About Time

After you remember the

missing pieces of a 2001

alcohol blackout, and

ring your friends to

apologise, know this –

there are other bits

missing up the hoover too,

bagpiping a dischordant dirge of

protest at every attempt to

spring clean your life.

So write “sorry” on the banners

in bold, definite letters,

cover every window in

explanations, and replace the

feathers in your pillows

with chicken necks. 

Hang on, let no light in,

and sleep little –

get practice in for

whatever else will

inevitably transpire

when you’ve decided

you can live with yourself.

Poetry Mongrels

As I've said many times before - to the extent where I'm sure it gets boring - at heart, I'm a spoken word/ performance poetry purist.  I'm never happier than when I'm watching one poet live on stage delivering a brace of strong and topically varied material to an audience - one spotlight, one mic, one voice, lots of ideas.

A lot has changed in the last few years as people try to market poetry in new ways to a larger audience, and tight themes and concepts for shows are beginning to become more prominent than they once were.  When Luke Wright and his cohorts launched "Aisle 16" many years ago and delivered a live poetry show mocked up to look like a business motivational workshop, it seemed like a peculiar but brilliantly staged anomaly, a gimmick which would never be expanded upon by anyone else.  And indeed, for a time conceptual poetry shows remained unusual occurrences, but for the last two or three years it's become impossible to head up towards any festival with spoken word content without coming across shows based on Big Themes.  Or small themes.  Everything from left-leaning politics to video games has played a role (and I was recently treated to two shows catering for each of those topics courtesy of  scratch performances from both Niall O'Sullivan and Dan Simpson at the Poetry Cafe some months ago).

It has to be said that a few of these shows have been excellent.  Some, on the other hand, have felt like mediocre stand-up routines with bits of poetry uncomfortably stapled on.  The shows that don't work for me are the ones with long confessional shaggy-dog stories weaving their way around what is essentially a very short poetry set, which under ordinary circumstances might be done and dusted in fifteen minutes.  Where is the meat, I find myself asking?  Where's the poetry I actually paid my ticket money for?  I can see that they do a lot to pull in the poetry-curious and the floating voters, but for a traditional, hardcore poetry punter like me (and indeed comedy lover) they often feel a bit insubstantial, neither fish nor fowl.  On top of that, there are few things more embarrassing than poets who suddenly decide overnight they can have a crack at comedy, just, y'know, because it seems straightforward enough.  After all, it's a lower artform, isn't it?  (No it's not).

So then, take note. A recent example of amazing content came courtesy of Richard Tyrone Jones's "Big Heart" radio show. I've already written about his stage show here, and it came as little surprise to me that BBC Radio 4 have snapped it up and turned it into a poetry sit-com.  It's an absolute treat, taking all the best elements of the theatre experience and sharpening them into something which is immediately both more amusing and moving.  Richard also has comedy experience to spare having spent time in Footlights and the stand-up circuit long before his stint on the poetry circuit took off, so has a more keenly tuned sense of comic delivery, character writing and absurdism than most poets.

The show is obviously necessarily dark due to the topic of his heart failure being the central theme, but like some warped, introspective, ambient soundtracked version of long-forgotten eighties sit-com "Only When I Laugh" crossed with "Seinfeld", it uses the tragedy to pull in a cast of self-obsessed eccentrics and oddballs.  Paul Birtill stars as himself, dropping in to dourly read poems about death and smoke cigarettes ("It could be worse - imagine a world where the only way to die is to be kicked to death").  Jacob, his publisher and lawyer, sniffs the rare opportunity for poetry money out of his sudden demise.  And between all this are some genuinely moving, well-written poems, representing the quiet introspective moments behind the natural comedy chaos that always occurs during moments of tragedy.  If the first episode had any flaws at all, it was that (like most sit-coms of any ilk) the show took a little while to establish itself.  Once there, however, it became a peculiar piece of work with an atmosphere not much like anything else on air at the moment, either on television or radio.  It's on every Sunday evening, and you should listen.

(this blog entry continues after the photo)

Also gaining ground in the last year or so has been Poetronica, a combination of poetry and electronic dance music.  Scroobius Pip set the ball rolling here when "Thou Shalt Always Kill" was released many moons ago, and other ambitious poets have followed his lead and begun to set their words to music to varied results.

