tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51270899902362980372024-03-13T22:24:22.360-07:00David BryantOne of those new-fangled writer's blogs for people who like life with the DVD commentary always turned on.23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.comBlogger106125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-62838897054316290812020-07-24T11:20:00.000-07:002020-07-24T11:20:46.608-07:00Before The Honey<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I'm going to resist the temptation to say too much about this one. When I used to introduce it at gigs, I'd get great mileage out of claiming it was based on a real life event, often starting my introduction by claiming that it was a document of the typical experience of having attractive thirty-something women breaking into your East London flat in the middle of the night.<br />
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People would either laugh incredulously or heckle, obviously, because that's patently not true, but amazingly I have been asked who it was based on. "Who was this terrifying woman?" someone said in a concerned fashion after a gig.<br />
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The answer? Everybody and nobody. Without giving the game away too much, I was having an almost adolescent session of philosophically musing to myself about how much compromise takes place in relationships, how much their success depends upon being in the right place at the right time, and how suitable, lovable people seemingly emerge from the ether just at the time you're mature enough to deal with them, and how this can almost feel as if it's been plotted out for you by invisible or manipulative hands, even to the extent of you being seduced or bashed around the head by the comforts of conformity. Somehow, that romantic and anti-romantic naval-gazing eventually morphed into this poem, which perhaps partly addresses some of those questions but to be honest, probably just raises a hell of a lot more (not least about my state of mind).<br />
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The woman isn't based on anyone in particular at all, and while I was writing it the vision I had was actually very vague and imprecise. I've always imagined her to have blonde highlights in her hair and a green summer dress on, but that's as much as I ever saw. If you see more, let me know.<br />
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It's a very simple poem but it's one of the few old ones I don't get the sudden urge to stick red lines through and rewrite. What it sets out to do, it does, and it feels like it weaves a neat narrative and has some images I still quite like. In particular, the line "before you honeyed me to death" could have about four different interpretations, any of which is correct so far as I'm concerned (as smug as that sounds). Interestingly, how people interpret it seems to depend upon how they feel about relationships in general. It probably doesn't help that the scenario sounds so terrifying...<br />
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If you want to read it rather than listen to it, <a href="https://davidbryantpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/04/before-honey.html">you can do so here</a>.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-28619218384540024722020-07-06T00:18:00.000-07:002020-07-14T07:09:53.913-07:00Newport Pagnell<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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One of the weirdest things I've found about live poetry is that it tends to be the material I feel lukewarm, or at best ambivalent about that gets the strongest responses from audiences.<br />
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This one is particularly odd. It was inspired by a really bad poetry night I attended, filled to the brim with wannabe slam superstars who had all the swagger but no decent material, and I envisaged that my own particular idea of hell would involve being stuck on a broken down coach on a motorway siding near a dull town with them (but not actually IN the town - too interesting, that). I have no memory of why I picked Newport Pagnell in particular, but perhaps something about the name itself and the town's proximity to Milton Keynes loaned itself neatly to the concept (I might be imagining this, but I think an early draft might even have used Milton Keynes instead of Newport Pagnell, but I correctly dropped it as being too much of a cliche). </div>
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I really quickly wrote up the basic idea on the tube journey home, with two suited city workers sat either side of me making no attempt to disguise the fact they were gawping at what I was doing with interest and perhaps concern (which may have further fed into the poem's atmosphere of frustration and irritation). I tidied it up the following day and promptly forgot all about it, until I tested it at the "Poetry Unplugged" open mic one Tuesday evening and found it went down astoundingly well, even picking up compliments from people who haven't always been kind about my work. </div>
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From then on, it became a feature of every set I did for at least three years, always getting the same enthusiastic audience response, until I decided to ditch it one day. Why? Well, the nagging doubts I always had about it never quite disappeared, and it turned out I wasn't alone. My wife complained about it one evening, arguing that it was a long rant about poetry and wannabes and "not about anything that really matters to anyone else". Somebody approached me after a gig to complain about the "bad vibes" the poem gave off. I performed it at an open spot at "Bang Said The Gun" and again, a couple of members of the audience took exception to the general tone. This would have been a brilliant response and their irritation would have been seen as proof of my genius if I genuinely believed that I'd written a savage piece of satire exposing the shortcomings and downsizable downsides of the spoken word circuit, but I really didn't. I too was plagued with doubts about the poem, and their criticisms felt far too on-the-money for my liking. </div>
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This was also written at a time of enormous change in the poetry circuit when younger, streetwise and more naturally confident performers were surging towards the headline spots, and part of me wondered if I was responding to this threat with the insecurity and jealousy of an old lag rather than with honest criticism. Some of the poets who inspired the anger to begin with have probably developed into fine writers and performers by now, and possibly part of me wanted the live poetry circuit to remain an outlet and entertainment option for geeks, freaks, outsiders and weirdos rather than the flash boys and girls of London. I don't know this for a fact, but once the idea occurred to me, it never really went away. </div>
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Anyway, fast forward to 2020 and I was slightly surprised when I was in the Poetry Cafe shortly before lockdown and someone collared me and asked me to do "Newport Pagnell" again. It's been retired for at least seven years now, but I suppose its repetition and the snappy simplicity of some of the imagery means it is, if nothing else, memorable to those who heard it. I don't like to use a lot of repetition in poetry, but the few examples where I have - primarily this and "Slow Death Of Another Trade" - have paid off with a much higher recognition factor and probably helped me to get gigs. </div>
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People have often asked who inspired the "shit in a slogan T-shirt from Surrey" line in the poem. The boring answer is it's a composite again. It is true to say, however, that early on my days in the circuit I knew someone who was obsessed with success and discovering a good formula over and above everything else, and tended to sneer at anybody who "lacked ambition" - ironic, then, that he disappeared without trace very quickly before getting any gigs, perhaps realising that poetry was never going to scratch the fame itch he clearly had. Nonetheless, he never wore a slogan t-shirt - other poets who weren't very good did.<br />
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I would occasionally go into long, fanciful, almost surreal monologues before starting this poem at gigs, building up fanciful pictures about who this character was, to the extent that the audience thought I was having some kind of breakdown, before revealing them to be exaggerations and lies. There is no interesting story to be told here. To be honest, though, I often think those weird, rambling monologues were funnier and more interesting than the poem itself, though sadly I don't have any recorded examples.</div>
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Still, here's a live recording of the poem itself, so anyone who ever really wants to hear it again can just press play to their heart's content. This was recorded at the Live Poetry Podcast event at the Poetry Cafe, which I remember as being a fantastic evening (hosted and run by Dominic O'Rourke - long time no see/hear, Dom, if you're reading this). I don't think the poem itself is due a revival, though. </div>
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-72363571922311817992020-06-21T15:06:00.003-07:002020-06-22T10:06:52.260-07:00Checking The Engine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Right, so this is a new one. A poem which hasn't even found a place in a live set yet, because it was written too close to lockdown (and who knows, maybe it never will. Maybe I'll decide I don't like it by the time I'm even back into a position to think about live sets again).<br />
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One of the problems I have with poetry as an artform, which I'm sure I've written about before, is the idea that everything is a confessional - that as soon as you write about it, it's both the whole truth and nothing but the truth (rarely so; often poets have a tendency to pick places or objects which scan better or which stronger metaphors can be built around) and something you feel really strongly about, or have suffered some trauma over. Otherwise, why put pen to paper in the first place? Well... the truth is that ideas are largely uncontrollable, and if two things which seem as if they could connect incredibly well in a poem pop into my head at the same time, then I'm hardly going to be able to resist the temptation just because it's not a burning issue or it may lead to false impressions. </div>
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"Checking The Engine" wasn't inspired by a recent situation, but by those awkward relationships which have dogged both my life and everyone else's periodically. The people you're meant to get along with and life has thrown you together with, and have nothing against, but have noticed are a little stern, false or disapproving around you. Partners of friends whose differences of taste and opinion have somehow become a problem rather than something to be laughed off. Neighbours who wish they weren't living next door to you, without ever really telling you why. Dinner party guests who have taken an immediate dislike to you for working in the arts or writing poetry (you can only assume, having never met them before, and given that these are the only facts they've been provided about you). Usually what causes these people to finally snap isn't a serious situation, but an honest mistake or a trivial issue which then creates an eruption of rage, like one of Frank Spencer's jowl-quivering foes in "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em".</div>
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I'm going to resist the temptation to say whether the concluding lines of this poem are the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but they are based on something that actually happened to me. I did own a racing car duvet as a child - the top of it nearest the pillow was a cockpit, and the road stretched ahead on the rest of the covering. God, I loved sitting up in it and pretending to drive my bed around the chicanes of Brands Hatch, or imagine I was sleeping in a racing car for the night and not a warm house. I sat up for ages twisting an imaginary steering wheel pretending that I was an adult and I was able to drive, and of course, in the end I never actually learnt. Anyway.... POEM. </div>
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-4048290006805305382020-06-15T04:36:00.001-07:002020-06-15T04:36:55.301-07:00X<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The ways these narratives usually progress in film and fiction is that the person receiving these letters - which are, of course, witty, wise and often confessional, because we all think we're astonishing at writing letters, <i>obviously</i> - gets wooed by the writer and a serious relationship ensues.<br />
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That never happened to me, but whenever I entered into a relationship through other less extraordinary means, the letters often became a source of jealousy and suspicion. Likewise, at least one of the partners of the recipients of my letters made enquiries about who I was and what was going on, even though he didn't live on the same continent or time zone as me.<br />
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To summarise the problem in a nutshell, the posted written word can be quite loaded and more dangerous and easier to misinterpret than a phone call. That's the inspiration for this poem/prose piece (call it what you want) over and above everything else.<br />
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As to whether an event actually occurred as suggested in the audio below, not really. I never had a proper conversation with a partner about the appropriateness of someone else's behaviour, though I did have to deal with the odd withering comment or raised eyebrow ("Oh, I see <i>[insert name here]</i> has been in touch <i>yet again</i>") - but pretending I did have a serious issue gives the piece something to react off and bounce against; plus, giving the piece an interrupting additional voice also serves the added purpose of making me sound like less of a vain shit who is assuming romantic interest from someone else where there might actually be none. Now do you see how deceptive people who think about writing a lot can be? Stick to phone calls, that's my advice.<br />
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If you'd prefer not to engage with the audio below and just read the piece you can find the text <a href="https://davidbryantpoetry.blogspot.com/2009/04/x.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-14853692758285847002020-06-08T04:31:00.004-07:002020-06-08T04:31:56.502-07:00Being English<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Some poems never really get old, unfortunately. Years ago while at a writing workshop, I was warned to stop writing "topical" poems. The world moves too fast these days, I was told, and the turning cycle of publishing houses is slower than an oil tanker in high winds - by writing about political events, I was usually giving my work a six month "use by" date. </div>
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This turned out to be rubbish advice (and possibly inaccurate nautical advice, though I'm no expert). While it's certainly true that political parties move at an incredibly swift pace, and the emergence of new figureheads and influential voices constantly surprises - I couldn't have foreseen Donald Trump becoming president when I first wrote this poem, though I might have had an inkling that Boris Johnson would eventually become Prime Minister - the underlying tensions seldom change that much. The political pendulum is constantly trying to find its natural resting place, and poems and works of literature which seem irrelevant one year can frequently become relevant again two years hence, however much you might wish that weren't the case. Sometimes all you need to do with political poems is swap the names of the politicians around a bit, and hey presto, they're relevant again and nobody is any the wiser. </div>
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Still, nobody is actually named in this poem and none of the above really nails what it's actually about, but the lines "<i>we are immeasurably, utterly sorry for every state of affairs/ but nothing must change</i>" leapt out at me yesterday, and you'll know why. Apologies come easily to us as a nation. Shifting the entire narrative and instigating real change, on the other hand, often seems too frightening, too sudden and impolite, undoes far too much "tradition". Enough said, hopefully.<br />
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There's lots of bits of this poem I don't like anymore and I'd do it differently if I had to do it all over again, but that will never stop being a problem either...</div>
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-56478664791171805482020-06-01T05:29:00.000-07:002020-06-01T05:29:03.758-07:00A Year In Morse<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I hope you're all keeping well. If you've also been staying productive and writing a lot of new poetry, then I doff my cap to you - or I would, if I had a cap to begin with, but the best I can do instead is ruffle my overgrown lockdown hair in general approval. Will that do?<br />
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I'm very happy for you if you're managing to write like a demon during this period, but honestly, I'm not finding it especially conducive to creative activities. I've always been someone who needs to be able to observe other people to write. The material I produce is overwhelmingly frequently about human interactions, and without any of those in my life, apart from the continual growl and bark of social media, it's very difficult to find inspiration at the moment.<br />
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Nonetheless, a huge part of me misses poetry open mics and events and just delivering my poems to a live audience, and I thought it might be good to upload some home recordings of some of my stuff here a bit more often.<br />
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"A Year In Morse" was written quite a long time ago now, and while it was definitely partly inspired by a particular situation I was in, the usual load of symbolism comes barreling in to render it more fictional than confessional in the end - not that there's much to "confess" here, in all honesty. At the time I wrote it, I was reflecting on a period of my life which was as dull and directionless as it was stressful, so it's perhaps it's not surprising it's the first poem I reached to record for the blog.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-63486605946266363602020-04-26T09:36:00.000-07:002020-04-26T11:21:49.938-07:00The Freedom of Workshop Rules<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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One of the greatest things about being young and naive wasn't my spotty face, or my social clumsiness, or the way I'd gallop speedily and enthusiastically through every exercise which actually required thought and intelligence and care... oh, hang on. Let's scrub that last one from the record, if you please. I've changed my mind.<br />
