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25th April 2025

On her quest for the eternal spirit of poetry, Sam Burcher meets the Mancunian poet and spoken word performer Stephen Belowsky in West Hollywood.

Stephen and I bond over a shared dislike of over-chlorinated swimming pools, which is true in the case of our Sunset hotel pool. Stephen’s eyes are red and sore and he’s a worried man. Later that day, I see him on the Strip; sunglasses on, almost as if in a trance, picking up the stories and energies on this world renowned street. I know better than to interrupt his flow. 

The next day he bounces into the discrete nook on the hotel’s sun balcony. He flicks up his sunglasses to show me his clear eyes are healed after the application of eyedrops prescribed by the chemist. He announces he’s just had breakfast with Neil Sedaka and flashes a selfie. I’m aware of the iconic tunes of singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, but who is Stephen Belowsky? 

Turns out, he is the only two times winner of the Western Australia Poetry Slam and twice an Australian Poetry Championship finalist. Originally from Manchester, his family emigrated to Australia when he was a youngster. But Belowsky couldn’t settle, bouncing between Manchester, Perth, New York and LA. He was the in-house poet at the Standard Hotel, where Creation Records founder Alan McGee, who released Stephen’s single 2020 Ball Drop on his Creation 23 label during lockdown, was the sometime DJ.

How do you write your poems?

“Every poem’s got a story, there’s always a reason,” Stephen said. Stay Greasy Baby is about when he had a HairBear Bunch afro combed style. And, because he was losing his hair, he smoothed it down into a slick greased back pony tail. He was hanging out with the actor Steven Seagal, known for an extraordinarily slick hairstyle. 

“Stay greasy baby, ‘cause it’s a long slide down, I don’t mean slicking it back with L’Oreal, ‘cause I’m worth it, or slicking it back like Steven Seagal, Just stay greasy baby, stay greasy on that long slide down.”

West LA Gypsy of the Nineties is another of Stephen’s poems that, “just made itself.” Inspiration flowed at the Insomnia Cafe, a quirky hangout on Beverley Boulevard, in the early 1990’s. The writers coming in and out included the scriptwriters of Friends. One young woman often came in wearing her shades. She once said to him, “Tell me what you think of these sunglasses?”and that’s how the line came about. The scenes of Los Angeles just hung around in that poem, he recalls.

A gateway into live performance came from Steve Issacs, one of the first Video Jockeys (VJs) on MTV, who hosted a spoken poetry night at The Mad Hatter on Pico Boulevard. Stephen quickly gained recognition for The Frosty Flake Surfer, a surreal dream of a poem about escaping the challenges of life on the minimum wage. His residency at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York provided another pivotal opportunity for Belowsky to hone his stagecraft.

Earlier this year, he performed in London for Plaster Magazine at their artsy Store on Great Chapel Street,Soho (right).The enthusiastic crowd clearly loved the high octane delivery, and chanted his name in appreciation. His encore, The Race to End the 21st Century, is a dystopian, but hilarious recitation in which Stephen is the verbally dexterous commentator on a horserace with runners named Deadly Virus, Climate Change, Thermo Nuclear War and other threats to the human race. 

How do you remember your poems?

Stephen shares his masterful insights into the art of good recitation with me. He said, “You can’t fake it, but you become it. It’s a mindset, you can’t force it. It has to come to you. It’s there, you can become it. And, the only way to become it is by letting go of your limitations and letting go of what’s pinning you down, basically. It’s like, open your wings.”  

His sagacity aligns with the finest directives of Poet Laureates and the best teachers of speech in the world. Stephen makes the distinction between the writer, as a poet, reading from the page and the poet reciting from memory, which he does ever so well. Both can fall prey to reciting the poem like a parrot. “But”, he says, “with a truly great poem, knowing it or feeling it, you can access it anywhere. It’s in here,” he gestures towards the core of his body, “You’re not reciting it, it’s part of you, it’s a living thing.”

Read more: Stay Greasy Baby

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2nd April 2024 

The two women in the front row

are twins with dyed red hair.

They turned up for the wrong film - 

thought they were seeing My Week With Marilyn,

but it’s The Deep Blue Sea by Rattigan.

I start to relax.

Everyone coughs and whispers.

The trailers finish,

the film starts

with white letters, fire crackers

in London - Somers Town -

where curtains are drawn

over bomb-site windows.

She counts her bracelets

with awkward elegance.

Her fingers mean so much,

because they touch 

survivors.

Excitement and fear

in cluttered pubs.

Alcohol breaks down inhibitions,

until love has permission: red nails on white flesh,

tongues and petticoats,

pills to overdose,

an emetic to restore equilibrium.

The luxury of health, 

and taking it for granted.

Long lean legs and cigarettes.

Let’s smoke and lose the memory.

Pearls and black snakeskin -

symmetry.

Passion flowers, 

passion people -

safety.

Green velvet trees.

A sailor went to sea.

Nicotine depression.

Sex without obsession.

Words and Artwork by Sam Burcher

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Two poems by Christopher dedicaterd to Peter Woodcock (1939-2023). Peter, the writer and artist, is not to be confused with the serial killer with the same name born the same year.

Fever (Peter)

When I felt my fever had passed right away,

And just before, you’d vanished from my sight,

I wished, I wished, I prayed, that you could stay,

To hold me close before the curtain of the night.

You nursed and comforted me in my fear.

I did not want to lie on this bed alone.

I was now well & cheered when you were near,

And soon must face the ghosts I left at home.

Ashes on the Shelf (His Enchanted Isle)

Base metal into gold, ashes on the shelf

Watching over me, worship to be free

To fix the desolation, wrecking health

You've died again, inside I cannot be

How can I forget the words you said

When I have your whole body in a jar

Throw them away as I lie in your bed?

