John Hegley – Not Just Udder Poetry Show

By Gemma Seltzer

Sunday 9^th September 2007

It was sunshine and cock(rill)s on Sunday down at Hackney City Farm with the marvellous John Hegley entertaining bewellied children with his A to Z of animal poetry. Playing his ukulele, Hegley shared his views on the octopus that gets a nasty shocktopus, Jesus’ pet dog and a pair of goldfish living in a Luton bungalow.

Hegley played to a crammed corner of the farm covered with chickens, children, and their parents sitting on haybales. He opened his performance by inviting a woman to describe an armadillo, which she did in her native German, humorously translated by a man leaning on the cow shed. This readied the crowd for the audience participation that ran through the rest of the set, from singing in rounds to a complicated solo by the tallest man there.

Hegley doesn’t make a fuss about his work; he simply tells us what he’s seen out and about with his uniquely clever, misshapen rhymes. And he doesn’t make a fuss about his performance, frequently diverting his attention to someone’s mobile phone, a lost child and the ‘more intelligent’ spectacle-wearing spectators. Because of this, the poems seem to begin with the audience, rather than come from the poet himself, which is fascinating to see.

Hegley’s poems seem to grow bigger as he proceeds. Each poem becomes funnier than the last, until the whole crowd – both adults and children – is hysterical. Unfortunately, the breaks in this set for the duo who sang rhymes accompanied by a guitar, a kazoo and a weird bee doll, prevented Hegley from reaching a comedic peak.

What a funny man John Hegley is, the funniest poet around maybe. He was especially apt in a farmyard setting, making full use of his animal-related repertoire. His performance was short enough to keep the children’s attention and gave ample time to admire the rather large pigs in the next field afterwards.