Sam Burcher meets the performance poet in London for the launch of his debut collection Honk
I first had the pleasure ofmeetingthe poet Stephen Belowsky last year in LA. Then he was having a mini-meltdown over the deleterious effect of chlorine in the Ziggy pool on his sore eyes. This time we meet in House, a members cafe deep within the National Gallery days before the launch of his first poetry collection Honk at the Plaster Store in Soho. He is animated and hilarious, but after spilling coffee on his best jeans he’s in a panic.
Stephen’s on a tour of the UK showcasing his exceptional gift for spoken word poetry. His travels started in Western Australia, where he did a ‘“cool and beautiful” gig in his hometown of Perth before leaving for the chilly North of England. Originally from Salford, it felt like something of a homecoming performing to eager crowds in the small to medium size clubs of Manchester, York and Hull.
“Honk is a history of my life so far every poem defines me and my habits and style. This is a collection of poems that sums me up a lot and it tells you a lot. It was a collaboration that took a year.” His main collaborator is the artist and publisher James Jessiman https://internationaltimes.it/james-jessimanand Honk is the first imprint on 020 Desk Zero, which also operates a 24 hour telephone hotline of intriguing poetry and prose.
Stephen honed his Beat style performing in the Bowery Poetry Club amongst others in New York’s Lower East Side, in residencies in LA and along the West Coast. He was Virgin Airlines In-flight magazine pop poet with tracks released by Creation Records 23 label, but for Honk he liked the idea of going in with someone from the start. “James was the perfect foil,” he said, “Because that’s exactly how Black Sparrow Press got started. One guy had the idea to open a publishing company and his first poet was Charles Bukowski,” one of Belowsky’s literary inspirations.
A direct link to the American poet is the cover image of Honk by Ken Price, one of the great LA avant-garde artists (currently having a retrospective at Lisson Gallery in London) and used by Black Sparrow Press and Bukowski. There are around sixty poems in the book, many with special dedications to well known and lesser known characters, and all have garnered ringing endorsements on the sleeve notes from such pop culture luminaries as Sir Bob Geldof who says, “…….His poetry is a self-medicating lexicon of understanding that is unique and exhilarating.”
Belowsky Packs A Punch
Two days later I’m watching Stephen perform his poetry at a live show for first time, and he did not disappoint. Not once does he read from his book. He’s got pages down pat in his head and there’s rarely a moment of hesitation in, to give the art of recitation a modern phrase, “spitting it.” There’s a good feeling in the room, it’s the sign of someone giving everything they’ve got, and then some.
He’s a winner, literally, twice a finalist in the The Australia Poetry Slam and twice the winner of the West Australian Poetry Slam Champion. And he’s got the crowd going with one of his favourites Hooks Jabs and Words.It’s a rhythmic anthem to boxing, and like a boxer, albeit a solo one, he’s inspired to bravely step out from what a Times Literary Supplement critic once described as,“the perilous isolation of the stage” in regards to recitation.
Anne Pigalle (centre)
Stephen has drawn a ring of people around him, and it’s fun for the crowd and is making interesting angles for the cameraman filming the event. By stepping into the centre he has invited the audience into his energy field. Quantum physicists call this donut or bagel shaped ring of electromagnetic energy a Torus. And from where I’m standing about four people deep towards the back of the bagel peeping over the long feathers in the hat of singer, poet and multimedia artist Anne Pigalle, I feel the waves of his heart connection radiating into the crowd and I’m touched.
After the show Stephen said, “I love to step into the audience and make them part of my performance, be right there with them. I had people around me not just for that poem, but for The Frosty Flake Surfer (an ode to breakfast cereal), The Last Load (the highs and lows of domesticbliss)and Stay Greasy Baby (a love letter to LA), in which I was able to work with the audience, playing around there. I want them to walk away going wow! I want to move them, change them, and let them see different perceptions, give them another outlook on life.”
His Torus is a two way transmission between Stephen and the crowd. And, his senses become super sharp on stage, so someone talking can affect his performance.“ I have to cut that off quick, because I’ve got around two minutes to get into the flow of being funny and unique, because if you don’t they will walk away and see someone else who is. I very much go with them, but you are alone on the stage when you perform. You’ve got to be because if you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fail alone and if you’re gonna succeed, you’re gonna succeed alone. There’s no one in the audience who can compromise that.”
The launch at Plaster was a wonderful moment of serendipity for Stephen. He felt he could conquer anything, all his projects were coming together from all angles. ”The people were there, things were happening. It’s all positive, there’s nothing negative about it,” he said.
Plaster Store, Magazine & Guide
What is Plaster?Plaster Magazine was launched by Milo Astaire, a former art gallery owner, with his brother Finn Constantine, a BAFTA winning photographer and film maker. They were inspired during the 2020 lockdown to put together a Posterzine, which they sold and mailed from their West London kitchen. After eight or so issues they held a party and 200-300 people attended. This was an ah ha moment for the young brothers to take their idea more seriously.