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I definitely didn't enjoy being the clueless bumpkin in the workplace with more enthusiasm than knowledge of acceptable procedures, but for writing? For writing, it made things ecstatic, electric. I never knew exactly what would happen each time. Everything felt fresh and new - the ability to surprise myself regularly. Not quite knowing what was going to come out of my pen next. Feeling only slightly in control of the situation. Naturally, it meant that I wrote reams of material and most of it wasn't any good, but the flukes, even the flawed flukes which needed cuts and spit and polish, used to make me feel as if I'd just channeled an accomplished dead writer who, for reasons known only to him or herself, had chosen my writing hand at that point in time to dump some reasonable work on the page. They felt surprising and I barely recognised myself in the finished work.<br />
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That feeling seems to fade over time, and writing becomes less of a spontaneous exercise. In fact, when you've been writing for a number of decades, it can become so lacking in spontaneity that you become more prone to dumping serviceable, average and unremarkable work on to the page than slightly dirty gold. You overthink each sentence as you write it, ignoring your brain's first prompts. Is that word you're going to use <i>really</i> what you wanted to say? It's not, is it? "Dirty gold", what are you thinking, David? (SHUT UP BRAIN. I need to think about this for another five minutes).<br />
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I've been attending workshops recently with the primary aim of getting some of that spontaneity back, the idea being that heavy edits after a first draft are the best approach to writing, not careful consideration during phase one which should be lighter touch. During these sessions, someone introduced an exercise which for me worked really well and bought some of that raw pleasure back into writing again. I was given a fairly run-of-the-mill topic (freedom) then forced to change perspective every few minutes while I wrote as quickly as possible. How does freedom feel? When did you last experience it? What does it look like? Not as a societal concept, but as a thing, in front of you? And on it went.<br />
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The feeling I had while writing this was fantastic, because I was forced to be very quick and spontaneous around subjects and perspectives which were completely out of my control, and relinquishing that control meant - ironically - freer expression. I was no longer bound by my own expectations of the outcome, because I had none to begin with.<br />
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I'm reproducing exactly what I wrote below, not for admiration - because God knows it's a quick exercise rather than a short story or a poem - but to prove that as unlikely as these workshop techniques sound, they do have a clear value. Lots of this prose went in directions I'd never have expected. If you want to find more workshop ideas you can try during lockdown, there's lots all over the Internet. Some will probably work better than others, but even the most hackneyed ideas like freedom, childhood memories or the best holiday you ever had can produce surprising and even unusual results, provided you keep an open mind and introduce some randomness into the proceedings.<br />
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<b><i>Freedom</i></b><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I feel most free when I have forgotten who I am, when there are no expectations, no rules about my usual conduct. Or perhaps I should say - I feel most free when I am able to pretend that I have forgotten who I am. Maybe that's while I'm on stage, or have had enough to drink to convince others that I'm no longer in my usual casing.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I sometimes look down at my pen and think it's a form of freedom, that any moment now it might flip something out of me that I would never dream of sharing, but usually it doesn't. It pulls forward on its own leash. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I sometimes feel terrified when I'm free, or liberated, or angry or even in love, it depends totally on the circumstances. Fear because suddenly there is nobody to guide me, angry because I've found a way out and others haven't. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>My earliest memory felt like freedom - aged three, running and shouting around Stonehenge, and most of my feelings of freedom stem from childhood even though I wasn't really - somebody was watching, somebody could catch me.</i><br />
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<i>Freedom feels like a spiky, spiny, smooth and brittle pine cone, one which shatters if you hold it too tightly or drops to the floor if you don't take hold of it strongly enough. It smells of nature mixed with alcohol, of wood with no grain or sculptured finish, nothing to suggest the passing of time or the imposition of the tree on your ideas of its life.</i><br />
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<i>It's not something you can see the margins of, though the margins are there somewhere, on the outer edge of the structure. They are rubber bands, thinner than the line of life itself, bouncing your thoughts from the edge to the epicentre - let go and you'll even feel them move.</i><br />
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<i>It rolls around like a ball but moves at a speed so variable it will confused the keenest scientist, stops mid-air sometimes before dropping like an anvil on to the head of an escaping coyote, or rises upwards like a bird retreating from danger.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Sometimes I think I can see it, usually late at night when everyone is resting, and the foxes aren't outside. I think I see it as a transparent globe with a blurred blue and red core, like a glass marble waiting to be chipped away to unlock the swirls inside. Then I fall asleep. </i><br />
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<i>I don't know where it comes from, I just think it probably doesn't get permission to exist from America, or the West, or our collective force, or art, or any of these places we think it stems from. I just think it's there through a belief that it exists, and when that belief fades, it too becomes a fuzzy outline, fading behind the trees, the grass, the living room lights and outside the barracks of the nearest military town. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The people who would banish it usually fear it, are usually keen to believe it doesn't exist, don't want it because they are terrified of what they themselves might do with it - but that seems to be no reason to make the rest of us suffer. </i></div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-69273403495964036252019-12-30T13:06:00.000-08:002019-12-31T04:12:10.086-08:00Everybody Loves You When You're Down And Out<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Many years ago, an acquaintance who shall remain nameless posted an update on Facebook stating that they were shocked - and upset - by the fact that one of their friends seemed to have turned against them since they'd been offered a major writing opportunity. My response was, in retrospect, poorly timed. I replied to suggest that unfortunately there would always be somebody who hated the fact you'd got to the top of the tree before them, adding that jealousy and backstabbing were rife in the creative industries. I think I got called cold and cynical in response. Oh well - call a spade a spade, I suppose, although under the circumstances "cold, tactless gobshite" would have been more appropriate. I must make a mental note not to offer condescending titbits of advice when people are still upset. <br />
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But allow me a few minutes grace to defend my point of view in general, readers. It seems to me that when most people first enter a creative sphere - be that art, music, writing or even taxidermy - they are immediately struck by the comradely, good-natured attitude of most of the people engaged in the activity. They all seem encouraging, dispensing words of advice, getting the drinks in, and generally seeming like an extended family. "It's great!" the person in question will usually blog, "I've heard that London is full of careerist, backstabbing, scenester arseholes, yet within four months of engaging with 'the scene' here, I've made tons of friends and I've been made to feel totally at home. Truly, this city has a thriving, welcoming underground!" Oh - OK, nobody ever blogged this, to the best of my knowledge. But I know that I did put something exactly like this in my diary once, back in the days when I kept one.<br />
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I wasn't completely wrong, but then again I wasn't 100% correct either. Foulweather friends exist just as much as fairweather friends do, although I've been fortunate enough not to be on the boot end of many of them in London, partly due to my at-best-middling (and by now low) profile on my particular circuit, I suspect. I'm forced to recall a musician friend of mine who got to a point in her career when she received a small mention in the NME, and some late night airplay on Radio One. She picked up the telephone to relay this information to somebody she considered to be a close friend, and was horrified by the abruptness of his response. "I never want to talk to you again," he simply replied. She laughed, believing this to be a joke at first, but had her worst fears realised when the line went dead, and he did indeed cut himself out of her social life. She never went on to further success, so an apparently good friendship was terminated for the sake of a Radio One play hardly anybody heard, and a brief NME mention it's doubtful many people noticed.<br />
<br />
This is admittedly the most extreme example I can think of, and to put it into some sort of context it's worth noting that the NME girl's friend had ceased his involvement with music a few years before due to a road accident which left him unable to continue playing effectively - so the bitterness doubtless stemmed from a very troubled, impotent place. Yet there are other examples too, and I've never understood why some people engaged with art regard success as a betrayal of the conditions of their friendship. Contrary to Morrissey's lyrics, it's fantastic when your friends become successful. Not just because they're your friends, and it's marvellous to see them content, appreciated and happy, but because there's some small vindication in watching people you believed in, people whose ideas you shared, getting the respect they deserve. I have friends I feel envious of, but never jealous of. And if anybody is unable to feel good about the success of their comrades and can only feel green eyed rage rising in their gut, surely having a friend on the inside is also extremely valuable? Sometimes the truly cold-hearted are too wrapped up in their teeth-grinding jealousy to even be mercenary and cynical about the situation. Truly, this is not the attitude that wins.<br />
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On the flip side of the coin, what I can understand - because I've felt it myself - is the infuriating sensation of unjustness when somebody seemingly without much talent, who isn't a friend at all, leaps up the ladder via friends in higher places, or their background, networking abilities or looks. I used to have a talented singer-songwriter housemate who spat invective every time one of Dido's wispy paeans to cocktail party melodrama seeped out of the radio, and I could feel her pain. I could hear she was better than Dido, and she knew she was better than Dido, but there was nothing she could do about it. Whilst her famous rival sang frailly about the regret she felt for having to dump her fiance to go on a two year world tour to promote her album, she was stuck listening to me arguing on the phone with the landlord about the unrepaired broken boiler. Anybody would have been pissed off about the whole situation.<br />
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Ultimately though, the arts aren't fair. History is littered with examples of talented people being ignored, whilst the mediocre and the at-best-rubbish forge ahead. My other blog "Left and to the Back" has become a catalogue of the unfortunately ignored who mistimed their entrances or else just weren't fashionable or pretty enough. Still though, these days, when I pick up a newspaper and see somebody much younger than me - because they're always much younger than me now - being touted as the latest genius when all they've produced are a few pieces of semi-amusing doggerel, I go quiet for ten minutes or so, and get slightly twitchy. Then I sigh. It's OK, you know. It's all right. Really. I won't comment on Facebook about it. I won't blog about how over-rated they are, about how this is just one more example of the emperor's new clothes. If they've anything to offer, it will become apparent in time, and their discovery will prove to be an early lucky break. If they've nothing to offer, they'll be forgotten about in two years, and that will be that. It's not worth starting wars over. Especially when I know, deep down, that if ever I get the same treatment, plenty of people more talented than me will also feel that same, slightly depressed chill, and I hope - deep down - that they'll remember I'm a relatively nice person, and won't feel the urge to smash my windows in, or, worse still, wipe my number off their mobile phone.</div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-16026613075481156462019-08-09T08:51:00.000-07:002019-08-10T05:55:15.312-07:00The Fluffiness of Poetry Bunnies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There are a few drawbacks to having been on the London poetry circuit for nearly twenty years. The idea that if you're not highly successful by now you're probably rubbish/ damaged goods, to give one example. Social media networkers-come-poets half your age approaching you with well-meaning but unsolicited and useless advice, to offer another. This sort of thing is, if nothing else, at least slightly understandable. The one recurring downside I've never got my head around, however, is the assumption that everyone who is a long-term performer must be a supremely confident human being.<br />
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Hyper-Confident? Are you kidding me? <i>Confident?</i> Listen, there are moments where my stage persona appears very assured, but that's just because I know nobody will give any poet a fair hearing if they're shuffling around mumbling apologetically. </div>
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In reality, I've met and watched some fantastic performers over the years, many of whom not only clearly - while in that moment - believed in their work so much it bordered on arrogance, but could charm the audience into forging a bond with them too. Off-stage, though? That energy and charisma quickly dissipates into neurosis and finger-biting in the bar area. Niall O'Sullivan tweeted something very perceptive only a week ago: <i>"Many assume that all performers are extroverts but it’s often the opposite. Introverts can be attracted to performance because it’s a social situation where they have more control than usual while shying away from other forms of human contact."</i><br />
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On the general scale of things I'm probably midway between an extrovert and an introvert. Perfectly friendly and approachable most of the time, but not so chummy that having a complete stranger hugging me after a gig doesn't make me a little bit uncomfortable. And of course, those strangers notice this, and tend to think that I'm being stand-offish or rude rather than just slightly nervous or awkward. After all, I seemed pretty cocksure beforehand.<br />
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And no matter how long poets have been going on stages or behind lecterns or microphones for, or how successful we are, the following gives most of us a horrible, creeping dread:<br />
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<b>1. Reading new work for the first time.</b><br />
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I'm probably a fairly extreme example, but I have such a pathological hatred of this that I've been known to put off doing it for years, using the "six months in the drawer, then reassess the work" method as a crutch and an excuse rather than a tool, employing it for every single re-write. In some cases, this fear has cost me in ways I would never have previously anticipated. I wrote a tribute to Jazzman John Clarke on the way to his funeral, then lost my nerve and failed to read it at his wake, worrying that it was too inappropriately jokey and frivolous in places. Of course, it wasn't, and would never have been taken that way. There's some heavy irony in this situation given that he was one of the best spontaneous poets I've ever come across and had the least self-conscious approach of anyone I've met - me making an exception and allowing for nerves and self-doubt, just that once, would have shown that I'd learned some lessons from the man.<br />
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If work has already been read or performed to approval or applause, you know that something about it is appreciated by at least some people, it works to at least an extent, and even if it gets an uncertain reception the next time, its moment will come around again. Putting your personal views, thoughts and emotions on the line for the very first time feels unnerving however long you've been writing poetry for. If it's sentimental rubbish or poorly constructed, the audience might switch off believing that the rest of your work is of an equal quality. And if it's supposed to be a wry, ironic or satirical take on the world and is so poorly written that it ends up getting taken at face value, you're in real trouble.<br />
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I actually read a brand new poem, only a few hours old at Poetry Unplugged on Tuesday and even doing that, in an open mic space where scratchy draft work-in-progress is tolerated, took a <i>lot</i> out of me. I slumped back into my chair with a big sigh of relief afterwards, then felt a bit pathetic for needing to do so. <br />
