By Lorna Callery-Sithole

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As we descended upon Summerhall’s Dissection Room on a cold November evening, to see one of the most significant poets and spoken-word artists of our time, the air was electric, and the crowd buzzing with a poetic tribalism, usually reserved for football matches.

Joelle Taylor looked quite the part with her perfectly coiffed hair, and signature three-piece suit complete with pocket watch (not that anyone was keeping an eye on the time). The clinical space was illuminated by Taylor’s personality before she even spoke, and her dialogue with James, the mixologist from Ruma, was playful, as he instructed the audience, “Don’t neck the drinks!”.

James had interpreted each of the poems to follow into a cocktail, which seemed essential for this performance as Taylor read from her T.S. Elliot prizewinning collection ‘C+nto & Othered Poems’. As the night unfolded, we sipped each drink slowly whilst absorbing the words that they were intended to complement.

This collection documents Taylor’s experiences of butch counterculture in the 1980/90s in the UK. It is a book inspired by grief and the loss of close friends, which evolves into a celebration of the joy of friendships, community, possibilities, and unity. Taylor tells us that “180 butch women were murdered in the last two years.” These stories don’t make the headlines; I was shocked to hear this.

It makes perfect sense that ‘C+nto’ will be adapted for the stage in 2024 (whenTaylor herself will be playing one of her deceased friends, Jack Catch), as this collection of “scene poems” already reads like a play.

‘C+nto & Othered Poems’ is powerful, moving, and innovative in the way that Taylor plays with language, punctuation, and form, allowing her to slide seamlessly between the intimate microcosm of her life, friends, and experiences, to the macrocosm of a whole culture, a movement, and a place in time that she has taken the audience back to, sharing her most sacred memories. Every poem is inextricably linked and interchangeable with Taylor’s narrations on her own life and backstory, which punctuated every performance and cocktail.

The opening poem, ‘SCENE ONE’, from the section ‘O, Maryville’ sets the scene within a dyke dive bar where Taylor says, “Women could meet and be women, it was a safe space, an erotic space”. Taylor grew up being told she was ugly, so the Maryville was symbolic she tells us, “Within its walls you could go from ugly to handsome, exiled to belonging, outside to inside”.

This sense of belonging and community, of finding oneself is beautifully captured within this poem which literally sets the scene and is laid out on the page like stage directions:

The sound of a door opening into a chest cavity. A / lone woman walks briskly, head down & holding invisible bouquets. Ahead of her is a hunched building with its hands in its pockets, bracketed by gossiping fairy lights.

The poem anthropomorphises the building itself, making it seem awkward to begin with, like a shy kid at their school disco, hands in pockets, contemplating their place in the world – there an uncertainty here which quickly becomes seductive:

 “A neon pink sign flashes in pink dilate. Maryville, the / sign says. The woman pushes the door & enters / her own body. At the bar she orders a drink and when it / arrives it is her breath. Music is playing. It is the sound / of someone being listened to. She notices that she is / sitting at every table. When the woman asks her to dance / the whole of her past stands up to dance with her […] The song ends. The world opens. Venus rises.”

Taylor places the reader effectively into the centre of this brave new world, and she is about to give them an education. The use of the building as a metaphor for the central character is hugely significant as the Maryville becomes cathedral like, a haven, where Taylor and her friends could find themselves and find each other. The use of “Venus rises” nods to the London lesbian club night of the same name, one of the biggest of its time in Europe.

“At the bar she orders a drink and when it / arrives it is her breath” – at this the audience are instructed to sip on the first cocktail of the night, Venus Rises – Plantation dark rum, hibiscus, and a hint of lavender which connects us back to the scent of the “invisible bouquets” the character was holding as she entered the nightclub in the poem.

It is an intense, dark, broody drink, on the inside, but gorgeous pink neon to look at, almost at odds with itself, yet another layer of metaphor for this poem on the palate. James talks about the gender perception of drinks; a strong, boozy drink, served in a feminine glass with a long, elegant stem, becomes an entirely different experience.

The second poem ‘Valentine’ ruminates like an oil painting, linseed luminating the features of this strong pantheress, Taylor’s “black butch friend, who was absolutely stunning, and she knew it”. This poem is bold and sensual:

Born right body / wrong day, Valentine / flicks her lighter / in the corner of the club / & white women flutter. / Tonight, she has dressed / as the inside of a mouth / a handsewn suit excised / from a cured night sky.

Taylor has phenomenal stage presence, embodying the character of Valentine with tightly choreographed finger-clicks like the spark of a lighter. She holds the audience in the palm of her hand completely, every poem is seductive, leaving you wanting more:

“Every part / of a woman is a weapon / if you know how to hold her / Valetine says. The corner / flicks a Morse & in the dark / white hearts beat like moths / against a headlight.

