The Fluffiness of Poetry Bunnies

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.

Hyper-Confident? Are you kidding me? Confident? 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. 

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: "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."

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.

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:

1. Reading new work for the first time.

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.

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.

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 lot 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.

2. Catching the eye of somebody who clearly doesn't enjoy what you're doing.

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.

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" (middle aged, tubby, bearded). The one who got visibly annoyed halfway through "Starstuck" and slung her bag under her arm and stormed out of the venue (slim, dyed blonde hair, mid-twenties). 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" (curt young male, glasses, short, French).

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.

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.

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.

3. Having a well-known writer you really respect in the room. 

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, obviously, is multi-faceted and deeply experimental in places, actually - is far more rounded than that.

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?

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.

4. "The wits in the back row". 

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.

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.


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?

(Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay)

Utter! Lutonia - 6th December

*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.*

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.

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.

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 found here in case you need reminding nearer the date.

(*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). 

Take This Conversation And Hand It In

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?"

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 surprising 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.

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. 

Jazzman John Clarke RIP

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. (update - you're reading this, so obviously I did).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spoiling All The Paintwork

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.

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.

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.

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, everyone writes blogs like that do they, David! I see! That includes me, obviously!" - a voice outside).

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.

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 reason 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.

"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.

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.

--------------------

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.

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.

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.

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...

What do Lawrence out of Felt/ Denim and Mark E Smith have in common?

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.

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.

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.

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 here.

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.

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?)

The Poetry Cafe is on Betterton Street, WC2 9BX, and again, the Facebook details are here.

(Thanks - kind of - to Jon Hall for the cartoon at the top of this entry, by the way). 

The Bigger The Map

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.

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.

“I’m sorry for the way I’ve been behaving lately,” I began.

“I know, I know”, she replied gently.

“This isn’t me really, you know, it’s just that I’m ill,” I continued.

“I know, I know,” she repeated.

“Everyone says so,” I added, sensing rare sympathy from her. “It’s generally agreed”.

“I know,” she said again.

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.

“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.”

“I know,” she said wearily. “I know.”

“But things are definitely going to change”.

“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.

--------------

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.

“It’s not,” she trilled camply, in the manner of a 1970s TV show puppet, “in my nature 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 hotel, I’m afraid. I banged and banged on the door, but you might have been dead for all I knew”.

“What?!” I replied, sitting bolt upright, desperately trying to make sense of my surroundings.

“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”.

I quickly scanned the room in a vain attempt to make sense of the situation. We had set the

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.

“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.”

“Where did she go?!” I demanded forcefully. I received a baleful glare.

“Oh, she’s paid, if that’s all you’re worried about. Don’t fret about that.”

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.

“Where’s she gone?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

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.

“What is this?” I asked, the panic bubbling to my head, “Where is she? What happened?!”

“What happened,” replied the lady, “is what always happens. Men like you happened to her. That’s all there is to it, dear. There’s no big mystery. Unfortunately.”

“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”.

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.

“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!”

“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 tablets, let me tell you that”.

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.

“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”.

She awaited a response from me, something as little as a facial expression, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction.

“I mean, a landscape painter,” she scoffed. “I said to him, ‘Jerry, people have cameras nowadays. Cameras and good photographers. Nobody needs good landscape paintings, never mind yours.’ Wouldn’t have it though, would he?”

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.

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.

I looked up and down the street for possible signs of where Anna might have gone to. I was

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.

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”.

“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.

“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.”

“Houses disappear, but streets don’t,” I said, smugly justifying my purchase.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Where are you looking to get to?” asked the driver, an olive skinned man with cropped hair and a matey expression.

“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”.

He regarded me with an amused face.

“How old’s that map you’re looking at?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Early eighties, I guess.”

“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.

“No,” I replied.

“A shame. You see, I use one of these”. He pulled out a small black box with a shimmering flat monitor screen.

“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.

I held my atlas up weakly.

“This is a big atlas, though,” I said. “It covers the whole area! And it was cheap.”

The man laughed at me piteously.

“Well this,” he said, holding the black box up again, “is the whole bloody country, and it fits in my hand!”

I regarded him silently.

“You need a lift back somewhere?” he asked. “Hop in if you want”.

“No,” I replied. “I’ll be fine. I came out for a walk, and I suppose I should carry on having one”.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Good luck!” then pushed his foot down aggressively on the accelerator and skidded away noisily.

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.

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.

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.

A Dog On Its Hind Legs

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?

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.

“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.

“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”.

“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!”

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

I told Claire about this incident the next morning.

“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.”

“He could have jumped up and switched them on,” I answered, but she just told me to stop being “silly”.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

“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”.

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.

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.

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.

Mortimer Ribbons

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.

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...

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.

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 did 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.

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).

"Well, you know who would be a shoe-in for that kind of bill," I said. "Mort, obviously."
He looked at me slightly taken aback.
"Dave," he said. "Mort's dead. He passed away some time ago."

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

"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".

At least, not in this life. Not in this life.

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.

Leave The Capital

"The tables covered in beer
Showbiz whines, minute detail
Hand on the shoulder in Leicester Square
It's vaudeville pub back room dusty pictures of
White frocked girls and music teachers
The beds too clean
Water's poisonous for the system

And you know in your brain
Leave the capitol!
Exit this Roman Shell!
Then you know you must leave the capitol

Straight home, straight home, straight home
One room, one room".

The Fall - "Leave The Capitol".

(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). 

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.

(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".

"You don't, though," I said. "This isn't London".

"Well... it is and it isn't", he replied). 

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 you can read the final results here (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?

1. The Cost Of Living

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.

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").

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).

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".

2. The Focus Is Moving Away From London

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. As the Government's drive for increasing artistic funding outside London gains ground, and more minor arts organisations in other areas up their game, this is going to become a more common story. And about time too.

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. 

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).

3. The Supportive Environment

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

4. You're Not Wanted Here

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". 

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.

This isn't something that's about to happen or might happen in the future, contrary to what you might read in the press - it's the state London is in right now. 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. 

(These views are entirely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone else at all. Sometimes that's just the way it goes.)

20 Years of Poetry Unplugged

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.

"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?"

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.

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.

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.

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 night out, not a test pad for new poetry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm glad it's twenty. Even if that makes me feel incredibly fucking old.