Out With The Old, In With The New (Book!)

Do we ever truly leave our early work behind?

Hey friends.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to judge and perform at the Unislam finals this year. An incredible national competition (facilitated by the equally incredible Toby Campion) bringing together young poets from all over the country. I performed at one of the first ever Unislams in my final year of University in 2015 (10 years ago!), and it has gone from strength to strength - congratulations to this year’s winners Leeds!

I was introduced as a World Poetry Slam Champion and my fellow judges asked if I was going to perform the poem that won me that title 13 years ago, and I realised it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Despite having written poems in the very position these brilliant young writers were in, the poems I felt compelled to share came from the decade of lived experience and honing of my craft that has come since, and as such were both from my new book Wonderful (thankfully an appreciation of Ted Lasso and Taio Cruz is able to transcend all ages).

This followed on from a conversation I had with the glorious Vanessa Kisuule when I took Something Borrowed on the road to Bath last month, where she said she is unable to perform her earliest poems anymore, because she cringes at the person and writer she was when she wrote them. I think I hold a greater fondness for my earlier poems than perhaps she does (shout out to Paper People, 59 and Dinosaur Love!), but it was only having performed a few gigs of my new tour that I realised none of the setlist come from my first book The Sunshine Kid, something that would have seemed unfathomable to me when it first came out. These poems not only helped me get to where I am in terms of my career, they made me the person I am today.

A youthful looking Harry Baker performs ‘A Love Poem For Lonely Prime Numbers’, which was shared on TED.com and gave me the confidence to try and be a full-time poet 10 years ago!

This is not to say I will never perform these poems again, but to acknowledge that in the same way our body is able to regenerate all of its cells every 7-10 years, my body of work (!) may well be completely different to when my first book came out, but it still has the same heart and hopefully honours everything that has got me to this point, and will no doubt continue to develop and evolve even more over the next 10 years! Speaking of which…

I Have a New Book Out Next Year!

Wow, way to bury the lead Haz. Announced on none other than World Poetry Day itself (which to my shame I didn’t realise at the time), my new collection Tender, based on the first 100 days of fatherhood, is being published with Canongate. The new book has now been officially announced and is available to pre-order now, which apparently makes a massive difference in bookshops stocking it. All of my other books have been published with the wonderful Burning Eye, and I had an exciting and terrifying week in October meeting with five different potential publishers for this new collection - I want to give a massive shout out here to my fantastic agent Hayley Steed for being the absolute best and helping me navigate this new terrain. One publisher literally offered me £100,000 if I destroyed all three of my current books and started again with them, but (given the aforementioned fondness I have for these poems) I foolishly heroically managed to resist that sweet, sweet blood money. I chose Canongate in part because of the range of fantastic authors they have published that I look up to (Matt Haig, Nick Cave, Lemn Sissay, Vanessa Kisuule, Jordan Stephens to name a few!), and mainly because it felt like they got the vision of the book the most, and having done this independently for so long I wasn’t ready to give that up. I will of course talk about this much more in the months to come, but in the meantime if you would like to go an pre-order 100,000 copies so that I can be principled and financially validated, that would be lovely.

Tour Rolls On

Having gigged in Blackpool, Skipton, and a mega three-night run in Brighton, the wheels on the tour bus/train are well and truly going round and round. Most of April’s dates have sold out, hence my uncharacteristically relaxed approach to sending out this month’s newsletter, but there are still a few tickets left in Bristol on the 26th April if you would like to come and join, then in May there’s still space in Cambridge, St Albans, and a series of Cornwall dates. Since the last newsletter as promised I have also added matinee shows in Norwich and London, as well as some Christmas shows for any keen earlybirds/robins. Dates for those are above, and original tour dates are below, and all are available on my website - hopefully see you there!

Any Other News

Thank you for reading this far! Your reward is the knowledge that the latest Something Borrowed with Jasmine Gardosi has just come out and is fantastic and available for free wherever you get your podcasts. As mentioned I took it on tour last month to Bath with Vanessa and Hollie Mcnish so keep an eye out for those, we had the lizardy legend Gecko last month and we have the magnificent Maria Ferguson at the end of April! I think as a result of me doing about four hundred gigs in Margate last month the Gecko one wasn’t as well attended as I would have hoped, so if you are able to come out and support and see Maria at the end of the month, it would be a welcome boost to know that it’s worth continuing with!

Finally the news you’ve all been waiting for since last month, my interview with Kent Life magazine is out! I haven’t actually been able to track down a physical copy yet, so if you are able to and wanted to pick up two, please do send one my way.

Otherwise I will continue to post poems online for people who can’t make it to my gigs, and continue to plug my gigs for people who can. Until next time, stay brilliant x