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<b>2. Catching the eye of somebody who clearly doesn't enjoy what you're doing.</b><br />
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And then, worse still, having to stand behind them in the queue for drinks in the interval, with both of you pretending that nothing has happened - even though one of you has been reading poems at the other for the last fifteen minutes, which is hardly an everyday occurrence.<br />
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I've had gigs where the audience has been almost completely on my side, but the people I can usually remember most - years down the line - are the ones who behaved in a critical way. The one who folded his arms and refused to applaud as I walked off the stage, only catching my eye and giving me a sideways look that clearly said "Hear that applause? You don't deserve it, pal" (<i>middle aged, tubby, bearded)</i>. The one who got visibly annoyed halfway through "Starstuck" and slung her bag under her arm and stormed out of the venue <i>(slim, dyed blonde hair, mid-twenties)</i>. The one who came up to me after a successful gig and said "I don't understand what planet you're on or what you think you're trying to achieve" <i>(curt young male, glasses, short, French)</i>.<br />
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Why do I remember these people and their appearance and characteristics much more than anyone else? Because like most writers, I'm a sensitive bunny, that's why. In the early days I used to actually try to return my gaze to people who clearly weren't enjoying my work five minutes, ten minutes, and fifteen minutes later just to see if the situation had improved and they'd somehow changed their minds, but you quickly learn that such self-obsessed and pathetic behaviour can crash an entire gig if you're not careful.<br />
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This cuts both ways. Once, I wasn't enjoying someone else's gig. He arrived onstage late on a Friday night, read the room incredibly well and noticed that half the audience were drunk, and included a bit of raucous doggerel about the joys of alcohol into his set to get them on-side. It went down a storm with everyone apart from me - I was relatively sober. I had no idea that my facial expressions were visible from where he was performing, but he later approached me with the words "Here you go, here's a flyer for my next gig, you're bound to be there since I could see you enjoying my performance tonight SO much!" then stomped off. So obviously they were.<br />
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There will be moments in his life - perhaps when he's trying to drift off to sleep or just enjoying a bowl of Cinnamon Grahams in the morning - when my face will come into his mind and he'll think "Oh, that bastard. Why did he have to be there and ruin a perfectly good evening?" But there will always be 'that bastard'. If it's not me, it will be someone else.<br />
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<b>3. Having a well-known writer you really respect in the room. </b><br />
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A double whammy of opportunity and threat. Of course, you've always wanted to meet them, but you probably wouldn't have chosen these circumstances. If the gig bombs, you've humiliated yourself in front of one of your heroes. Even if it goes well, that might be because you've pulled out your most obvious, popular work and the writer might not understand that your talent - which, <i>obviously</i>, is multi-faceted and deeply experimental in places, <i>actually</i> - is far more rounded than that.<br />
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On the other hand, if it goes brilliantly and they love it, you've potentially impressed your literary God; but who would chance those odds?<br />
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At one of my earliest full-length gigs Bob Cobbing was present, who was a big influence on my work at that point. I couldn't meet his eye and a friend reassured me that he did "vigorously applaud" two of my poems. This might have been a lie to help me sleep sounder that night. I'll never really know. All I do know is that Bob Cobbing, if he were still alive, would probably seriously dislike most of my current material and that would still bother me.<br />
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<b>4. "The wits in the back row". </b><br />
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Every performer before they take the mic, whatever their business is there - whether it's to perform comedy, monologues, poetry or even after-dinner speaking - has a finely tuned nerve alarm that goes off as soon as they notice that there's a slightly drunk hipster in the crowd being loud and over-confident. These drunken fops have always been with us, with or without the drugs that embolden them. The playwright William Wycherley makes a vague reference to a "wits row" in a theatre in the play "The Country Wife", produced in 1672, where presumably these flamboyant idiots typically quaffed and bothered Wycherley so much that he started satirising them in his own plays.<br />
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The occurrence of hecklers at poetry nights is relatively rare, but one glimpse of a drunken brat behaving in a raucous way before an event has begun puts the chills into a poet's bones - and the host and promoter's, for that matter - and makes them think that they might be about to witness one of the infrequent occasions. And coming up with a half-arsed retort to a heckle mid-way through a poem is even harder than doing it in the middle of a comedy routine. Poets always feel a bit more content when an audience isn't seen to be enjoying themselves too much before a gig.<br />
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And there you have it. Proof, if proof were really needed, that poets tend to be pathetic, insecure, egotistical people who only really want the approval of their audience and heroes. Everything you were assured they weren't when a broadsheet paper once informed you they were, in fact, the new, rebellious rock stars. Who ever would have thought the press would lie?<br />
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<i>(Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/Free-Photos-242387/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1149060">Free-Photos</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1149060">Pixabay</a>)</i></div>
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-68521291732016020682018-11-11T08:59:00.001-08:002018-12-02T08:32:19.952-08:00Utter! Lutonia - 6th December<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>*UPDATE: Sorry, due to a family bereavement I will be unable to perform at this event. However, it's a fantastic line-up and you should still attend if you can.*</i><br />
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It's been awhile, but I'm happy to announce I have another live appearance on 6th December. I'll be venturing outside my usual "metropolitan elite bubble"* and into Luton alongside the esteemed acts Swing & Son, Fran Isherwood, James McKay, Lucy Leagrave, Omer Truth and Mr Stephen Whiting.<br />
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You can expect some new material which I've been steadily working on, as well as the good old stuff that keeps me out of trouble when I'm dealing with new audiences who haven't heard me before anyway. There you go - there's a slice of pure, unblemished honesty for you on this Sunday afternoon. The gentle Jesus would be proud of me.<br />
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The gig will be taking place at The Theatre Bar in Luton Central Library, St George's Square, Luton LU1 2NG. The Facebook invite can be <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2235594096668665/" target="_blank">found here</a> in case you need reminding nearer the date.<br />
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<i>(*Of course, living in a converted garage space in one of the cheapest areas in London constitutes "elitism" these days. Or it does if you're especially feeble-minded and like hiding behind buzzwords in lieu of any reasonable arguments). </i></div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-84704142186195233482018-10-07T07:45:00.001-07:002018-10-07T07:45:29.606-07:00Take This Conversation And Hand It In<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I often get the impression that people who have "proper" jobs (like being engineers or medical practitioners) are suspicious of writers and artists. Their lives involve getting out of bed and going out to deliver work which either succeeds or fails in absolute, indisputable terms. No middle ground, no messing about, no "Well, the patient died, but your scalpel work was beautiful, the best I've ever seen" for the surgeon on Ward 54. No room for bluffing, either. An engineer can't say "Well, the machine doesn't work, but of course it doesn't, I didn't mean it to, can't you see the statement I was trying to make about the increased mechanisation of society?"<br />
<br />
Back when I was in the second year of my university degree, which had a creative writing segment, a friend of mine on my course confessed that he was in "deep shit". He was due to hand in an assignment the following morning, a script for a short 25 minute theatre play, but he had managed to complete nothing. He'd started on numerous ideas which had tripped him over by the second or third page, then he'd torn them up, tried to begin again, but still got nowhere.<br />
<br />
I, on the other hand, had been working on my script for months on end, and therefore, my friend felt, didn't have anything to worry about. "It's all right for you," he kept saying, "yours is bound to be good, you've put loads of work in... what the hell am I supposed to turn around in the space of an evening?"<br />
<br />
I suggested a course of action to him. We would wander to the bus stop, sit there until the irregular and unreliable mini-bus service came to take him back home, and just have a very self-conscious, absurd conversation, observing random bits of behaviour, rubbish and tat as we went along. "Get on the bus, then type up what you remember of our conversation, exaggerate events slightly, make an artistic justification up for the script in your submission notes, and it will probably scrape a pass. It's better than nothing," I reckoned.<br />
<br />
We did exactly that, and my friend stayed up all evening drinking Coke and strong coffee, and pulling together a script I think was called "The Number 17" (named after the bus he took home, naturally), editing and improving on bits and inserting Pinteresque pauses until he had something resembling an absurd piece of theatre.<br />
<br />
You obviously know where this is headed next, so I'll spare you the long, shaggy dog story and just say it - my friend got given a 2.1 whereas I was given a third for my play. My effort was apparently over-long, over-written, and "without a decent conclusion", whereas his edit of a conversation we both had on a wet February night was "in places, fascinating, and with very naturalistic dialogue".<br />
<br />
The way the grading system worked for creative writing at my university bachelor's course was reasonably simple. A first meant the piece of work could potentially find a place in the real world, outside the university walls, as a piece of accomplished, professional work. Anything downwards from that was effectively varying degrees of juvenilia and work in progress, so nobody was claiming that my friend had accidentally spat out a work of genius - just that it was a damn sight better than something I'd wasted months on.<br />
<br />
For a few hours I was unsurprisingly very bitter about this result. It seemed unfair. How, when I'd put the hard yards in, had I almost failed my coursework assignment when someone doing a candle-lit rush-job could keep his overall term grade buoyant? It took me a few more months to get over the stinking grade, feeling that it was harsh beyond measure, but at the end of the year I looked again and I realised that it was a pile of shit after all. Rambling, waffly, filled to the brim with unrealistic dialogue and unlikely to hold an audience's attention for more than five minutes. I'd made the fundamental mistake of getting so droolingly carried away with the fun of creating a piece of work that I'd forgotten entirely about the audience along the way. My friend, on the other hand, had taken some unlikely raw material and sculpted it in a way that made a mundane chat seem sinister and interesting. Unlike me, he'd realised he needed to impress at least one person apart from himself at the end of the exercise.<br />
<br />
Ours was a mixed block of university lecture rooms and halls, and we shared building spaces with people on teacher training courses and nursing degrees, and some of us lived in the halls alongside Business Studies, engineering and science students. Sometimes if you went to one of the stinking public toilets, you'd see graffiti above the toilet rolls saying "Arts Degrees - take one here". There were never any variations of this joke, and as such it became very dull very quickly, the toilet wall equivalent of a family comedy show that's never off UK Gold.<br />
<br />
Sometimes, I worried that the other students had a point. They were spending long hours learning complex skills which had practical uses, whereas we were occasionally demonstrably winging it. And not just us, either - outside in the 'real world', as my older brother called it whenever he was ridiculing my left-wing politics, bands were knocking off songs in half-an-hour flat and having huge hits, and artists were employing assistants in their studios to do the hard graft for them.<br />
<br />
For the most part, though, all of them had taken the long road of making many mistakes to get to that point, handing in or producing work nobody liked (but they loved), dealing with the criticism, and dusting off and starting again. We were all learning in different ways. And when they finally became so accomplished at what they were doing that they could occasionally produce great (or passable) work out of unlikely material really quickly, why resent them for it?<br />
<br />
You should only get irritated at people who produce the same punchlines over and over, who would have us live in a world of Dad's Army repeats and reproductions of Van Gogh paintings. Sometimes the good stuff, the really <i>surprising</i> stuff, comes quickly, and it doesn't matter what the person who produced it was paid by the hour. Sometimes the best material for a play comes out of a conversation had with someone during a moment of minor crisis.<br />
<br />
So if you just don't have much time in your life, pick up a pen and write to that tight deadline anyway, and hand it in, or at least put it to one side to see if it ferments into something bigger. You may be pleasantly surprised by the end results. </div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-66527677709592313672018-08-05T23:49:00.000-07:002018-08-05T23:49:27.518-07:00Jazzman John Clarke RIP<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I learned about the death of London poetry scene stalwart Jazzman John Clarke this morning, and I'm still trying to process the news. I feel slightly self-conscious about writing a blog entry about him - I'm in two minds about whether it's my place to, and it might seem distasteful to those who were closest to him rather than just a friend of his on the circuit. What I'm hoping, though, is that if I get some of my memories and thoughts down, it will help me to sleep a bit better tonight... and I can make up my mind whether I post 'publish' on this or not tomorrow morning. <i>(update - you're reading this, so obviously I did).</i><br />
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First and foremost, right from the off, John was there. He was one of the first poets in London I spoke to when I moved back in 1999, and he remained a constant presence on the circuit rather than disappearing for a quiet life after a few years. That's why his death has been slightly trickier for me to process than most, I think. I'm a republican and want to see the British monarchy disbanded, but when Queen Elizabeth II passes away there's a possibility I will have my own hypocritical and confused period of low-key mourning, not because I believe in what she represents, but because her death would create a complete erasure of a figure that had dominated my life through many different means - like having an historical landmark deleted from the London skyline overnight. The London poetry circuit without John feels a bit like that, except unlike the Queen, I obviously never wanted to see his role in society diminished, though he might possibly have suited a tiara at one of his bigger gigs (he'd certainly have bloody rocked her EU flower hat).<br />
<br />
I can't remember where I first met him (Kerouac's in Deptford? Walking The Dog? Poetry Unplugged?) but he immediately impressed with his energy, enthusiasm, the rhythm and carefree absurdity of his ideas, his beatnik image, and his excitable pre and post-gig patter which was guaranteed.<br />
<br />
He always knew of a fantastic gig going on somewhere else in town that week, or a jazz performer you really just had to see - he was, it has to be said, good at making quite personalised recommendations to people he knew reasonably well, always on the look-out for 'your kind of thing' - and once he'd finished talking about those he'd fill you in on what he'd been up to, which would take another few minutes at least, because it was never just a few things. You had to pause whatever you were planning to do and just hear him out.<br />
<br />
He had a few decades on me in terms of age, but his energy and determination continually shamed my own. Apparently, he had a much-hated role in a bank which he had quit early to dedicate his life to writing and performing, and it always seemed as if he was throwing himself into the practice with total zeal to make up for lost time. It was impossible to imagine him working in a bank - I sometimes probably wrongly imagined it as being like Manny's role as an accountant in "Black Books" - but he made a very convincing beat styled poet.<br />
<br />
The first work of his I was familiar with felt, from memory, zingy and enjoyable but a little naive in places, driven largely by his energy and stage presence. He got good very quickly, though, and as his writing improved so too did his ability to improvise and speed-write in a way that had recently begun to stun me. In February this year, he attended the Mark E Smith tribute night at the Poetry Cafe purely on a whim. He had no idea the tribute night was on, and had turned up to the cafe purely on the offchance of catching up with some fellow poets, having found himself wandering in that general direction. He immediately decided he was going to take part, and quickly scribbled a poem on a sheet of paper - sometimes taking breaks for conversations with people walking through the door - before going downstairs to do his slot where he read the new piece of work. <br />
