NOT ENOUGH
Hours in the day to think in
Days in the week
Days in the month
Weeks in the year
Not enough time to think in
...
Monday, 1 March 2010
not enough
...
Sunday, 28 February 2010
POETRY TRIED TO KILL ME...
...
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
Saturday, 27 February 2010
ungood morn
A morning gone so ungood
...
We still have colds
Worse than yesterday
Which is annoying after 10 days
Plus the travel shop has disappeared
And the one i found after too much walking in the hot sun
Was first a pain-in-the-butt rip-off joint
And second had a powercut so have to go back for ticket
And third i cannot work out if we need US dollars to buy our Nepalese visas at the border
Every version differs
Then the bookshop we pilgrimmed too was crap
...
All in all, a morning gone so ungood i hesitate to sit in front of this screen
Because it seems too likely a
large fist will burst out of it and wallop me on the nose
...
You know that Bob Dylan line?
This telephone was ringing
It just about blew my mind
When i picked it up and said hello
This foot came through the line
...
That’s Bob Dylans 115th dream
My favourite Bob Dylan song
And the origin of much performance poetry
Johnny Clarke must know it very well
On the other hand
Lyrically its fairly Chuck Berry
Who i reckon is the chief origin of Bob Dylan’s verbal humour
Subterranean Homesick blues is Too Much Monkey Business on amphetamines
And Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan are where i start...
...
In the mean time i’m going back to a darkened room to lie on the bed so nothing bad can happen beyond the demise of the British Empire in The Last 1000 Days Of The British Empire
Which is OK, in fact good
Friday, 26 February 2010
H&S
...
I wonder
do Health and Safety inspectors ever
come on holiday to India?
do they?
or is it one of the worst mistakes they could possibly
possibly make?…
would they have a rapidly concatenating
personal crisis
culminating in a
nervous breakdown?
...
Where do they for a holiday?
Zurich?
Singapore?
Copenhagen?
...
...
varanasi still
i love this place
alot
boats on the river watching the daily puja ceremony just after
morning rooftop coffee before the river and the low sun
strolls up the ghats
loads of work to do
so much i look forward to going to bed so i can get back into it
aaaah bliss
what a place?
...
Thursday, 25 February 2010
ONE MAN RIOT
...
I have a script
I have a show
Its unlike anything i’ve done before
Firstly, its a story
so its storytelling, which is new to me
And also, its about me
...
I thought i’d be doing a show of ten or so new performance poems
and i have enough i like at this stage for
a show i like a lot
to be well doable come June
But i’ve kept coming back
And coming back
And coming back
To a thing i wrote five years ago in France,
Dec/ Jan 04/05
About something that happened to me in 1990 at the Poll Tax Riot
And its a story, a ghost story in fact
So i have to learn some new skills
Storytelling
Which is a different ballgame to performance poetry
Though less technically demanding than any show i’ve done before
[unless it gets hyper-theatrical, which it might]
But which is story led
When everything i’ve ever done has been writing led
And its now Late Feb
Meaning i have 14 weeks to get it right
To get more gags in
And work out the physicality
Will premiere it in Edinburgh in late May
And 14 weeks is a long time
Long enough to get consummate at new-ish skills
To come up with a number of decent gags
And easily enough to iron out the many kinks in the tale
If i work hard enough
very hard
hundreds and hundreds of hours hard
...
Plus its about me
When very little i’ve done has been about me
Some have been about a kind of caricatured me
But nothing like so personal
…
Back in Sept I showed it to TJ Dawe
and Jonno Katz
and Rob Gee
And they all said, you gotta do it
So here we go
My only regret is that, if I do a show next year of performance poems
It will have been a way too long, 4 years since I did a show of new pieces
…
The romping success in 2008 was one monster poem about shopping
Biggest show on the whole fringe tour
2009 was my misguided Greatest Hits show
So, with a story this year, I don’t do a show of new poems till 2011
And, more than anything else, I am a performance poet
And 4 years is a long time
…
Whatever, that’s it
This is it
The new show
ONE MAN RIOT
Here we go...
...
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