Niall O'Sullivan is a poet, editor and event host. He has published two books of poetry with Flipped Eye and hosts London's biggest open mic, Poetry Unplugged, at the Poetry Cafe.
But remember this Dr Glendun, the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best. -Dr Yogami (Werewolf of London, 1935)
On conquering the heights of that stark peak,
in search of the mariphasa flower
that only blooms during the moonlit hours,
I was attacked by some carpet-faced freak.
And though I found my treasure, so unique,
I wondered, if at home, you dreamt of lovers,
old flames with supernormal carnal powers:
in their stark heat would your resolve prove weak?
It was not the full moon that caused the change
but that old flame whose name slipped from your tongue
the last time we reciprocated lust.
And now blood trickles down the city’s drains,
your petals bloomed before my fangs had sprung:
the beast seeks to destroy what it loves most.
The smile I want to stamp into the ground
is older than the triumph of ninety-seven,
it’s older than its name, body, even
older than the gratifying sound
of promises to nail it this time round
and not repeat the mistakes of heathen
predecessors. But this clean-shaven
boat peers from store fronts about town
and not a drop of blood has stuck to it.
Behind the smile the weasel words still flow
from page to page as they did from the podium.
When its body is earthbound we’ll know that
the smile will linger on, the vilest seed ever sown,
toxic as weapons-grade Plu-Tony-Um.
The morning DJ’s gag. O tawdry quip
that doesn’t raise a smirk across the city
before the regurgitated ditty—
the auto-tuned bulimic that the paps
pursue for their quota of nipple slips,
when China White spews out its casualties,
the battle of the B-List deities
to be the smile that frames tomorrow’s chips.
And then the adverts, no time for a fag.
He eyes the producer through gleaming glass
and tries to think up one more bawdy tale
to feed the digital/analogue lag,
his voice straddles the future and the past.
He had a gig on telly once. He failed.
Just a few days now before the hoped-for avalanche of sonnets arrives. I thought about having a practice run by writing a few sonnets privately to warm up with, but after about two it just didn’t feel right. Like a lot of things I find myself doing in this life, practise just seems to take away from the fire of the moment, I’ve always been into baptisms of fire. I got myself into a first choice art college by talking bollocks and improvising. My first open mic readings were never preceded by reconnaissance visits to the venues. These days, before a reading, I’ll sketch out a set list in a notebook and bring it up on stage with me, the set list usually depends on the mood I’m in on the night, what’s been happening in my life and in the world.
I have no idea how many people are going to follow the project and how many will stay with it ’till the end, but it’s giving me the butterflies, the same butterflies I felt before doing a floor spot in the late nineties. If it was a form that I had already mastered, I doubt I’d have much enthusiasm for the project. I have no idea of the poems will suddenly come from nowhere individually or whether I will end up penning some kind of sequence. I feel like one of those guys at some end of pier flying machine contest from the turn of the twentieth century. I like to think that while those guys all had the same dream of flying into the wide blue heavens before an adoring audience, the real thrill for them was the moment they stepped over the edge, and that was a moment that cannot really be prepared for.
Belated apologies for the lack of recent new content. Marriage, honeymoon, a return to Wimbledon, Latitude and laziness have conspired to keep me from my dedicated shedful of followers. However, that is about to change.
For the whole month of September, I am going to be your sonnet hack. That’s right, I will be posting a sonnet a day right here for 30 days. I will be writing on my own personal whimsy, current events and from suggestions posted in the comments. I will be trying to stick to the form for most of the project, be it Petrarchan, Spenserian, Miltonic or Shakespearian, but I may also break a few of the rules, whether it be line length, structure or rhyme. At the barest minimum the poems will always be fourteen lines in length.
Why am I doing this? Well, for one I think it will give this place a bit of a shot in the arm and make it a bit more dynamic. Secondly, my schedule isn’t packed to the rafters in September, so why the hell not? Thirdly, I want to help rehabilitate the noble sonnet.
