Yahoo News Young Poet Laureate Caleb Femi: 'My generation has embraced technology - we're not waiting for publications anymore'
"When you’re young, you’re just not at the top of the list of people who get listened to,” says Caleb Femi, 26, London’s Young Poet Laureate. “London moves so quickly, because it’s so focused on improving itself and being bigger, being better, that sometimes it doesn’t give you a chance.”
Sitting on the Southbank Centre’s ground floor, a beanie cap pulled low over his hair, Femi, a former English teacher, doesn’t just talk the talk. Since being appointed Young Laureate last October by the writer’s group Spread the Word, he has hosted workshops and classes at schools around London to discuss poetry and cultivate “confidence and creativity”. Tomorrow he will be performing at Young Progress Makers, an event presented by the Evening Standard and the Roundhouse in Camden designed to inspire, inform and entertain Londoners aged 18 to 25. “As a child, you think you’re the only one like you. Poetry is just another way of finding people, not only who see the world as you do but from the perspective of those who don’t. It shows you where you fit in.”
Right now, poetry sales are booming, driven by a surge in interest from young readers. The Bookseller reported last year that annual poetry-book sales were set to smash the £10 million mark for the first time. Celebrity endorsements have helped, with Beyoncé using the work of London poet Warsan Shire — Femi’s predecessor as Young Poet Laureate — on her Lemonade album. “A decade ago the only place you’d find poetry was at a show, in a bookshop or at school,” says Femi. “Nowadays it’s on your phone, it’s on your Instagram, it’s on your Twitter, it’s on your eBooks, while there are poetry films and recorded versions of readings by artists such as Kate Tempest on YouTube. It’s much more accessible.”
Femi, who grew up in Peckham having moved to London from Nigeria at the age of seven, believes poetry can provide an education that schools can’t. He left teaching at Gladesmore Community School in Tottenham in 2014 to pursue poetry full time, because he felt the education system was “stifling the students”.
He adds: “I was contributing to creating a generation of robots. Teachers are under so much stress because they’re directed to look at grades, data and performance-related numbers. In English, for me, it’s no longer about exercising any skills beyond technical writing, nothing that explores humanity or imagination. It’s not about creativity, it’s become about how well you can regurgitate or memorise.”
What’s the solution? “For me, learning isn’t a destination. It’s not about just being asked to work out X and getting the right answer, it’s about all the ways that journey to the right answer is possible. That’s how all the greatest inventions came to be.”
Poetry has helped Femi solve his own problems. Suffering from “bouts of anxiety and depression” at school after his “first heartbreak” at 16, writing poetry for the first time was “a good type of therapy”. Despite three older sisters, a younger brother, a bishop father and a mother who runs a teenage pregnancy charity, he found himself unable to talk to anyone, trapped by “doctrines of masculinity”. Couldn’t he talk to his friends? “We talked about trainers and clothes. We talked about girls but it was in a fleeting way, to be one of the lads. No one talks about the vulnerable elements of being in a relationship because you might be seen [as] weak.” None of his friends was a girl, he says. He felt alone. “That’s part of being a man; no one expects you to be the one who wants to cry.”
Femi recently spoke at the Southbank Centre’s Being a Man festival about breaking down gender stereotypes, using the theme of superheroes with young boys to discuss “the set of performances they’re expected to adhere to. They’re expected to be physically strong, mentally strong, and this idea of mental strength seems to mean being void of emotions. They’re the ones who are meant to always have it together.”
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He says binary gender divisions such as black toys for boys and pink for girls are toxic. “I don’t see feminine as being the opposite of masculine,” he says. “I see them co-existing in humanity. When you have these perceptions of men being on one polarised side and women being on the other, then what you are doing is separating the natural state of being a human.”
Poetry is becoming an easy medium for young people to find a voice through, Femi says, because “Our generation has learned how to appreciate and embrace technology, and therefore take ownership of our own — we’re not waiting for companies or publications any more.”
While he believes self-publishing through Amazon is cutting out the red tape, Femi is still to be published himself. “There are so many gatekeepers that stop people getting their voice heard. There are hoops you have to jump, and so many rejections. So it makes sense that a lot of people say, ‘Whatever’ and do it themselves.”
He has supported his own writing with jobs as a professional photographer of weddings, birthday parties and, for a while, at London Zoo.
London is his natural habitat. Despite Brexit, despite Trump, he says young people “need to have hope and you need to think things will get better, because if you don’t, they never will”. But he says you need to take as much ownership as you can. “When there aren’t opportunities, you make opportunities. I know it’s so easy to say, but you can turn good ideas into whole new industries, or simply carve yourself a new slice.”
Who’s an inspiration? “Even something as basic as the Chicken Connoisseur.” The chicken-shop YouTube video guy? “Yeah. He was like, you know what? I’m going to do this. Maybe he wants to be a food critic. So he went out and became a food critic with the food that he loves.” But even he has had his critics, I say. “Forget about the critics. Once you’re able to pay your rent, the least of your worries is what critics have to say.”
Young Progress Makers takes place at the Roundhouse tomorrow (January 24). For details, go to: standard.co.uk/ypm. To buy tickets for the event go to: roundhouseorg.uk/ypm. #ESYPM
The Office Group are proud supporters of Young Progress Makers The event is also partnered by the Gates Foundation and Citi
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