Red Ford Escort

Listen to the poem here

The story of ‘Red Ford Escort’

In October 2007, Inspire! worked with an artist called Yemisi Blake, a writer and poet. This is an extract from Yemisi’s blog which explains how the poem was created.

The Inspire! group had been working together for a few weeks before I met them. They’d made a radio trailer for a talk show called Pamela McFair, a spoof of Jeremy Kyle. Pamela had her own catch-phrase ‘FIRM BUT FAIR!’ They already had the story of the show’s guests, Gary and Susan, who resorted to calling the show after arguments about him eating all the peanut butter. In my eyes the job was almost done. These young women had come up with an idea worthy of the Catherine Tate show.

I decided to work with them on developing the back story of the characters and working that into a poem. Using question lead brainstorming, within an hour we knew the lives of all the characters:

Pamela McFair: Born in Yorkshire, divorced (twice), had an accident when she was a child. An iron burnt her leg and ever since then she’s had problems. Blonde hair. Wears a pink suit.

Gary and Susan: Have known each other since sixth form college. Their first date was at the Duck Inn. She was wearing a red tank-top. He said ‘order anything you like, get the aromatic duck”. She went to the toilet and made out with the waiter..etc…etc

We’d come up with a couple of flip-chart pages showered with names, places, objects, quotes and emotions. I asked the young women to rip up the page into individual words of phrases. We mixed them up and randomly placed them on the table face down. One by one we turned the pieces over and watched the poem unfold. By the nature of the process, the poem is quite abstract, off-beat. It left us with some fantastic lines of poetry.

e.g.

The bare black clouds of undertakers
Passion is red, anger is red
I’m walking out of the door, a broken lie-detector
Love
Blue blue Sue, jealously
Your mouth is cockney accent, damp-rot

Please take a minute to listen to the poem. The first recording is of the whole group reading a section each. The second is Yemisi reading the whole poem.

See the photos from the process here

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