Back to 4Talent POLARBEAR
One of Britain's foremost performance poets, 28-year-old Steven Camden (aka Polarbear) is taking it to the next level to encompass hour-long monologues and graphic novels.
"When I was I kid I was obsessed with animals and football," Steven recalls. "If I wasn't playing football I was watching a video of Wildlife On One, and one day I saw one about polar bears. It said that polar bears were the only animal on the planet with no natural predators other than themselves or man - which to me meant nobody messed with a polar bear."
"I was getting a lot of stick at school because I was quite small for my age, so I actually started saving up my money so I could change my name to Polarbear by deed poll. Obviously I never made it, but when I started freestyling with my mates at 16 we all had to choose names. Everyone else went for things like MC I'm-Going-To-Kill-You or MC I'm-Really-Hard which were just stupid so I chose Polarbear. It sounded daft at first but now it's just stuck."
It's a story which not only reveals how the poet came by his nom-de-plume Polarbear but also encapsulates the interplay of fantasy, hard reality and hip-hop influences inherent in his verse. Poems like Inside and Broken seem woven from hazy recollections of teenage years smoking in the park, with Soul II Soul playing in the background and coloured by a hindsight that maybe can't be trusted.
Of course, given some of the subject matter and the Birmingham twang with which he reads them plenty of people have raised comparisons to Mike Skinner, but in truth the introspection and sparse language of his poems place Polarbear more in the lineage of Larkin or his hero Charles Bukowski.
"My whole thing is 'less is more' in terms of style," he explains. "If you reduce it down to its simplest points everything becomes more immediate and raw. Bukowski is so raw you can hardly read him at times, but I guess I come across as softer because I'm not a drunk 40-year- old. I'm interested in doing stories and giving things a narrative, and it's introspective in the sense that I'm looking back to assess where I am now."
And where Polarbear stands now in his 28th year is as one of the most promising young talents to emerge from the UK performance poetry scene, as his 4Talent Award attests. Originally inspired by hip-hop, Polarbear was persuaded to enter a slam poetry contest in Birmingham because he heard it 'was like rapping without music.'
Since then he's appeared at Glastonbury and toured nationally with the Apples and Snakes collective, as well as working on a number of projects for Birmingham REP amongst others. Slam contests might have been Polarbear's entry into performance poetry, but the projects he is currently working on are all far too ambitious to be slotted into slam's three-minute formats.
"I don't really like slam because it often ends up sounding like a load of people just trying to make you laugh," he says. "The most exciting thing for me at-the-minute is to write and perform things that blend the straightforward with the surreal. The biggest thing I've done to date with was an hour-long monologue about a man in his twenties and a ten-year-old private detective. It had lots of existential elements and concepts, but the story was simple and strong enough that people really related to it. I'm really chuffed with it and I'm now working with an artist called Goon to turn it into a graphic novel. It's called If I Cover My Nose You Can't See Me."
CONTACTS
www.myspace.com/polarbearspoken
polarbearpoet@hotmail.co.uk
Judge: Cath Lovesey, editor, T4, Youth & Music, Channel 4
Text: Paul Clarke
Photography: Adam Mattison-Ward
Polarbear was one of 20 4Talent Award winners in 2007, our hotly tipped young creatives to watch, to hire and to collaborate with. To meet the other 19 click here
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