Sting in the tail for Wasps vs Humans

Marjorie Brennan meets first-time novelist and performance poet Carl Plover

THE thunderbolt of inspiration can come at the most unexpected of times, as Carl Plover can testify. A dose of flu proved to be the impetus the performance poet needed to bring his debut novel to fruition.

“The character in the book is part-fact, part-fiction, he’s having a mid-life crisis, looking back on his life. I had a bout of the flu, I was really medicated, spaced out, and I felt the pressure of the mattress in the bed — that made me try to work out where I was. A week beforehand a friend had showed me a video of a band I was in, Monkeys With Clothes On. Seeing myself as a 20-year-old made me think, ‘where was I at that time?’. Not just the bushy hair and braces… everything about me was different. The guy [in the book] doesn’t know if he’s in a dream or having a breakdown, but I drifted back to where I lived in 1986. I have a recurring dream of walking through the houses I used to live in. The space these houses were in inspired the story — is this real, is it a dream of the future, where is the present?”

Plover’s book, The Mattress, is published under his performance name of Wasps vs. Humans and entwines poetry, dreamscapes and storytelling in the narrative. He has been a playwright, screenwriter and also a member of the UK-based experimental band, 4,000,000 Telephones. His more recent collaborations include the release of two singles with Cork-based producers and composers, Eat My Noise. Given his many creative endeavours, how does Plover describe himself?

“It’s for other people to describe you really, isn’t it? I think it’s all about the art — if I describe myself as an artist that sounds a bit pompous, but it’s all connected. I remember being very inspired by Dylan Thomas as a child — my mother got me into Under Milk Wood — and the magic of the words, the emotion. I was inspired as a teenager by the energy and rawness and non-polishedness of punk — I like all those different elements. The poetry of John Cooper-Clarke was an influence, as was the work of Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Mike Leigh. I’ve always had that love of words through music, theatre, and now through writing.”

Plover has lived in Cork for the last 15 years and is inspired by the vibrancy of the creative scene.

“I love Cork in the sense there’s little pockets of everything. There’s a poetry scene, the film festival, the Indie Cork film festival, the Midsummer Festival, all the interesting arts groups. There is also lots of stuff happening in West Cork, especially now Connolly’s of Leap has opened again. Things can get swallowed up by Dublin sometimes, but Cork is big enough to have a lot of energy and people but small enough to feel like a local town.”

While it’s an achievement in itself to get a book written and published, Plover’s accomplishment is made all the more admirable by the fact that he is dyslexic.

“I was born in the late ’60s and my mother went to my school and told them she thought I might be dyslexic but they just said ‘yeah, yeah’. It was only when I went to art school that they did the tests and said I was dyslexic. It was a relief to know that that was why I’d struggled. I’m proud of myself for having written a novel, having gone through school with those struggles. I’m a dyslexic punk writing a book, there’s a few gags there. Spell-checking the book was harder than writing it.”

As for his distinctive performance handle, Plover explains the origins.

“The name’s quite random, it came when I started doing poetry, I felt I’d give myself a band name. It was a summer day and the wasps were gathering, I was thinking, ‘what can you do with a wasp, leave them alone and they sting, swat them and they get angry, that’s the real war on terror, wasps vs. humans’. It was one of those two glasses of wine remarks you think is amusing.”