Spread your ashes now, like words from afar?

You belonged to me, but didn't I as well

His dreams were mine too, not just yours alone

I was his son, never knew inside his shell

Now time for us to bring his words back home

Stolen wisdom, and stolen compassion

We are still in time with modern fashion

© Christopher 2023 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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December 2022. Artwork by DD Watton.

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February 2022

Alan Franks reviews GIVE ME MORE Poems/songs by Léonie Scott-Matthews. Various artistes

If, like me, you spent much of a now-distant youth reading the lyrics on the back of LP sleeves while the big black disc was spinning on the turntable, possibly in an underlit garret, you’ll be grateful to Léonie Scott-Matthews for sparing you the task.

In a welcome new approach to the business of conveying song-words, she recites them on one CD, then has them sung and played by a variety of singers and instrumentalists on its companion in the twin-pack. If anyone’s used this welcome formula before, I haven’t come across it. Welcome because, if you’re writing in a style that could be termed English chanson, the lyrics are as vital as breath.

A seasoned actor and director, she gives these eleven poems a proper wind, so that when you come to hearing the settings of them, you’ve a degree of familiarity with the lines and their challenging diversity. At random: “To go to the city is like visiting an alien planet”; “I fear that mouth. Let me look at your face without that mouth”; “I want to beat your being into skeleton dust.”

The imagery ranges over a broad horizon, from the clifftop nostalgia of childhood to the dire corridors of mental torment and emotional breakdown.

The musical treatments which such lyrics have drawn from their composers/performers have a properly broad stock of inflections, taking in folk, jazz blues and cabaret. Among the most arresting tracks are the poignant “Love Was,” sung by Zoe Aronson; “Selling Death,” (David Dinnell); “L’Idée Fixe” (after Paul Valéry), and “Gold of the Morning Light,” both sung with powerful tenderness by Alice Old.

Strange, more-ish fruit, the whole thing – sweet in its bitterness, bitter in its sweetness, bold in its vision.

Alan Franks is an author and former Times journalist. His most recent play was “Looking At Lucian,” starring Henry Goodman at the Theatre Royal in Bath.

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By Christopher

Children should be seen and not heard

Lest my secrets, icons, flattery, be revealed

I'm grown so tall and heavy; magpie bird

My land, house, car, partner, wealth, future sealed

Fantasy is my island, I am buried in my screen

Earth scoured; trees, crops, animals, coal, gas and oil

My weapons of war annihilate; desolation, my dream

With Las Vegas riches, comfort; watch all other's toil

Let me ring those bells; the angels get their wings

Messages fly through the ether; spread across our lands

A Wonderful Life, Auld Lang Syne, this whole planet sings

Our children, now they're seen and heard; holding hands

©Christopher 2022  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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You took me in, you said Hello,

You compassed me with friends

Of yours who soon were friends of mine

And tied up my loose ends.

Was it because of my blue eyes,

My locks of golden hair

That I so unexpectedly 

Found myself welcomed there?

Did I a life or two ago

Give to a Buddha rice

That now in my turn I could feast

So well with folk so nice?

Whatever. It took place and I’ve

Been happy the whole day.

To tell the truth, that’s really all

I’m trying to say.

Yours gratefully,    Robert Ilson     October 2019 

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By Phil Smith

How do you begin the biography of a cloud

Or explain poetry to trees?

Write a tight sonnet under the guidance of a flea,

Raise stings in the skin of theologians, 

Ordain an elk,

Or brew symphonic scores from the cooing of bees? 

Where do you write the dedication of your revision of Genesis to viruses?

Or start work on the provision of new volumes, partly of trees and partly of vellum,

On the matter of intelligent vegetables?

Watching an author flee along a complicated sentence, chased by calves,

Crossing a membrane before spraining an ankle in the drained fields,

You may well wonder if your feelings will be spared,

Or whether you will ever be allowed 

To cower or fail.

How many of us can hang on to arachnids before we fall?

What weaves us all? 

What weaves it all?

Where can we fix our story and end it all,

Print it out in crushed beetles? Spill 

Our ink, stink of shaved pigs? How big

Will our novels have to be to fill all that bubble wrap? 

Will we rhyme in plastic bags?

Or have permission to fill bookstores with seeds and spores? 

When gorse and heather are elected together to the Commons,

How should we respond? Compose the memoirs of a crow, perhaps, 

Or publish the table talk of wood lice and of mites? 

John Bunyan wrote the fable of Pilgrim’s Progress

In Bedford County Gaol. 

How will it feel to be written by a pond near Slough?

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By Christopher

Dreaming, I heard you shuffle beside me

Just 6 pm and after dark, ‘will you stay?’

‘Hello, my love’, ‘make yourself a cup of tea’

‘Be here while I sleep’; I slip quietly away

Memories: Musee l’Hospice Comtesse, 1237, I was free,

Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt in Amsterdam; a pleasure to be

Statues; two golden camels, two wood ducks, a Labrador

Balanced photographs; myself, friends, lovers and loves

Coloured beach stones in  a transparent jar by the door

CD’s, Vinyl, Encyclopaedia Britannica, heavy on the shelves

Who was I then? ‘No War For Oil’, ‘Give Peace A Chance’

‘Disturbing signs of haves & have-nots’, the chimp’s dance

Rubber ducks tell me a tale from the bathroom rack

My mirror; look, those sparkling eyes, but craggy faced

That poster from Montmartre, come back, come back

Picture, a smile from 1893, ‘The Gaiety Girl’, corset laced

I am almost silent, eyes closed, shallow breath in bed

You are here with me, now sharing what’s not said

©Christopher 2021  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.