WATCH: Biff Smith performs his Forward Prize-winning poem 'Dumbarton East' for the Scotsman Sessions

Biff Smith is a memorable performer with a memorable name, but anyone who knows him from the Scottish arts scene doubtless knows him as a musician. As a baroque indie songwriter, he’s long been the driving force in A New International (house band of theatre company Vanishing Point’s memorable and acclaimed 2019 production The Dark Carnival) and before them the Starlets.

Which is why it came as a surprise last month to see he’d been awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) at the UK’s premiere poetry awards ceremony, for a composition named “Dumbarton East”. Taking as its starting point the fact that Dumbarton has Dumbarton East and Dumbarton Central stations, but no Dumbarton West (“Dumbarton seems to run out after a certain point,” says Smith. “Where's the rest of it?”), the poem becomes a surreal meditation on placehood, delivered with inky-dark humour in a tone midway between quizzical and meditative.

Biff Smith | Contributed

“As every poet knows, if you enter any poetry competition it's like buying a raffle ticket,” says Smith, who was raised in Cumbernauld, lived for many years in Glasgow and is now in Helensburgh, where he’s a support worker. “You mostly expect not to hear back, or to get a polite email saying sorry.”

The version of “Dumbarton East” he submitted to the Forward was recorded at Edinburgh’s Scottish Storytelling Centre as part of a Loud Poets night. “I got lovely news back that I'd made the longlist, it put a wee skip in my step, then I forgot about it. Soon after that I got another email saying, "by the way, son, you've made the shortlist." Then I realised, oh, that means I get a jolly to London.”

With his mum, his sister and his friends in poetry Cat Cochrane and Morag Anderson, Smith travelled down to the Southbank Centre for the Forward, which has previously awarded Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay. There, he performed the poem again.

“The audience were all very much poetry fans, they knew what they were buying the ticket for,” says Smith. “Every good performance should be a dance, a dialogue, as you meet the audience half-way. It felt very easy to dance with the audience that night, I'll never forget it, it was an absolute privilege and a pleasure to be there. I won a raffle, so hurray for that.”

As a poet, even a prize as well-regarded as the Forward isn’t going to lead to fame and fortune, but Smith has just released a new pamphlet with Stewed Rhubarb, Dance with the Silence. His new life in poetry began during lockdown and moved into open mic nights like the one at Inn Deep in Kelvinbridge, inspired by his Dark Carnival experience. Originally he’d begun writing a new play with his band as the subject, which has mutated into a book of poems in the shape of a performance.

“We all perform in some way in our everyday life,” says Smith. “I would hope that transfers and stops it being self-indulgent. You can sometimes overlook the fact that the everyday is actually quite odd and surreal and beautiful.” As you’ll hear in his three poems for this Scotsman Session, this sense of the commonplace made magical permeates his work.

Biff Smith’s new poetry pamphlet Dance with the Silence is published by Stewed Rhubarb, see www.stewedrhubarb.org. A New International play the Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh, on 18 December.

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