Interview with Fran Isherwood

Hello Poetry Lovers

Welcome back to the Talk Show studio

(Audience clap ecstatically – Security on Standby)

Now, settle down, PL’s. We want to give a huge welcome to this enigmatic poet, who I have been dying to get to know. Lets give a warm hand for Fran Isherwood

(audience cheer and clap loudly)

Welcome to the show, Fran. So glad to have you as a guest!

Thanks for having me! Nice place you’ve got here!  

I am a writer and performer with a comedic bent. I am originally from Manchester but have lived in London for centuries. 

I was always an avid reader, but when I was 8 or 9, I came across some books that my mum had won as prizes at school.

There was a Complete Works of Shakespeare which I dipped in and out of, but my favourite was a pocket-sized anthology of famous poems.

I carried it about with me and read it several times, and was particularly enamoured by Blake’s The Tyger, and Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, especially the former.

Around the same time my head teacher was given to reciting The Green Eye of The Little Yellow God whenever he got the chance. I’m not sure it was age appropriate for primary school kids, but his delivery was most entertaining.  

Also, my multi-instrument playing, maternal grandma used to write song lyrics and poems. 

I would write poems, stories, and nativity plays that would have given Ernie Wise a run for his money.

Then, as a teenager, I was a Marc Bolan fan. I read his own poetry, and the poets he recommended in interviews, who included Rimbaud, Kerouac, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I was inspired to keep writing poetry (often sitting up all night to do so), and later, song lyrics when I was in a couple of bands in my late teens and early 20s.

I did a degree in Drama and became a performer of comedy and theatre but it still didn’t  occur to me to  perform  my poems despite having seen John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson gigs back in the late 70s.

Then, I ran into an old friend (the brilliant poet Steev Burgess) whom I hadn’t seen for many years, in about 2007. He told me he was co-running a weekly poetry open mic called Y Tuesday. I dug out some poems and went along and kept going along.

This made me write more, usually in the kitchen while cooking the family’s dinner on the night, so I had new poems.

It snowballed from there, and I went further afield, and started to get feature spots. Later, I would run my own gigs in various places, then got published in anthologies, periodicals and in my own slim volume.  

Ooh…Spike Milligan, Pam Ayres, Marc Bolan, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Edward Lear, Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy Cope, Dorothy Parker 

I did an MA in Creative Writing in 2018 to 2020, and one module called Poetry- Alternative Practice introduced me to the likes of Peter Manson, The LANGUAGE Poets, and the New York School of Poets. This led me to produce some quite experimental work.  

 

I am working on a very gradual (add to it every couple of days), long poem which is a bit obsessive and surreal. It has been about a year and a half now. I probably should stop and edit the thing.

I did a solo show called The Songs My Mother Used To Sing three times last year. I would like to get it out there again at festivals next year. 

 

The best? Hmm.  A recent favourite was last year at The Poetry Of It All at The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, hosted by the fantastic poet Catherine Shaw. I shared the bill with that lovely man John Hegley, Toria Garbutt, Michelle Scally Clarke, and Claire Askew. I love doing bigger rooms (when they are full, that is!) like that so you have a crowd to bounce off (not Literally. I’m not Iggy Pop!).

I have done a few where I was the only poet on a music bill. In 2016, I was lucky enough to support Beth Orton.

I really enjoyed doing features on the Morecambe poetry festival Alt Stage in 2022 and 2023. That’s a fantastic festival put together by the force of nature that is Matt Panesh. I went along this year, too, to watch and do the occasional open mic spot and as you know, Heather, that is where we met. 

Having said that I like bigger gigs, one of my favourites from 2012 or thereabouts was in a very small pub room with an audience of about 10 people. I followed an acoustic musician who had sat down to play.

A couple of poems in, I realised there was a microphone behind me right at bum height. I pointed this out to the audience, and riffed on a hypothetical, potentially embarrassing scenario where a performer might be feeling flatulent. This led to a hysterical conversation between us all, and we all ended up crying laughing. 

Worst? Anyone who has done afternoon fringe shows will have had that audience consisting of 1- 3 people. That has happened on occasion, but the show must go on, and all that.

I had already had my worst gig as a new comedian back in the late 80s (crying on the night bus home after a room full of drunk men shouted sexist and lewd comments at me), so I don’t think anything has topped (bottomed?) that.

 There have been a couple over the years where the gig was not in a fully self-contained room, so you were competing with the noise from the bar or a disco. They weren’t easy.

Oh wait! I’ve remembered a frightful one. Between 2011 and 2014, I was a visiting poet in schools for a now defunct agency. I would usually do a performance of my work at morning assembly then run workshops with different classes throughout the day culminating in a sharing of the kids’ work at the end of the day. It was usually primary schools, and it was lovely. However, there was a booking where my agent and I were under the impression that I was to do an hour to include a performance followed by a Q & A, at a posh grammar school out of London.

---

The wires had got crossed somewhere. I did some of my poems and saw the headmaster glaring at me (meanwhile the pupils were enjoying it and laughing in all the right places). It transpired that he had been expecting a serious talk/ lecture about poetry with readings from classical poets. He actually stopped me to have a word about that. I was mortified.

For the rest of the time, I improvised a talk about some famous poets and asked the students some questions about poets they had studied etc. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

On the way to the station, though, some kids stopped me to say, “that was great, Miss”.  

Before I go, to counteract that bad story, I must tell you about a lovely moment whilst poeting in a primary school. I had finished doing my set of poems when a teacher stood up and asked the children if they had any questions for me. A hand shot up from the row of 4 and 5-year-olds sitting cross-legged on the floor at the front,  

“When are we getting our eyes tested?”

(For the first time, our guest looks awkward)

Well, Heather, despite our artistic differences…..Oh, is that the time?!

(our esteemed guest legs it elegantly up the lighted stairs – fast. Before things got awkward)

Wasn’t Fran Isherwood a wonderful wonderful guest. (Huge applause from the audience)

Keep a look out for Fran, a truly incredible poet.

Thanks for visiting the Talk Show studio, Poetry Lovers. We’ll be back with more poetry action real soon…..