Ask the Author: Harry Giles

Two Poems from Harry Giles appear in the London Calling issue. He talks with us about where he would fly, theatrics and writing, the slam scene abroad and more.

1. If you could fly, where would you go?

I’d use the super-ability to get to know Scotland much better. The imagined ease of travel is what attracts me to the dream of arm-powered flight, as much as the aerial views, but I’m not much of a tourist: I prefer to stay in one place and explore it. So I’ll fly all over my home first, then start on the rest of the UK, so it’ll be a decade or so before I start looking over the Channel, let alone the Atlantic.

2. What is the intent of the long title of the first poem?

This is actually a bit embarrassing. I’m really rubbish at titles, so for a period I started pulling phrases I liked from Wikipedia. I surfed the pages about bird flight until I found out about whiffling, of which the title is the definition. Whiffling is when geese turn upside-down in a rapid controlled descent. It’s pretty cool. I just liked the way the words sounded and thought their meaning a nice tangent to the poem’s.

3. How does being in theatre affect your writing?

It makes me think about the reader as an audience. The audio part of that is important. Being theatrical, I began in poetry as a performance poet and slam competitor, and that’s still my home turf — when I write, I still think about how this will feel on stage, in my mouth, in a microphone. Shaping the poem around the way the audience are going to feel it.

4. What is the poetry slam scene like in the UK?

Not having gone international yet, I’m not sure I can comment. Performance poetry is certainly very much alive — it’s a strong community that pulls in good audiences. There’s a lot of mutual respect; performance poets are good at maintaining connections. And a lot of people who can just wow an audience over and over. But the slam part — sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s amateurish. We suffer from irony a bit too much. Is that the same everywhere?

The real kicker for me is that slam in Scotland, and Scottish performance poetry in general, is totally under the radar of most of England. They find out about it when they descend on Edinburgh for three weeks in August, and then rapidly forget to book Scottish poets later in the year. And we’re so chippy about this in Scotland that we don’t get poets up from England often enough. Everyone uses travel expenses as an excuse, but really it’s about poor communication and a failure to build relationships across the border. I’m being too harsh: loads of people are already working on it. But still.

5. How much do you trust standardized testing?

My partner tells this fucking horror story: she grew up in alternative education systems, which focussed on learning for the pleasure of learning rather than for getting a particular score. When she came to university, where we met, she found the scoring there utterly corrupting. By the end of her degree she really struggled to learn for pleasure any more, so terrified of the mark was she. Me, I aced tests all the way through school up until my final year, when a single C plunged me into depression (and lost me a place at Cambridge). Even now, I can feel that growing up scored over and over again has messed my head up in ways I haven’t properly confronted yet.

So, not at all.

Hey, thanks for asking. There’s a poem in this. Probably one of those ranty performance ones.

6. Are you what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Ambitions by age:

5: Racing driver
8: Chef
13: Writer
15: Famous
17: Not a virgin
18: Academic
20: Revolutionary
22: Director

Four out of eight ain’t bad. And right now is the first time in my life I feel like I’m doing what I want to be doing most of the time.