Now, you could easily argue that with exponents such as Don Paterson, what could the art of the sonnet possibly gain from me? I would have to answer that it would probably gain nothing, and yet I feel the sonnet needs defending. It seems that the sonnet has become interchangeable with “rubbish old poem” in the current parlance of some Spoken Word enthusiasts and other Outlaw ‘zine poets. Plenty of people that I really respect have talked about the sonnet as something that is in the past, an old feudal system of how to write a poem. So for me, this whole project is maybe to make people stop worrying and learn to love the sonnet, even the old ones.
According to Paterson in his introduction to his fantastic anthology 101 Sonnets (I have bought this book many times because I keep giving it away to people, the selection and the introduction are a must-read), the form is something that reveals and appeals to innate human cognitive faculties. He also believes that the sonnet is an unavoidable consequence of when poetry transferred from its oral mnemonic origins and onto the page. Many feel that the most agreeable length of a line, aesthetics wise, is five stresses. Five stresses take about three seconds to read, which is equivalent to the length of time that our brains judge as “an instant”. From there, fourteen lines make a poem consisting of five stress lines makes the poem appear on the page as a nice square of text. Even the turn, or volta, that comes in the final sextet of the poem obeys the aesthetic premium of the Golden Ratio. In short, according to Paterson, the sonnet is “a paradox, a little squared circle, a mandala that invites our meditation.”
What I love about the Sonnet is that it invites you to read it, and if the language proves too arcane or tricky to enjoy the first time, it invites you back to take it on a second time. It is as easy a poem to memorise as any, a good sonnet can be picked apart and mulled over inwardly during a train journey without having to open up a book. Anyone who thinks the sonnet is dead or something left in the past is pitifully mistaken. Its foundations are fused deep within the urge to place what we say into the visual plane. It’s going nowhere and it sure doesn’t need any help from a schmuck like me. Consider the thirty days of next month as an attempt to clamp onto its shirt tails and ride its slipstream for a little while.
Tim Wells, Todd Moore, Niall O'Sullivan. London 2006.
I had the honour of hanging out with Todd Moore for a couple of days when he came over to London a few years back. All I really knew of Todd Moore was from the terse Dillinger vignettes that appeared regularly in Tim Wells’s Rising magazine. The poems seemed to scan the contents of a moment, much like a haiku, usually a violent one. If the moment wasn’t violent then it involved a brief chunk of time when something was said or done by a protagonist that cut through all the bullshit. His poetry was about action and movement rather than contemplation or navel gazing. It took no shit and it took no prisoners. There was no sermonising or hand wringing, just a pared down description of one moment following another and then vanishing forever. From his poetry, I expected a short fused, abrupt person that didn’t suffer fools gladly. While the latter part was certainly true I found Todd Moore and his wife Barbara to be warm, humble and gentle human beings, a delight to hang out with. This has often proved to be the case with poets, those that write the edgy, hard edged material tend to be very personable, while those that write the sermonising, hand wringing guff tend to be preening egomaniacs.
Moore chose Dillinger, or Dillinger chose him, as the vessel for his great American epic. The poem Dillinger has been published in rare instalments via books and chapbooks for the past few decades and was estimated by Moore to be over a quarter of a million lines in length. The fact that at least half of these lines consisted of two stresses or less doesn’t do much to soften that number. The style and the content chose each other, Dillinger was the light footed outlaw, the machine gun antihero who leaped over bank counters and was gone again in minutes. Moore’s style moves at breakneck pace, moments and memories flying by as the poem speeds onwards.
Moore commented on the short line style of his poetry in interviews. He said that the energy always escaped from the long line, but with short lines the energy had nowhere to go but downwards, to be channelled into the momentum of the poem. One doesn’t have to dabble in mysticism to understand this. The line break is all about the moment when the eye flies off the end of the line and draws itself back into the poem. The longer the line, the greater the momentum built up but also the greater momentum that gets lost when returning to the next line. Todd Moore found the way of building the momentum and keeping it, make the line short enough for the eye to take in at a glance so all it has to do is move downwards. Of course, in hindsight, the momentum gets lost in the page turn, but pages are longer than they are wide so the logic is sound. Perhaps the best way to take in the Dillinger epic is via the down scrolling e-reader, though the energy built up by that sonofabitch may be too much to bear.
