I need some fine words and you need to be nicer

Show at the Foundry

2008-01-02T17:27:00.000Z

Towards the end of 2007, we transported the site of poetic practice from the page to the basement of a pub, moving impressively through group formations, bad dancing, horoscope recitals, costume changes, cascades of pages on the floor and a fair bit of random shouting. You might say meaning billowed up in waves, crashed and dribbled about, words were slipped on and grasped at, randomness was clung to in hopeless embraces. You might say the world at large was greeted with bafflement, childish imitation, gushing despair and perverse, willful adulation. You might say guiness and vodka and beer were drunk. It all hung together beautifully, at any rate, and we even came up with a performance souvenir: a fanzine called 'Wet ink'. Whatdowetink? We tink it went well?

Sophie Robinson Talk at Birkbeck

2007-11-20T13:42:00.000Z

Sophie Robinson's on-line work understands its medium really well. It was strange to have it presented to us in a lecture format: her website seemed like quite a personal realm. Here are my notes from the talk:

Sean Bonney Talk at Birkbeck

2007-11-06T18:11:00.000Z

Sean Bonney was giving a talk at Birkbeck the other day, on his Baudelaire translations, for which he uses a (particularly old and knackered, he said) typewriter as an artistic tool, or perhaps a weapon against 'the forces of banality and their attendant cleanliness' as he put it. He said he considers these translations 'by and large to be my poems', but claimed they were anything but confessional, because in an era when torture is making a come-back, I think he said, or something along those lines, 'no one should think it's a good thing to confess'.

I wondered if only someone who didn't feel mentally or emotionally tortured would say that, or would rock about in his or her seat quite so vigorously as Bonney, and I doodled him reading:

Sucking on Kenneth Goldsmith's words

2007-10-26T23:36:00.000Z

Meeting strangers can be interesting, but it can also provoke social anxiety. So it was nice to meet Kenneth Goldsmith for the first time last night, having already read a word-for-word account of his daily speech habits ('Soliloquy') and a sinew-by-sinew narration of his every bodily function ('Fidget'). If at any point I felt too far at ease in his company however, I was able to reflect on the knowledge that he has been named the James Joyce of the 21st century.

For someone mad enough to document the ins and outs of his existence for his readership (or his 'thinkership', as it was described) and genius enough to be compared to Joyce, Kenny G is a really friendly man. Well he is a radio DJ; and he has the soundbites to boot. We were gathered in the hallowed halls of the British Library to watch a new film about him, Sucking on Words. Some such 'suckable' words he gave us included the following, about his own books: 'I fall asleep when I proof read the things, but I love the fact that they exist'. And a battle-cry for conceptual writers: 'We don't need the new sentence, the old sentence reformed is good enough.'

He also likes hats. And he presumably likes Caroline Bergvall, who was there too, and who is also very friendly. We sat outside a pub, and we were all serenaded by some crazy X-Factor-reject-human-juke-box. He was very friendly as well. Perhaps he's the James Joyce of the 21st century, because I'm more inclined to think Kenneth Goldsmith is the literary Marcel Duchamp. Well anyway, if he'd like to claim either of those elusive epithets, good because they must be long overdue somebody or other.

The Alter Egos of Jow Lindsay and Julian Fox

2007-10-17T09:08:00.000Z

I saw Jow Lindsay at the Veer Books readings that took place at the Small Publishers Fair last weekend, though his was less a reading, more a deranged character solo; a kind of Yosemite Sam gone Ginsberg, high fiving and whooping his way through a love poem LOUDLY dedicated to someone sitting in the audience. I couldn't work out if his stuff is devised as pure performance or if he is trying to reproduce his writing style using his whole body, and the poem got a bit lost in the excitement of it all, but I'd definitely like to see him and his alter ego again.

