getting cultural whiplash from jumping between the spoken word and post-punk music scenes in London. Many curious and striking people numbered the audience. Feeling at home up there, Eliza warmed the floor with one of her poems.

It's difficult not to be captivated by her verses that catapult off her tongue and land with gracefully humorous rhyming couplets. Few people have her grasp over the spirit of the age. She writes straight from the sleeve where she wears her heart;

Indulge me in the rarest vintage

I’ve been saving for a special occasion

I want to bottle my emotion

Other times, her poems touch upon commonalities which escape our attention; like making your barbies fuck.

There’s something fantastic

about plastic on plastic

Having frequented the spoken word gatherings around London, Eliza had carefully curated the lineup with names that never failed to stir the audience. The first person she brought up was Colin B. Osborn who took the floor like some literary pirate with his shaved head, wild beard, and keen eyes. His verses were laced with fast witticisms that beckoned cheers and hoots from the crowd.

be subjected to waterboarding

be a Saxon in a Saxon village

with Vikings marauding

The poets read some of their materials off phones or cue cards while reciting others from memory, their manner looser from having absorbed the words. Colin was revelling in his powers of snappy descriptions during one such memorised piece about some restaurant from hell.

Next up was Ollie whose thick ginger stubble matched the sunset lamp’s glow. After a poem introducing himself, he cautioned, “I mean no offence to anyone,” laughter ensues, “and if you wanna talk to me about it afterwards that’s completely fine, I’m just tryna raise a conversation.” With steely determination he read a poem about the power of language.

words are like magic

it’s like concocting a potion

and if you use the wrong ones

there could be an explosion

Isolating derogatory insults in the petri-dish of his poem, Ollie tests whether the offence lays in the intent or content of these words. Although this poem has ruffled a few feathers in the past, the enduring applause shows that most people get what he’s trying to do. Besides, not everything has to be universally palatable.

A lot of Ollie’s poetry reads like reconnecting with an old friend, humour and tenderness walking hand in hand. Whenever a poet recited a sublime verse, the crowd would express approval by clicking their fingers. Safe to say, Ollie elicited plentiful clicking.

When Nols Nathanski crawled up to the floor like some subterranean denizen, I knew we were in for something surreal. Shrouded in a black coat with green lapels and a fedora, he wandered like an undertaker between graves. There’s an unabashed eroticism in his literary imagery that would feel right at home in the Naked Lunch. But underneath all the sexual viscera and flirtations with death, there’s a deep yearning for companionship and goodness. After describing a string of amorous exploits resulting in death, he finishes the poem with;

give me this lover’s death

not a hospital bed

not an ugly death

suspended living, drawn out on pills

being nursed, never fucked again

lover destroy me before my death turns sad.

Eliza followed this bizarre reading with a poem she wrote in three minutes on a podcast hosted by Nols. Which is a dazzling feat because what she wrote in three minutes would take me well over an hour. On her episode of Make Poetry Weird Again, Nols prompted her to describe her midnight voice, which she weaved together with an apocalyptic cadence punctuated with the refrain; sleep now or forever hold your peace.

Simply saying one of her oldest friend’s name brought a smile to her face when Eliza brought up Alexia Chrysostomou to the floor. Dressed in a sedate assemblage of all-black, she showed the crowd a small poetry book she bound together with pink ribbon. “If you don’t think that’s impressive, I don’t know what to tell you. This one’s called Your Dad is Autistic and So Are you. Write what you know, eh?”

Whenever she paused to turn the page people would cheer and applaud thinking she’s finished, only for her to continue reading, the applause getting wilder each time.

“First of all, trigger warning: LinkedIn.” She then regaled the crowd with a poem of a baby documenting their growth on LinkedIn, oozing with the corporate self-congratulation we all love that weird platform for.

If you aren’t optimising milk time with the first tooth growth, you’re sure to fall behind in your general development. Maximise the opportunity now. I personally have three new baby teeth. Nanna calls me a little shark. If only she knew about the stocks and shares I have in both Megablocks and Lego.

She flips the page but everyone starts cheering avidly. “It’s not done, it’s not done!” she said over the applause and continued reading. No one could get enough of her delightfully deadpan stage presence.

