Lucy Anderton has the unique ability to convince you she's just like you. Don't be fooled. She's simply gifted with the ability to radiate her ideas so well, that you "recognize" them as your own.

She is a Welsh performance poet who has travelled extensively through Europe, Africa and the Americas. But her writing and performing career emerged only after settling in the USA. Her interests in poetry first surfaced in Chicago in the early 1990s. At that time, the first generation of slammers were finding a broader stage for their work. They were diversifying into theater, radio, and even music. This cleared space for newcomers, and Anderton and her generation stepped in (notably Greg Gillam, Cinny Anderson, Monica Kendrick, et al). They tried the stage on for size, and it fit very well.

In 1994, she performed for the Poet's Tent in the Lollapalooza rock tour. She also organized the Allen/Anderton Arts Alliance, and began curating various special readings in and around Wicker Park. She and her generation began to throw a bit of weight around on that side of town.

I remember seeing an Anderton event upstairs at Chicago's Flatiron Building, amidst paintings, sculpture, and other "happenings". It felt like a breath of fresh air, after a fairly steady diet of old-style slam up to then. Her generation had a poetry that didn't apologize for knowing something about art history in the broad sense. And contrary to first-generation slammers, the new kids embraced performance art and drew inspiration from it. Where slam had shunned (and almost took pride in shunning) contemporary art and music movements, this newer poetry was at home in a gallery as much as in a saloon or bookstore. The new kids were up to something. I particularly remember being impressed with Anderton's performances. I featured her in videophone link-ups to Los Angeles and Cambridge, England in 1995.

In listening to and reading Anderton's poetry, one recognizes two strong themes right away, and these hold up over the work that spans some time now in this writer's career. She gets to both using a language that sometimes borrows from storybooks, and so reinvests the poetry with magical potentials.

The first theme is facing challenges on a life-threatening scale. Anderton charges right into a very psychological fray, where friends and foes, internal and external, challenge the existence of her personna. Abuse, suicide, manias, rape, self-destructive behavior of all kinds pepper this landscape. While keeping a resiliency about it as survivors are due, Anderton nevertheless telegraphs that these parts of life make permanent, if not scarring, impressions on us. She lets us in on the quality of life in the aftermath. As in other suvivors' poetry, and the better stuff at that (For example, see Natalie Kenvin.), the work doesn't wallow in victimhood, but it doesn't blink, either.

The second thread is woman sex. Loud, resounding, body tranfigured in charismatic throes kind of sex. Pan-gendered sex. Sex with men. Sex with women. Unashamed, and motivated with just an ounce of pride that it'll all be good, but never objectified, and never lacking some kind of endearment in it, too. It's woman sex, full-on. Anderton relishes the mechanics of attraction, and loves to spin bits of it out through her verse. Men: Understand this and how it works, and you'll have done a good share of your homework on why women behave as women do. Then use this perspective to re-read her appreciation of birthing a messiah.

Anderton also worked for a period in Los Angeles in the later 1990s. That West Coast stint ended, however, when she realized her artistic family were back in Chicago. LA was survivable for her. It was even pleasant to a point, but it simply wasn't home. For a woman who has traveled as much of the world as she, that was saying something. She came back to Chicago, and by the time the Guild Complex launched their "Power Lines" anthology in autumn of 1999, she was already back in the midst of Chicago's writing and presenting, volunteering for the Guild and instigating new readings around town.

In 2001, she represented Chicago at the Seattle National Slams on the Note's slam team. She lives and works in Chicago, performs and/or MCs in the monthly Women Out Loud show, and occasionally MCs readings for the Guild Complex. While her public life is quite visible, her private life is quiet and respectfully out of view. As a long-time friend of Anderton's, I can attest that the privacy conceals nothing but a safe place, a space wherein she can recharge, write, rehearse, and prepare once again to shine with her voice as she does so well.

- Kurt Heintz, e-poets network
July 2001
 

copyright © 2001, Lucy Anderton & the e-poets network
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