On the other side of the coin, and the other side of town, I saw a 'scratch' performance of a piece that Julian Fox is working on with Patrizia Paolina. Fox is apparently always himself, as he showed when playing different characters, each one 'written' by the last. Donning different wigs without so much as a nod or a wink towards a different speech pattern or a way of gesturing specific to another character, he showed us that everyone is kind of the same. Patrizia Paolina is kind of the same as Julian Fox, for example, just more prone to swearing and talking in different languages. The moments they interacted, such as the comtemporary dance between a boring designer and his new wife that revealed the meaninglessness of their existence, and the death song duet for accordian and trumpet that revealed, well, the meaningless of their existence, those moments were thoroughly sublime.

Caroline Bergvall at Openned last night

2007-10-04T12:24:00.000Z

Openned is a group that among other things 'seeks to create flexible spaces for poetry and poetic practitioners by inviting less established and more established writers to read together'. It does this by hosting evenings in the bowels of the Foundry in Old Street. Take a wrong turn and you might walk into the middle of somebody's sprawling sculptural plaster work, still in progress; retrace your steps and you will find yourself surrounded by mildly psychedelic canvases in a long, low-lit basement room, suitably scruffy and bohemian, but not so far away from the real world that we can't hear what sounds like a Lauryn Hill retrospective booming from the speakers in the upstairs bar. Jerome Rothenberg seemed quite at home there, stroking his beard and delighting in the sound of his vowels.

Someone with a more diasporic relationship to her diphthongs was the French-Norwegian Anglophone, Caroline Bergvall (below). Brilliantly, she had found in the Canterbury tales the exact point in time where the sound of the English language most resembled her own accent. Her joyful reworking of Chaucer, in which she grouped together all his food references, sparkled off her tongue and allowed her to confidently move into a mix of Chaucerian and her own English for her second reading.

It was when Bergvall was commissioned to write a piece in Norwegian for the online poetry journal Nypoesi that she really came up against her linguistic anxieties, and in doing so created a very moving piece, Cropper.

I want my John Ashbery

2007-09-21T13:31:00.000Z

The global pop brand MTV have appointed, I can hardly believe this, a poet laureate for their student channel , mtvU. And it's John Ashbery. How this came about I can only imagine. It's perfect, of course. At its best, MTV borders on the avant-garde with its surreal animated indents and its zeitgeisty programming, and Ashbery once wrote a pastoral sestina based around characters from Popeye. What seems difficult to comprehend is that, right at the heart of a culture increasingly in thrall to the rapidly assimilated and easy to swallow, a place has been found for one of the most academic and inscrutable living poets, in some ways the US version of Geoffrey Hill.

'He's among the most beloved and celebrated poets of our time. Now he's the poet laureate on mtvU,' boasts the homepage of the website. Will this mean anything to anyone? Are they suggesting that Ashbery has reached the pinnacle of his career, that being poet-in-residence on MTV is tantamount to winning the Nobel prize for literature? I can't help but disagree. It's far more exciting than that.

Philip Larkin's biography

2007-08-30T09:21:00.000Z

I'm reading Andrew Motion's 500 page biography of Philip Larkin, which might sound like the most boring prospect imaginable, but it's oddly compulsive. Almost straight away we are given a strong sense of a Larkin quite different from received notions, and nearly loveable. His letter-writing style is disarmingly passionate, more demonic than demotic, yet quite funny, like an alcoholic Adrian Mole, and it is liberally punctuated with words such as 'cunting'.

We never quite shake our preconceptions about the old goat, however, which means that some passages are far more shocking then they would appear in other life stories. Did Motion invent the secret lesbian porn novels that Larkin wrote in his early twenties? He shamelessly picks out all the naughty bits for our pleasure.

It is interesting to get a broader picture of a writer and his influences, pints of lager aside. His heroes are all 'Celtic' or English, all men, relatively modern, each one dabbing him in another direction, from Auden to Thomas, from Thomas to Yeats, until he finally shores up with Hardy.

I'm already about a third of the way through. It's encouraging that he is lost and depressed and working in a shitty job, and ego-centric and self-loathing and all the rest of it. Maybe he'll be one of my heroes. Sobering thought.

