Friday 9.30pm
Saturday 3.00pm
Sunday 1.00pm

POEMS is PAUL MCDERMOTT’s most recent foray into performance. It’s a SOLO show which finds the great man alone on stage.

There is no guitar and, more importantly, no beautiful voice to hide behind. POEMS features recent works of rhyme. It’s a strange and dizzying show, shifting effortlessly between hilarious, bizarre and darkly comical to unexpectedly touching.

In POEMS Paul reveals a hidden world of peculiar obsessions, particular skills, and abnormal interests all precariously balanced on the edge of an undiagnosed madness.

POEMS incudes many of Paul’s never-before-seen scribbles. drawings, and paintings. As well as some of his maybe-seen-before-by-someone-somewhere (but statistically unlikely) scribbles, drawings, and paintings.

Apart from poems (no one wants to hear) and paintings (no one has seen), POEMS features insights into Paul’s early life in Canberra (which no one is interested in).

Paul was the scrawny kid with jam-jar lenses and specs held together with sticky tape. But, even in those early years there was something that set him apart. Something sensed by nearly everyone he met. Because everyone - fellow students, teachers, strangers and members of the clergy told Paul, constantly and pretty bluntly, he was “wrong in the head”.

AND,

It was in the creation of POEMS while studying the repetitive mathematical structure of FLUFF - the Master Work of this cycle, that led Paul to wonder if those early taunts were eerily perceptive.

”Paul McDermott’s solo foray into publicly uncharted poetic waters pays off, with moments by turn hysterically funny, satirically whimsical, darkly fantastical, and movingly poignant. **** ”

“McDermott is an intellectual comedic genius. No hyperbole.”

“…moving, complex, technically proficient, and socially informed art.”

PAUL McDERMOTT (in conjunction with PEACE OPUS) presents…

POEMS

Amongst all the multitudinous variants of performance the most maligned is the vocal presentation of a poem (or poems).
And justifiably so.
The reading of poetry (aloud) to an individual (generally) or groups of people (rarely) is seen by many (in the profession of the Arts) as the most self-serving, shallow, egotistically vapid, puerile and purposeless of pursuits.

Poetry is dead. It has been dead for years. It cannot be resuscitated.

And it should not be performed live as an entertainment as – IT IS NOT ENTERTAINING.

It is the sad pony in the empty field.

Poetry lacks the immediacy, audience engagement, and free-wheeling imaginative associations of stand-up. It lacks the excitement of a play or solo performance. It lacks the rhythmic pulse of a song, or the colourful costumes, toe tapping hits and emotional highs of a musical, the pageantry of a panto and the complexity and passion of classical music. And neither does it display the torturous years of dedication and practice to perfect the “art” of tossing things about with precision for coins.

It is an isolating art form, the domain of the self-absorbed introvert. Poetry duos do not exist, there are no two-handers, trios or teams of poets - for poets are people best avoided. And public readings, dear god, readings are the empty vessel a lonely scribe howls into to amplify themselves. To take to the stage and read from your self-published, soft-cover, micro-book/pamphlet of desperately sad verses displays a disregard for the audience and a supreme arrogance.

With this in mind - Paul McDermott will be presenting, for the first time, recent works of rhyme.

“Strap in, this is unlike any poetry reading you’ve been exposed to before.”

“Yes, it’s brilliant.” “…be prepared to bust a gut laughing.”

“…high cultural pretensions.” “*****”

(There have only been 2 reviews so far (& 5 shows): In Review and Glam Adelaide. So, the quotes above are from them).

OTHER QUOTES PULLED FROM THE SAME TWO REVIEWS.

“… 60 minutes of very well-crafted comedy, tinged with lunacy, and topped with menace.”

“… brilliantly mad images of cats wearing the skulls of human children,”

“… an epic journey.”

“… evocatively dark, moving words and images,”

“… an acerbic satirist and scorner of high cultural pretensions.”

“… hilarious rants and anecdotes.”

“… hysterically funny, satirically whimsical, darkly fantastical, and movingly poignant.”

“*****”
InReview

“****”
Glam Adelaide