Can’t get enough of that iambic pentameter

Lewis-Alan Trathen, a UNSW English Literature Honours student, will be the featured performer in the State Library of NSW Sonnet Slam on Saturday, performing five of Shakespeare’s sonnets and an original work as part of the library’s day of free events marking the 400^th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

The Sonnet Slam will be like a poetry slam, with spoken-word poets performing original works written in Shakespearean sonnet form (14 lines following a strict rhyme scheme and ending with a rhyming couplet) for the chance to be crowned the Bard of Sydney.

Such slams have helped take poetry to a wider audience but not everyone is a fan, with Trathen noting some friction between the written poetry and spoken-word poetry camps.

“I don’t want to say poets have a responsibility to straddle both worlds but they should at least acknowledge the multiplicity of ways in which we can engage in poetry,” he says. 

He sees a poetry slam as the ultimate democratic art form, where anyone can get up and perform irrespective of their socio economic background, educational background or ethnicity. "Spoken word effaces poetry's connection to the bourgeois, upper-class, educated character ... which is really important," he adds.

Trathen has memorised five of Shakespeare’s sonnets for Saturday’s event, although it seems that forgetting them is the key to success.

“I feel like the more you’ve forgotten it, the better you perform it,” he says. “If you’ve memorised something really, really well, the best performance will be in six months when you’ve forgotten that you memorised it. You’ll get every word right, you’ll absolutely kill it.”

UNSW student Lewis-Alan Trathen will feature in the Sonnet Slam when the State Library's marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Picture: Leilah Schubert

He says the performances come when he knows a poem back to front but it feels as if every word is being discovered for the first time. “If I treat every poem like it’s fresh, feel it properly with all of myself every time, that’s when I enjoy it. You let go and allow your feelings and body and soul to take over.”

Being an effective medium between poem and audience is vital: “When you perform Shakespeare you’re placing yourself between one of the greatest and most famous writers who has ever lived and 30 people sipping beer. You somehow need to communicate the exceptional qualities of this work to them,” he says.

“The first thing I need to do is to remind myself that people sipping beer can appreciate Shakespeare. They’ve got as much education as they’ll ever need, which is the ability to listen and to give up their time. That is all the qualification you need to enjoy Shakespeare, provided someone is acting as an effective medium.”

UNSW has helped in this regard: “When one participates in artistic expression, one must be armed. And one of the things UNSW has done for me is best arm me to express myself by introducing me to the techniques, theories, other poets, criticisms and all of the faculties of pedagogy that allow us to represent ourselves better.”

When he isn’t prowling around a stage, Trathen indulges his love of heavy metal. That might seem an odd combination to an observer but it makes perfect sense to him.

“What is often perceived as noise by people who haven’t calibrated their ears can actually be very textural and sophisticated landscapes of music,” he says. “Some tracks might have 50 layers of guitar – half might be doing the same thing but the other half will be doing something different. You actually get very nuanced walls of sound.”

What: Sonnet Slam, part of the Shakespeare fan day

Where: State Library of NSW

When: 23 April, Sonnet Slam 2.30pm-3.30pm

Registrations: Click here to register