Comedian, actor and writer Robin Ince, who presents BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage science show with co-creator Professor Brian Cox, has published his first book of poetry. Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth is described as “an instinctual collection pursuing the psychological essence of personal and societal wellbeing, explored through experiential neurodivergence and humanism”.

If you find all that a bit of a mouthful, here’s what Robin Ince has to say about it in his introduction to his debut collection published by Flapjack Press:

“Since late spring 2024, I have filled ten notebooks with probable, possible, even definite, poems. It feels like the most exciting development in my artistic life in the last decade, possibly in my whole career. It has given me a new freedom to express myself in more directions than I have been able to before.”

Ince, who has performed his work at Morecambe poetry festival and will be there again next month, added: “I was worried when I took to the stage … there were many real poets in the audience and Attila the Stockbroker in the front row. That feeling at the end of my hour was akin to the feeling I had over thirty years ago when I came off a stand-up stage and everything had worked. It was a feeling of a vast new potential.”

He says that it is “a rare day when I don’t write one or two poems. The trick is to catch them as they form; I cannot hold them for too long and they are often gone if I don’t write them down within the first minute.”

So what are Robin Ince’s poems about? ‘Haunted by a Star’ begins intriguingly: “Last night / A ghost collided with my head / It was the light of something dead.” The poem discusses his own anxiety: “My atoms battle / My molecules revolt // Yet still more than / A solo chemical reaction / Or the single line of an equation”. Final lines are always crucial in a poem. This one is: “Emergent complexity briefly defeats the void.” A brave line to end on, to be sure. But one that someone has apparently had tattooed on his arm!

Another poem, ‘Angry Soup’, satirises the outrage when Just Stop Oil protesters threw soup over a Van Gogh painting: “The ability to regrow a rainforest / Or rebuild an atmosphere / May take more effort than / Wiping Vegemite off a Vermeer / Or waffles off a Warhol.”

As a science show presenter, Ince’s poems are spattered with quarks, electrons, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and some other terms that are meaningless to me. He includes a poem in praise of Greta Thunberg, and in another imagines alien tourists stopping by to visit Earth, dropping litter, and never returning (“They couldn’t see intelligence / Just a WC in space”).

Returning to his introduction, it’s clear that Ince has found in poetry a safety valve “for the ADHD mind. Something is casually seen, a firework of a thought ignites a trail of words, and then it is on the page and ready to perform to an audience  … I think what has happened is that my negative hypervigilance has become positive scrutiny … I find it interesting to see how people receive the poetry and when it does make people cry or move them, because there is so little design in them.

“Like so many other neurodivergent people, I am in a near-perpetual state of questions and thoughts and also not always good at, or interested in, following the staid rules of socialising. I can be quite matter of fact about things that other people consider almost taboo, and using this pattern of poetry, devoid of filter, excites me in terms of its possible connections.”  

 

Robin Ince, Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth, Flapjack Press, £10.50