Performance Poet

"With McMillan, you feel a draught coming from the blast of fresh air blowing through the dusty cobwebs that festoon most literary programmes.."  Sue Arnold, The Observer Review.

Ian McMillan is many things to many people; writer of poems and prose columns, performance poet and  Yorkshire community poet to name but three. Born in the North of England,  Barnsley, Yorkshire in 1957 Ian McMillan has influenced other Yorkshire poets, such as Geoff Hattersley and Simon Armitage not to mention the many schoolchildren, educators and self pronounced influencers of the world in general.

Language is wonderful and wonderfully powerful especially when, “this universal thing, like broad daylight” is in the hands or rather the mouth of Mr. McMcMillan. The broad daylight comparison, made  by McMillan whilst roaming Mexico on the invitation of the British Council in 1997, suddenly makes poetry as accessible and there as broad daylight is.

The  “.. dusty cobwebs that festoon most literary programmes " are indeed unceremoniously blown away from any notion of poetry being for an elite who are able to decode and decipher because they have been initiated into how to do it. An interviewer on the same tour in Mexico politely asks performance poet McMillan what performance poetry is. “ Poetry that leaps up off the page and stands up on it’s own and performs” replies McMillan  in the video of his visit to Mexico “ … it’s ordinary speech but just turned up a bit.”

Learn more about Ian McMillan.