"I wanted to do a show about ego and ambition – and my own inflated ego and thwarted ambition.

“If you’re going to talk about stuff like that you’ve got to put yourself in the firing line.”

So says performance poet Luke Wright, who is returning to Brighton with his latest show, a largely autobiographical look at where he is and how he got here.

“It’s a bit of a coming of age story in some ways,” he says while travelling back from a gig in Aberystwyth.

“It’s about that moment you realise your youthful dreams were just that – they weren’t related to reality.

“I get to tour around the country, read poems to people and get paid for it – but it’s not the all-singing, all-dancing lifestyle you dream of as a teenager.”

Luke’s decision to turn his hand to poetry came after a failed attempt to be a musician.

“When I was 14 I got into lyrics,” he says. “It wasn’t that I always wanted to be a poet. When I was a teenager I wanted to be in a band, but I didn’t think that was very realistic as a career.

“I realised when I started doing poetry that it might not be possible either – the only performance poets I could think of were Roger McGough and John Hegley. I thought to be able to do this I would have to become a huge star, but of course that is not true – you can be a modest success. John Hegley once said if 5,000 people give you £10 a year then you have a living.”

There is a certain amount of comical storytelling in this show, but as Luke says the real meat is the poetry.

“I want my shows to be entertaining,” says Luke. “The main ways of doing that is to wow or tickle your audience, and this is a combination of the two.”

Luke’s teenage outlook plays a part in the show, as the poet deconstructs some of his youthful lines.

“I wrote them when I was 16,” he says. “It’s a really terrible poem, but it’s trying so hard to be good.”

Many of the poems featured in the show are collected in a new pamphlet High Performance, which he plans to follow-up with another collection drawn from his next show Cynical Ballads, which focuses more on characters.

“It is a bit of a departure but I’m really enjoying the writing,” he says.

Although he has an education project, a sitcom idea and the possibility to create a sequel to his popular attack on adspeak Who Writes This Crap, he wants to concentrate on his first love.

“I’m really focusing on my poetry at the moment,” he says. “I’m not prepared to take time out from it.”

Next year should underline this as he plans to follow up his second pamphlet with his first full poetry collection.

* Starts 8pm, tickets £8/£10. Call 0845 2938480