To take in some of Todd Moore’s stylistic genius, check out this link below.
During his stay in London, Todd read at an event alongside Hugo Williams and Phil Jupitus on the Friday and at my own venue on the Saturday. Todd read out a long Dillinger poem called Death Song, it was the first ever reading of this work and I was honoured to have it read at my venue. When he turned up on Facebook, I was very chuffed to see that Todd’s profile photo was taken a the Poetry Cafe, with the Cellar’s chalkwork behind him. Barbara later told me that it was one of his favourite career moments. That welled me up a little. The reading of Death Song has been up on The Cellar’s myspace page and will remain there for as long as Murdoch will let it. Unfortunately, the original recording travelled out of my living room window under the arm of a very small time Dillinger a few years back. So, because of the work of the small time crook and my lack of trust for big time crooks like Murdoch, I ripped the audio and you can listen to it right here, right now by pressing play on the player below.
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Todd’s death has illuminated many things for me, as has his life. His work points out another way to poets lost between the twin poles of performance poetry and academic poetry. By academic I mean the mainstream rather than the UK avant garde that seems to subsist off the teat of academia, with no community sustenance despite its Marxist proclamations. Otherwise we seem to be stuck between the wine circuit (prize winning poetry set on some verander on the continent in the company of someone terminally ill while eating an exotic lunch before someone says something profound in French) and the resurgent Spoken Word/Performance Poetry scene (”Look at all the problems of the world, I worry about them, love me, I have suffered profoundly, love me). Okay, I have greatly exaggerated two aspects of poetry, but I do so only to point out that there is another way, poetry that expresses the excess of life without having to prove its erudition or moral aptitude. Todd Moore called this the Outlaw way. We can cast a critical eye on this and point out that plenty of Outlaw Poets are guilty of a juvenile need to shock and a lack of editorial intervention, but Moore was not one of them. His work may have been vital and energetic, but it was also tighter than a gnat’s chuff. As the page/stage fissure seems to once again be appearing across the landscape of the UK poetry community, and factions are falling back on their old cliques and attitudes, I’m glad Outlaw pioneers such as Todd Moore have shown us that there’s always another path: your own. His spirit shall endure.
Is the live poet just a brain in a jar? Some gigs have felt like this . . .
I know that there are poets out there that don’t do readings, that there are poets who keep their work shut in drawers and notebooks. I know that this is sometimes a conscious choice and that sometimes it’s not. I know plenty of great live poets that read from the page, whether I qualify for that category or not, it’s certainly something I’ve done my fair share of. But lately, with a new body of work building up nicely, I’ve found myself taking the time and effort to memorise new material and this has re-ignited my passion for performance.
Not that I don’t love the editing process too, the problem with a lot of performance poets is that they’re too good at memorising what they’ve just written and too adept at covering over the cracks in their underwritten, scantly drafted poems with their performance skills. Being a barely adequate memoriser and fair to middling performer allows me to get a feel for what needs to be changed in the poem, prolixity and prosaicness tend to lack the memorable stickiness that a more poetic line posesses. So, if something just isn’t registering in my memory, it probably needs a bit more work.
I think that there is something more to memorizing a poem than helping out performance, I think that there is something natural about it, something wedded to poetry as a natural product of the human mind, something wedded to the poem’s natural history. Memorising a poem is in some ways more of a completion of a poem than the publication, it is a return to the source.
The poem starts in the mind as a registered moment, an arresting image or a string of words that just sound good. Then comes what I have found to be the least important moment, writing the poem. Now, when I mean least important, I only mean the first draft. Of course it’s important to get the poem out there into the world, but the work that hopefully makes the poem something special happens after this. The first draft is like a lump of clay that is slammed onto the work surface and thumbed into a rough form so that the poet can step back and get a good look at what they’re dealing with.
I think there’s something about this that chimes with a lot of cognitive science, all the detail and complexity is really out there in the world and any complexity and detail within our imaginations is really just a feeling towards it. Even poets such as Benjamin Zephaniah who compose poetry without writing it down probably have to speak the words out loud to gauge what they are as something that exists in the outside world.