<br />
The crowd completely lapped up what he'd written and the whole thing gelled. Moreoever, he got me thinking about the value of spontaneity, and how you don't have to chisel away and toil over every piece of work for it to have some kind of meaning or value on a particular day or night. We talked about it later on, and he made me realise that sometimes, you just have to let go of your work and have fun with it, see where it leads your feet. Both the best and worst ideas flow out of your pen when you completely relinquish control. Oddly, that conversation was one of the last decent ones I had with him, and made me re-assess some of the bad habits I'd let myself get into lately, including slowly editing my work as I wrote rather than letting something fall on to the page first.<br />
<br />
He also had a habit of popping up in unexpected places or being uncannily accurate in predicting your interests or bizarre obsessions. While I was working for Pearson Publishing in 2003, I was stunned to leave the office one day and find him strolling past on the pavement outside. He said hello and gave me a flyer for a forthcoming gig as if it was the most natural occurrence in the world, not a remarkable coincidence at all, then went on his way to whatever his appointment was. I suspect that even in a city like London, he randomly bumped into someone he knew every day.<br />
<br />
On another occasion, he sidled up to me at an event, pointed at a random object at the wall and quoted something (I can't quite remember what) from Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" trilogy. I immediately got what he was on about and replied with something appropriate, to which he giggled enthusiastically and said "I knew you'd be into that!" He always enjoyed it when someone was locked on to his wavelength, though he seemed faintly disappointed I DJ'ed at Northern Soul nights ("What's wrong with DJ'ing a bit of jazz?") The jazzman was always pushing his love of jazz.<br />
<br />
I've been watching his Facebook page all day, and tributes have been flooding in from every corner of the London poetry circuit - because he was familiar with every corner of it. The man knew everyone, and his work seemed to translate to every audience, even outside the poetry world to places like Ronnie Scott's, where he occasionally gigged. I only really learned today that he would also subtly have words with promoters about suitable acts they could book, and try to influence the circuit for the better. I remember one occasion he did me a huge favour by performing one of my poems at "Bingo Master's Breakout", and sent members of the audience over to talk to me when they wanted to know more about who wrote it. I think people who didn't really know him sometimes got the impression he was a bit of a hustler, ever ready with his bag of books to sell and flyers to distribute, but he was a writer trying to sell his work, doing what writers without other jobs to rely on have to do - besides promoting himself, he also genuinely cared about and listened to what other people were offering, and freely apportioned praise to those he felt deserved it.<br />
<br />
That's the tough part about this for all of us, I think. He was our link between the different poetry scenes, an enthusiast as well as a performer, and the rarest of things in our often introverted, insecure and occasionally self-obsessed little world - a genuine people person who would approach anyone he thought he might like completely unselfconsciously. Meeting and talking to people, and having places he could happily share his most absurd ideas without judgement, seemed to make him happy. He's one of the few poetry performers I've met you could put on the bill at a Fall tribute night, or Ronnie Scott's, or an urban spoken word event, or an anti-folk evening, or a 'serious' reading, or an event at an art gallery and get away with it. His image and enthusiasm gave everyone easy immediate points of entry, and the quality of his performances just caused everything else to click into place. I'll miss him, but so will many, many others. <br />
<br /></div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-80594157049358813992018-02-18T13:52:00.000-08:002018-02-18T16:12:13.303-08:00Spoiling All The Paintwork<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Back in the earliest days of getting regular poetry gigs on the London circuit, I used to write about them on a fairly obscure Livejournal blog I kept. Hardly anyone read it, and it was rock bottom in any Google rankings. I liked it that way, and didn't bother to publicise it at all. Initially, it felt like a halfway house between a personal diary and a public blog, read only by about thirty or forty people.<br />
<br />
Naturally though, you can't keep secrets on the London poetry circuit, and as soon as people found out that I was not only writing about myself but also other poetry gigs I'd been to, they began to drop by in greater numbers. Nothing is more likely to grab a fellow poet's attention than finding out you're writing about them. I was never openly savage towards anyone on the blog (I'd rather not talk about people who are still finding their feet at all. What's the point?) but that didn't matter - if I made the merest hint of criticism, along the lines of "Not quite as good as the performance I saw in Camden last month, but still great", or "One of their new poems fell a bit flat", or "the event over-ran and I didn't get home until half midnight, which was a bit of a pain", people would zero in on that and assume that I was implying something far worse - that they were losing their touch, or all their new material was rubbish, or they had mismanaged their set times in a completely unprofessional way and ruined my entire life.<br />
<br />
That's probably not surprising given how insecure a lot of writers are, but I noticed another interesting side effect of keeping a blog. If I highlighted flaws in my own performances, noting when they had gone less well and why, people also dialled up the criticism and assumed it must be far worse than I was letting on. After all, this is social media! Everyone's here to sell themselves! Nobody would ever openly confess to being "not quite up to scratch" unless they were anything other than head-slappingly awful on any given night. These are the kind of lines given to an audience to read between.<br />
<br />
Eventually, I just stopped writing about the live poetry scene and my own day-to-day experiences on it, because I became a coward and had retreated to writing the same old non-commital beige nonsense everyone ends up writing in order not to offend anyone else or damage their own chances ("Oh, <i>everyone </i>writes blogs like that do they, David! I see! That includes me, <i>obviously</i>!" - a voice outside).<br />
<br />
Having said all that... After 24 years of doing this, I'm sort of past caring. Which is why I'm going to be brutally honest and admit that while certain parts of the feature slot I did at Bingo Master's Breakout earlier this month flew well, other bits received bemused expressions and only polite applause. It was my first feature slot in two years with quite a lot of new material packed into the time I had available to me, and not all of it seemed as good under the glare of a live performance as it potentially could do. Also, some of my intros needed a bit more work.<br />
<br />
These are the kinds of issues that you only get to realise in a live performance in front of a proper audience. Open mic slots tend to be short and snappy and have an entirely different dynamic to the sprawl of a full-length set. There were a few moments at BMB where I found myself thinking, while I was onstage, "Oh, there's a <i>reason</i> I never used to structure sets in this way or load them with so much new stuff". On the plus side, the newest poem in the set was the best received, and the longer things went on for, the more I could feel my sea legs returning. The set started in a slightly flat fashion and ended well. That's better than the opposite situation.<br />
<br />
"Bingo Master's Breakout" remains one of the weirdest and most unlikely poetry nights on the circuit, combining karaoke, bingo and poetry to an interesting effect. Each Friday night they run follows the same pattern, starting with a Butlins atmosphere and gradually crashing into sing-a-long messiness. They also book a band at each event, meaning a lot of punters who are really only interested in music and showing off on the karaoke machine end up getting exposed to live poetry as well. It's too much of a niche idea to be partly responsible for any upswing in live poetry's popularity, but it has definitely made its own small, eccentric local contribution. I was walking down a street in Central London a few weeks back and heard two bearded young men talking about it behind me, proving that if you have an unusual themed way of delivering a poetry night, people remember and talk about it.<br />
<br />
The last show was themed on the work of the reliably brilliant and brilliantly eccentric Lawrence out of Felt/ Denim/ Go Kart Mozart, and one thing will always stay in my mind - the dry ice machine setting all the fire alarms in the pub off. A taxi driver actually stopped his cab outside to stare at the "smoke" billowing through the upstairs windows, and was possibly in the process of dialling 999 until a cheery smile and thumbs-up from me assured him everything was OK. In all, the whole night was the best fun I've had in ages.<br />
<br />
--------------------<br />
<br />
I've already talked about Mark E Smith's passing on here, and weeks after the announcement of his death, things haven't quite settled down for everyone. A lot of us are still thumbing through our old records and reflecting, which has been a revelation for me in its own way. The Fall were such a constant creative force, issuing albums with such a frequency, that I usually focused on their latest LP rather than delving back into their back catalogue much (beyond the obvious favourites). Lately though, I'm finding myself picking up copies of under-rated records like "Country On The Click" (from 2003) or "Middle Class Revolt" (from 1994) and realising that while critics might like to tell you that certain periods of The Fall are better than others, every era has at least one great LP in it.<br />
<br />
At the Mark E Smith tribute night at the Poetry Cafe on the 12th February, a few people take the stage to read their own tributes or deliver Smith's work as poetry, and the night gradually becomes as unpredictable and chaotic as a typical Fall gig. Blasts of reggae come out of the PA when they shouldn't. A Fall mega-fan who followed them from gig to gig and was eventually beaten up by the drummer Karl Burns "fifteen years before he got to Mark E Smith" gave us backstage gossip. Then finally, a poet delivered the line "Mark E Smith - he has fallen!" dramatically, and at that exact moment a picture of Smith collapsed from the wall. Everybody fell silent for a few seconds and then applauded, presumably figuring that while it probably wasn't the work of the ghost of Mark E Smith, it was probably better not to take any chances.<br />
<br />
For my part, I read out The Fall's "Portugal", a bit of an obscure Fall track whose lyrics consist entirely of the cut-up contents of a letter or email complaining about Smith's behaviour. I'm the first reader on, and I feel slightly uneasy opening with this, because it plays into so many of the more recent cliches about him being a chaotic rock and roll character first and foremost. There's way more to The Fall than that. But it sounds great as a piece of poetry, it's huge fun to do, and it's one of the few late period Fall tracks to have a lot of wit and humour behind it ("Mountain Energie", off "Country on The Click" from the same period, is another, and the evening's organiser Paul McGrane read that later on). A few months before he died, Smith said he wanted the next LP to have more lightness and humour about it - "Portugal" points to one way things could have gone.<br />
<br />
In common with BMB, it didn't feel like a typical poetry night. It felt like a drunken wake. Albeit one that didn't end as badly as Smith's actual official wake back in Manchester...</div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-10287352976763278302018-02-01T11:33:00.001-08:002018-02-01T12:04:45.563-08:00What do Lawrence out of Felt/ Denim and Mark E Smith have in common?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Answer: Besides continuing to stubbornly beat their own particular paths for decades without ever softening what they do... they're both the themed subject of two poetry nights coming up in London very soon, both of which I'll be involved in.<br />
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The Lawrence themed evening is at Bingo Masters Breakout, "London's premier poetry/ karaoke/ bingo night", which is exactly as described. Attendees will have the opportunity to sing Lawrence songs on the karaoke machine, win a cash prize at bingo, and listen to poetry - either from other folk on the open mic, or me in the feature slot. It is, to put it bluntly, one of the least conventional poetry nights in the UK, but has managed over a decade of activity and shows no signs of slowing down. I even managed to overhear two bearded youths talking about it while I was walking down a Central London street last week, so clearly it's reaching ver kids in the know.<br />
<br />
It's a night that's also very, very difficult to plan a set for, but by pure coincidence I was working on a poem last year which I scrapped because I found it rather too Lawrency, and being contacted to do this gave me the excuse to pull it out of the draft folder and put some meat on its bones. So at the very least there will (probably) be that.<br />
<br />
This will be taking place at The Betsey Trotwood at 56 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3BL on 9th February with a 7:30pm start. The Facebook details are <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/740078649520400/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
On a slightly more sober note, the death of Mark E Smith, while slightly unsurprising given recent reports of his health, still managed to shake up a lot of us on the poetry circuit. This might sound odd to outsiders, but Fall gigs were generally accidental socials for us, as we'd bump into poetry people we hadn't seen in a long while. Smith's lyrical ideas and influences were a beacon, especially to the more experimental spoken word artists, and that's resulted in a huge outpouring across social media over the last couple of weeks.<br />
<br />
The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden is hosting a Mark E Smith special on Monday 12th February at 7:30pm, where anyone can turn up and do an open mic session where they reminisce, read Smith lyrics, poems or short stories by any of his influences, or whatever they feel is appropriate. This is a wonderful idea and I'll definitely be present, as will Tim Wells, Emma Hammond, Richard Price, Michael Shann, Matt Abbott, Claire Temple, Mark Gilfillan, Matt Melia, Dan Cockrill, Michael Wyndham, Simon Pomery and Gavin Martin… and others to be confirmed (Luke Wright - where are you?)<br />
<br />
The Poetry Cafe is on Betterton Street, WC2 9BX, and again, the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1172758526191288/" target="_blank">Facebook details are here</a>.<br />
<br />
(Thanks - kind of - to Jon Hall for the cartoon at the top of this entry, by the way). </div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-57833795792205946732018-01-02T00:25:00.000-08:002020-01-02T00:25:35.084-08:00Box Test 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Testing purposes only.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-90360879306417343492017-11-28T13:59:00.003-08:002017-12-03T11:14:42.462-08:00The Bigger The Map<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At the end of another trying day, we found ourselves lying down in a suburban London Bed & Breakfast not far from where my grandmother had lived. The amber street light outside bled through a gap in the curtains, so I could make out small amounts of detail in the minimal light- Anna’s arm arching on to my chest, and the faint traces of summer freckles creeping up towards her wrist. I could also see faded hints of flowers on the uncomfortably off-white wallpaper, like faint splashes of Ribena that nobody had been considerate enough to clean off.<br /><br />Aside from the noise of the odd passing car, the silence was uncomfortable – unexpected even – for a grotty B&B. I decided to break it by talking, which had not usually been a good policy at many points in the last few months.<br /><br />“I’m sorry for the way I’ve been behaving lately,” I began.<br /><br />“I know, I know”, she replied gently.<br /><br />“This isn’t me really, you know, it’s just that I’m ill,” I continued.<br /><br />“I know, I know,” she repeated.<br /><br />“Everyone says so,” I added, sensing rare sympathy from her. “It’s generally agreed”.<br /><br />“I know,” she said again.<br /><br />The simple repetition of her words and the noise of her gentle breathing was hypnotic. I had grown used to the metronomic noise of the grand-daughter clock we owned in our Bristol flat. When Anna first moved in, she demanded I let it wind down, as it left her unable to sleep. Once I had let it run its course, though, I found I couldn’t sleep myself – I needed the reassurance of its mathematical precision, the certainty of its rhythm. Without it, I felt afraid, wide open to chaos. Right now, her breath and repetitive platitudes were taking its place.<br /><br />“And this is a fresh start,” I said. “Once we get to Australia in a few weeks, we can rest for as long as we want, and I can recuperate.”<br /><br />“I know,” she said wearily. “I know.”<br /><br />“But things are definitely going to change”.<br /><br />“I know,” she replied again, and moved her hand slowly around to touch my face. I felt her fingers pulling gently at my eyelids, and the palm of her hand brushing my nose. I had forgotten how tired I really was, and her hands felt like a rubbery foam oozing in. Sleep rushed forwards, plugging my ears and eyes, making me oblivious to everything. Before I went under, I had a strange suspicion that she said something else, something which varied the script away from the gentle reassuring rhythms she had been uttering earlier. It caused a vague pang of doubt, but whatever it was, it wasn’t loud or shocking enough to stir me from the first throes of sleep.<br /><br />--------------<br /> <br />The next thing I knew, light was piercing its way through the open curtains, and an unfamiliar middle aged woman was stood in front of the window, talking loudly at me.<br /><br />“It’s <i>not</i>,” she trilled camply, in the manner of a 1970s TV show puppet, “in my <i>nature</i> to burst into the bedrooms of strangers in this way, but it’s fifteen minutes after the time you were supposed to have left this <i>hotel</i>, I’m afraid. I <i>banged</i> and <i>banged</i> on the door, but you might have been dead for all I knew”.<br /><br />“What?!” I replied, sitting bolt upright, desperately trying to make sense of my surroundings.<br /><br />“I said,” she replied, “You have got to be out in the next fifteen minutes. Unless you want to pay for another night here, that is, and,” she sneered, “I’d say you’re not in a position to do that”.<br /><br />I quickly scanned the room in a vain attempt to make sense of the situation. We had set the</span><br />
