WORDS Maud Sampson
It was never Hollie McNish’s intention to share her poems out loud. “I always just wrote poems for myself, to sort things out in my head,” she claims. Yet in 2009 she became the UK Slam Poetry Champion and third runner up in the World Slam finals in Paris. She has gone on to perform at a host of festivals including Glastonbury and WOW Festival, and her commissions include Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, the Tate Modern and, most recently, the Dove Self-Esteem Project. Unafraid to confront contemporary and often contentious issues, including immigration, race relations, pregnancy and the chemicalisation of our food, McNish is situated at the forefront of modern spoken word and proof of the continued relevance and ever-evolving nature of contemporary poetry.
While she uses social media as a platform for her work (she is a YouTube sensation with her poem Mathematics having over 1.6 million hits), McNish is foremost a live spoken word artist; her lyrical tones, quick wit and sharp stage presence ensure her poetry is most powerful in front of a live audience. She is a counterexample to the common charge against modern poetry slams, that they reduce poetry to a competitive sport, explaining, “There are hundreds of competitions for written poetry too. For novels. For everything. I think there are so many types of poetry, so many ways of presenting it and reading it and performing it and there’s space for it all, just like there’s space for 5 million forms of music and performance.” She sees them in much the same way as she sees hip-hop: “People diss it because all they see is chart stuff, a lot of which is quite one-sided, not so lyrical and pretty misogynistic, and often racist or violent. But that doesn’t mean the entire genre of music is the same as that. I think it’s the same with slams.”
Her poetry reveals a social and political awareness. Having a young daughter has ensured the disposition of motherhood and “our weird obsession to separate little girls and boys stuff — books, toys, even food and drink packaging” feature predominantly in her current work. Furthermore “the issue of voting, spying and freedom of speech I find really interesting and worrying. And migration.” She champions gender equality through poems such as Cupcakes or Scones — an attack on the societal pressure for women to remain young-looking — and Embarrassed, named by the Huffington Post as the new anthem for women breastfeeding in public. Refreshingly honest, she is happy to call herself a feminist:
“Of course I am. I was able to study, I have my own bank account, my husband no longer has the legal right to rape or beat me. I’m honoured to live in a place and a time where people have fought for that stuff. I think it’s rude to then dismiss it like we do. I do find it interesting that I get labelled a ‘feminist’ poet above all else, when I write equally about women, immigration, nature. Being a feminist doesn’t mean you put women’s rights above all else. I also hugely support children’s rights for example. Being a feminist is one part of all of that.”
She was recently featured as MTV’s Kick-Ass Chick of the Week, a channel notorious for playing music videos objectifying women in a way she is deeply critical of. She outlines her contradictory feelings towards this, “I don’t love MTV. I don’t love the word ‘chick’ even. But I have nothing against the person who wrote that article and am really flattered and honoured to be included in it. I love a lot that MTV does. I hate a lot that it does.” She explains the challenge of negotiating autonomy within the modern media system patronised by advertising companies and corporations: “Things are complicated. I went viral because of YouTube. Again, a channel supported mainly by advertising revenue, which also plays videos where people crap in boxes and film it. I don’t endorse that! MTV is the same. In fact most media, most funding is tangled into this whole system.” She is aware that compromises must be made and paradoxes of commercial success embraced in order to reach a wide audience, knowing that it is too easy to make generalising assumptions about the media today. “Thousands of people work for these organisations. I think people are too black and white about many things like this. No one asks me what I feel about being on Channel 4’s Random Acts for example, or performing at sponsored festivals. But it’s much the same.”
Despite her wide-ranging success, she is no stranger to criticism, much of which has been very personal: “I’ve been called all sorts of names by people, been accused of hating white people, hating my own family, of hating men, of hating breasts, of being a slag, of being a prude, of sleeping around, of not being able to get a man.” Yet she has the strength of character to ignore the crass and irrelevant comments, remaining open-minded enough to take criticism in her stride:
“My poems are just my opinions and not everyone has the same opinions, thankfully. People close to me tell me to switch off YouTube comments, but I like that open platform, it’s the one good thing for me about social media, it cuts slightly through the media hierarchy. I want to read the comments, I want to learn, and if something is argued against, I want to know why. I change my opinion all the time as I learn and talk and discuss stuff. And I learn a lot from those comments, good and bad.”
McNish’s future projects include an album of 15 poems, a book of her diary entries related to being a parent (“I have always written my diaries in rhyme, always”) and a collection of poems for children. On top of this she runs poetry workshops in schools, youth centres and secure units across the UK using poetry as a tool for social change, particularly amongst young people. Of all the opportunities her work has opened up to her, she cites this as the best: “It’s exciting to hear new poetry and to get younger people involved in expressing themselves. I love that part of my job.”
