When did you discover spoken word, or did it evolve gradually?

I think it evolved very slowly, and then took shape just after I arrived at university. I’d written other kinds of things when I was at school, and then in my gap year a friend of mine introduced me to Kate Tempest. I started watching her poems on YouTube and thinking, “this is really cool”. My friend wrote a poem and emailed me saying “could you make this better?”. It was sort of the story of the prodigal son, but it was only half of it, so I wrote the second half and started trying to find ways to perform it. But I didn’t do a lot about it until university, when I went and performed it at a SpeakEasy.

What was it that appealed to you about spoken word, as opposed to written poetry or drama?

Drama’s a weird way to express yourself - you’re basically just expressing somebody else. What I love about spoken word is that you can say something you really mean and care about, but in a way that’s engaging and performing - you don’t have to just write it down and hand it to somebody else to study. You get to tell it.

So would you be uncomfortable with someone studying and analysing your poems as they would do for say, T.S. Eliot?

No, I don’t think I’d be against that, although it’s cool in English literature to make up some sort of edgy thing that you think [a poem] means. If I read a blog in which someone had analysed my poem and thought it was about something completely different, I’d want them to know that I didn’t actually mean that. I’m not just trying to write things that are beautiful and ambiguous.

What are your main inspirations?

Kate Tempest is a spoken word genius. Last year she won the Ted Hughes prize for poetry and was also nominated for a Mercury for her rap album. But what moves me the most is what I have found and seen in Jesus and the whole of Christianity. Everything that I write that’s any good is either trying to directly express and explore some aspects of that, or trying to think about how something in the world is illuminated by it. Sometimes a poem comes from something I’ve stolen from somebody I was chatting to, who had a good story.

Are there particular writers that you go to for a lens through which to look at the Bible, or do you prefer to go directly to it?

Actually, C.S. Lewis says that to know somebody really well you have to spend time with them and with other people too, because different people bring out and realise different parts of who a person is. So I do read a lot of stuff by different people about God and seeing the world through God’s word, C.S. Lewis being a top-notch writer.

How important are the delivery and the words in relation to one another? Is there one you would sacrifice?

The thing that really excites me about it isn’t how well I come across, it’s what is there. The only sense in which the performance is important is how strongly and clearly I can communicate what the words are getting at, though I love it when other people perform the poems too. If you do it right, you’re not drawing attention away from what you’re saying to how you’re saying it.

Who are you trying to communicate with?

Well, anybody who’ll listen, really. For me, I really want people to know Jesus who don’t yet. What gets me really excited about poetry is expressing it for people who don’t want to know about God, who, if you started the poem with “this is a poem about God”, might not be interested. I’m trying to show it to you in a way that surprises you.

I read a blog post in which you said you were going up to people dressed as a Christmas Elf and reciting poems about Christmas. How do they react to that?

[laughs] I mean, that’s not my normal approach, to be fair. I assume there are plenty of people who enjoy it, nod politely and carry on with their lives. But the people who speak to you afterwards are the ones for whom it was powerful in some way... Once or twice I’ve had people come up to me and ask, “what’s it about?” and that is so exciting. I appreciate it when people think, “Mike’s good at writing poems”, but I’m much more excited when someone’s excited about what it’s about, when somebody’s going, “hang on, maybe that didn’t just move me because Mike made it rhyme”.

What do you think the future of spoken word is? Is it a flash in the pan or is it here to stay?

I hope it stays. I think it’s great. It’s the future of poetry, or the type of poetry that people actually pay any attention to, outside academia. It’s a real, accessible, cultural thing, and what it’s doing fundamentally is just preaching some really powerful ideas. I hope it will grow and become more and more established. If somebody offered me a job as a spoken word poet, I’d be keen.

What would be your advice to someone giving it a go for the first time?

Um... try and find something that is true, and then say it as clearly and as beautifully as you can.