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travel alarm the night before, but that had disappeared from the dressing table. Along with it, Anna’s clothes, her rucksack, and her yellow summer jacket had also gone. It was almost as if she had never happened to me, as if the last five years had been some sort of peculiar dream, and I had in reality spent the time sleeping in dingy hostels like this one.<br /><br />“Oh, she’s long gone, by the way,” the lady said with a pleased expression, restoring some startling sense to the moment. “She left very early this morning in quite a bad way. Having hysterics, she was. I had to sit her down with a cup of tea, try to get her to calm down.”<br /><br />“Where did she go?!” I demanded forcefully. I received a baleful glare.<br /><br />“Oh, she’s <i>paid</i>, if that’s all you’re worried about. Don’t fret about that.”<br /><br />I looked up at the woman in disbelief. She was possibly the angriest individual I had encountered in the last year, and 2005 had taken me to all sorts of places – the DSS, the squalid house-shares of untrustworthy acquaintances, and, due to a misunderstanding with some officers of the law, a police cell for the night. Her face looked like a silicon mask in the process of being peeled off, with a number of pale white spots the shape of individual Rice Krispies glued to her forehead. She looked down her long nose at me from behind dark curls in her fringe, waiting for me to respond.<br /><br />“Where’s she gone?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”<br /><br />The lady tossed a sealed envelope on to my bed, then waited for me to open it. I ripped it apart with trembling hands, only to find the words “I’M SO SORRY” written in block capitals on a torn-off piece of paper, followed by a single, meaningless “X”, presumably meant to simulate one last kiss.<br /><br />“What is this?” I asked, the panic bubbling to my head, “Where is she? What happened?!”<br /><br />“What <i>happened</i>,” replied the lady, “is what always <i>happens</i>. Men like you <i>happened</i> to her. That’s all there is to it, dear. There’s no big mystery. <i>Unfortunately</i>.”<br /><br />“Yes,” she said, dusting the windowsill whilst I sat in stunned silence, “we had quite a chat this morning. I only spoke to her for about ten minutes or so before she went away, but it was enough to get a good picture of things. She told me all about you and her. I know all about you, don’t you worry about that. You’re lucky I’m not pulling you out of bed by the ears and kicking you on to the street, dear, though I shall be charging you for an extra day if you don’t shift your backside at some point in the next ten minutes. And don’t think I won’t call the police if you don’t have the money to pay me with”.<br /><br />This made no sense at all. Anna had left me before, four times in fact, but the departures were never sudden. Forty eight hours of tears, tantrums, shouts and arguments normally preceded her exit. Friends of hers appeared at the house to pick up her things, shaking their heads at me disdainfully, and it would always seem as if she’d picked the ones I disliked the most to arrive, purely to spite me. And then we’d sort it all out on the telephone – I’d tell her what I’d been doing to improve my deteriorating ways, and she’d come back wearily, hugging me by the front door in tears. A pattern had established itself. Anna never left me without having some sort of last word. There were times when I expected her not to return, but she wasn’t the type to do things suddenly and without spelling out her reasons. There was no victory in that.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“It’s not what it seems! I don’t understand what’s going on!” I spluttered, playing the sympathy card. “I’m ill! I’m on tablets!”</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Oh, we’re all on tablets, love,” replied the crone. “I’m on so many tablets I rattle when I walk. You don’t have the monopoly on <i>tablets</i>, let me tell you that”.<br /><br />She left the room for me to pick up last night’s clothes and bundle them back on to my body. Panting and in a rush, I slipped on the faded grey New Order T-shirt that was at least ten years old. I didn’t even listen to the band anymore – it was a relic of my youth that I’d somehow never discarded, something I’d decided to cling on to for reasons that were unclear even to me. I then leapt into my 32 inch waist red corduroy trousers that were seeming at least an inch too small for me these days, and put the wrong socks on the wrong feet, the right shoes on the right feet, picked up my rucksack and went out to the hallway where the landlady was waiting. She was relishing every moment of my misfortune, and had the final line for my departure she delivered precisely with relish, as if she had been rehearsing it for half her life.<br /><br />“It’s all the same with you lot,” she said, standing before the glass front door, whose vertical lines distorted the street outside like a picture slide puzzle. “With all your big ideas. My husband was just the same. Had a perfectly good job as a lorry driver for years, then decided to quit one day because he thought he could make a living as a landscape painter”.<br /><br />She awaited a response from me, something as little as a facial expression, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction.<br /><br />“I mean, a landscape painter,” she scoffed. “I said to him, ‘Jerry, people have cameras nowadays. Cameras and good photographers. Nobody needs <i>good</i> landscape paintings, never mind yours.’ Wouldn’t have it though, would he?”<br /><br />She then opened the door and made a weary waving gesture for me to walk through on the street outside, seemingly spent of her quota of words for me. It slammed behind me as soon as my right foot left the first step. <br /><br />I considered knocking on the door again in an attempt to get some more information from her, but the futility of this idea slowly became apparent. My brain was in poor logical working order on an average day these days, never mind after a sudden shock. Sudden shocks had the effect of numbing its workings, making it seem as if I was viewing the world through the lenses of a penny peep strip show at the arcades. It was all dim, slow, flickering and distant, and happening to somebody else. I felt like the voyeur of my own seedy life.<br /><br />I looked up and down the street for possible signs of where Anna might have gone to. I was </span><br />
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greeted only by arching concrete streetlamps goosenecking their way over a quiet road, and rows of bed and breakfast hotels and Victorian houses. There was no sign of anyone around at all.<br /><br />I pulled the rucksack from my shoulders and tugged at the giant A-Z atlas that I’d bought the day before from a charity shop. It was leather bound, as solid on the outside as a flatpack furniture shelf, and preposterously large. Anna had tried to talk me out of buying it on account of the fact that it was heavy, old and therefore, in her words, “out of date”. <br /><br />“But it’s huge! It covers all of London, and all of the far suburbs we’re going to! You can see fields on it! And the farms are all marked!” I replied enthusiastically.<br /><br />“Size isn’t important,” she said in a small, tired voice, too worn out to even bother to turn her statement into a weak double-entendre, “but age is. Look at it! The M25 is just a proposed motorway on the map. It hadn’t even been built when this was published.”<br /><br />“Houses disappear, but streets don’t,” I said, smugly justifying my purchase. <br /><br />I felt less sure of myself in the light of a new day, but hoped I was right. I flicked through the pages, and turned to page 24, which seemed to cater for the immediate area I was stood in. Roads twisted like spaghetti around the page, with one straight, orange A road spiking through the middle of them. I sat on the wall of a neighbouring house and considered my options. The first thought that occurred to me was to return to our Bristol flat to see if Anna would be back there, but then I remembered that I had the only set of keys. She had thrown hers into the Thames a week ago in the middle of an argument, and hadn’t bothered to get any more cut. I now realised that I should probably have read something significant into that at the time. <br /><br />I phoned Anna’s mobile twenty times, and on each occasion it went straight to voicemail. I then considered telephoning her mother to ascertain her whereabouts, but her mother had placed strict instructions for me never to contact her house, demands that may even be enforced by the local constabulary. I had turned up drunk there on one occasion shortly after a row, and traipsed dog shit into her pile carpet. Contrary to her claims, I hadn’t known I’d trodden in it, but the combination of the angry shouting and the smearing and the smell had used up whatever residual goodwill there was left between us.<br /><br />My brain, like an old Bakelite television, was taking its time in warming up, and I decided to walk to the visitor’s farm that Anna and I had made plans to go to the night before. I’d talked long and hard about how much it would mean to me, what a large part of my life it had been when I lived with my grandmother, and if there was any hope for us at all, any semblance of romance in the world, I felt that she might actually be there, maybe waiting for me, maybe just trying to make sense of who I was. I had no better ideas.<br /><br />To get to North Edge Farm, which was clearly marked in a faux-handwritten font on the atlas, I had to follow a few suburban roads that almost appeared to twist into each other, then follow a curved lane which ran alongside some common ground to the north. One thing perturbed me about the atlas. Just above where the farm was, a fat blue semi-transparent dotted line ghosted its way across the landscape, showing the then proposed route of the M25. This had not been present during my grandmother’s days, and I wondered if it might have obliterated the farm now. As I slowly walked through the mist, and heard the hum of traffic in the distance, I totted up facts and figures in my head. I had heard of the farmer near Manchester who had decided to leave his business in the middle of the north and southbound carriageways of a motorway, but was quite sure that such things were far from typical. <br /><br />I quickened my pace and eventually saw a giant concrete bridge in the distance, slamming its way across the winding lane beneath with delivery lorries snarling above it. Across the open ground I could see the route of a slip road sliding off the motorway embankment leading up to a neighbouring main road, and smaller vehicles and white vans creeping towards it. It looked like the toy road network I dominated the living room with as a child.<br /><br />I looked to my left for the entrance gate for the farm. It was still there, but there was no mailbox by the stile, no welcoming sign, and no signs of any cattle or life. I put one foot over the other, and clumsily hauled myself over the fence, scraping my legs into mud as I fell awkwardly to the ground. <br /><br />The grass was truly overgrown and hadn’t been mowed by man or beast in some years. Grasshoppers sounded off their announcements to their potential mates, and empty tins of Special Brew lager clunked under my shoes. As I drew closer to the main farmhouse, I could see only smashed windows, and the distant traces of half-scrawled graffiti over the face of the building. The closer I got, the more the roar of the motorway obliterated the noises of nature. As a child, I would have been pursued and warned by a flock of honking geese by this point, but now, at the turn of the twenty first century, all I could hear was the snake hiss of tyres on wet tarmac, and the growling throttle of trucks.<br /><br />I turned to go back to the lane, consulting my map again to consider transport routes back into London from where I could return home to Bristol. I must have cut a troubled-looking figure, for eventually a car pulled up beside me, and the driver put his head out of the window.<br /><br />“Where are you looking to get to?” asked the driver, an olive skinned man with cropped hair and a matey expression.<br /><br />“Well, I wanted to go and look around the farm,” I said. “It used to be here. But this is all that’s left now”.<br /><br />He regarded me with an amused face.<br /><br />“How old’s that map you’re looking at?” he asked.<br /><br />“Oh, I don’t know. Early eighties, I guess.”<br /><br />“Jesus, mate…” he said. “Listen, that farm’s been derelict for almost as long as I’ve been living round here. The farmer packed up and went. Do you drive?” he asked, disconnectedly.<br /><br /> “No,” I replied.<br /><br />“A shame. You see, I use one of these”. He pulled out a small black box with a shimmering flat monitor screen.<br /><br />“They can show you an up-to-date view of the roads in your area. Suggested routes, possible short cuts, the works. I don’t even need to think anymore with this gadget, frees my brain up for other things!” he joked.<br /><br />I held my atlas up weakly.<br /><br />“This is a big atlas, though,” I said. “It covers the whole area! And it was cheap.”<br /><br />The man laughed at me piteously.<br /><br />“Well this,” he said, holding the black box up again, “is the whole bloody country, and it fits in my hand!”<br /><br />I regarded him silently.<br /><br />“You need a lift back somewhere?” he asked. “Hop in if you want”.<br /><br />“No,” I replied. “I’ll be fine. I came out for a walk, and I suppose I should carry on having one”.<br /><br />“Suit yourself,” he said. “Good luck!” then pushed his foot down aggressively on the accelerator and skidded away noisily.<br /><br />I began to walk in the direction of the main road. According to the atlas, a railway station lay just two miles away, and from there I could get a train into central London. I assumed the train line, at least, would still be operating. <br /><br />The roar of the motorway obliterated everything and stopped me from thinking about anything apart from the discomfort of the noise for awhile, but when I got further away I realised that my brain was working again, and the wrongness of everything that had happened recently came to the forefront. Somewhere in the country, in a mysterious, non-specified place untraceable by the man’s black box, was Anna, but no amount of technology was going to trace her at this stage, and no amount of life-changing, mood-altering pills were going to make her change her mind. She meant it this time. I knew that. The patterns of our relationship had inexplicably changed. There were no games being played anymore.<br /><br />I turned back and walked towards the motorway again. The noise, the steady flow of traffic, the roar of lorries, the certainty of destinations, drowned the chaos of my life out. I welcomed the modern racket in, and gazed at the vacant farmhouse in the distance. As I looked on at it, I found myself wondering why I was in any rush to go home. It was summer, I had nothing good to go back for, and this was a kind of shelter. I could hide here for a long time to come. <br /><br /><br /></span><br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-34197227083319912402017-04-22T12:41:00.001-07:002017-04-22T12:41:55.235-07:00A Dog On Its Hind Legs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Of course, we’d both always wanted a dog. We’d discussed the issue many times over, weighing up the pros and cons, zig-zagging around the complexities of canine care. Who would look after the mutt whilst both of us were at work during the day? Would it be fair on the creature to be locked in a small flat in London? Did we really want to make compromises to our lifestyle, always having to put a quadruped first?<br /><br />These are questions every serious dog owner should ask themselves before committing to their new role, and I’m sure you’ll have seen the numerous campaigning leaflets for yourself – “A Dog Is For Life, Not Just For Christmas”, “Dogs Are Animals, Not Fashion Statements”, “Dogs Die in Hot Cars”, that kind of thing. I was still in the process of quizzing myself over the muddiness of my desire to have a new friend versus the practicalities, when Claire came home one Saturday afternoon with a large black Standard Poodle. <br /><br />“Surprise!” she declared loudly as she walked through the door with the soft metal haired creature, an eighties salon on legs. It regarded me with what seemed like a mixture of affected nonchalance and dismay, like a rocker sibling observing his skinny, short-haired liberal brother. <br /><br />“We hadn’t discussed this properly yet!” I said, but she simply waved her hand at me dismissively, as if she’d had enough of that particular subject, then replied “His name is Geoffrey”.<br /><br />“Geoffrey?” I shouted. “But Geoffrey isn’t a dog’s name! It’s the name of Tory MPs, or children’s presenters, or ageing Yorkshire cricketers! Dogs should not be called Geoffrey!”<br /><br />“Well, that’s what they told me his name was at the rescue centre, and that’s what he answers to,” she replied, and the two of them walked off and barely acknowledged me for the rest of the afternoon.<br /><br />In fact, if Geoffrey did indeed answer to his ridiculous name, he certainly never did it when I called him that day. It was almost as if I wasn’t a presence in the flat so far as the hound was concerned – he never once looked at me, nor acknowledged my entrance into the room. If this was what the glory of companionship with a mutt was supposed to be all about, I wasn’t feeling the satisfied glow at all. I was beginning to wish we’d bought a cat.<br /><br />Two nights later, after two full days of being ignored by Geoffrey, I was woken up in the middle of the night by what I thought was the light in the spare room flicking on and off. I sleepily poured myself out of bed to investigate, and saw only Geoffrey stood by the spare room door, glaring at me. There was no other human presence to be seen.<br /><br />“Is there someone else in the flat, Geoffrey?” I asked, almost expecting him to answer, but he trotted off doggishly to the kitchen, and returned to his bed-basket. It was then that it occurred to me that he must have used the light-switch himself.<br /><br />I told Claire about this incident the next morning.<br /><br />“Don’t be ridiculous,” she laughed. “You’ve just been dreaming. He’s not tall enough to turn the lights on and off even if he stands on his hind legs.”