The Beatbox, the Word Bank, and a Lion I Never Used

I was invited by Dr Kai Syng Tan to a beatboxing workshop about co-creating ways to embody and reimagine love and leadership in a time of lovelessness. The workshop was led by Dr Jasmine Gardosi, a former Poet Laureate for Birmingham. My honest first reaction was not delight. It was the specific low hum of dread that a mathsy, late-diagnosed autistic brain produces when asked to be spontaneous, loose, and expressive in a room full of people. I have aphantasia …. I do not see pictures in my head. I feel in vibes and narrative. Asking me to freestyle sounds felt a bit like asking a fish to file a tax return … however, I was determined to give it a go!

I went for three main reasons ….

• I had been told Kai and I would get on well, and I wanted to find out if that was true. (It was, she is fantastic!)
• I believe knowledge exchange, and public and media engagement in particular, needs creativity to work at all. The School of Art knows a great deal about that, so I wanted to see where the links might be.
• I am on a mission to try new things and live a bit more, rather than reading about other people doing it.

Arriving, and not immediately leaving

The group turned out to be small. Everyone was kind and welcoming in a way that did not feel performed, and the room felt safe almost at once, which matters more than I can easily explain to people for whom it is the default setting. (In the interest of disclosure, I did encourage two of my research assistants to join me, which made it a team outing!)

We listened to a beatbox poem to start. I did not know what to expect. The combination of rhythm and words turned out to be genuinely powerful, the beat carrying the meaning rather than just sitting under it.

Then came the vocal warm-ups, and this is the point where I would like to report that I threw myself in … I did not. I went very classic, reserved, could not make the sounds or let myself be loose, and spent a meaningful portion of the exercise hiding near a pillar …. trying and failing … Nobody’s fault …. Everyone else was cheerfully letting go. My brain simply needed time to accept that this was happening, and get comfortable, before it would agree to try. A few sounds felt more manageable than others, and slowly, one sound at a time, I found myself joining in and even relaxing a little. The tongue twisters and word play after that were actually fun, which I did not see coming.

After the break, there was a second performance, a newer piece about gender euphoria. It spoke about not feeling like you fit, or like you are enough. Whilst the overall piece was about a different journey the feeling underneath of feeling like you don’t belong, was one I knew intimately, and it landed hard. The way it was performed held the whole room, they were very captivating and it was very moving!

The opposite of perfection

Next, we were asked to shout out pairs of opposite opposing words (love/hate). People called out young and old, and others in the same shape. I wanted to say perfection …. the trouble was I could not work out what the opposite of perfection actually is, so I sat quietly and listened, which is a very on-brand way to fail a warm-up exercise.

Then we learnt to build a word bank using a three-stage system, and this was the moment the whole thing clicked for me. The structure took the pressure off. Suddenly, there was a method, and a method I could work with. I asked the computer for opposites of perfection and settled on “flaw” as the word closest to the vibe I was feeling.

I will be honest about the process, because honesty is the point … generating random words, or anagrams, or free associations on demand is hard for me. It is not how my brain moves! So I tried on my own for a bit, then asked the computer to help me pick words, from the list it gave me I selected ones that fit the vibe I felt, and worked from there. I was quietly delighted when I independently produced the word “Lion”. I had no idea how a lion was supposed to fit into a poem about perfection and flaws. It did not make the final cut. It is always good to have a lion in reserve. That gave me a word bank to build a poem, which I did without the computer!

Writing the thing

Then I built my poem, which was nerve-wracking, so I asked for feedback. Classic autistic worry: I was convinced I had missed the point entirely, or that I could not really feel the thing I was meant to be feeling. The feedback was genuinely useful, not because it told me what to change, but because it helped me understand why I had been drawn to certain lines in the first place. That is a rare and welcome thing!

We read our poems aloud, first in pairs and then around the table. I expected to hate this …. instead, it was one of the most empowering parts of the day. We clapped for each other, gave real positive feedback, and shared something personal in a room that had somehow been made safe enough to do it in.

Here is mine ….

The battle with perfection is such an autistic thing. I struggle with the line constantly! I am often told I am well over the mark when the work still feels so flawed to me that I cannot understand how both things can be true at once. This poem is that, put into rhythm.

A note for anyone tempted to tell me it needs more images …. I cannot see in images …. I feel in vibes and in narrative, and this is how I feel it, how I “see” it, which I appreciate is not how most of you do. The abstraction is not a gap in the poem …. It is the poem.

Why this matters beyond one small room

I did not come away thinking everyone should take up beatboxing, and that is not the argument I want to make! The argument is about form. Knowledge exchange, and especially public and media engagement, lives or dies on whether people can actually receive what we are trying to share. A paper reaches the people who read papers. A talk reaches the people in the room. A poem with a beat under it, performed in a safe space, reached me somewhere a slide deck never has managed, on an emotional and vibe level …. and it did it fast.

The workshop was a live demonstration of that …. a former Poet Laureate and a group of near-strangers took a difficult, personal theme and made it shareable by changing the form it travelled in. That is precisely the expertise the Winchester School of Art holds, and precisely the kind of thing our engagement work should be collaborating and building from more often. The question worth taking away is not “which medium is best”, it is “have we tried enough of them to have found the right fit for this message” …. Most of the time the answer is no.

The debrief

Then it was time to leave, so naturally we went for a Sherfox debrief coffee. It was a lovely campus, we had a genuinely good time, and I did something I was fairly sure I would never do! I am not claiming it is the world’s greatest poem …. it is mine, though, and I made it, lion-less and all!