The Morning Paper

2007-08-16T09:10:00.000Z

I wished for a monogrammed handkerchief
a parasol and a big dress. I wished
I had seen Tennessee for the first time
without the spaces. Without the clearings.
Anywhere swept around is a theme park.
Space is a theme park. It is the shape of
a mold of the earth and the moon because
we've landed on the moon. If we pretend
to leave it all behind us and ignore
park rangers, police search operations,
we would have no surfaces for breakfast
or surfaces for dusting or sweeping.
Unless we took a broom to the forest
or a knife. These animals are hoodlums.

Wallace Stevens

2007-08-11T18:06:00.002Z

I've been looking at Wallace Stevens poems. I would like to respond to this one, as it features Tennessee:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The Hunt

2007-07-23T13:47:00.000Z

We have our feed, our carcass. We were strong
a billion hunts back, we were hard won,
now we are stronger than gods, every bulk
of grocery is a bludgeoned mammoth.
We barely move a limb to fill a bag.
Slam down the trunk door. The car is full.
There is no room for this one. We strap it
(buck naked) to the roof-rack. We're all set.
She stares at the never-changing blue sky,
her eyes tear-red, her lungs dry and weary,
her spine pressed on painted metal, her back
thrums with the bass of the engine, echoes
of her vain screaming trail the exhaust pipe.
We drag her past yet another Wal Mart.

Shenandoah Valley

2007-07-13T15:22:00.000Z

I never know what to do with a view.
For some it's poetry or abstract art,
for me it's a view. I try and summon
a sense of the wonder of landscape.
Nope. There is a carpet of trees. I jump
and they muzzle me, give, and release me,
like the loop of a high dive rewound,
I rebound, land lightly on my feet again.
They are broccoli, but that's not allowed:
where is the grandeur in vegetables?
(In Golden Door, the peasants are fooled
by the promise of collosal onions.)
Then: the sound of a leaf,
___________________a billion more,
and there the smallest sound I ever saw.

Greetings

2007-07-11T20:48:00.000Z

"People here, they yell all hysterical
-like, like a zombie at the coroner's.
Y'all look like the circus, you foreigners.
To pledge allegiance to America
snap a graham cracker. Sharpen a stick.
Elect a marshmallow. Inaugurate
until it's bubbling ugly. Squish it.
Use Hershey's chocolate. You will be sick.
Just kidding. Y'all might want to leave this town.
To do this, get a tattoo. Drive around.
Grab a beer. Go to the yard with the flag.
Lie down, light a cigarette, take a drag,
and greet the stars as they appear. One, two...
Fifty-one, fifty-two... White upon blue"

The Poems of Philip Ridley, "Still That Boy"

2007-05-18T09:44:00.000Z

Last night, the sweatbox studio space in the Soho Theatre hosted a reprise of Philip Ridley's 20-year-old poem cycle 'Love Songs for Extinct Creatures'. Ridley is a hotly corporeal presence, a subaqueus undulation of smooth pink life, if you will, emerging at once in camp flourishes and then in violent convulsions. One of the most repeated images in his 'Love Songs' was the cocoon, and the cycle itself revealed a Russian doll of cocoons, repeatedly pushing forward a renewed Ridley in the playful guise of another one of his creatures, none of them really extinct, but each pulsating with perversion and sensuality.

Mr Philip Ridley

Love, for Ridley twenty years ago as much as today (he announced in the final poem he is 'still that same boy') is brutal and beautiful, callous and hopeless, multicoloured and meaningless. The 'singer' of the songs doesn't want his beloved to leave him anything in rememberance of their affair, only 'a bottle of smoke' so he may 'choke' on it. Almost every aspect of a relationship is re-imagined as a chain of animalistic and fetishistic images. The foolishness of love and trying to encapsulate love is screamed from the rooftops in Ridley's coltish rhymes and fast metres, hammered home with his no-bullshit humour.