<br /><br />“He could have jumped up and switched them on,” I answered, but she just told me to stop being “silly”. <br /><br />My suspicions about him continued over the coming days. Many of my possessions had been moved around the flat, some placed on different shelves, some with the tell-tale marks of pawprints or toothmarks. It was almost as if Geoffrey was expressing his dissatisfaction with my reading materials, hobbies and interests by dumping them precariously in unsuitable places. Some even smelt suspiciously of urine. I tried to raise these concerns with Claire, but they were greeted with the usual incredulity.<br /><br />As you can imagine, then, it perhaps wasn’t as much of a surprise to me as it should have been when I walked into the kitchen yesterday to find Geoffrey stood on his hind legs, as bold as you please, frying up some eggs over the stove for breakfast. LBC Radio was also switched on, but in fairness I don’t know if he had chosen to listen to that station of his own volition or Claire had left it on before heading out. He didn’t even acknowledge my entrance into the room, not even to turn around from his activity to gauge my reaction. To all intents and purposes, it was as if I were of the lowest significance in the dog’s priorities. Whilst the eggs sizzled, he gently rocked the pan backwards and forwards with his front left paw. He looked more like a relative of Brian May’s than a dog. <br /><br />“What do you think you’re doing?” I commanded Geoffrey, deciding there and then that using the stove surely had to be off the map in terms of what an owner should or should not allow a dog to do. But once again, Geoffrey failed to acknowledge me and I was stunned into silence, and could only watch as he waited for the pan to cool, and then licked the eggs straight off it.<br /><br />“I don’t think dogs are supposed to eat eggs anyway, it’s bad for their bowels,” I said to him, but he was clearly too busy enjoying the results of his kitchen labour to comment.<br /><br />While contemplating whether I should phone somebody to sort this ridiculous situation out – although I was a bit stumped to think of exactly who – I also noticed that various slices of Battenburg cake – my Battenburg cake – had been put on to saucers and strategically placed in the corners of the kitchen.<br /><br />“What the hell have you done with my cake?” I asked the dog furiously, and at that very moment, a mouse scuttled out from under the fridge, took a nibble of the cake, and Geoffrey immediately pounced with the speed of a whippet half his size and clutched the creature in his jaws. Once the rodent’s neck was broken, he let it hang limply in his mouth, and for the first time ever, he looked at me. It wasn’t the loving, compassionate look a dog should give his owner, complete with wagging tail, but a cold, superior look, the look a bear trainer gives to the animal he forces to dance. <br /><br />Geoffrey did not say a word – he never has done, for all his intelligence he clearly doesn’t think speech is worth the effort – but from his look I seemed to comprehend a clear message. <br /><br />“Look at you,” he sneered, almost as if he had actually verbalized the phrase. “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that? For months your flat has had these mice, and you’ve never been able to get rid of them, you bumbling piece of airy, pink flesh with your music and your useless, decaying books. You haven’t known the creature’s habits, but I’ve made the effort to watch them come and go. That’s why I cut up your stupid cake and placed it strategically around the kitchen. <br /><br />“And don’t you ever, ever, order me around again. I tell you, I won’t stand for it. How do you think it feels for me, having an owner like you? You might think I have the hair of the guitarist out of Queen, and need to get myself groomed in poncey boutiques, but you spend money on clothes and still look like some try-hard jerk. At least I can only ever be a dog, and I tell you, I’m bloody proud of that much”.<br /><br />Once this glare-message appeared to have finished, he dropped the mouse where he stood, then trotted off into another room, leaving me to think about what had just happened. I hadn’t had the chance to absorb very much when Claire came home again and reprimanded me for eating eggs without properly cleaning the frying pan afterwards. I felt it pointless to explain the facts behind the situation.<br /><br />I suspect I may not be long for this world. Geoffrey has other plans for me. Books about murder have moved their way mysteriously to the front of the bookshelf. The axe from the attic appeared in the hallway recently. And many times, when nobody has been looking, Geoffrey has bared his teeth at me in a manner which could be a hint of things to come. Claire never notices. So far as she is concerned, he seems to take priority in the household these days. <br /><br />More than once at night he’s come into the bedroom and sniffed my testicles, and made mouth-gestures as if he’s about to bite them off. Next time, if I don’t wake up and notice him there, I believe it may well happen for real. Reader, if I am ever found dead, please take this note seriously, and examine the evidence on the basis of what I’ve just told you. I realize it will be an unusual case, but there may be other similar ones to come in these strange upside down times, where dogs are walking on their hind legs behind our backs.<br /></div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-34559094900991670102016-11-15T15:40:00.003-08:002016-11-15T15:40:54.071-08:00Mortimer Ribbons<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Towards the close of the last decade, just as the London spoken word circuit really started to find its feet and actually gain mainstream media publicity, numerous characters seemed to come and go. In the rush of apparently new faces, it became confusing to keep track of what everyone was up to. You would meet people fresh from university with William Burroughs books under their arms who would appear at Poetry Unplugged three times to read some cut-ups then never be seen again. Then you'd get poets or writers who were actually damn good who disappeared suddenly and unexpectedly, and had no mailing lists organised to tell us what was going on. And Mortimer Ribbons - or Mort, as he was known towards the end of his performing career - was one such.<br />
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I first became aware of him at Poetry Unplugged. An incredibly dapper figure, he sat down onstage and glassily gazed at the audience beneath the brim of his hat while delivering a sinister and downbeat monologue about the unrealistic nature of most ordinary people's dreams. It referred largely to people's fantasies about relationships and sex, and was a straightforward piece but expertly delivered (I guessed immediately he had a background as an actor) and written with care. I approached him at the end of the night to say how much I'd enjoyed his performance, and made encouraging noises believing him to be a new writer and performer. He was perfectly polite and amiable about this, but to my embarrassment I later found out that he'd had a long history with poetry, running workshops and performing throughout most of the seventies and eighties, and had even been an actor in the Crystal Theatre Group in the sixties. In my defence, I can only say that I've witnessed other people give similar 'encouraging' praise to long-serving performers at the Poetry Cafe and elsewhere - if poets aren't on the Latitude hitlist and the first time you've see them is at an open mic, incorrect assumptions can get made. Hey, we can't all be everywhere at once, and it's not as if any of this stuff goes out live on the BBC, you know...<br />
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Our paths continued to cross, with us sharing a couple of poetry bills in London, including at a notorious event in Shadwell which booked bands and poets. The poets on the bill either tended to get a rough, mocking ride from the audience (and on occasion the bands) or blow everyone away. Numerous people got gigs at this night, had a brilliant time and felt insufferably smug while watching their fellow poets bomb, only to be invited back again another week to bomb themselves. It taught poets a lot about working with difficult crowds and developing some humility, something many of us needed to learn back in the mid-noughties. Anyway, I digress.<br />
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Mort, so far as I'm aware, never "stormed" it at this venue. His act was too macabre and sombre to possibly illicit whoops of enthusiasm. What do you do when someone stands on stage, staring at you through glassy eyes beneath a wide-brimmed hat, making slow, dramatic gestures and riffing on distinctly noir ideas about all the things that would never happen in your life, reminding you that death was an inevitability? A whoop and scream of "Yes!" wouldn't feel appropriate. And death began to feature much more prominently in his work. One piece I remember him reading regularly at this time contained the regular refrain "But not in this life". Each burst of optimism, each private fantasy, was demolished with this uttered dismissal. I wish I had the text or some sort of recording to show you how it worked, but I don't. And it <i>did</i> work. Mort was a captivating and subtle performer who just got audiences to shut up and look at what he was doing. And the particular thing he was doing was never going to spark a revolution or propel him to headline slots with Hammer and Tongs, but you remembered it - or I remembered it - years after the event, when all the hundreds of slam-winners and boisterous versifiers all joined together in my brain as one unidentifiable mush.<br />
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Months passed, and I didn't see Mort. On the poetry circuit, that's quite usual. People have demanding dayjobs, families with needs, problems of their own. I assumed he'd be back soon. Then I was talking to a poetry promoter - the very same poetry promoter who ran the night I mentioned - in a bar about a night he was giving half a thought to putting on for Halloween, consisting of dark or horrific poetry. (A night that never came to pass, so far as I know).<br />
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"Well, you know who would be a shoe-in for that kind of bill," I said. "Mort, obviously."<br />
He looked at me slightly taken aback.<br />
"Dave," he said. "Mort's dead. He passed away some time ago."<br />
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He went on to explain to me that, even while he was performing at his venue and doing other gigs besides, Mort had actually been going in and out of hospital for cancer treatment. His health had been in poor shape, and the last anyone had seemingly heard of him were a few half-hearted gig arrangements made on the phone, subject to his health, which were pencilled in then never confirmed. Radio silence commenced, and news filtered back through the circuit that Mort had indeed passed on. News I obviously hadn't received myself.<br />
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My first response wasn't to be upset, and I didn't feel the need to grieve. I admired Mort, but I was never properly friends with him (more is the pity). We were on nodding terms and talked about each other's work on occasion, but I knew nothing of his life or background until after he died. What I felt, however, was terribly chilled and unnerved, and there are many moments where I remember him (like today) and still get that chill. I realised that for most of the whole time I'd watched him perform, he knew he was unwell, and possibly his life would be over soon. It seemed to explain the "Not in this life" refrain, and his obsessions with film noir and trash novels with death on every page. His work suddenly acquired an extra layer.<br />
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Of course, these are all assumptions on my part, and it's entirely possible he wrote all the material ten years before performing it and it bore no relation at all to his present life, and the whole thing was fuelled by some dark coincidence. But nonetheless, the fact that during a dark and worrying time in his life he bothered to get himself to pubs with sticky floors to take a mic and try to shut a chatty London audience up - that's astonishing. Will I spend my last year or two on Earth like that? I might, but don't bank on it necessarily, and I doubt I could ever do it with such style.<br />
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Most of this blog entry has actually been sitting in my draft folder for three years now. I keep returning to it and feeling awkward about it. Is it really my business, as an outsider of a person's circle, to have this particular interpretation of someone's work and death? Have I said everything I wanted to say? Have I done Mort as a performer justice? I'm seeing three big "Nos" in answer to those questions, like a row of three lemons on a fruit machine. I don't know if I have any right to be saying this, or any right to be here. But a couple of years back, when I was surfing the web trying to find out more information about Mort, I saw James Brown (of "Loaded" fame) saying that he'd seen a memorial bench with Mortimer's name on it in a park. He asked if anyone knew who this Mortimer Ribbons character was. A couple of people piped up affirmatively. The bench has since attracted attention from people on other social media sites, marvelling at his name and wondering whether he lived up to it. Damn right he did. And I did want to actually answer those people's questions, somehow, if nothing else.<br />
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There are very few film or audio clips of Mort online, but I managed to find the one at the top of this blog entry on YouTube. It seems to be a clip of him from 2008 improvising work at an open mic in a pub where people happen to be watching a football match in the next room. It's not the best Mortimer performance I've ever seen or heard, but you can get a clear impression of his presence and where he was coming from, and the finality of it at the end is striking.<br />
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<i>"And finally the waitress watched the hero walk away, realising at last... that he never was a poet, and he's never going to Paris, and he's not going to take her with him".</i><br />
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At least, not in this life. Not in this life.<br />
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So I suppose I could rewrite this blog entry again, and sit on it for three more years wondering if it's appropriate, but clearly nothing in this life can ever be perfect. In a minute, I will press "publish", and it will be done.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-2622200582341976092016-10-22T01:55:00.003-07:002022-02-09T05:59:29.430-08:00Leave The Capital<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>"The tables covered in beer</i><br />
<i>Showbiz whines, min<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5127089990236298037"></a>ute detail<br />Hand on the should<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5127089990236298037"></a>er in Leicester Square<br />It's vaudeville pub back room dusty pictures of<br />White frocked girls and music teachers<br />The beds too clean<br />Water's poisonous for the system<br /><br />And you know in your brain<br />Leave the capitol!<br />Exit this Roman Shell<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5127089990236298037"></a>!<br />Then you know you must leave the capitol<br /><br />Straight home, straight home, straight home<br />One room, one room".</i><br />
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<b>The Fall - "Leave The Capitol".</b><br />
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<b><i>(I drafted this blog entry a long time ago, in a foul mood. I then left it as a draft for months, thinking "Do I really believe this is true? Do I want to have an argument about it?" But I revisited it today, and thought "Fuck it", and I'm about to press publish. So far as I'm concerned, it's ALL true). </i></b><br />
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Technically speaking, of course, I left the capital a year ago, though it wasn't entirely planned that way, and the way in which I've done it would have been pathetic and half-hearted if it had been a sincere attempt at a protest. I'm now back in my birthplace in Zone 4, Ilford, a border town whose actual geographical identity seems to confuse local residents. A recent local newspaper poll showed that around 60% thought it was part of London, the other 40% considered it to be part of Essex. Given that the postal address is in Essex but the borough the town sits in is designated as part of London, you could forgive everyone for being muddled. As for me, whether I deem it to be part of London or not depends entirely on what mood you catch me in and how contrary I feel like being.<br />
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(Largely to see what would happen, I corrected my local takeaway owner the other day. He said to me "You know, sometimes I don't like living in London".</div>
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"You don't, though," I said. "This isn't London".</div>
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"Well... it is and it isn't", he replied). </div>
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For today, I'm going to be a contrary sod and insist that I've left London, and I will do so only because I personally believe that it puts me ahead of the curve, meaning I can affect a pathetically superior air. Some time ago I interviewed Luke Wright about his brilliant book and spoken word piece "What I Learned From Johnny Bevan", and <a href="https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-22ec-If-my-work-was-visual-it-would-be-in-the-vein-of-Hogarth" target="_blank">you can read the final results here</a> (this is an exceptionally late plug, for which I apologise). Luke is somebody who has spent much of his career in either Norfolk or Essex, away from the financial pressures and distractions of the city, and is now one of the leading lights in live poetry, not just being a top draw himself but organising major events including the poetry stage at Latitude. At the time when Luke first began to gain a serious profile as a poet and performer, there was a bit of a dominant myth around the spoken word circuit that you had to live in London to get gigs and progress. Without being able to network freely, attend gigs and open mics regularly and be on call at the drop of a hat, you could forget it. A lot of poets in other towns and cities around the UK were occasionally openly angry about how much bias and preference London poets were shown. These days, I have to wonder if London is more of a hinderance than a help to anyone's development - it's true that there's a huge volume of poetry gigs and readings around the capital that probably rival any European city you care to name (much less British ones), but... well, let's weed out the problems, shall we?<br />
