I used to say: ”I’ve pretty much done everything that there is to do here in Canterbury. I’m ready to move on.” How wrong was I? There’s plenty of talent sprouting in this corner of England and every season brings new events, energy and entertainment to the roof-height-capped medieval city centre.
One such mover and shaker within the grassroots cultural scene is Louise Devismes.
Poet, Graphic Designer, Actress, Model, Performer, Host… The list truly goes on; Louise’s horizons are boundless. She declares: “I like throw a bunch of s*** at the wall and hope something sticks and makes me rich”. Even her French accent yields an assonant tone.
Rising through the local open mic scene, Louise has established her voice within Canterbury’s walls. It’s been almost a year since she won the Utterance Grand Slam Final at Sunrose Arts Festival and she has gone on to; act, self-publish, start a zine, write and star in a music video, and found her own poetry slam competition: Cacofonix. I caught up with the rising star, on the top floor of Micro Roastery, ahead of the bi-monthly competition’s fourth iteration.
After an initial mix-up of venues (I sent the wrong address) she arrived just as the barista was telling me of the caramel-flavoured notes within the day’s roast. It sounded delicious! “I’ll take a large black americano, please” I said. Louise opted for an Orangina and a glass. She was wearing a kleptomaniac collection of items; a jacket hard-badgered for from friend and fellow actor, Ciarán Barata-Hynes, her navy-blue pin-striped jumpsuit dress was similarly on long-term loan from another friend, who no longer fits into it, and the word ‘Honey’ was emblazoned in Old London typeface below a string of pearls on her neck. No outfit is ever complete without rings today; a large turquoise gem and a piece of Italian allegedly cooled volcanic lava adorned her fingers. She gave Kill Bill’s Uma Thurman a run for her money with bright blonde hair that pierced through the typically dreary British overcast sky. April showers have arrived late this year. Louise reminded the record: “If I’d known, I would’ve worn something cooler.” That’s on me for saying ‘come as you are’.
As a fellow writer, I can’t help but pick Louise’s author brain first. She lets me in on a little secret: “I’m someone who writes for like four months of the year and the rest of the time I forget I’m a poet ‘cause I can’t write in the winter. I hate the winter.” Aestival themes avoid literary clichés in Phare – even throughout a fruit-filled picnic where the narration indulges in youthful romance. Don’t be fooled by its marble-white cover, there’s plenty of textual colour locked within the pristine leaves of this poetry collection. The perfect pair for a bottle of Bordeaux (provided you don’t spill it), this four-section chapbook follows a potent coming-of-age narrative that progresses from hometown ‘Harbour’ to made-it ‘Museum’. Packed with self-professed “feminist badass confidence” Louise says the narrative reflects: “the me that I want to be.” She no longer likes the aesthetic ambrosia that comes with idolising heartbreak and the poem she won the first round of Utterance with, ‘nostrum part ii’ is something she “would never write today.”
“It’s a trauma dump! I feel like when I started writing poetry, I loved visceral imagery like blood and lungs and organs and being just very melodramatic. The more I write the more I find myself writing about the small things in life.”
She credits Alice Munro as one of her current favourite writers and subscribes to her philosophy of ‘finding the beauty in the everyday’.
Destiny is one of the subtle through-lines in Phare and this reflects the serendipity that landed Louise in Canterbury. She recounts in our conversation how a last-minute change to her UCAS application came from her mother’s suggestion to check out a city closer to native France. Talking of fate, she adds: “I never knew that I had so much of the sea in me but now when writing poems, I realise that I always come back to the sea.” New addition to the collection, ‘the house’, details the surreal story of seashells ‘following’ her family to the countryside and curiously sprouting behind the greenhouse of their home.
Talking of her acting career, it’s obvious that Louise is blossoming past the nascent stage. She co-wrote and starred in Koto Kill’s recently-released music video for Téléphone Party (YouTube) and featured in Medea alongside Barata-Hynes (Amazon Prime). The pair will also feature in boyfriend, Laine Slater’s short film The Devil’s Threeway now that he has surpassed his Kickstarter funding goal.