The online Plaster Magazine https://plastermagazine.com was launched at their offices and shopfront Plaster Store on 20 Great Chapel Street in 2025, where Stephen performed to an exuberant crowd. This was swiftly followed by the PlasterMagazine Guide, an insatiably curious heads up of the best of London’s bountiful art shows with beautifully curated links, lauded by the likes of style magazine The Face.
Milo acted as the medium introducing Stephen and James Jessiman at a show at his former gallery The Art Space. Originally Honk was to be called Running With Words after the poem in the book I Run With Words. For Stephen that was the beautiful title set in stone until James suggested Honk, which he thought was a mad idea. Then Milo’s father, the author and publicist Simon Astaire called him and said, “I’ve got one word to say to you, Honk! You know you’re a rocker, and Honk means something.”
Stephen thought about it overnight and in the morning, as he told me in his comic way, he’d seen the light! “Honk Honk Honk Honk Hoooooonnnnnnkkkkkk! Four letters H O N K. Boom! Honk! And I walked around all day saying to people Honk!” And so it became the title with a dedication to Simon of his hilariously insightful poem Guru Number One, which Stephen spontaneously recites over an unspilled cup of coffee her https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQq-uUbubSg
AI Will Dumb Poets Down
Stephen’s poetry has a serious side without being too serious. The Final Beat is about how AI is dumbing down the human mind. He believes it could be the last hurrah for the poets, and they have to be careful. He said,“We’re being overtaken by machines and how can the human mind really stay ahead of a machine that says it can think deeper and faster than you. I’m very worried about the future and the future of poetry. You know the next poet laureate of Great Britain could be a machine.”
He has a point, but like anyone questioning an unregulated technology – one that can take your face and do anything it wants with it – he will probably be called a Luddite. Once you consulted a Thesaurus for alternative words now AI does all that and then suggests changing or adding lines to your poem, he warns. He’s right and whilst this may be fun and different at first before you know it you’re letting it do the thinking for you. Which is fine, if you plan to spend your life in the pursuit of leisure or consciousness raising, but that’s unlikely in this social and political climate, which calls for more considered thought than ever. Fortunately, Stephen is still writing his own material, getting inspired, and considers himself lucky he comes from another era.
The era he comes from has birthed so many unforgettable stars and Honk eulogises many of them; Che Guevara, James Dean, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, and JF Kennedy, amongst others.
But Stephen and I specifically spotlight Richard Burton, who elevated acting and the voice to the highest of highs.
Richard Burton
Richard Burton (AI)
Was he an inspiration for you? “He is a total inspiration to me. He was so vulnerable, he was volatile, his self-destruct button was there, the genius was there, everything that you want to know about an artist you can find in Richard Burton. That is the artist conjured up in total, it’s every artist you ever saw, or ever heard of all rolled into one.”
Belowsky’s poem about Bob Dylan is called Between The Lines. But, he explained, his poem about Richard Burton could only ever be called Richard Burton. And he reckons that’s because hewas one of the world’s finest Shakespearian actors, he read a book a day, his movie Look Back in Anger is one of the great works of cinema, yet he could do Where Eagles Dare and had no hesitation in happily selling out to Hollywood to support his lavish lifestyle and multiple marriages. Stephen nods to Burton’s political leanings, saying, “He didn’t give a damn because he came from a Welsh mining town, and he would always wear a bit of red on him, even when he was buried.”
Richard Burton’s widow Sally Burton lives in Western Australia where Stephen lives and she read his poem about her late husband after it was handed to her from someone else. It was a proud moment when he received an email from her saying how much she loved his poem and how it captured her late husband perfectly and made the back of her neck tingle.
“Did Richard Burton need to destroy himself with all that alcohol?” Stephen wonders, then answers his own question, “Probably yes. I think without that maybe he wouldn’t have been Richard Burton, Maybe he would have been somebody else, a watered down version of Richard Burton. Some people need their drugs, some people perform better on drugs, you know.”
The Joy & Pain Of Poets
It’s not easy being a poet nowadays, and come to think about it, it was never easy. Stephen agrees, “All the poets, all the writers, there’s tragedy on all levels. From Sylvia Plath putting her head in an oven to the Beats; Ginsberg had issues in his life, it was all about issues, Jack Kerouac had his issues whether it was alcohol or relationship, and Charles Bukowski was a wreck. I don’t care, there’s no art without pain. I’m sorry, how can there be? How can life be perfect and you be a poet? I just can’t get that. Even if you’re more of a shallow-type poet like myself, because I write about breakfast cereal or pop culture or things that I’ve seen in the news.”