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<b><u>1. The Cost Of Living</u></b><br />
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I hate to open with an obvious one, but unless you have a healthy trust fund or a constant flow of cash from willing sponsors, London is presently nigh-on impossible for an aspiring artist to survive in. Shelter recently published a tube map showing which stations were "affordable" to live near by. The results probably won't surprise you - the suburban concrete slabs of Essex are probably the cheapest places to get by, the rest is largely unaffordable. <br />
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Landlords in London seem to have a stronger likelihood for being greedy chancers, purely because the market dictates they can be, and very few people buy spare property with the aim of being a charitable service - their main concern is just extracting the maximum cash they can for their pension fund (at best) or expanding their business empire (at worst). If a flat or some shared accommodation happens to be within your budget this year, there's absolutely no guarantee it will be in 2017 - that Organic Greengrocers that's just opened up 200 yards from your house may be a signifier of gentrification and a huge rent hike. Back when I lived in Walthamstow, I'd see Real Ale pubs opening up and not feel any joy that I could now buy Chocolate Stout in a pub with a vintage pinball machine in it a stone's throw from my house, I just genuinely worried about what it meant in the broader sense. Nobody really wants areas to improve anymore apart from the people with mortgages. This is how perverse things have become (a few years back, my wife actually told me off for getting involved in a campaign to improve public transport in Streatham, because "if that actually happens, we won't be able to afford to live HERE either").<br />
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London, of course, hasn't been an easy city to get by in for decades, but the traditional support networks that existed for artists are being eroded away at a terrifying rate. Squats and co-operatives are disappearing as property skyrockets in value, with the relatively secure option of co-operative living being wiped out of the picture by councils of both Labour and Conservative persuasions (Lambeth Labour's anti-co-operative propaganda was interestingly one-sided and vicious for a supposedly "Co-operative Council". But the excessive dilution of the original principles of the Labour Party in its London incarnation are another topic for another day). <br />
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In the good old days, these obstacles were a bit lower and just about surmountable if, as an artist, you were prepared to take on a mind-numbing, simple day job which involved clocking in at 9 and leaving at 5 on the dot, providing you with a modest pay packet and an uncluttered mind. Local councils and education services used to be a brilliant source of all kinds of glorified data entry jobs and filing and post room work - however, as these roles now don't pay enough and are also often taking place in grossly understaffed environments, they're just not the source of a steady wage and a clear brain as they used to be. Also, a lot of the work I used to get paid to do in my twenties in London is now actually being done for free by people on "work placements".<br />
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<b><u>2. The Focus Is Moving Away From London</u></b></div>
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Artists from other parts of the country may not actually hate London, but they certainly resent the focus it's had over and above other cities. Increasingly, the media are picking up on this and no longer want to publish stories about the latest Swinging Dick Whittington who moved to the capital to make their name. Rather, they would prefer to write about somebody who stayed loyal to their local community, helped to develop a scene (especially in a deprived or culturally desolate area) and came out with some unique sounding work, whether individually or as part of a collective. </div>
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If I were 22 years old now and two clear options were apparent - move to London to try my luck by myself, or attempt to join in to help build a poetry night or movement in a less obvious city, I'd probably take the second route for a whole host of reasons. Not only would I dodge the expense of the capital, but I would also be entering into exciting, unknown territories. The "streets paved with gold" tale is folklore, but creating something unique from scratch and giving a local environment something they possibly didn't even realise they wanted is far more exciting. Make your own myths and build your own movements - you don't have to join the existing machinery here. </div>
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And as somebody on Twitter said to me recently: "If Bowie got a scene going in Beckenham, anyone can do it anywhere". (If you've never been to Beckenham, you possibly don't realise the significance of this statement. Take a train there and look around one day and wonder at how anything at all could have ever happened in Beckenham, even a thunderstorm).<br />
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<b><u>3. The Supportive Environment</u></b></div>
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Poetry, like all niche art forms, has its arguments, spats and rivalries in any town or city you care to name. At its best, though, it offers a supportive community of generally like-minded people. Or at least, it should. </div>
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When I first started performing in London, gigs were thin on the ground but everybody knew each other, and regardless of the genre of poetry they felt they were delivering, it was generally assumed that we were all roughly on the same side. It's true to say that some experimental poets tended to be slightly aloof and even argumentative, but we all generally moved in roughly the same circles and bumped into each other at events. </div>
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As the circuit has grown bigger, however, the supportive social element has largely gone for a Burton. If you attend a poetry gig in London these days, a poet is more likely to thrust a business card into your hand and bugger off after two minutes than actually make an attempt to befriend you and attempt to talk about the work over a drink. Networking has become fast and impersonal. The scene has also fragmented into different genres and different geographical bits of the capital, meaning cross-fertilisation of ideas is becoming increasingly rare. In the past, poets of all stripes would quietly absorb ideas from each other - these days, it's rare to see a page poet, slam poet, experimental artist and comedy poet in the same room at the same time, never mind the same bill.</div>
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None of this means that London doesn't also have some of the most well-organised and entertaining live poetry nights in the UK, but getting noticed here is harder than it ever was, particularly if you're trying to attempt something slightly outside the mainstream. Overwhelmingly, the promotional focus in London is on showing poetry to be an immediate, relevant and everyday force - a noble and necessary aim, but not one that's always fantastic for poets who want to find the time and space to develop a unique voice.<br />
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<b><u>4. You're Not Wanted Here</u></b></div>
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I genuinely believe this is true (at least, we're not wanted by the powers-that-be). It's how I feel, anyway, often quite bitterly. If being born here counts for fuck all and London residents are steadily being forced out of the city, do you really think anyone cares about your latest collection of prose pieces enough to grant you easy access? "Money talks, bullshit walks". </div>
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London now is a city that, through its financial pressures alone, only welcomes artists who have already accomplished something and are successes. It's where household names settle. It is not a city that offers developing artists the time, money or means to find their feet. If you've got a sugar-daddy or wealthy parents, or family who live within the London zones you're happy to cohabit with, then sure, you can while away your time developing your craft here. If not - you are coldly and unreservedly on your own.</div>
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This isn't something that's <i>about to happen</i> or <i>might happen in the future</i>, contrary to what you might read in the press - it's the state London is in <i>right now</i>. We lost the argument. Which is why nobody, not even those of us born in the general area, could blame any aspiring artist or writer from catching the first train in completely the opposite direction and taking their chances there. Go forth and seek your fortune. Just do it in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol or Hull. Only a complete idiot would chance their arm here. </div>
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-85832688315437381682016-08-08T14:32:00.000-07:002016-08-09T09:24:20.102-07:0020 Years of Poetry Unplugged<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Legendary London open mic night Poetry Unplugged celebrated its 20th Anniversary last week, and to mark the occasion a huge shindig was thrown featuring some of its most memorable acts from the period.<br />
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<i>"That's a very direct and factual establishing sentence there, Dave, though a bit overlong and bland. Now, why don't you tell us a bit more about what happened on the night?"</i><br />
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Erm. I can't. I fully intended to go, but unfortunately was struck down with Tonsillitis, and decided that a late night in the Poetry Cafe's cramped basement wasn't something I could handle, even under the most celebratory of circumstances. The noise of me constantly churning up pus from the back of my tonsils can't have been anything anyone would have needed to hear, either, not even as an experimental five minute "noise poem" called "Tonsil Tennis Played With A Bigger Racket Than Usual". Still, from all the accounts I've read online since it was a great night.<br />
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Despite not being there to celebrate the anniversary, there's utterly no reason whatsoever why I can't talk about why it's an important event in the poetry calendar, and why it's twenty year landmark is a heartening thing. I've talked about the night once already in the Morning Star, but short articles in left-wing newspapers and personal pieces for blogs are two entirely different things with very different rules attached, and I can actually reminisce about my personal connection with the place hopefully without being boring.<br />
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I was actually something of a latecomer to Unplugged. For exceptionally naive reasons, I'd decided that the Poetry Cafe was an awful venue filled with deeply unfriendly nights after one bad experience I'd had there in its earliest days (Don't ask me the name of the event or the person who ran it, gossip-hunter - it's far too long ago for me to recall those details now. In fact, I can barely remember why I was so put out.) This was childish and simplistic of me, a bit like turning up to a bad gig at the Brixton Academy and then blaming it on the venue itself, but in my defence, you have to remember that the poetry circuit in London wasn't necessarily all-embracing in those days. If I'd walked out of the Poetry Cafe with the impression that all its events were essentially quite dry, academic readings with no young riff-raff to be tolerated, it might be because those frosty divides did exist in those days, and I felt that I'd been stung a few too many times. They still exist to an extent now, of course - and some young spoken word artists on the circuit have erected walls and barriers of their own, complicating matters further - but the circuit in general is more liberal and accepting than it was.<br />
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In the end, I was persuaded by a well-meaning acquaintance on the circuit to give Unplugged a go, and at some point in the year 2000 I wandered down the Poetry Cafe's basement steps into a small room jammed with people. The evening was run by John Citizen in those days, who had a reputation for running a tight ship in an eerily laidback way, as if he'd mastered the art of two contradictory states of being at once, a zen-like watcher of the clock and the reading list. I recall nothing of the acts who went on before me (and I doubt any Unplugged debutante ever does) because I spent the best part of 30 minutes worrying about the sheer volume of people, all seemingly from different backgrounds, with different expectations about poetry and different ideas. And such noisy bastards, too - they cheered at poems they particularly enjoyed, roared encouragement at newcomers, and in general made the place seem like a <i>night out</i>, not a test pad for new poetry.<br />
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If this sounds equally naive and you're spluttering to yourself, thinking "Don't be silly, the Poetry Cafe is a tiny venue, not the Hippodrome!" - again, context is everything. Most non-professional poetry nights on the circuit in those days, especially open mics, were lucky to get twenty people through the door. And it would usually be twenty quiet people in a slightly large upstairs pub room, not crammed into a small basement area. This felt new to me.<br />
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When the moment came when John Citizen announced my name, I rushed to the stage nervously and over-enthusiastically, and accidentally stomped on his foot. He howled out in pain, and my first words on mic at the Poetry Cafe - ever - were "Er shit, I've just trod on his foot. Sorry, John!" A new catchphrase was not born that night. Nobody laughed at me, which made the situation a bit worse. I suspected that instead, they might be dying inside on my behalf.<br />
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I rushed through my set at what felt like a breakneck pace, did the one poem I had I was genuinely sure of, and to my amazement got encouraging applause and cheers. I honestly doubt this was because my performance was genuinely good - I doubt it was even tepid, to be honest - but the audience seemed motivated to push me along because they'd not seen me there before, and they knew I'd got off to an awkward start, and somehow pulled through the mess. There was a camaraderie at the night I hadn't witnessed on the rest of the open mic circuit, and while it wasn't an explicit rule (I don't recall John Citizen telling everyone to give new readers big cheers back in those days, as the present host Niall O'Sullivan does as a matter of course) I get the impression that this attitude had already woven itself into the fabric of the night. From that point forward, I was back frequently, and I was never as nervous again.<br />
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I've since met and made some of my longest-standing friends at Unplugged, as well as being offered my first proper poetry gigs through promoters who happened to be there flyering for their night. Back in those days, they would engage in a sly bit of talent-spotting as well as engaging in promotional activity, giving Unplugged an additional purpose as a place people may earn paid ten-minute slots elsewhere. This element of Unplugged has fallen by the wayside in recent years, with only John Paul O'Neill still attending on a regular basis working out who to encourage. This is, to say the least, a deep shame, but let's leave the point to rest for now and have the argument another day.<br />
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I'm not necessarily claiming that without Unplugged I wouldn't have made these friends nor been offered those opportunities, but it would probably have taken me a lot longer. And on top of that, the fact that the night is in Central London at a specialist poetry venue means that it's the true hub of the circuit, the central drinking fountain - all poetry life is here, from dub poets to slam winners to Creative Writing students to self-confessed oddballs. While most poetry open mics tend to become clubs for like-minded writers and people, acting as extensions of the host's personality, Unplugged has always been far more unpredictable, and embracing of that unpredictability.<br />
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There are some (though not many) people who don't like Unplugged and seldom go, but what's interesting is that their criticisms are often sitting on opposite sides of the spectrum. I've heard the insult "Too orderly, not anarchic enough" before now (usually from hipsters angry that they couldn't read for ten minutes). But then I've also heard the insult "It's too rowdy". This is proof that when you're trying to satisfy a diverse audience, someone somewhere will still feel left out despite all your best efforts. Others have made the mistake of attending while believing that every performer must be above a certain standard, which is a rum expectation to have of any open mic.<br />
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The hosts have all had a tricky balancing act to carry out in the last twenty years, and have all handled the situation in different but equally successful ways. Citizen, as we've established, was a walking Little Book of Calm and a genuine comforting presence to new poets. Before he was famous, ex-Unplugged urchin Pete Doherty harboured ambitions to take over his reign, but sanity (and chart success) prevailed and Carl Dhiman stepped up to the ranks, often being gently sardonic to regulars in the process but a considerate and incredibly encouraging man towards new readers. O'Sullivan has sat on Unplugged's throne for the longest time of all of them, and manages to be entertaining and gregarious while still proving to the newcomers that he's interested in their ideas, ensuring they get maximum audience support and encouragement.<br />
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For me, it's a fantastic testing ground for new material (even after all these years) where I can get a firm impression of how a poem might sound in a lively venue. I still get to meet some interesting people. And I occasionally get the odd person asking me "Are you new? That was quite promising", which always brings me down to Earth with a bump irrespective of what other compliments I've had that month.<br />