Cacofonix was upcoming the next day and preparations were well under way. Stage lighting and decks were being brought over by her father by boat. Booked and busy, the multi-hypenate had managed to squeeze me in after a promising job interview for a French PR company, before going off to design a street-side advertisement board. Marketed as a ‘special’, the slam has temporarily moved to The Draper’s Arms just across the road from their old venue: Bramley’s. There’s a nostalgia for the nineteenth-century bohemian-interior cocktail bar emanating from Louise. Once the haven of a bygone ‘Your Bard’ (the Tommy Carver-Chaplin run antecedent to Cacofonix), the bar announced its closure in March. Along with it went the Open Mic Nights that had peppered its calendar for the last five years. The ‘Live at Bramley’s’ neon sign that was once a veritable backdrop onstage must be relegated to some dusty corner of a cupboard by now.
Louise feared not; for as one door closes, another opens. The Draper’s Arms has been refurbished recently and the owner’s chose to fill in its delicate square mezzanine atrium with wooden flooring, creating some valuable square-footage out of, quite literally, fresh air. Full advantage of this new event space was taken by Louise to carry forward her and tables were brought in from the balcony area to bulk out the audience’s seating options. It was a packed house that night. Navigating the room was like playing a game of human Rush Hour. I’m told that her bi-monthly event consistently draws around fifty attendees but she concedes that entrance has been raised to £3 to justify the running costs. There is a ‘cozzie-livs’ crisis going on, you know, and The Bank of England just announced an inflation rise to 4.5%.
What makes her audience different is the engaged community feel that she creates throughout the three-round competition. The stage was set just high enough for everyone to see the performers, but not so towering that they’re on an unreachable pedestal. Louise expects the audience to interact. It is not a passive spectator sport. Volunteer to pull the running order balls from a bingo cage and you’ll be made fun of if your timing with the drumroll is off. (This quality of randomness is a genius tactic that dissuades inter-competitor jealousy that so often riddles assigning the running order.) Sit on the lucky chair with a feather attached to the underside of your seat and you’ll have won yourself the power to reward your favourite slammer with a free pass to the second round. Raise it mid-performance for an extra flair of drama.
The Judging Panel that night was made up by; the two headliners, Sven Stears (Four-time National Slam Finalist) and Karl Anthony Mercer (March winner), Alice Gretton (Host of Utterance, Exposure and Sunrose Arts Festival), Louise Devismes herself, and a member of the audience. With such established critics in the room, winning Cacofonix feels more credible, something lost in other local slams where a popularity contest elects their most congenial figure.
Louise indulges me with her plans for July’s event: “I’m really hoping to do something outside in July because I really want a chicken. It would be so much fun watching it walking around”. The slam is known by its iconographic front, an odd-eyed, thin-necked chicken with half a worm drooping from its beak. Affectionately nicknamed ‘Caco’, this cartoon chicken is visible across all of the event’s branding, be it: on stickers, social media, the companion zine and website.
The Cacofonix clique is growing strong in Canterbury as Louise tells me she is thinking of formalising a Publishing House. Equipped with a flashy website stating: “Every poet is published. Every poet is photographed. Every Poet Matters” she is investing in the community.
With local artists: Eliot Guiver (@smeli.art) and Lenny Stroud ‘Big Len’ featuring at the book stall alongside sold out example copies of Cacofonix Zine Issue #1 *and* photographer, Mike Dowling on hand, there are the roots of something big happening here – Louise Devismes is one to watch out for!
We part ways just as the clouds begin to crack open. She walks off down a side alley of the high street holding the jacket over her hair. Practicality supersedes fashion when it rains.
Headliner Interviews, headshots and event information (past and future) are available at cacofonix.co.uk.
Photos from Cacofonix 11th May 2023:
Guy A. Forster-Pearce 