"With The R-Pattz Facttz, Andrew Blair has created a whirlpool journey through the worlds of personae and creative experience. Different narratives and images interweave with each other and in doing so the boundaries between fact/fiction, audience/performer, reader/writer, are all playfully interrogated. A real triumph of a book!” - Sean Wai Keung
I was doing short stories in five minute open mic slots and I was finding it difficult to write things short enough to read, so I tried writing poems instead. It was entirely pragmatic and had no romance about it whatsoever, which should be clear from my poetry.
I mention this in the pamphlet, but essentially after Twilight came out Robert Pattinson was both incredibly famous and a blank slate. We started making up bizarre lies about him at work and I kept writing them, which turned into a stand up routine and then a poem. The key discovery was that ‘Robert Pattinson’ is a really satisfying phrase to repeat, and that you can play with the boundaries between the real Robert Pattinson, the character Robert Pattinson and yourself. Turns out this is what the actual Robert Pattinson was doing all along.
The pamphlet is a condensed version of a two hour show at Hidden Door Festival in 2017. The written version contains less of Ross McCleary hollering ‘Rooooooooob’ to a slowed-down version of Born Slippy.
A lot of what you write is going to fail, in terms of audience responses or getting published. This is fine. There are a lot of failed Robert Pattinson poems in my notepads. Keep failing until you have a load of poems you know are good. Open mics are there for testing things out.
I think more venues will close, but it’ll always have grassroots nights, shows, and zines. It’ll survive in those forms no matter what. I imagine in Scotland there’ll be an attempt at some sort of Apples and Snakes style organisation, but it’ll fall apart due to self-interest. The cliques will retreat and stew for a while, and then eventually one of them will decide to re-enact the Darien Venture for reasons that will remain private. The Jamaican poetry scene will refuse to accept their Zoom call. They will return home and destroy their Cool Runnings VHS in protest. The ensuing pamphlet will have a shit cover.
