‘The poem has entered the fabric of the city’ – Manchester poet Tony Walsh on the global reaction to This Is The Place “People are still coming up to me and thanking me, or coming up to me and not saying anything, just […]

“People are still coming up to me and thanking me, or coming up to me and not saying anything, just taking my hands. That still happens. Big hairy-arsed geezers just hugging me.”

Manchester poet, Tony Walsh, is still overwhelmed by the response to his electrifying performance of This Is The Place – a poem which captured the mood of the city after the Manchester Arena terror attack in May 2017.

A full-time poet since 2011, Walsh (also known as Longfella) tells i about how Manchester has influenced his work, how his poem has entered the fabric of the city, and why poetry is undergoing a vital cultural revolution.

‘An open-mic night changed my life’

“I’ve written since I was five or six years old,” says Walsh, whose Nana used to write up his poems “in capital letters in red pen on pink paper in a late 1960s writing pad with a picture of a hippy woman in orange flares looking at a flower.”

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It wasn’t until Walsh was 39 and working for Salford Council that he was drawn back to poetry

Though he wrote into his teens, his poems becoming “more angsty and political”, Walsh soon stopped showing them to people.

And then he stopped writing.

“I had no money, so I had to work in a supermarket five nights a week,” the poet recalls.

“And that stopped me reading and writing. I harboured vague ideas of doing something with music or writing, but I did nothing with it.”

It wasn’t until Walsh was 39 and working for Salford Council that he was drawn back to poetry.

“I’d written a few poems. We’d had kids by that point, which keeps you in the house and gives you a new perspective on things.”

Walking into the Briton’s Protection pub for an open-mic night in 2004, Walsh nervously performed.

“It changed my life,” he says.

Carving a poetry career

“My mum was desperately ill when I did that open-mic night,” the poet remembers.

“As I pressed send on the redundancy form email, my phone rang asking would I like to be poet in residence at Glastonbury.”

“I wanted to say to her, ‘Mum, you know those poems I used to write when I was little? Well I took some into town and people thought they were okay.’ That was a big motivator.”

Having blagged his way onto Glastonbury’s poetry stage in 2005, Walsh started to meet poets (“albeit younger than me, and single”) making a living from it, and in 2008 he reduced his working hours to dedicate more time to poetry.

“Then, in 2011, I took voluntary redundancy and went full time,” says Walsh.

“Having discussed it at length at home – ‘Can I give up my job and pension and run away with the circus?’ – the weirdest thing happened.

“As I pressed send on the redundancy form email, my phone rang asking would I like to be poet in residence at Glastonbury. Clutching at straws, I took that as a good omen.”

‘The poem has entered the fabric of the city’

Before the Manchester attack, Walsh was “doing okay” as a full-time poet.

“I’m getting tweets and emails from around the world, still.”

“Not many people manage to make a living as a full-time poet, with kids as well,” he says.

“But there was quite a lot of work in the diary, and things were on the up.

“And then what happened happened.”

Walsh wrote This Is The Place for the charity Forever Manchester in 2013, but, when he performed it to captivated crowds in Manchester’s Albert Square the day after the attack, it took on a new resonance.

Demonstrating that poetry can be rousing, moving and life-affirming, and make us achingly proud, the words captured and even defined the mood of the city.

“People talk about it being a defiant piece. It gains that defiance in the face of terrorism. But it was meant defiantly in a different way originally,” says Walsh, who didn’t anticipate the global impact his reading would have.

“What I hadn’t appreciated was 24-hour rolling news. It was live around the world. My daughter told me I was trending fourth worldwide when I came off the stage, which is mind-blowing.

“The poem has entered the fabric of the city on lots of levels. And I’m getting tweets and emails from around the world, still.

“All cultural sectors responded. That speaks volumes about Manchester.”

A gritty city

The city of Manchester influences Walsh’s work in many ways, including poetic voice.

“I write in a way that I speak. Manchester is in my voice and intonation and accent and words. The voice in my head is a Manchester voice,” he reveals.

“I use ‘owt’, ‘nowt’, ‘summat’. I swear, if it feels right.”

Walsh believes the late Tony Wilson’s words about Manchester being a world-class city still resonate, and that people don’t need to go to London to flourish.

“I don’t know what it is in the air, but it inspires greatness in all sorts of fields, whether it’s engineering, radicals, artistic excellence, sporting excellence, music,” says Walsh.

“We stand on the shoulders of giants.

“Manchester is a gritty city, born out of huge adversity. It’s a working-class city at heart. People are looking for a route forward, and the arts, sport, and education can all be that.”

Striking a chord

“It means a lot to people,” says Walsh of his poem, This Is The Place.

“And I’d struggle to tell you anything that has entered this city’s – or any city’s – culture more deeply and more quickly.

“I’d struggle to tell you anything that has entered this city’s – or any city’s – culture more deeply and more quickly.”

“People are having it tattooed. There is graffiti art in the street. A deaf choir performed it and sent it to me, which was lovely. People are knitting, embroidering, crocheting it.

“Somebody put it on a skateboard. It’s been painted on buildings. It’s 30 foot wide in the Arndale. There is even a note-perfect Hacienda mix dance single of it, Together (This Is The Place).”

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“It’s being studied in every school in Manchester, it seems. So kids come up to me because they studied it, and they’re learning about Manchester history which they didn’t know before. Which is amazing.”

Connecting with audiences on such a scale – to a live crowd, a global TV audience and across social media – was “uncharted territory for a poet”, believes Walsh, who is heartened that a debate has now opened up about where poetry sits in our culture.

‘Poetry didn’t used to be in ivory towers’

“I think when poetry lost its relationship with music, that’s when lots of people lost their relationship with poetry.”

Walsh believes the negative preconceptions of poetry he sometimes encounters are due to how the art form has evolved in the last century – though change is in the air.

“Poetry didn’t used to be in ivory towers,” he says.

“There used to be working class poets on street corners, being satirical and bawdy and political. And now maybe it’s getting back to where it could, and should, be.”

Walsh questions where the emotional and political weight is in today’s culture, and believes it has never been both easier and yet harder to find.

“But I couldn’t tell you anything that is kicking against the pricks more readily, more razor-sharp, than poetry.”

The current scene is trying to re-frame how we see poets, and Walsh believes the word has a different weight in different cultures.

“There are places where poet is a holy word, and there are places where it’s basically another word for wanker.”

‘The dam is about to break’

Despite misguided preconceptions, Walsh feels “the dam is about to break” for poets, largely thanks to new voices like Kate Tempest and Hollie McNish on the scene.

“You’ve got the Insta-poet now,” Walsh says.

“Video is a great medium for poetry. It’s not always necessarily that quick, but you can write something in the morning, have it on YouTube in the afternoon, and be viral by the evening.”

Poetry is leaking out of its allotted space, believes Walsh, who would love to see the medium given a TV boost to break through to the mainstream.

“But I think they’re scared of us, of the art form and our voices. Of giving us that platform. If we try to nail something, it tends to stay nailed.

“Poetry is eye-opening for a lot of people, and life-changing for others.

“Watch out – the poets are coming.”

September 2017 sees the publication of This Is The Place, a collaboration between Walsh and Manchester’s creative community bringing the poem to life through illustration, photography and design.

With contributions from Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett and a foreword from the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, the book’s proceeds will be split across three charities.