'The Banksy of poetry' Brian Bilston is heading for two shows as part of Ports Fest | Interview

And if you’ve been on social media in recent years there’s a good chance – if you’re not already following him yourself – that you have come across the work of Brian Bilston shared by friends, as his carefully crafted and frequently laugh-out-loud funny works have often gone viral. He is pushing half a million followers across various social media platforms and his collections, You Took the Last Bus Home and Alexa, what is there to know about love? plus the Costa-shortlisted novel, Diary of a Somebody have been best-sellers. He is heading out on a lengthy tour in autumn, but ahead of that, he is making two appearances in Portsmouth as part of this year’s Ports Fest. ​

While he appears unmasked for his live performances and is happy to be interviewed – we spoke openly over Zoom – Bilston is not his real name and he prefers not to be photographed or filmed.

However, it appears this mysterious persona shrouded in semi-secrecy was not something he ever set out to create.

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‘I had a proper job before any of this, I actually worked in publishing. I joined Twitter, because younger people than me at work started talking about us “needing to optimise our social media strategy”, and they'd mentioned Twitter. I had no idea what it was, but just to keep with the kids I joined it under the shadow of darkness to work out what it was.’

When he started putting out his poems, he soon worked out how to beat the (then) 140 character limit by using screenshots.

‘I didn't really intend for any of this to happen,’ he admits, ‘so it's not as if I began with the intention of being this figure of mystery sending out poems!

‘It was simply when I joined social media, I didn't join under my real name and after a while, as I got popular, I got the sense that people were quite pleased to not know the real person behind all of this. They quite liked the fact that it was someone a bit mysterious sending this stuff out.

‘I was kind of keen for that to continue but the only problem was that once I started publishing books there were various suggestions from my publisher that I should be out there promoting them, then it becomes increasingly hard to stay hidden away.

‘I do enjoy reading my poems in front of people, and it was too difficult to manufacture a giant papier mâché head or something for when I was performing, like Frank Sidebottom, or hide behind a curtain, or anything – it was too much. That would be too weird!’

However, for his first live performances, Bilston did create an extra layer of obfuscation.

‘I got invited to a festival, Chipping Norton I think it was, and at that stage I was still more concerned about anonymity, so I actually did that performance – it gets a bit complicated – pretending to be a guy called Dr Dylan Miller who was then critiquing Brian Bilston's poetry, and not in a very complimentary fashion either!’ he laughs. ‘I found that quite helpful because then I could stand up and completely distance myself from it.

‘I kind of reprised it after my second book came out and I was invited by my publisher to a meeting in front of booksellers and various other key people in the industry and I did the Dr Miller thing again. They had some feedback afterwards that they really liked the poems “but it was such a shame that Brian himself couldn't be there”, so they didn't really get the conceit. I thought in the end, I'll come out as Brian, and it's been the same ever since.’

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Since then, though, he has embraced his live appearances, if not the baggage around them.

‘I do enjoy it once I'm up on stage, but I hate everything about the build-up to it. Being a typical poet, I don't drive, so I'm reliant on Network Rail to get around the country which can be fraught. And I'm naturally quite a shy and insular person. I still find it mildly incredible that I do this as part of my job, having hidden away for most of my life, to now be stepping on stage and reading my poems is very weird for me.’

As he recounts a typical touring routine it sounds very similar to the life of the itinerant standup comic.

‘When I'm doing my event, although the poems at the heart of it, I do try and take on some of those standup tropes, I don't just decide when I'm up there what to read, I do have a pathway I want to follow and poems I want to put in a particular order, so there's a sense and flow to the evening.’

Does he get fans calling out for his ‘greatest hits'?

‘Generally there's not too much shouting at my shows, but it depends how long people have had access to the bar in the course of the evening...

‘There are a handful of poems I tend to read most times, and I think people probably expect them. That's not to say I will always read them, but I'm still learning as I go. Even though I've got a lot of gigs lined up, I still feel like I'm learning new things every time I go up on stage.’

That said, some of Bilston’s best-known poems rely on their layout and typography to make their point or carry their joke. These obviously don’t work as readings.

‘There's a whole bunch of poems I can't really do in performance, and that might be to do with the visual aspect, but also I've got poems where I've tried to be a bit of a smartarse, and included really long words for comic effect, which I know if I'm up on stage I'm never going to have any chance of pronouncing – like that railway station with the really long name in Wales,’ Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, ‘I'd never attempt to read that!’

As well as coming to Ports Fest, Bilston appears in Ecstasy and Grief, the new volume compiled by local group Portsmouth Poetry. It came about after PP’s chairman Josh Brown approached the poet after seeing him perform at an event and asked if he could contribute to the book he was compiling.

‘I am quite keen to support the poetry world more broadly, and local poetry scenes, partly because I don't feel like I'm attached to any poetry scene because I sprang out of social media, so I was very happy to contribute a few poems. There were a couple I wrote specifically for it, and I couple I had knocking around, as it were, that I'd not done anything with. I wasn't quite sure they'd fit in with another project I'd been thinking about, but I wanted to find a home for them. I'm really pleased they ended up in that book.’

How does he feel about being one of our best known living poets?

‘That's really strange to think because I didn't really set off down this path. I get asked quite often on social media: “I want lots of people to read my poems, how do I go about it?” I'm almost non-plussed about that, because that was never my own objective. I started off messing around and the fact that anyone at all was interested in it surprised me.

‘I do struggle sometimes to conceive of myself as "a poet". If asked going through US customs what my occupation is, I'm not sure I would say “poet”. Maybe “writer...”? It seems slightly ludicrous that that's what some people would call me.’

He would, however, like to see poetry continue to move out of the classroom.

‘I feel it's a broader term now than it ever has been. I was brought up thinking a poet was somebody I would study in the classroom – I did Phillip Larkin for my A-levels, he wrote these poems that got published in books and that was “poetry”.

‘You knew that the poetry foisted on you at school would be difficult, you probably wouldn't get it, you probably wouldn't like it, and that would put you off.’

Has he found himself the subject of any academic research yet?

‘I've not seen anything overly academic. I have been informed by various grad students that I feature in dissertations and things like that. Who knows, maybe there will be some academic treatise coming through. I wouldn't want to read it though!’

But he sees performance poetry, spoken word, etc, as opening the form up to new audiences.

‘That's really exciting. It does open up new avenues and dimensions – it's not just on the page. There are often rows in the poetry world as to what constitutes "proper" poetry and I find all of that rather tiresome, to be honest.

‘In my space, people who came up through social media, there can be sniffiness around that, and sniffiness around people whose poetry aims to amuse in some way. People like Roger McGough would get very annoyed that their poems would be dismissed because they were illustrating a sense of humour.’

Of course, though, it is social media that has potentially opened poetry up to bigger audiences than ever.

‘The powerful thing about poetry on social media is – it sounds a bit highfalutin – that you can put it in front of someone at the time they need it. There's quite a few poems that have gone viral over the years because they've tapped into a particular mood that individuals, or indeed a country might have, after a certain disaster, or anger, or whatever, and it used to be very difficult to do that because poems were trapped inside the pages of a book. To read a poem you'd deliberately have to go out of your to buy a book of poetry, and who wants to do that, for heaven's sake?! But if it's there in your social feed in among videos of cats falling off wardrobes and things like that, brilliant.’

An Evening with Brian Bilston at The Groundlings on June 28 has already sold out, but there are tickets for his show at The Gaiety on South Parade Pier on June 29 from 7pm. Tickets £15. Go to portsfest.co.uk.

The Ecstasy and Grief is available from Pigeon Books in Southsea or go to portsmouthpoetry.co.uk.