Sure, we have examples of poets like Kerouac who do everything in the first draft, saying that the first thought is the best thought (as if the first thing written of the thought is not already a secondary happening), but most of the people that say this tend to be embellishing the truth for self promotion purposes, or are terrible writers that are lacking in self critical faculties. One glance at the work usually confirms which category they belong to.
What I love about poetry is that it does not necessarily belong to the page or the stage, its natural place of residence is memory itself. In the world of art, you have to stump up a big amount of money to own a masterpiece, or travel to a particular place to see it “for real”. To own a poem, all you have to do is commit it to memory. With this you have the power to reproduce it by writing it down or reciting out loud and in both instances it is still the poem itself rather than a mere copy or replica.
This is what we should have one eye on when we work on a poem: to try and create something that cannot help but be copied to another brain at the point of contact, for the performance to not just be the crowning moment, but a kind of beginning where the poem works its way into other minds and becomes part of them. As Mark Doty points out in his poem “Apparition (Favorite Poem)”, where a slight young man recites Shelley’s Ozymandias with a newly broken voice in a small bookshop: there is something about a poem and the fact that its natural home is memory rather than any external material that stands a greater chance of attaining immortality than some hefty statue of a mighty ruler.
I’ve blogged on this subject elsewhere, and ranted about it a few times on stage, so please forgive me if I repeat myself now. I think that the current advertising campaign for Barclaycard is perhaps one of the most deceptively honest expressions of the current financial crisis. Like many people, I just enjoyed the fun aspect of the advert when I first watched it. It featured the simple conceit of a man leaving his worplace via a waterslide that weaved through different aspects of a gleaming, busy metropolis. On his way, he happily swipes his credit card (this is the part that most people, including myself, didn’t notice, due to our immersion in the stupid enjoyment of the waterslide). I only really caught onto this when I noticed that Barclaycard were asking for “creatives” to make their own lo-fi versions of the advert, perhaps an attempt to reverse engineer a viral aspect for the commercial? It was only when this triggered my primal knee-jerk hatred of artists propagandising for banks, as well as my own personal dissatisfaction with Barclays that I came to view this device with fresh eyes. So here is the version of the ad that appeared at the time when the credit crunch veered into recession.
When looking at it through the lens of the financial situation it was current to, the message appears to co-ordinate with the advice that was given at the time: Spend!
We’ve heard this one many times before, a recession is coming, but you can spend your way out of it. By plunging further into personal debt, you help the phoenix of the financial institutions to rise and if they rise then the benefit will trickle down into your everyday lives. Your virtual credit still translates into real money for the economy and the interest you pay also keeps things peachy. Now, while this might look like a huge “fuck you” from the financial institutions that screwed things up in the first place, doesn’t the waterslide make it look fun? Feel that trickle down goodness, weeeeeee!!!!!
Please note that in this initial phase, the final shot is a wide panoramic of the waterslide that shows the waterslide seemingly going on forever. There is no landing. Oh no, when you’re spending and keeping up the repayments, there is nooooo ground zero. It also helps to establish getting in credit as the boring schlep this dudgeon has to make to work in the morning, those taxing steps or that awkward elevator. No way as fun as the trickle down, waterlslide goodness, weeeee…..
One is tempted to imagine the slide going on into the lower and seedier parts of this city; past beggars, drug addicts, street sweepers, prostitutes and the rest of the great unwashed; further on through tube tunnels and to be finally disintergrated in the fiery earth’s core. But, as the recession hit it’s lowest point we got the version of the advert with a landing: well, we don’t see the landing but we assume it happens as the final shot of the advert shows the waterlside entering a house from outside with a faithful beagle-type mutt entering at the same time through a doggy flap.
Has the worst point of a economic slump seemed more homely? Who cares if we don’t see inside the house with all the lovely furniture that’s about to be repossessed?
So, after all of us faithful citizens helped the poor, beleaguered financial institutions by digging ourselves further into the sewage trench, the economy made a tiny, minuscule step upwards towards recovery and we got our reward, the Barclaycard rollercoaster.
