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Hot Pink Bits.
 Kiwi "rhyming pop tart" Penny Ashton says she cannot stand most performance poetry, it often echoing mind-numbing remarks like "oh my vagina" and being presented in a generally repellent manner.
"Sometimes," Ashton says, "it just should be staying on the page rather than being performed in front of people, and that's what gives poetry it's awful name that people run screaming from. I mean, would you choose to go and see performance poetry?"
Considering she is herself is primarily a performance poet, such thoughts might be surprising, but then she is certainly not your average minstrel. In regards to her poetic output her central concerns include sex, thirty-something single life, femininity, masculinity, and the web of relations between all of these, and then all in terms of their ridiculousness.
"It's about my life; I'm nearly 32, I've been single for a long time and having a lot of fun," she notes. "A lot of women can relate to that, but a lot of men quite like it too because they see it as an insight. Also I can be a bit filthy, which I think they quite like."
Indeed, this ability for cross-gender appeal has made Ashton's work especially effective. The process of translating personal-life into widely-entertaining-spectacle has plenty of potential for truth distortion and loss of personality, but she notes that honesty and intimacy are not lost on her, claiming that "it's very personal, as I'm not very good at lying about myself."
However, she concedes that "most of it is slightly exaggerated. It's more like a heightened version of me, all based on thoughts and experiences I've had and poems I've written at three in the morning."
Having achieved a balance between truth and overstatement, she's able to be personal and funny, and in turn achieve the true object of her labours, which she maintains is "laughing at myself".
"That's the main thing - it's all about how much of a dick I am."
But when presented to an audience, Ashton asserts that what begins as humorous self-deprecation becomes a situation where the audience is simply laughing at itself, insofar as her views and actions mimic their own.
"I'm getting up there saying I'm a dick, and people are going 'oh my God I am too!', for exactly the same reason."
While observations on gender and gender relations, as Penny herself points out, "aren't necessarily new", she is "producing it in a completely different way". When expressed via the medium of poetry such material surely gains a kind of freshness and a revamped force, and evidence for this can be found in the positive responses she has received, both critically and socially, particularly during the 2004 and 2005 Edinburgh Fringes.
Wil McGinley
 | Penny Ashton presents 'Hot Pink Bits' from Fri 24 Feb in the Chandelier Room at Freemason's Hall. |
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