Award-winning former children’s laureate Michael Rosen takes to the road with his new one-man show
Interview by Ian McMillan
Former children’s laureate Michael Rosen is touring the UK with a powerful personal monologue and poetry event, Getting Through It. The talk delves deep into themes of trauma, grief and mortality. “It’s not really a family show full of laughs, although I guess older children can come along with their parents,” he muses.
There are two halves to the event; in the first half Michael reads poems about the death of his stepson Eddie at the age of 18 from meningitis. The second half is all about his own experience with Covid-19, of his 42 days in a coma and eventual recovery. The link between the two halves is language.
“When Eddie died, I felt I had no voice,” says Michael. “I couldn’t write anything and I was in a kind of miasma of thought, but I couldn’t get anything down.”
Miraculously, it was a poem that unlocked the poetry in him again. “I read a poem by US writer Raymond Carver. It was just a simple one about locking yourself out and getting back in the house, and it unlocked something in me. I was able to write, fragments at first, but then poems and things that I felt able to share with people.”
After the intermission, Michael will talk about his own terrifying descent into a coma as a result of Covid-19. “They were scary times,” he says. “Once I came out of the coma I kept forgetting that I’d been in one. My brain was scrambled, completely scrambled.”
But as it had before, language began to return. This time, it wasn’t a poem that unlocked the words door, but simply being around people and listening to them. “Nurses and doctors would tell me ‘you’ve been very poorly’. If somebody’s ‘very poorly’, I’d think they’ve got a cold or runny nose, they haven’t nearly died! So, I wrote a poem with ‘you’ve been very poorly’ as a repeating line.”
Michael wondered if he would ever be able to walk again, or stand up and perform his poetry. His physiotherapist was adamant he shouldn’t give up and, sure enough, a few months later he was doing a show for a huge audience at Royal Festival Hall. “Thanks to Covid-19 we still had to sit behind a Perspex screen,” he says. “I looked up and a woman said: ‘Do you remember me?’ And, of course, it was the physiotherapist. She was right, never say you can’t do something.”
Michael Rosen will be at the Corn Exchange on 7 April. See cornex.co.uk
