Broken Ballads

He might look like an undiscovered member of Westlife, or remind of a cheeky, chub-faced Jamie Oliver, but Essex-born poet Luke Wright packs a sometimes savage wit behind the front. He brings his acclaimed show, Cynical Ballads, to the Melbourne Festival this month, performing poetic storytelling interspersed with a rally through the history of narrative verse. He's a working poet and Dad, chatting while heading out with the kids. “I'm sort of filling the gaps with how (narrative poetry) developed from around campfires and in pubs, but then also presenting a kind of 'state of the nation'.”

Wright is known as an intensely patriotic Brit, but the Republican kind. His poems tear apart aristocratic privilege and the mouldy conservatism of England's 'pastures green' with witty dexterity. “We have this phrase in Britain, 'Broken Britain', it's one of the catch-phrases that the Tories like to use. I find that pretty offensive and I use it as a kind of sarcastic start to the show,” Wright says.

The title, Cynical Ballads, is surely a reference to one of the most ground-breaking poetry books in history, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, from 1798. That collection was all about capturing the overflow of spontaneous emotion and, just like Wright's work, prised poetry from the claws of a closed-off upper class, giving it to the people. “A lot of my work is satirical, not all of it, but a lot of it is, and I just like to tell stories – whether it's making people laugh, or making them cry – I want people to want to listen and I want to be engaging and entertaining,” Wright says.

A humble performance poet might risk getting lost at Melbourne Festival, in amongst big film, theatre and music acts. But Wright's shows, which here include projected animations from Sam Ratcliffe, are immersive events for their audiences. “I don't write with performance in mind, but I guess it's sort of ingrained in what I do now. I do write with my ears, you know. Every line I write I'll say out loud; not necessarily thinking what it'll be like for an audience, but poetry should be sonorous, it should sound great… I really want to try and make words sing.”

And he's sure that poetry has a much more prominent place in our cultural conscience than we think. “Poetry can be a bit of a turn-off for the kind of people that go out to gigs, but poetry itself is not unpopular – people just don't tend to go and buy a lot of poetry books. “People still enjoy it,” Wright says. “There isn't a circuit for it like there is for comedy… I find going to fringe festivals great. You'll get a reviewer along to the show, it spreads through word of mouth, and you can sell-out same as someone with 20 grand behind them and a big production company.”

Not that he is bohemian in any way: Wright has a ripping website, he blogs regularly, posts readings on Soundcloud, goes on the telly, and publishes books. He's a networked poet and his storytelling verse about quotidian Brits, from fish-and-chip shop-owning couples and dodgy politicians to “posh twits”, promises to say something universal for its Melbourne audience.