Spoken word stalwart Joshua Idehan leads Benin City lyrically and vocally, but what their debut album "Fires in the Park" isn't is Poetronica.  In fact, it's pretty difficult to decide what it is.  Brassy reggae sounds cut through bleak, wounded observations on failed relationships and urban scenes, while dubstep beats and jazzy riffs also emerge to join the party.  The album sounds like wandering through a backstreet in East London late on a summer night, listening to the sounds emerging from open windows - it sounds more genuinely cross-fertilised and truly urban than most music that dares to give itself that title.

What's staggering (and against all the odds) is the way it hangs together as a whole, and the atmosphere it evokes.  Frequently tugging in two directions emotionally, sounding simultaneously triumphant, defiant and despondent, Joshua's introspective lyrics combine with sunshine riffs to create something which creates mixed moods in the listener closer to Northern Soul than anything I've heard in years.  The downbeat "Baby" is, in particular, a masterpiece of both subtlety and bold strokes, pulling out of the gentle observations about a cracked relationship and morphing into something epic-sounding.  On occasion the end results echo Bristol trip-hop (and even early pioneers Bark Psychosis) but for the most part the album sounds like nothing so much as itself, yet still somehow accessible and wonderful.  If it ends up on any lists of the best albums of 2013, don't be remotely surprised.

Both these projects dropped in the last month, and have gone a long way towards proving that despite my initial doubts about poets trying to combine their art with other forms, sometimes the end results can be a lot better than a compromise and actually become wonderful mongrels, and may genuinely be our best hope at maintaining the growing interest in poetry.  If further results of this quality emerge, I'll be incredibly happy and may have to tear up my poetry purist membership card.  Despite having very little in common otherwise, both of these efforts, in very different respects, hint at possible ways forward and manage to be unique in a way that other new challengers in both broadcasting and music are usually failing to do. 

Verb Circus

Hello. Time for another plug. But you all care, I know you do.

I'll be appearing at "Verb Circus" at 2pm this coming Sunday 7th July, performing on the same bill as Fran Lock, Steev Burgess, Pauline Sewards, Jack Cooper and Gary from Leeds (he of "The Alarmist" fame).  It's £2 entry in a large tent in Camley Street Natural Park in King's Cross, right on the banks of the Regents Canal.  I promise not to disturb the Reed Warblers.

The entrance fee goes towards a fund for the upkeep of the park, so if you want a peaceful Sunday afternoon right in the heart of London, please drop by.  I'll be happy to see you.

If you do Facebook, the event link is here.  If you don't, you'll just have to scribble the details down in your diary.  

Night Thoughts Of The Solo Sleeper

(A trip down memory lane here.  This was one of the earliest pieces I wrote which purely had 'performance' rather than page in mind, and stayed in the set for many years afterwards before I decided to retire it off.  

The structure of it was always deemed to be odd and attracted negative comments from some audience members, so I kept it in as an act of personal faith rather than anything else. The idea behind the delivery was to gradually speed it up to almost - but not quite - an incomprehensible pace for the found pieces of material in the middle as a manic peak, then tail off again around stanza 10.  Given that the found segments consisted of newspaper articles and headlines, the concept was always that you should just accept the flashes of information without worrying hugely about what they were, in the same manner that blips of half-heard or half-seen adverts would penetrate your subconscious.  

It was disliked by some for that very reason, with one person - who happened to be an English Teacher, as she was only too fond of reminding me twice - telling me "Poems should never be delivered in that way".  Them's the rules, apparently.  Even though they aren't.  Performance poets like Miles Champion and Mike Diss were deliberately delivering work in this way for most of the eighties and the nineties, so the idea that you can't do this onstage is a relatively recent one now that concerns about the accessibility of live performances have started to move to the top of people's agendas. Eventually those concerns will ebb away again, 'name' stage poets will get more experimental with their work in either this way or other ways, and as to whether I'll start performing this again, no, it's unlikely.  It feels too much like something a man in his mid-twenties would write.  But here it is again anyway).

