David Bryant: November 2012

Sunday, 25 November 2012

Morning Star & Stoke Newington Lit Fest Christmas Assembly

Once again, I'll be DJ'ing at the Morning Star & Stoke Newington Literary Festival on 8 December. This promises to be a packed and exciting line up of poets, including:

Perry Benson
Tim Wells
Anne Brechin
Sophia Blackwell
Niall O'Sullivan
Emlyn Hugill
Graham Bendel
Matthew Hedley Stoppard
Jah-Mir Early
Nicola Gledhill
Charlotte Henson

Plus a short talk about the upcoming Fifth Monarchist film by Ian Bone and Suzy Gillett.

Once again, I'll be DJ'ing and won't be performing myself, so please don't drop by in the expectation that I'll be taking the mic, as one person did on the last occasion! But what myself and fellow DJ's John The Revelator and Graham Bendel will bring you is the best vintage sounds we can muster from our vinyl collections, with the usual merry mixture of freakbeat, mod, soul and funk noises. It shall be good.

For those of you who Facebook, the invite page is here.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

Girl From The End of The Line

Despite the bubbling meat of

chat between us, the

inexplicable way we start

chewing facts and cannot

stop making correlations in our

tastes, you’re digging for a

wishbone to pull together so

you can pray for escape from this

block headlines hostage situation.

We just get hungrier,

dig deeper in.

Despite the support we’ve

provided each other, the

flesh hook fingers

dragging each other out of

manholes, the common

clunk trip of scuffed shoes on

city pavements don’t send us

sailing towards the cushion of

each other. The bone-shattering

occurs. You bite down on your

lip without the comfort of anaesthetic.

Despite the rules I was told,

the modern facts I think I know,

the way things should be,

I don’t find you attractive.

Tomorrow you’ll get the train home.

Next week you’ll tell your friends

I’m a hypocrite and an arsehole.

Today I’ll beat you to it.

So....

I'm David Bryant. You'll hopefully have gathered that anyway from the title of this site, and the URL. It's supposed to be polite to introduce yourself, but in this instance I'm a bit like one of those irritating sales representatives who approaches you at conferences to tell you who they are, even though they have a horribly whimsical name tag placed boldly near their one of their nipples informing you of that anyway. Anyway, hello. Take my calling card from my hand, please - it contains details of my Twitter account, and my mailing list.

I write poetry and short stories, and over the last decade have had them published in numerous places and also performed them all over London. I've been featured in "South Bank Poetry", the Hearing Eye anthology "In The Company of Poets", "The Delinquent", "The Alarmist", "The Gloom Cupboard" and "The UK Poetry Podcast". I've also performed for many well-established and well-known nights and promoters (and lots more not-so-well known ones) including "Apples and Snakes", "Utter!", "The Cellar", "Y Tuesday", Borders Bookstore, Whitechapel Art Gallery, "New Blood", "Tall Lighthouse", "The Klinker", "The George Tavern" in Stepney, and other people I could mention, but won't because otherwise this biog will just end up becoming reduced to one long list of places and people and you'll just surf away.

Of course, it's perfectly possible that you'll know me from the blog "Left and to the Back", which focuses on obscure and lost vinyl recordings. That's been featured as an Internet pick of the week in "The Guardian" and picked up attention from numerous entertainment websites worldwide (even Belgium) and remains the most successful thing I've done. Poetry and short stories cannot yet compete with old vinyl recordings of adverts from the Milk Board of Mississippi, I'm afraid, but if you like what I do over there, you'll probably enjoy my other material as well.