He acknowledges his own battles in life with dyslexia, and always being on the outside. “I’ve always kept myself to myself. I’m like Lee Harvey Oswald in that sense, I can go to the cinema on my own.” He delivers this hilarious line deadpan and then explains that he hangs out with friends one on one or with two tops. “I’m not comfortable in big groups, I’m not someone who is led by a group.”
Stephen is a poet witnessing our everyday lives and finding humour and meaning in the little things. “Yeah, like right now I’m looking at everything is a pod, everybody’s getting pods; pod hotels, coffee pods, I pods, sex pods, birth pods. The human race is obsessed with pods.” But it’s not just pods that makes him think. Curious, rhythmical, descriptive, inventive and retrospective words provide an incisive and comic commentary on the postmodern world of suburbia, gurus, and junk food, whilst shampoo, pizza, doing the laundry and his teeth ( My Teeth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xHT2OXcSYU ) become metaphors for relationships, politics, sex, death, and everything in between.
Lives & Legacies
Jack Kerouac
We’ve talked about tragic, yet productive lives. Is it your intention to leave a legacy? “I hope so, you know why not,” Stephen replies. “In a billion years the worlds gonna break up and unless we’ve got off the planet and gone somewhere else nothing’s gonna really matter, there’s no legacy left, the whole world’s gonna expand, it’s gonna blow to pieces and the bits are going to float into the universe and that will be the end of earth. That is gonna happen one day in the future and then what happened this year or last year, did it really matter? But the world does exist. We know the work of Shakespeare, the speeches of JF Kennedy and of Churchill and we know Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and John Lennon’s Imagine and Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and The Times They Are A Changing.”
Where do you fit into that? What piece of work will you be known for?
“I hope I’m known for something like Hooks, Jabs And Words and the whole world cottons on to how strong a poem that is, or my poem Jerusalem. That’s the job of the artist to leave a legacy because we’re here for an X period of time and then we’re gone. So that poem or that film or whatever, that’s all we’ve got is the legacy of the work. All artists think like that, they have to, right? We all want recognition from the audience. When I hear the saying ‘you’ve sold out’ I never understood it. It’s like Andy Warhol said, “Art is what you can get away with.”
“A woman who came to the launch of Honk said she saw John Cooper Clarke perform last year and that I wiped the floor with him. To me it’s incredible that she compared us. It meant a lot when someone said that to me about one of my heroes. But I took a different path, I have my own beat and I’m proud of that beat. I’ve got my own rhythm and people say to me what’s that rhythm, is it Beat poetry? It’s a metre and I have my own metre. I’m not so much a rhyming poet, I have metre and there’s a big difference.”
Hopes and Heroes
Who is your absolute poetry hero? “Ginsberg,” comes the reply quick as a flash. And he was fortunate to meet his hero, who would have been one hundred years old this year, on a cold night in New York. It was snowing outside, and Belowsky was performing in a jazz bar on Avenue C. “I’m on the stage and Ginsberg walks into the club with his boyfriend, he wasn’t in the best of health. I knew straightaway that he walked in and the guy who was running the club called him and told him to come down and see this pop culture poet. And he came down and sat down in the corner of the room and I had a conversation with him.”
Orlovsky and Ginsberg
Plenty of couples have edited each other’s work; think Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Stephen’s been married for 14 years and Honk was edited by his wife Christie Sistrunk, a leggy Australian actress, who graduated with Hugh Jackman and has appeared in Neighbours (pictured with Jackman). He confides it’s difficult for two creative people to live together, but she had to be his editor, because she was there when he was putting the book together. “But it is sometimes fraught, and our marriage could have ended over punctuation and a parenthesis,” he said in his wickedly funny way, suggesting he’s as witty in private as he is in public.
Hugh Jackman and Christie Sistrunk
I ask him if his mother is still alive? Oh yes, he enthuses. He tells me she lives in Perth and is still active. But she has to wear a hardhat when she’s outside gardening because she’s been knocked out twice by golf balls flying over the fence from the golf course that backs on to her garden.That’s Stephen, full of real life observations.
He’s a fighter, and he’s not stopping anytime soon. Besides he’s got another hundred poems not in this book. Stephen is heading home to Australia with a bagful of Honk to sell at his shows. He plans to tour the UK again in October with a new tour manager Andy Bernstein and a stack of new merchandise; T shirts, badges and caps. New York beckons and his script for a movie about AC/DC’s Bon Scott nears completion. It’s onwards with a biopic based on his novel Stay Greasy Baby in which Sebastian de Sousa is first choice to play him, and filming has started for a documentary.
Poetry is important because it makes us think, and this is a guy who transmits humour and essential messages with the old one-two combo wearing velvet boxing gloves. Stephen Belowsky lives his life out loud, he’s a spoken word magus, a catalyst and best of all a free spirit.
Honk is published by 020-Desk-Zero.myshopify.com
Stephen Belowsky
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