What's He Playing At? Michael Pedersen Explains Himself

"Poetry sort of tumbled into my life," explains Michael Pedersen, when asked how this all started. 'This,' being his recently released and critically lauded first full collection of poems, Play With Me, and his successful and expanding night of performance, animation and music, Neu! Reekie! – oh, and he's also in the process of collaborating with various musical acts in a songwriting capacity. It was a chance encounter with a "Tom Buchan book (Poems 1969 – 1972): a thin, sharp yellow, aesthetically awkward looking volume that blew my cotton socks off," he tells me. "I was in second year of Portobello High School when I yanked it from my ma’s bookshelf. The punch and proximity of the words were a revelation."

Fastforward some years and he is currently at Scotland's cultural locus; one of its most interesting up-and-comers with a hand in established and new communities of artists. It's quite a change of direction from where his life seemed to be headed after leaving school: "Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I was mostly trying to run away from Edinburgh; the bastard kept dragging me back. I left school a very serious (mostly hairless) young man, adamant of attending an ancient, collegiate university doon sooth (and reading Law). And I did – passed from Durham to Nottingham; Nottingham to London; London to Siem Reap. Travelling the world for a year in between (I know, a likely fucking story – but I plucked plenty of my principles out from time spent in India, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam and Japan – both from expats and the denizens). I came back to Edina for a pit stop in 2010 and never left. My anchor got stuck in Leith Harbour / fell down an open drain."

Edinburgh and the worlds of poetry and performance can count themselves lucky it did. Play With Me is an accomplished debut collection; diverse and appreciable to many audiences, with Pedersen's unique perspective and voice pushing the reader on to gobble these verses up in as few sittings as possible. "Poetry-wise it’s a pretty diverse menu," he explains. "Talking Cambodian treehouses to NHS overdose clinics; teenage perversion to wet arses, quitting cheese and learning to read people as rivers. It’s like taking my hand and walking me through a peculiar puberty – sometimes we’re leaping forwards together, often we’re somersaulting backwards; an ending spoiler would be I’m not quite there yet. I’m caught between Irvine Welsh and Alasdair Gray – in terms of the landscape covered and the characteristic introspections (not as regards their brilliance)."

As a collection it comes after two well-received chapbooks and brings together the best poems Pedersen has penned in the last few years. In typically self-deprecating style he describes it as "a greatest hits for someone who hasn’t had any charting hits; akin to sneaking cover versions of your own singles onto the new album." He says his earlier chapbooks "reek of a writer over-ardent to find his work in print. For young poets keen to secure their inaugural chapbook publication there’s no telling them to slow down and really I don’t think it does any lasting harm – all the dribble and zeal of rushing into it. I used both experiences as an edification in working towards a full collection. So perhaps it’s less the greatest hits/cover version scenario and more a process of warming up or redressing the leftovers to accompany all the new recipes you’ve learned – a buffet fit for feasting on. I compare a lot of things in life to food."

Play With Me is something he is much more prepared to stand behind and he's clearly proud of it: "The collection felt ready to hatch because it wasn’t rushed but incubated lovingly up until the shell began to crack. Thought was given to sequencing, placement on the page, typography, all that; everything that needed pondering was bloody well pondered. This was partly due to deft editors politely prodding at me. The poems were put on the treadmill – losing words where they could, in some instances shedding stanzas. The collection started out a pub brawler and ended up an athlete – 100 plus pages down to 70 odds. I like to think that’s because we all saw the fire in its eyes. That’s not to say it’s flawless of course, it’s not."

Perhaps the collection's greatest strength and weakness is its diversity; darting in a hundred different directions and sometimes missing the mark. The thing is, when it hits, it hits hard. Reading the poems, the assumption one makes is that it is largely autobiographical. Pedersen often places himself, or a version of himself squarely in the middle of proceedings, encouraging the reader to follow him into awkward adolescence, booze-soaked epiphanies and the task of finding truth or honesty in among the morass of life in one's twenties. When I ask him directly he describes poems like Colmar – the opener, on awakening teenage sexuality – or Jobseeker – a lament on returning to the broo many of us will relate to – as "100% autobiographical." He explains that "If it’s not my story it’s likely to be somebody else’s I’m close with or have related to. Many pieces are self-reflections, others self-revelations, some nothing more than ugly self-indulgence; all are strung together using different versions of myself."