This performance, first devised while he was a student at Saint Martin's College of Art, must have been the calling card that launched Ridley's polymath talents into the world, and it now serves him and the Soho Theatre very nicely as a supporting piece and advertisement for his new play. His storebank of images is as surprising and delightful as his 'proper poet' contempories Carol Ann Duffy and Selima Hill, but Ridley is unconfined to the page and to the rules of the page: at times his wordplay skims the register of the angst-ridden adolescent or hopeless romantic. His cheekiness belies a true artist at work, sweating humanity; like the anxious speaker of one of his poems, whose love has him sewed up at every orifice, I hope Philip Ridley never comes apart at the seams.

Marie Lloyd and The Art of Suggestion

2007-05-11T11:31:00.000Z

I watched a TV film about Marie Lloyd the other night(see BBC web page). There were many elements to Lloyd's performance: costume, character, having a knees-up; but it was the lyrics that she had to defend, at risk of being banned or regarded as lewd.

In defending her act, she revealed the power of performance in conveying language. Singing the songs from her routine with an entirely 'innocent' delivery let her off the hook with the Vigilance Committee by proving there was nothing vulgar about the phrases themselves. The story goes that she then performed the supposedly charming and respectable drawing room ballad 'Come into the Garden Maude' 'with such a wealth of gesture that it became quite obscene' (see website about 'The English Music Hall').

Marie Lloyd

I loved watching Jessie Wallace as Marie singing 'My Old Man'; I found it genuinely amusing, the 'old cock linnet' and all...

'We had to move away, 'cos the rent we couldn't pay,
The moving van came round just after dark;
There was me and my old man, shoving things inside the van,
Which we'd often done before, let me remark.
We packed all that could be packed in the van and that's a fact;
And we got inside all we could get inside,
Then we packed all we could pack on the tailboard at the back,
Till there wasn't any room for me to ride.

My old man said, "Follow the van, don't dilly dally on the way!"
Off went the cart with the home packed in it,
I walked behind with me old cock linnet.
But I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,
Lost the van and don't know where to roam.
I stopped on the way to have the old half-quartern,
And I can't find my way home.'

From Taylor Mac to Ruth Padel, and The Last Day of Smoking

2007-05-04T08:05:00.000Z

Last night we danced around the maypole with TAYLOR MAC, a vision in green glittery lips, rags, raffia and rubber bunting. On his website he describes himself as 'a theater artist working in the genre of pastiche', and his Gil Scot Heron re-working 'The Revolution Will Not be Masculinised' shows exactly what kind of pastiche this is: sweetly political, post-trans-everything and out of this world. Sometimes he seems like Guthrie or Ginsberg, when he whips out his ukelele it's like flying monkeys have whisked an NYC cabaret George Formby through the Emerald city, his falsetto is part beautiful, part venemous cat, and he hits all the right notes of grotesque sex humour for the Royal Vauxhall crowd. John Cameron Mitchell has posted a video on his website here; Taylor Mac deserves to be bigger than Hedwig.

Taylor Mac

On Monday I presented LAST DAY OF SMOKING, in the Curzon Soho cinema. I get the impression that it was a succesful performance. I would sum it up like this: Zillakiller prowls behind the bar in whiteface on the cinema's last day of smoking, repeating in a cod-american accent various rhythmic phrases: 'Gedda loada me', 'You gat the piano ready?', 'Of all the bars in all the bars...' and, most relentlessly, 'I wanna cigarette'. Thommy Balloon, near-dead, is a human ashtray, and other people burst his balloons with their cigarettes. Frustration levels rise, people are more interested in trying to meet their barman's request for a cigarette than buying drinks from his mute assistant, until Zillakiller carries Thommy Balloon off, accompanied by the last bars of a jazz piano number.

RUTH PADEL needs no such spectacle. We saw her in the Poetry Cafe the other day, performing in front of a wobbly microphone, coming on after several wobbly open-mic slots (including one bloke who excrutiatingly claimed that with his painful witterings he had invented a 'new poetical form'). After our compere launched her with an explosion of accolades, Padel started weaving her latest lenghty, unfinished poem, possibly called 'In Christendom'. Using words like jewels, and foreign dialect as a way of compressing images with glittering novelty, Padel seemed able to negotiate botany, astronomy, politics and religion with the lightest, most musical of poetic phrasing. These were big, serious poems though, and every time she insisted the next one would be light-hearted, we were sent on another head-spin.