1.

and then it all comes back to me,

when I walk through

damp busy streets

and the puddles ripple

with the interruption of passing heels,

and the image of two strangers

breaks totally,

a shimmer of street lights

zagged in a liquid storm.

A year feels inaccurate.

It feels like yesterday

you slammed the door.

2.

and he realised he

might become one of the

lost men who all date

teenage girls and dream of

having a beautiful woman

who timidly thinks she’s ugly.

She hides shaking in wardrobes

while they fantasise about

her shape, and keep onlookers

from their door.

All photographers flashes

will bleach out

the negative delusions,

she’ll realise the truth,

the last he’ll see of her

before she leaves is

her shadow on the wall,

caught in one final

global media blink.

3.

and she remembers

those inebriated nights

where it didn’t matter.

Nails in her feet

couldn’t be felt then.

She’d touch them on the bare

floorboards heading to her room

staggering on his arm,

but they wouldn’t hurt.

Nor would he.

4.

and did she have any

“date me” trousers left to wear?

5.

“and is anyone really shocked by

celebrities who put their fingers

down their throats in bar toilets

anymore?  I mean, I do it, all

my friends do it, it’s the

secret of having a great time,

pulling a man and

looking grrreat”.

6.

and the smell of money

produces a sensation of a

free fall through zeroes,

in large numbers

preceded by a positive digit

their hollow centre is

empty for endless possibilities.

Everybody has a price.

7.

a family home can be

yours for only #300,000

8.

are you gorgeous?

Do you live in London?

Are you busy, single and successful?

The gorgeous club is

looking for people,

#200, meal included, meet

other gorgeous people,

and the good news is if you’re seriously

thinking about replying

to this ad, psychological

statistics prove that

chances are you already qualify!

9.

he read that the only common

popular fantasy between men and

women was thinking about sex with

complete strangers they see on trains.

Carriages are full of people

dreaming of rocking in

another motion, but

fearful of talking to a soul,

hating unknown members of

their own sex who

block the way.

10.

and we said goodbye,

but we didn’t mean it.

It exists in mind

like a fog of episodes of a

Dudley Moore light romantic

comedy, shot in grainy

Eastmancolor rather than Technicolour.

We carried on rewinding and

playing back again

for another year, on and off.

We forgot the unexpected fight scenes.

We had poor memories

for the not-so-homely dialogue.

The picture got even worse.

The tape snapped.

The only copy I’ve got left

exists in my head.

I’ve wiped lots of it on purpose.

I never learn.

I wonder where you are now.

11.

and you said there was no

romantic poetry left.

Capitalism Kills Love - Saturday 8th June

Hello. Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the complete lack of updates on this blog recently - it's not that I don't have work or ideas to share, it's more that I just completely lost track of time and didn't realise that May came and went without me uttering one single word. Sorry. I'd love to say it won't happen again, but it probably will at some point.

In lieu of a proper update as such, you should be aware that I'll be participating in the Morning Star/ Well Versed event "Capitalism Kills Love" as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.  I'll be working in a DJ'ing capacity rather than a reading/ performing one along with Jody Porter (aka John the Revelator) but also on the bill will be Andy Meinke, Ian Parks, Influx Press, Tim Wells, Chip Grim, Joe Glenton, Kayo Chingonyi, Amy Acre, Abi Palmer, Matthew Hedley Stoppard, Emlyn Hugill, Rachael Allen, Chimene Suleyman and Sophia Blackwell.

The event will be taking place at the Mascara Bar in Stoke Newington at 72 Stamford Hill, London N16 6XS from 8:30pm on, but you should also be aware that audience members are also likely to be present to watch Phil Jupitus (Aka Porky The Poet) and Tim Wells do longer sets from 6pm at the very same venue.  This event has been organised in order to benefit Freedom Books following the recent arson attack on their store.

And that's not all... "Capitalism Kills Love" also offers a full line-up on Friday 7th June as well, so if you want you can make it along to both events.

Facebook information on the Morning Star event can be found here, whereas more info on the Freedom Books extravanganza can be found here.  If you can make both, rest assured I'll be hanging around somewhere in the audience or busy on the decks.  See you then.