Perhaps, in precognition of the dreaded double dip, our protagonist (now a pudgy, bearded rock and roll type guy, who may have a salary and a mortgage, but he’s still sticking it to the man by having facial hair and peeping at naked continental ladies) makes his way to work on a rollercoaster that weaves it’s way through the city. He arrives, evidently the “cool guy” of the office (a moniker comparable to least smelly turd in the field), and throws an apple to his female colleague that he’s doubtless had time to douse with Rohypnol. The waterslide appears to have been dismantled, perhaps because the kids from the estate were wedging razorblades between the joints.
Ah, how philosophical it is, how knowing we are in our appreciation of the climb and the plunge, how they all come together to form the unpredictable (especially to futures markets) beauty of this journey we call… life…
Needless to say, on watching the first advert I said fuck you to Barclays, withdrew all my money from my Barclays account and finally got round to opening an account at the Cooperative Bank. I have this advert to thank. Sure, they’re still an evil bank but they have an ethical policy and there are no board of major shareholders riding high on the back of a crisis.
So this is where it should all end, but I see that “Barclaycard Create” (I would puke up again but it’s all dry now, even the stomach acids have been purged at this point) have a new video up. Let’s watch it together shall we?
Sooo.. the gist seems to be that when you’re paying for something and plunging yourself into more debt, don’t forget that you are actually part of a harmonious hive of other denizens who are working together to perform some electro travesty of Booker T’s timeless Green Onions. Fantastic. Like Mephistopheles calling in the debt of Dr Faustus, the devil himself has come calling on the Blues for the deal that Robert Johnson made with him. And while the advert is called “Barclaycard Freedom” isn’t there a slight deterministic vibe to the fact that everyone is actually playing the same tune through their specialised individual pin numbers? Is this actually a profound philosophical statement or more Barclaycardcreate wankery? I just can’t tell any more.
This week at Unplugged we had a little film crew down from UCA Farnham, students making a film about the UK poetry scene. They showed up, weren’t overstaffed, didn’t mess with the lighting and generally proved themselves to be more professional than most of the film crews we’ve had down. I’m wary around cameras and often think that the crew is out to make me and the poets look like idiots so I’m not always the most cooperative person in the initial organisational stages. However these guys seemed genuinely interested in the subject and I have much more time for a student film crew than the companies that will eventually employ them.
Anyway, before they filmed I stepped out to be interviewed outside the Poetry Cafe. This consisted of having to provide about 30 seconds of interesting monologue before some Betterton Street denizen popped up to walk into shot while saying “Sorry!”; start talking to the camera about what they’re pissed off about in the world, assuming the young late teen/early twenties guys with dreadlocks and band tee shirts were a direct line to God, the PM or Sir Trevor MacDonald; or start unlocking their bike so they can get home and no, they’re not going to wait for some long-haired shithead to sign off about the contemporary relevance of the sonnet.
The thing about this kind of interview is that you get asked a question, you mouth off for a few moments and then it’s a wrap. You can’t edit what you said or add to it. All you can do is think of the questions you were asked and then think of the answer you would have given if you had a while to think about it (why don’t people do that during chat shows? They can ask the few questions to the interviewee, who nods his head and then starts pondering them, pacing about with hands behind their back while the interviewer tells the audience we’ll be back for the answers after the news and X Factor results).
So, while you’re probably never going to see the video, seeing as its a college project, I still have to give the more definitive answer to two questions because that’s how OCD I am. Plus I’m narcissistic enough to think that you guys are itching to hear them, so let’s go.