The 1990s: Era of Slam

2007-04-19T11:47:00.000Z

'You have commanded attention... now what do you do with it?'

I have just watched Slamnation, an entertaining documentary about the 1996 national Slam contest in the US. Slam poetry originated in punk-era America from the idea of applying the format of a boxing match to poetry performance. While its Boston founder Marc Smith was trying to break the relationship between the 'literary' poet and the reverent audience member, in San Fransisco Gary Glazner was presenting the poetry bouts as performance art, bringing the boxing aesthetic to the fore and revealing the competitive element as absurdist.

"Unbeknown to Marc it was a very Cagian way to present the poetry," Glazner is quoted as saying in this history of slam, "Not unlike casting the I-ching to determine the instrument to be used in a performance. It left a lot up to chance to determine the evening. We were coming from a Cagian mentality. The judges were totally different every night."

In the same on-line article, it is interesting to read the views of another original Slam founder, Anna Brown, who broke ranks on artistic grounds:

"Performance art is an extensive concept based in theoretical work, whereas to me a lot of the good performance poets have great theatrical personalities and happen to be great writers. They usually don't have any background in art theory or the various art movements."

The film is entertaining, and its young, passionate stars have since become moderately succesful artists (well, they've got lots of MySpace friends at least). I Googled them all, and the most interesting of my findings included an open letter to Oprah Winfrey written by Slam participant Saul Williams, in which he tries to answer a question she asked on her talk show: Are all rappers poets?

His response hints both at why he broke away from conventional hip hop to become a Slam poet, and why he rejected the competetive element of the Slam contests:

"...The most popular emcees of our age are often those that claim to be heartless or show no feelings or signs of emotion. The poet, on the other hand, is the one who realizes that their vulnerability is their power."

He also states that this negative 'heartless' aspect of hip hop is only a reflection of society at large, quoting George Bush's initial response to the September 11th attacks, in which Bush called upon the nation to '...show no sign of vulnerability'.

Though introducing a competitive mentality to poetry, Marc Smith's intention with Slam was to bring the community together to 'listen to each other's words'. Another contestant in the film, Beau Sia, gives a hilarious on-line account of what drove him post-Slam:

Beau Sia

"[1998] was the year pop singer jewel tried to kill it by deciding she could write a book. [...] it was in the hands of every middle school girl in the country, and it was disgusting. when it seemed there was nothing to do but lie down and take it, nyc based poet beau sia told jewel to fuck off. in four hours, he turned out his own book [...] an exercise in the poetic retort. [...] sia's version of "wolves in the canyon" is: i could never write a poem/ about wolves in the canyon/ so don't/ expect me to." jewel's is five times longer-and actually about wolves in the canyon."

Berkoff's Blairs

2007-04-13T11:32:00.000Z

Yesterday, The Independent's Pandora column
revealed Stephen Berkoff's plans to write a new verse drama, described as a 'dark comedy about the implosion of Tony Blair's premiership.' The column gave an interesting glimpse of an early draft of the opening scene of the play ('tentatively titled Albion'), including some of the following lines:

"Cherie:

Like Boadicea I must seem
the sunlight's sparkling little glints
upon my new-oiled precious curls.
That's worth a mere 250+ a day my darling
don't you think? How the filthy British press
can't wait to make their rancid stink.

Tony:

Like we should live like monks, or purer
and wear a loincloth round our limbs.

'Boadicea' and her beau

Cherie:

Take care, we're in the stinking public eye
a great big bloody bulging orb
that sits above a filthy yelping mouth
that just can't wait to squeal and shout.
So have a care: be subtle when you claim
- those dodgy expenses - play the game."

It's quite fun, like a naughty note about the teacher passed around the class, but could this weirdly-archaic syntax and over-the-top imagery be sustained for much longer than a Two Ronnie's sketch? Berkoff is probably going for a Brechtian style, but I'm sure a lot more fun could be had with the pentameter by using it to bring to life Tony's trademark speech patterns.