Nowhere are the varying voices and versions of Pedersen more apparent than in his live performances, of which he admits that "Yes, there are layers of meaning that can only be conveyed when experiencing the work live, just as there are insights that won’t be picked up on unless scrutinised on the page. How’d ya like your eggs? For me it varies day-to-day and that affects the way I write. I try to keep a balance although I’m not sure which way it’s heading." 

It is no surprise to learn that "performance-wise I try to memorise a lot of my works; which makes readings less clinical." Seeing Pedersen read his work is to see him straining through his mouth and body each nuance of each word, wrapping his tongue around the complex syllable pairings he conjures and the rises and falls between high-faluting vernaculars and Edinburgh patter. He also likes to experiment in each performance, saying "Not least is that I’ve lots of different versions of each poem burned into my memory; the cadence, the hostility and even the words are alterable within each audience. There’s definite moments where I walk into a room and quickly realise if it’s to be the more performance-based pieces (humour laced) or those poems I’d consider more stylistically accomplished."

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"If Neu! Reekie! itself was a penis it’d be starting to expand and twitch a little, a semi at a push" – Michael Pedersen

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Of course the place to see performances from Pedersen and his cohorts is Neu! Reekie!, which was conceived and is run jointly with Kevin Williams of renowned alt-publisher Rebel Inc. Pedersen relates how "Neu! Reekie! recently got described by a local councillor as 'a weird laboratory of cross cultural pandemonium.’ I liked that. At its core N!R! is a meticulously curated medley of spoken word, animation, performance and music. Although we’ve been known to spiral out into: table sculptures; origami; digital portraits; live drawing; lightshows; and our (now formidable) Raffle of the Absurd – prizes for which have ranged from rare books and aged whisky to pig heads and dubiously labelled sugar pills."

The night is on the up. A recent Neu! Reekie! featured performances from names as mainstream as Liz Lochhead, as well as recent recipient of this year's SAY (Scottish Album of the Year) Award, RM Hubbert. It is clearly the place to be: "Neu! Reekie! is booming at the moment, there’s new limbs to every show; it sort of gives me an erection, because despite gathering speed we’re still in the infancy of what we want to achieve," Pedersen casually notes. He continues by saying that "If Neu! Reekie! itself was a penis it’d be starting to expand and twitch a little, a semi at a push; a creature bubbling with excitement at the thought of the size and shape it's destined to take; the extremity of which it alone knows; and even then it’s only a gut feeling. That’s not to say it’s strictly masculine, the same metaphor exists with growing levels of vaginal moisture."

It's charismatic analogies like that which must have convinced the great and good to perform at Neu! Reekie! in its early anonymity. Nowadays Pedersen is invested in the musical side of things. He has assembled and written songs for Jesus, Baby who have enjoyed a BBC Radio 6 session and some decent airplay. He admits "I’d like to collaborate more on songs – I’m working out a way to make this work with my good pal Bill Ryder-Jones (formally of The Coral, he's went on to produce two sensational solo albums). I’m also hoping to collaborate with Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit at some point – although nothing's being confirmed and we’re still not sure just how that would work."

For now though it's his poetry that leads the way, whether written or proclaimed to a growing number of admirers. It's ideal for Pedersen: "Poetry is that allusive remote control that can pause, fastforward and rewind time, plus a wand and a crystal ball all rolled into one." He describes it to me as a way to reconfigure past experiences with a greater dexterity than he could ever manage in the maelstrom of life. A key realisation for him was that "it wasn’t so much about having an extensive vocabulary, but an explosive one – there were/are writers out there using very simple language to say very powerful things. Building bombs." This is exactly how the best verses of Play With Me land – like a rupture of truth and recognition, of wish-fulfilment, of dragging the base and crude into something transcendent. They leave you sputtering for air.