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I'm glad it's twenty. Even if that makes me feel incredibly fucking old.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-28660970747255324132016-03-02T05:25:00.000-08:002019-12-21T05:25:58.391-08:00Box Test<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Preview files below. Test purposes only. Not loading properly.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-50928393429059024362016-02-11T14:13:00.002-08:002016-02-11T14:13:32.358-08:00Scriggler<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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As I'm sure I've probably whined on here before, the life of the part-time writer with a "proper" day job is never a simple one. You may mean to update your blog, write new material, get stuff out to publishers and even tap promoters on the shoulder and remind them you exist, but if you're working overtime more often than not and struggling to get indoors before half eight in the evening, it's not going to happen. And all of us have those periods in our lives.<br />
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Failing that, of course, you might just live in a desperate bit of nowheresville, a small town orbiting a not particularly interesting city, and lack the ability to get feedback for your work or even perform. I've been there too. Every single time I've ever ended up staying for an extended period in my parent's spare room, I've relied on the Internet to get feedback on my latest work. The lack of any other local cultural outlets at all made it the only way.<br />
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Last time this happened, way back at the turn of the 21st Century, I used the long-forgotten but actually pretty brilliant literary sharing website Poesie, which allowed you to share drafts of short stories and poetry. It was busy enough to keep me interested, but quiet enough to spot the regular contributors and home in on the best. In particular, I always got huge enjoyment out of the work of the Austin-based poet Cindee Sharp, who is hopefully still producing poetry somewhere. It had a varied user-base, ensuring that the style of the work was also varied and it was easy to at least be surprised by someone's work even if you didn't actually enjoy it. A few fairly famous London poets even cut their teeth on Poesie, a fact I found out years after the event.<br />
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Those nights on a dial-up internet connection in my parent's spare room ("David, could you get off the Internet, your Aunt is trying to phone me and she's confused by the bleeps on the line and thinks something's going wrong?") eventually fizzled out. Due to the fact that my life has got a bit too hectic for poetry readings or workshops in the last few months, though, I've decided to give another poetry and short story sharing website a try - namely <a href="https://scriggler.com/" target="_blank">Scriggler</a>.<br />
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I haven't been a user long enough yet to form a definite opinion. I get the distinct impression that you really need to join specific clubs or communities to get the most out of the service - it's awash with vampire stories, fantasy, erotica, thrillers and angst-biographies as well as other work, and trying to land on something that's to your taste is often difficult work otherwise. They have a tagging system in operation on the site, but there's nothing specifically for non-genre fiction, for example, which might help in cutting past some of that other material (I've nothing against people who read fantasy or vampire novels, you understand, but it's really not my bag). Like all literary sharing website and open mics, of course, the tone and quality are often wildly divergent as well. That's the deal you get with open access - it's not curated, it's wild and open. Sometimes that's fascinating in a "Human Zoo" way, other times it's trying.<br />
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All that said, the site is clean, simple and pleasant to look at, and has the clear and obvious support of a number of social media users who retweet and highlight work they enjoy. It seems as if you'd get more feedback and possible support by posting a new piece there than slapping it on your blog and getting the usual five people to comment - and for that reason alone, it's serving a positive function and going one step above the areas the pre-social media Poesie managed.<br />
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I've placed a number of <a href="https://scriggler.com/Profile/david_bryant_23daves" target="_blank">my own pieces of work on there</a>. You'll be familiar with some of them already, as I'm not putting up much new material until I get to better grips with the site, but there's one short story on there that's never been published elsewhere. Go and take a look, and I'll continue to add more material over time. It would be nice to get some feedback and comments as well (<i>*mumbles to self*...</i>)<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-40795973556675378192015-11-19T12:48:00.001-08:002015-11-19T12:48:58.101-08:00Forthcoming gig/ Emma Hammond's "The Story of No"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Yes, I know, it's been ages since the last blog update. But as it seems like I begin every new entry with an apology, I won't bother this time. Moving house is a mighty old chore, especially if you're moving into a new place that needs considerable volumes of work done to it - I'm typing this entry right now from the one inhabitable room on a laptop with a newly cracked screen (if anyone has one they'd like to sell to me, you know where I am) while builders have left their bricks, concrete, wood and rubble in the downstairs area.<br />
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Still though, I'll be out of the chaos on the evening of Thursday 26th November and doing a gig for the Girlfriend in a Comma spoken word night, alongside musical comedian and poet Cecilia Delatori and award winning American poet Molly Rivkin. It all kicks off at 8pm at the Full Stop Cafe at 202 Brick Lane, E1 6SA. If you're on Facebook, you get the simple and easy diary details <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/423229841206718/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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It's been a long time since my last gig as well, largely due to various bits of chaos (good and bad) that took over my life from the Spring right through to this Autumn. I've given some material a test run at Poetry Unplugged and it felt very, very unusual to be back out doing poetry again, while at the same time reminding me why I enjoy it so much. I complain and whinge as much as the next poet about the fickle waves of fashion in the scene, but the reality is that none of it really matters that much - twenty years down the line, just getting a chance to mess around with new ideas is still simultaneously nerve-wracking and thrilling.<br />
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Meanwhile…<br />
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It's been my absolute pleasure to review Emma Hammond's latest collection "The Story of No" for the Morning Star newspaper. Like any other daily newspaper, The Morning Star doesn't have room for 1,000 word dissections on new poetry collections, which is a deep shame as this a book I would have been fully able to give that treatment to. Early drafts of the review sailed way over the word limit. The poets I tend to respect the most are those who have a very recognisable style and world-view of their own, and Emma has that in spades - her influences always seem to be as much rooted in the 60s/ 70s poetry underground as they are modern spoken word and satire, and it meshes together unbelievably effectively.<br />
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You can <a href="http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-77da-Poetry-Review-Emma-Hammonds-The-Story-of-No#.Vk41FUvb8yD" target="_blank">read the review here</a>, and you really should buy the book.<br />
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23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-46432647037362686752015-08-17T14:34:00.000-07:002015-08-17T14:34:55.359-07:00Do Nothing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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All right, poetry folk? Yes, I know. I know. I've been very quiet for some time now. No blog updates, no new poems, no gigs, not even the odd open mic appearance. I'm not going to pretend that anybody cares all that much what I get up to - very few people care all that much about what any poet bar the most popular ones have to say - but I do feel the need to at least justify it to myself. Even if very few other people are saying it, I do still have a voice in my head asking <i>"Are you sure you're not on the verge of giving poetry up for good?"</i><br />
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So this could be denial, but nonetheless, here's the main reasons for my silence:<br />
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<b>1. Life got complicated and busy.</b><br />
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There are numerous things going on at the moment. For starters, I'm trying to buy a house, a process which seemed pretty simple to start with provided me and my partner weren't too fussy about our final destination, but has obviously bundled a lot of stress and uncertainty into my life. These elements spur some people on to brilliant work, but the effect they tend to have on me is that I lose focus.<br />
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And also, there are other events and worries which are private business and therefore outside the remit of this blog. That good old whiskery fun-loving guy Uncle SpareFunTimes isn't my friend right now.<br />
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<b>2. Because life got complicated and busy, I've felt the need for light relief much more.</b><br />
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So when I've finished work at 7pm, my first thought hasn't been "I know what I need right now! A nice foaming nut brown ale and a two hour poetry gig, with me trying my new pieces out at the open mic beforehand!" It's been "God, I think I need a drink, some decent company, a good conversation, and preferably that pub up the road with the really good jukebox with loads of Northern Soul on it".<br />
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I know the love some people have for poetry is greater than their need for social interaction, but I'm afraid I can't push things that far. I need to speak to people as well as listen to them sometimes.<br />
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<b>3. In terms of live work, the circuit isn't really very geared up to work like mine at the moment, so I'm disinclined to waste energy.</b><br />
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I've been doing this for twenty years now, and I hope to carry on for another twenty at least, and I'm able to recognise the temporary nature of dominant styles and trends. The poetry circuit is very geared up towards young, snappy, immediate work at the moment, whether that's hip-hop or comedy influenced, and it's presently harder than usual for subtle or reflective poetry to get slots on bills, especially if it's being delivered by established stalwarts (and I'm quoting the last couple of descriptions I had from promoter's bills with 'stalwart' here, not making it up) rather than fresh new names. Ten years ago, I'd have panicked about this. Right now though, it illicits a big "meh". It will pass. Trends in the arts are much more fleeting than you'd suspect, trust me, and vacuums get very quickly filled.<br />
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<i>"But you've made what you do sound really boring there, and I saw you at a mixed comedy/ poetry bill this year and you weren't, you went down quite well"</i>. Thanks for saying that, sir! What can I get you to drink?<br />
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In the meantime, there's no point in me knocking myself out at open mics or slams (which, in terms of the latter, I don't really do anymore anyway) if it doesn't pay any dividends. I don't really feel I need the practice time unless I'm working on new material, and even if I do get a really positive audience response, it's not going to do much to convince the average promoter that the work I produce has a place in their scheme of things. Most have already made up their minds. They already know who I am, where I am, where they can contact me, and what I do. So, being pressed for time and money and energy at the moment, I'm treating this as a "will go out and do things when I feel I need to" situation. (And I probably will be back out very soon, because I can feel myself being pulled towards it as I type this).<br />
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<b>4. I've been writing a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily lean towards live performance.</b><br />
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Short stories, prose pieces, quite layered poetry. That's when I've been writing at all, of course. This year hasn't been that productive, I admit.<br />
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<b>5. We need another night like "Walking The Dog" again.</b><br />
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No, I mean it, we do. If somebody just ran a poetry night with a nice load of drinking and socialising on the side, where people were chatting happily in the break and catching up with each other and meeting new and interesting people rather than pushing product and networking, I'd go to it.<br />
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Anyway, that's my excuses for being quiet. I'll update the blog in another three months with more excuses if things flag further still. </div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5127089990236298037.post-39196859070933254952015-05-15T12:42:00.001-07:002015-05-15T12:42:10.084-07:00The Alarmist - RIP<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Last night (Thursday 14th May, if you're reading this days after the event and are the most unreasonable kind of diary-keeping pedant) saw the launch party for the last ever edition of "The Alarmist". The passing of any good literary magazine is nothing to celebrate, but the death of an angular one with so much colour, wit, intelligence and accessible experimentation is particularly tragic. By combining brilliant, highly original short stories and poetry with humorous shaggy dog stories and biting bits of comedic verse, it was a reasonably left-of-centre literary journal and casual lunch-break reading dip combined. If there's another magazine out there doing something similar - at least in the English language - I'm not aware of it. Literary publications frequently suffer from an overload of pomposity, and "The Alarmist" replaced that with playfulness.<br />
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The front section of issue 5 is taken up with a large essay on how and why the magazine failed to last for more than two years, and it's well <a href="http://www.alarmistmagazine.co.uk/memoirs/" target="_blank">worth a read on their website</a> if you've even the faintest interest in how independent literary magazines operate, or are thinking of starting one up yourself. If your ambition only stretches as far as producing a small black-and-white periodical with local distribution, it's probably not that relevant - but anyone who wants to attempt something bigger (or pull their small regional effort up to the next level) will probably learn a lot, or at least be forewarned about the pitfalls.<br />
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The regrettable lesson coming out of all this seems to simply be that the more ambitious you are, the more likely you are to fail. "The Alarmist" started out by giving away free artefacts such as poetry scratchcards - an utterly fantastic idea which is almost impossible to believe nobody's thought of before, until you get a sense of the scale of costs involved. Later issues just focussed on original design and striking content, and on that level the magazine really hit its stride around issue 4, which contained the most consistent stretch of stories, poems and artwork (lest anyone think I'm being biased about a magazine that published my work here, I didn't feature in issue 4 at all).<br />
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I'm occasionally asked why I don't start up my own literary magazine. The answer is simple. I don't have the time or money to do it myself, I don't believe that the magazine I would most enjoy producing would sell very much in an already deflated market, and I don't have a cohort of people willing to help me make it a workable venture (and that cohort extends far beyond people working to get the damn thing made and distributed, and into the realms of people willing to plug the damn thing on social media and elsewhere). But even if I did have a willing cohort of people, I probably still wouldn't have the time. The world is filled with writers hungry to get published somewhere - most magazines worth their salt get hundreds of submissions between issues - printers being an unreliable pain in the arse, bookshops not paying up on time, and poetry nights to sell your wares at. It's a big task to take on, and anyone who starts it with the best of intentions has my admiration.<br />
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The final "Alarmist" launch last night was odd to say the least, in that there was a poster outside 93 Feet East in Brick Lane advertising the poets on the bill - our names will probably never be emblazoned around Shoreditch again - and the terrifying comedian and winner of the Malcolm Hardee originality award Candy Gigi ended the night with aggressive audience participation and psychotic invective. But it suited the occasion, and was the most explosive finish everyone could have hoped for. If anyone wants to watch grown men being terrorised at high volumes by a barking wild-eyed woman with fruit, vegetables and cream, it's worth every minute. You probably won't even realise that you need to see this outside of the environs of the shit end of Walthamstow Market, but you do.<br />
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Anyway, <a href="http://www.alarmistmagazine.co.uk/buy/" target="_blank">buy issue 5</a>. A poem of mine is in it. Then buy as many back issues as you can. Then please - go away and produce an interesting magazine yourself, no matter how much Gary and Mansour make you feel as if you shouldn't. </div>
23 Daveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06341570374606412042noreply@blogger.com0