I wished I had taken up work as a stenographer as my drunken hand was unable to keep up with transcribing the poets’ words. Next before us was Alan, dressed in the average-man’s uniform of white t-shirt and blue jeans. Obligatory spiderweb tattoo on his elbow.

He’s pretty well known in the scene for running the I’m Not Leaving Yet, an Instagram showcase of rising poets here and there. His poetry has the strangely pleasing quality of pressing a mildly painful bruise. The words evoke a lost love gone self-destructively sour. “This one’s about being a pisshead as well, there’s a bit of a theme,” he said – picking up his bottle of Budweiser – before reciting his next offering called Wild Horses. Each poet had a heavy-hitter which they usually closed their set with; a crowd favourite that shot their cheering to a frantic pitch. Alan’s was about a racist tinder date.

I realised quite quickly

we’re two different people from two different places

I like long walks and open spaces

she hates people with different coloured faces

………because she’s a racist.

Thunderous applause ensued when the poem reached its finale with;

we end up parting ways in the dark night

I go left,

obviously she goes far right.

Our host took the floor again, beaming with unabashed radiance as she recited a poem called Hungover with a cheeky smile on her face. Burdened by dreams of an old lover, the words stagger – heart aching as much as the head – through the cluelessness of why things have turned out the way they have.

I haven’t seen you since I told ya

that I drink to forget that we’re over

But the only thing I get is hungover

I’d been wondering this whole time about the black Fender Strat plugged into an amp up front. My curiosity was finally answered when two lads, Jake the Artist on vocals and Robin Banks on guitar, trampled up on stage. “I apologise for breaking up the poetry,” Jake said, “I’m gonna rap, so I hope that’s close enough.” In their two-tone top and short pairing, their outfits resembled flavours of ice cream on display. They looked as nondescript as their musical chemistry was seamless. Robin’s guitar tone was laced with distortion as he played these simple and spacious riffs which Jake arranged with some rapping. The guitar amp was thrice as large as the one for the mic, so I lost a lot of his words in the acoustic storm. But their flow weaved nicely around the zapping melody, keeping the whole thing real tight.

After a brief cigarette break, the crowd had become sufficiently drunk to cheer at anything by this point. We whooped and clapped while Eliza straightened out the mic cable that had twisted and knotted around itself. “We’re going back to poetry now,” she announced, inviting Lawrence Blackman to the floor. The bald head and sunglasses combo gave him the stature of an undercover cop; sweet irony compared to his poem lampooning video game violence which read;

“Tanks and guns and armies and guns and gunships and tanks and tanks and tanks and guns, immolating the non-existent bodies infinite virtual humans and non-humans. lol”

He capped his set with a brilliantly sleazy love letter to none other than Nigel Farage wherein the narrator kidnaps the man off Saville Row and locks him in his garage. Maybe someone should actually do that.

Things took a sombre turn when Hannah Wallwork went on. She towered over the crowd in her mountainous platform heels and paisley red dress. A deathly hush descended on us as she recited a poem about a little girl frightfully witnessing her mother perform a séance from under the very table. Her Geordie accent lilted through the whispery narration.

I’m dying to rest awhile

dying to shift from this cold hard tile

this waiting becoming a trial

We feel every ounce of the girl’s fidgeting fear as it expands out upon us from the space between Hannah’s words and verses. In cinematic detail does she chronicle the ascent of supernatural forces which culminates in a chilling denouement.

I strain to listen as they accept this mystery,

they believe they are speaking directly to history,

they are calmed by the clanging

they are loathed by this fable

so I continue my banging from under the table.

Micky, the next poet, strolled onto the floor in loose cargo shorts, flipflops, and a thin shirt. His glasses and weathered beard gave him the appearance of some government official stranded for too long on his holiday. If there’s one poem Micky’s known around the block for, it’s Sex on. In his viscous cockney accent he delineated a simple and riotous list of all the ways and places a person can fornicate.

Sex done rough

sex done gently

sex with a member of a cognoscenti…

done in the back of an antique Bentley.

Sex when you’re guilty

sex when you’re pure

sex with a vicar in the church next door.

