Tricky things, acceptance speeches. But there’s normally some kind of etiquette. Let the accolade say it for you. Name the names (don’t forget your mother) and never go on too long.

So imagine the perplexed faces when the noted Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance stepped up to receive a Tony Award at the weekend and began a diatribe on uniforms.

The former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre told his bemused audience at the Radio City Music Hall, New York: “When you’re in town wearing some kind of uniform, it’s helpful — policeman, priest. When you join a revolution, wear an armband and carry a home-made flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan. At the very least, you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone.”

He carried on in that vein before finishing with an exhortation that on the theme of “if you are in the woods” it would be a “good idea to wear orange and carry a gun”.

Rylance’s speech as Best Actor left some thinking that his Broadway debut in a very different role — as a virginal Midwesterner in the 1960s sex farce Boeing-Boeing — had somehow gone to his head. However, backstage, the actor explained that his words came from a prose poem, Back Country, by the Midwestern writer Louis Jenkins. He said he had also recited a Jenkins poem when he won a Drama Desk award for his role.

Jenkins, contacted at his Minnesota home, said last night that he had seen Rylance on stage once in Peer Gynt in Minneapolis but had never met him. He was taken aback by the reading at the Tonys. “It was quite odd, his audience must have thought,” he said. Rylance had been given his prose poems by mutual friends. The reading prompted speculation that the actor was planning a play based on the poems. “If he wanted to do that, I’d certainly be willing,” Jenkins said.

At least Rylance’s audience did not have to suffer the self-aggrandisement of Halle Berry. Her speech for an Oscar for Monster Ball in 2001 began: “And I thank the Academy for choosing me to be the vessel for which His blessing might flow. . .” Even if you do feel handpicked by God, it’s probably best to keep that fact to yourself during an acceptance speech.

My thanks go to

“When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc. Driving a tank is very impressive, or a car with official lettering on the side. If that isn’t to your taste you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan.

At the very least you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone, or wear a team jacket and a baseball cap and carry a cell phone. If you go into the woods, the backcountry, someplace past all human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange and carry a gun, or, depending on the season, carry a fishing pole, or a camera with a big lens. Otherwise it might appear that you have no idea what you are doing, that you are merely wandering the earth, no particular reason for being here, no particular place to go”

— Louis Jenkins

Poet's corner

— Louis Jenkins lives in Duluth, Minnesota

— He has been a truck driver, fisherman, librarian, guard, gardener and shoe salesman

— He has published seven books of poetry, the latest, North of the Cities, in 2007

— Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems won the Minnesota Book Award in 1995

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