Two shorts...

Learning the art of succinctness

I'm trying
To write

Shorter
Poems


"..."

Dramatic...
...
...pause

These arrived at 5am...

In the early hours of not sleeping, these two bits of nonsense arrived:

MxB
If you were to multiply
The number of cats
Lost in Murakami novels
By the amount of women
Bukowski shags in his
The sum total
Would equal
The mistakes made
In my life


Literary Ambition
I have no literary ambitions
Beyond finishing
This Dan Fante novel
And heading to the pub
For some lager
Carling Black Label, probably
My friend for nigh-on 30 years
Although, back then
When you ordered
You used the suffix
Shared with Johnnie Walker
Whereas now
Four times the price it was back then
It's simply Carling.

Tryptich...

I was going to perform a poem about graf writers and star-crossed lovers at the Adelphi the other night. But it was a bit long. Unable to bore an audience with it there and then I unveil it here and now, just for you.

Jacko's house...

Hopped on stage last night at the Adelphi to do a couple of poems - part of Write To Speak. Much fun. A couple of folk performing had never been in the legendary venue - which has seen performances by such stellar acts as Radiohead, Oasis and Pulp - before. They, like so many others before them, were quickly taken by the 'unique atmosphere' of Jacko's house and the damp aroma. A very special venue indeed. Prior to last night I was probably one of the few people of Hull to not have done some kind of performance on the Adelphi's stage. Pleased to be able to cross that off my long 'stuff to do before I'm dead' list. Naturally, any time you go to the place you wake up the following morning covered in mildew. Currently bagging up fungus to send back to Jacko.

Sticking it out...

In town filming some footage for a Larkin25 project I'm involved with. A dearth of people with anything to say, other than "never heard of him". Then a chap outside of Waterstone's starts waxing lyrical. "There's that Nick Cave song, yeah? Where he talks about Larkin being stuck in the library in Hull. I find it amazing that there's this songwriter from Aussie writing about a poet from Hull, don't you?"

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St Vincent's hospital

from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' There She Goes, My Beautiful World

Poetry and motions...

At the beginning of July I took part in the Joe Hakim, Mike Watts and Cilla Wykes' organised Write To Speak Larkin-fuelled writing experiment They F**k You Up. To say I was out of my comfort zone and was stupidly nervous is something of an understatement. It was a brown trouser day for sure. Although, pop a mic in my hand and I can generally get away with it. So, because many of you didn't bother turning up, here's one of the poems I performed that night:

Chronic inactivity in an epic frame...

Hull is about to go Larkin crazy, with a several month-long celebration of, erm, the man's death. As was pointed out in The Guardian Review last month, "there will be no attempt to rebrand him as a genial figure who arrived at work each day with a spring in his step". Which is a good thing, obviously. I've just re-read an essay that Martin Amis wrote for the New Yorker in 1993 and was published in Amis's 2001 collection The War Against Cliche. The opening goes...

"In 1985, the year of his death, Philip Larkin was unquestionably England's unofficial laureate, our best-loved poet since the war: better loved qua poet, than John Betjeman, who was loved also for his charm, his famous giggle, his patrician bohemianism, and his televisual charisma, all of which Larkin notably lacked. Now, in 1993, Larkin is something like a pariah, or an untouchable. He who was beautiful is suddenly found to be ugly."

The few people I've spoken to recently re Larkin have said terrible things about him; they are very much in that 1993 state of mind. In 2010, Larkin looks set to return to his previous state, and be much-loved again. I like that. Sometimes, when I'm walking in a fug through Pearson Park near his old house, or near his other place on Newland Park, or am strolling along Cottingham Road, or enter the grounds of the University of Hull, I sometimes find myself wishing that he'd ride his bike into me.

Talking about Andrew Motion's biography Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Amis describes the book - full, as it is, of a "poverty of event" - as "chronic inactivity in an epic frame". Love that phrase. Good title for an emo album, perhaps?

The night before Christmas...

Merry Christmas everyone - back soon!

Twas the Night Before Christmas - Clement Clarke Moore (1779 - 1863)

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

Dung...

Went to Write To Speak last night - Hull's (and the region's!) monthly spoken word extravanganza organised by local legends Joe Hakim and Mike Watts. A good night, as they have all been to date, but a sense that I was watching someone really important in Kate Tempest, a scribe in the ancient tradition and, despite her sweet young girl looks, as punk and revolutionary as they come. The night was rounded off by Matt Panesh, who also goes by the moniker Monkey Poet, who gave us his Welcome To The Uk show. He was pleasantly filthy, although to compare him, "amongst others, to Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks," is surely lazy reviewers at their worst. Anyway, towards the end he did a good little ditty about the art of Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and the cow dung-happy work of Chris Ofili. Which, when Sam and myself headed to Hull's municipal arts gallery after seeing Up at the cinema today, made seeing Chris Ofili's Popcorn Shells all the more interesting. "It's about celebrity and musical heroes," I told Sam, as he tried to find the image of Michael Jackson tucked behind one of the big lumps of shit. "I still don't get the cow dung," he complained.