You get the idea; he enumerated all these scenarios from his cue cards for a good five minutes and at no point did they get stale. If his cards got scattered in the wind, I would love to see the faces of those who discover these.

The clash of grey and cream in Vidya Gosain’s outfit, I think, is very emblematic of her poetry. As she read off her phone through thin, round glasses, I sensed a skirmish between many contradictory emotions. Her verses tell of an ambivalent soul caught in two currents going the opposite direction. How does one reckon with so much to do and little means to do them with? A decision paralysis of what path to take in life.

And sleep isn’t coming; it’s quarter to one.

I don’t know what mood I should be in,

so I’m checking Co-Star, for the position of the sun.

But I’m just gonna sleep,

Because that will please… someone.

Anytime a performer would read something they’ve recently written, the entire crowd knew to start chanting “NEW SHIT!”. With such an affirmation, the poets are welcome to push their poems out the nest of their notebooks and see if it flies or crashes. Vidya’s new shit was someone’s heartfelt Christmas routine. As delicate as my restraint against devouring the whole advent calendar in one sitting, her verses read so tenderly. A slice of cake layered with memory. Appreciative clicking all round.

She finished her set with a poem about air-fryers, the details of which elude my drunken memory.

Rich Bliss came on as the final featured poet. His tattoos covered him like murals up a wall. A prominent figure in the scene, Rich runs ‘Av A Word, a poetry night that’s kind of in between venues right now. The first and only other time I’ve met him was at one of these nights at the now-closed Peckham Art Lounge. I had arrived unfashionably early so I waylaid Rich into a conversation during which I got a glimpse of his utter passion for spoken words. He thrives therapeutically off it.

Rich energetically projected his voice as if he likes the sound of it – which there’s nothing wrong with because some part of every poet should love the sound of their own voice. With prophetic zeal, he read through Ten Reasons, an emphatic affirmation of self-acceptance even in the face of life’s gravest moments.

The bulk of life’s weight on a cerebellum of a plate

it offers meals thrice daily with no frills

a cheapened enclosure on a life-or-death deal

I was warmed by the spirit of community that emanated from the encouraging cheers when Rich tripped on one of his verses. With renewed vigour, he listed ten resilient reasons to stick around and deal with it, culminating fantastically in;

And when you’re feeling rotten and forgotten

and too long in tooth,

please stay here and see it through

because life looks pretty fucking good on you.

The lady of the night took the stage one last time to thank the poets and the audience. While up there Eliza delivered a particularly vivacious reading of Toothbrush Brown, her polemic against all the obnoxiously performative fools whose toothbrushes have suffered thanks to their rubbish talk. Another crowd-favourite, everyone was cheering and completing the verses.

In my hour of pensive solitude even speaking becomes a chore,

until that creature comes yap yap yapping at my chamber door.

You talk a load of bollocks from Clapham North to Camden Town,

and you chat so much shit, that’s why your TOOTHBRUSH BROWN.

It was time to move the night to a secondary location. Many had left but the considerable rest of us that remained waltzed down the road to some strange and totally deserted pub. As our undisciplined group charged into its tired interior, I could feel the bartender – who’d most probably been counting the minutes until closing time – cursing us. After powdering my nose in the disgusting toilet, I found a shot of tequila waiting for me like mana bestowed from heaven. I was sporting a thick sheet of facial hair that day which – on top of the skin tone - made me look rather similar to my friend Lonny. Throughout the whole evening we’d been telling every new person that we’re half-brothers who only learnt of each other’s existence a couple of weeks ago when our deadbeat father double booked a meeting with his sons. I remember us pulling this nonsense on Lawrence Blackman and Micky outside the pub… Trivial details from that hedonistic night are bobbing to the surface of my memory like dead fish.

It's been close to a month since that night and I feel like that was the start of something. Eliza continues to tinker around with her own personal brand of gonzo poetry. Who knows what the hell gonzo poetry even is? An indefinable commentary for incomprehensible times, I guess. A proud affirmation of one’s sins with the intent to be better rather than sorry. Making oneself the hero of their own celebration or criticism. A gateway drug to stand up and your voice heard, no matter how many times you stumble over your words. Whatever it is, it’s ripe, loud, sensitive, and happening right now.