“Why has the popular poetry of today got backing music?” I think my answer to this was “The best selling poetry is by a bunch of dead people and Seamus Heaney, I can’t think of any backing music to those.” Then I carried on, elaborating on whether they were referring to Scroobius Pip, Cooper Clark and other poets/spoken word artists that work with musicians. I think I added that ultimately, poetry has it’s own music within the language itself and should be able to work without any musical accompaniment. However, I now wonder if they were being a bit crafty and trying to catch me out. After all, all those dead guys and Heaney put together aren’t shifting as many units as Jay-Z. Of course, that provokes all the hue and cry that Hip Hop isn’t poetry, or that Jay Z’s brand of hip hop isn’t poetry though all that tedious moralising shite that likes to remind us that it isn’t as evil as Jay-Z is. My definition of poetry is pretty simple: language that uses the sticky techniques of rhyme, alliteration, rhythm or imagery to make particular statements resonate and become more memorable. I understand that this might not be appreciated by those whose barometer of poetry is ” a neatly written missive that describes the malevolence of the natural world, the death of a loved one or a profound epiphany had when on holiday (don’t forget to have at least one line in a foreign language)”; but it will be interesting to see what is thought of and remembered as poetry in a hundred years from now. Next question:
Someone in “I Heart Huckabees” said “(People) don’t understand poems. They don’t want
to hear poems. They have no time for them.” Is this true?
Well, apart from my contention that poetry gets played on mobile phones on the backs of buses and from many a car sound system where I live, I answered that this statement is bullshit but there is a truth concealed within it. Poetry does demand your time, it cant be skimmed over like a gossip column. Attention wise, the more you give to a good poem, the more you get from it. But the big fallacy here is that in this busy day and age, we don’t have time for something that can demand so much of our attention. The truth is, these days, we have too much time. If I get a few spare hours, I can spend it writing, reading, editing, chilling out, walking etc. but it’s pretty easy to switch on my laptop and let my brain get sucked into cyberspace for a few hours. This isn’t like some hunter gatherer society where if you do nothing for a few hours you and your tribe may starve to death. We have too much time and it’s killing us.
I think that the biggest pleasure I got from reading poetry was when I felt I was stealing some of my time back and turning it into something beautiful and constructive. During my days as a gardener I always carried a volume around in my pocket. I remember the moments when I would pluck the book out and give my attention to the stylings of all those poets: on the train, the tube, on a park bench a few minutes before my start time, in little moments when my work mate would go to fetch his baccy from the van, but most of all when I was sat on the bog. Oh yes, I can gladly admit to being brought to tears by my first reading of Rilke’s Sonnets of Orpheus on a February morning in an unheated cabin in Acton with my long johns and trousers round my ankles and the ice cold porcelain beneath me. That, comrades, will always be my definition of freedom. “Eternity in an hour…” or eight and a half minutes.
So here’s the lowdown, I’m five minutes into my set in a dark, broody Soho garret and I’m unable to finish a sentence because some guy keeps on shouting “Fuck off” at me. Other members of the audience are telling him to shut up because they want to hear some poetry. Despite my polite attempts at placating him and an assortment of tough guys about to take him outside for a kicking, he keeps on shouting.
A week later I’m at the local theatre of a town that is pretty far from Soho. I’ve finished a set about an hour before, but now I’m back on the stage with the headline act John Hegley and the host Paul Lyalls as well as a good portion of the 100 strong audience. We’re dancing to the greatest hits of Tom Jones.
The only real connection to these two events is that they were both gigs on a Saturday night that happened within a week of each other. But there was something about the contrast between the two that made me think long and hard about the relationship between the arts and the public.
So, let’s get back to the guy shouting at me. He’s tall, looks a bit like a cross between Mick Fleetwood and that guy that plays the serial killer in Manhunter. The reason why he’s kicking off is because I told him about the former comparison. Only reason why I did this was because he got up, talked a little, knocked into some furniture and basically made a horses arse of trying to get out quietly. I had just started a poem that would run for about three minutes, but the whole audience have been distracted by him. So here’s the choice I have available, carry on reciting the poem, aware of the fact that the audience have missed the opening segment, or stop reciting, address the incident humorously and start again. So I make a Fleetwood Mac reference. The guy goes apeshit, goes downstairs to complain and within five minutes is back upstairs shouting at me and being a world champion twat. In the meantime, I’m apologising to him. this goes on for about five agonising minutes. He finally calms down when a great poet stroke boxing trainer tells him he’s going to get his arse kicked. One final detail, the bar stopped serving the guy an hour ago.
