...
Well not so much kill me as
make sure I never lived
which is pretty serious
And me I’m
taking it personally
…
I’ve never had any relationship with proper poetry
That world of books
those bleak shelves of flat oblongs
Its always seemed such an appealing world
With such unimpressive and unappealing people
That I couldn’t be bothered
…
I mean
no-one does anything
Hardly anyone makes a living from it like, say,
I do from performance poetry
Its all teaching and grants and editorships and prizes
Given each other by a insidiously incestuous bunch of mates
The sales are abject
Embarrassingly feeble for a medium which,
because of its shortness
should be perfect for this age
if only it would free itself from the
aesthetic and professional
prisons of the past
the archaic forms
the do’s and don’ts
the ivory towers
the eternal bunch of self-serving mates
the mouldering puny establishment
…
A gang of public-school types
A cliquing claque all convinced they’ve got the ball
They are the ball
Yet all they do is run off and sit in a
shadowed corner being very
pleased with themselves that
They’ve got the ball
They are the ball
Though it’s a battered and ragged ball
Lacking the air and roundness
The bounce
That makes any functioning ball a, well, a ball
…
While performance poetry is a considerably more dynamic medium
Its always right here right now
Where, if you throw yourself at it
And always believe you have much more to learn,
Doable
Liveable
…
But I can think of a more human reason why I’ve never wanted anything to do with it
It tried to kill my Dad
Cos my Dad spent the war in
His Dad was a policeman and air-raid warden
And
German bombs killed people in my Dad’s very street
While he was there
Which is close
…
And a few years before that
John bloody Betjeman wrote that poem
Come friendly bombs and fall on
And you know what?
They did
So Betjeman
And therefore poetry
[he was laureate at one stage]
Tried to bomb me into non-existence
…
Maybe the Germans heard him
Maybe he put
I doubt it, but
Whatever, he did his best to get it bombed and me
I’m taking it personally
Mind you
I’ve always quite liked Betjeman
The Cockney Amorist in particular
He was what he was
And I also like the fact he liked and admired the modernists
And got what they were trying to do
But it wasn’t what he did
Or wanted to do
So he kept getting better at what he did best
…
…
I got put me off the whole Arts Professional milieu forever
A horrible experience at an
Arts Council live literature meet
in
Come to think of it, it rather blew off track my enthusiasm for performance poetry for a while
…
Those ghastly arts professionals who didn’t know
Who didn’t care that they didn’t know
Why was I expending so much energy to get into a world at least in part inhabited by those horrible people?
The small-minds and the snobs and their elevated nostrils?
Why?
Suddenly I
didn’t know the answer
…
I’d been running a really rather good poetry cabaret weekly in
Busting a gut, burning my head, fraying my nerve-ends and generally having a slightly wonky good time
Plus, I was the only person capable of running a poetry cabaret in
The only successful one in decades
Apples and Snakes, the estab, had just abjectly, laughably failed
and yet a number of those careerist arts professionals
their nostrils in the air
wouldn’t even talk to me
…
and yet their only function that I could see was to receive pay cheques
so other arts professionals could persuade themselves they were doing something
and receive pay cheques themselves
…
One of them was so self-important she even refused to read my press pack
Full of more juicy press quotes than many established poets and performance poets have ever had
And she refused…
I was some street-level schmuck and she was in the rarefied air of the litfests
…
the funding people, arts council, were far less awful, they would at least listen
it was their job to
and they did
And I returned to
Thinking, this is the world I’m supposedly moving in to and
Its hideous
I want none of it
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