And there is is much more to Valentine than meets the eye – “i know why we are drawn /  to the corners it’s where the road / cannot reach us.” – even this absolute goddess of a woman, so confident on the outside faces similar demons in the quiet dark of night.

The accompanying cocktail was a blend of El Presidente, Barbados and Jamaican rum, sweet and dry Vermouth, and peach liqueur. It was strong, heady, and intriguing, like Valentine. It was also a nod to Tom Bullock, the first African American bartender to write a mixology book who famously used peach liqueur (a fruit with deep associations with the Southern slave states), to flavour his drinks.

Before the penultimate poem ‘Angel’ about a boi (a young butch), Taylor discusses butch women as “women who didn’t women properly” and talks about growing up in the 70/80s “in the arse end of nowhere where being gay was spoken about in the same terms as paedophilia – this creates rage”.

You really feel this sense of rage with Angel who was terrifying but adored, “When Angel looks in the mirror / it looks away first”. Taylor observes, “when you walked in the room / it became you. How you brought the silence in with / you. How you brought the night to its knees”, echoing the inner and outer conflicts that Angel felt, struggling with her own past, identity, and sexuality:

I have seen your fists sob / at the centre of every boi / is a bare room / & inside a swinging lightbulb / a wire thin girl dances / stays with you even when you look away / angels don’t / fall from Heaven / they leave at closing time / unscrew / their fucks in the backs of black cabs / abandon their / bodies / beneath a girl beneath a duvet beneath the wet / dilated night. on fire.

The accompanying cocktail is a perfect portrait of Angel, robust, intense, and exciting. There’s some kind of fizz on the palate, perhaps soda, but the main attraction is the Plantation O.F.T.D. rum – a classic style of overproof rums – a blend of Guyana, Jamaica, and Barbados rums bottled at 69% alcohol. James tells an anecdote, that one of the creators of this rum exclaimed, “Oh fuck that’s delicious!” after tasting it. Although officially it stands for Old Fashioned Traditional Dark, this drink was the “terrifying but adored” Angel personified.

Before the final poem of the set, Taylor comments on the world outside Maryville, and how the infrastructure of gay nightlife became a survival mechanism. She quotes Derek Jarman – “the world was ending, so it was time to dance!” – the nightlife was like home, a sacred place, a church, where “we prayed to ourselves, and we held each other and prayed to each other”.

‘Heaven, 1995’ was inspired by a night when Taylor had dropped some LSD at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and realised there were people, loved ones, no longer there, “like candles snuffing in a cathedral, it got darker and darker”. The Lighthouse referred to at the end of this poem is a reference to the hospice for gay men, where they would host disco funerals, and have nurses in leathers. The AIDS pandemic was global, taking her friends, one by one. Taylor reflects:

maybe the light / is an escalator to the afterlife, / or after party, or the part of her body / she checked in the cloakroom, / but tonight, all of the dead / will dance with her.

There’s a real celebratory element to this very difficult subject, which must have been hard to achieve when so affected by grief. Larger than life characters return from the afterlife one last time:

Tequila Mockingbird releases / her wig back into the wild / blows a kiss that exhales / into carrion birds / the caw of bad lipstick / numb beaks scattering / round white seeds / from which Gaultier / sailors grow, haloed / in certainty.

This stunning last line suggests a playful hopefulness in the face of adversity, “how The Lighthouse / winks at the storm.” This poem was accompanied by the ‘Paloma’ a cocktail popular in the 90s containing martini, fresh watermelon, grapefruit, lime, tequila, and white rum. At this point Taylor was given a cocktail by an audience member and she confirmed, “Tequilla Mockingbird is definitely in there!”

To quote Bernadine Evaristo, “Taylor’s poetry is at once epic, and intimate.” She gives us the microcosm of her live, loves, and losses which ultimately connect to the macrocosm of shared experience within butch counterculture of the 80s and 90s. This was not a poetry reading, this was an immersive experience, where the audience was transported into a completely different world.

Taylor is a phenomenal poet and performer, bringing her own authenticity, backstories, lyricism, humour, and playfulness with form in a unique and moving compilation of poems – mixed together with James’ cocktails, this distilled the narratives of these strong butch women so eloquently.

There was a symbiotic relationship between the two, a poetic alchemy, which ensured we all felt we were having cocktails with friends, not strangers, on a cold night in November – squished together, shoulder-to-shoulder in an autopsy theatre.

Cocktail Hour with Joelle Taylor was performed on Saturday, 25 November as part of Push The Boat Out, Edinburgh’s International Poetry Festival.

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