So, the questions you’re probably asking are, why wasn’t this guy chucked out or knocked out, why was I being so nice to him and why did he seem so sanctimonious and self important? The answer my friends is this: the event was at a member’s bar and the man in question was… a MEMBER! My main reason for being so well behaved in the face of his bullshit was because a friend of mine runs the night, it’s a cool night and I don’t want to cause any hassle for the artists and promoters. The whole audience is on my side apart from one boho idiot who looks like Milli Vanilli and is probably pissed off that no-one else is paying him any attention (if you watch the video link, he’s the guy that applauds Fleetwood at one pathetic moment). So because this guy is a member, the incident comes off like some kind of diplomatic crisis. In the end, order is restored, I get to read one more poem and the guy leaves during the break. Here’s a video of the incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uKZSiMG6ok
A week later, I’m at the Crawley Town Football Club VIP area with Paul Lyalls. John Hegley is supporting the away team, so he’s in the stands by choice rather than by some kind of punishment. While this is the VIP area, there isn’t a single toff in attendance. The VIPs are mainly made up of local working class people who are connected to the club. The VIP dinner consists of pie, taters and peas. Not a prawn sandwich in sight. Within minutes my plate goes from heaped to spotless and I have to undo my the buttons on my suit jacket.
There were plans at one point for us to perform some poetry at half time, and I’m glad those plans aren’t going through. They even thought it might be a good idea for us to march out to the middle of the pitch and recite. I can imagine the response: “…even though they booed and jeered me while I was up there, they must have liked me because they kept on throwing money at my face. Mainly coins.” Luckily the plan is scrapped and we save our performance for the theatre later on.
It turns out that a fair portion of the 100+ punters packing the theatre went to the match too. Some of them chat to me afterwards and congratulate me on the bespoke poem I wrote about Crawley’s underdog victory. They recognise all the little moments I put down, they felt like they were at the match again when they heard the poem, and by jove I feel like I’m doing my job. All the books get sold and the gig goes great. Any bad feeling from the idiot the week before has been forgotten and I’m feeling good about my profession and the health of my art form. Hegley comes on stage afterwards and does the business, as usual. It’s a good night.
So what’s the big epiphany I have to share about these two events? Well, here’s where I get all party political. If you’ve been following the election coverage then you know that the two major parties will be cutting arts funding. Not only that, but the Tories are wanting to encourage patronage from companies and the wealthy. This can only lead one way and the episode in the members bar reflects it. People will fund the arts until the moment comes when they feel it’s insulting them, then watch the tantrum erupt. Many people still feel that the culling of Thames television by the Tory government of the time was due to the critical documentary Death on the Rock. The toffs and nouveau rich will only fund the arts if it can help them feel a bit boho and less bourgeois, a sop for their vanity rather than the pin that pricks the bubble. It’s the equivalent of Charlotte from The Cherry Orchard, entertaining the complacent aristocrats with some sleight of hand magic to distract them from peasantry outside.
Arts funding represents another alternative and a worthy one at that, not all art should be made to impress patrons or work as a business plan. Quality art should be funded for its own sake. But there is another way. That other way is to stop underestimating the man and woman on the street. This doesn’t mean that you have to march out onto the middle of a football pitch and recite your verse, but a little advert in the match program might entice a few of them to the show later on. You know, these guys might be just as bored with X-Factor as you are, but they haven’t been shown the alternative. The poetry stage at Latitude is another example, plenty of families came for the bands and the kids attractions, stopped by the poetry tent and spent the weekend there. In short, I guess I’m saying in my usual half arsed and messy way that poets should spend less time feeling sorry for themselves in their garret when there’s pie in the kitchen.
Niall O'Sullivan is a poet, editor and event host. He has published two books of poetry with Flipped Eye and hosts London's biggest open mic, Poetry Unplugged, at the Poetry Cafe.
This week at Unplugged we had a little film crew down from UCA Farnham, students making a film about the UK poetry scene. They showed up, weren’t overstaffed, didn’t mess with the lighting and generally proved themselves to be more professional than most of the film crews we’ve had down. I’m wary around cameras and often think that the crew is out to make me and the poets look like idiots so I’m not always the most cooperative person in the initial organisational stages. However these guys seemed genuinely interested in the subject and I have much more time for a student film crew than the companies that will eventually employ them.