What is religion? Little more
than a shared dream of landscape
fenced with simple rules

by which to live a life of listening
for the quivering fire-voice of hope;
some spark of kindness
in the desert’s inward creep.

*

Does it still the hand
that wields a knife? No,
not always, but it is built to do so;

at least until some chancer learns
how easy it can be to throw
their voice into the fire.
Thereafter, watch the fences burn
and as they burn, watch
how the gentler truths they held mutate
into a cancer-rush of fright;

how people begin listening
to any siren song that panders to their fears,
in a flame that someone else has set.
New fences, ten feet tall and charged
with panic by the lightning bolt will soon spring up
and then there’s nothing left except
to be livestock in someone else’s bonfire,

screamed at till you cannot wake,
until all that’s left of thought
is the desire to fight.

*

What is faith? The tending
of empty places where structures
fail to find a foothold.

The act of reaching out
for a quivering fire-voice of hope;
some spark of kindness
in the desert’s inward creep.

Day two of NaPoWriMo and I am still writing. Again the results have been consigned to a drawer for further contemplation, but again it is something I am content to call a poem, for the moment at least.

At this rate I may need a NaPoEdMo to follow up the month of writing. That said, I could well be risking jinxing the process with over-confidence and may yet spend the final sixteen days blogging nothing but “All work and no play makes Adam a dull boy”…

Now; where did I put that axe?

A couple of weeks ago, I got a nudge on Facebook from the poet Carrie Etter, suggesting that I might like to get involved with National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo if you want to make it sound like a sunny island where people go to get frighteningly drunk and dance to repetitive beats over the summer.

I was cautious, cagey even. I’m not the most prolific of poets. I like to take the time to stop, to consider, to consign a poem to a drawer for a few weeks and then get it out again and see if it’s still breathing the same air as me. Especially if the topic is of personal interest.

I have written a fair amount of public and occasional verse, which of necessity needs to be blurted out and left to run around on wonky pentameter if needs be, but NaPoWriMo requires one to combine personal interest and the ability to let go.

Basically, I fretted.

Then, yesterday, I decided to go for it, which lead to a deal more fretting and a considerable number of avoidance tactics today, the first day of NaPoWriMo. Good grief, I even cleaned the kitchen and hoovered, and made sure I had plenty of friends visiting me so that I could make endless cups of tea.

And then my friends left, and the sun started to sink, and I began to do the washing up. Which I stopped suddenly, midway through a mug, and rushed to the kitchen table for pen and paper, the image of a deer peering through my front door at me this morning lodged in my head, and the sound of someone’s voice laughing pleasantly at me rattling in my ear. The poem came in a giddy rush.

It will take some editing (and is already sat in a draw waiting for me to look at it again in a few days time) so I will not be posting it here. Instead, here is the diary of its arrival, and there are only 29 more poems to go.

It helps, doing this, that I have a manuscript slowly taking shape for a second book – there are cogent themes to work within and around during the coming month as a consequence – but if NaPoWriMo works, maybe I’ll surprise myself completely in the next 29 days. Unless I suddenly decide to run away with a bottle of something and dance to repetitive beats instead, that is…

For much of my life I’ve watched people unused to my father’s approach to poetry and music look on in fury, delight or bewilderment when he gets up on stage. Sometimes these three reactions are fused in the same person. It can be rather like watching the weather changing off the coast of Orkney; a rapid succession of fronts co-existing in the same sky. Even the people who are used to him or who love him dearly sometimes undergo these same divergent emotional states when he gets up on stage.

So when he walked out on stage at the Royal Albert Hall wearing a tank top featuring sheep in a field last Saturday night, having been announced by Noel Gallagher, of all people, as a ‘wonderful poet from the 1960s’ and surrounded by Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Paul Weller, to perform, with their accompaniment, his song-poem Ballade of the Nocturnal Commune, I was watching the audience with as much interest as I was watching the stage.

I was rewarded, too. For all the distant storms of discontented chatter that emanated from some of the more conservatively-minded Oasis fans in the audience, those who chose to ignore Gallagher’s instruction to ‘shut the fuck up, open your minds and listen’ (I warmed to him enormously at that point), there were numerous rays of sunshine; people who were clearly delighted, amused and transported by the pastoral dottiness of the poem and the subtle lyricism of the jazzy semi-improvised music.

The Ballade is a strange and beautiful thing, a surreal evocation of the night-sounds of the countryside. Robert Graves once accused my father of being “incorrigibly urban”, and he often is, but much of the first nine years of my life were spent with him in a cottage in the country, where I am living again now, listening to the exact sounds he describes. In this poem, as in his (in my opinion) finest poem Midsummer Morning Jog Log, he captures the rural landscape with just as fine an ear for the owl, fox and bat-strewn night as he does the urban landscapes of his childhood. For all the griping in the press about noodling, the music written and played by Albarn, Coxon and Weller to back and extend my father’s melody invokes the spirit of the poem beautifully and subtly.

What seems to have caused the most mischief with the audience at the Royal Albert Hall is the interpolations my father throws in – owl noises and sheep bleats punctuate the poem at regular intervals. But mischief is the key word here, as Caroline Sullivan rightly pointed out in her Guardian review of the event – expectations in my father’s poetic world are there to be played with, to be poked, prodded, deflated, inflated and run around the streets and gardens with in joyously naked anarchy. Words become music and music spills out into words. That’s never going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

It was therefore immensely gratifying to see quite a number of people bounce up to my father as he and I walked through the Albert Hall afterwards, on the way to catch Gallagher’s headline set, and pat him on the back, ask for photographs and say things like “nice one” and particularly “that was mad, mate – mad but great”.

I now can’t wait to see what reaction there will be to the Record Store Day 2013 album Bankbusted Nuclear Detergent Blues album (a state-of-the-nation poem initially commissioned by Paul Weller and written for the inner sleeve to his last album, Sonik Kicks) and its accompanying 7” single Ballade of the Nocturnal Commune/Extra Time Meltdown.

The single moves from a more tightly controlled and subtle version of the pastoral Ballade played at the Albert Hall to the polemical Extra Time Meltdown, but for me it is the nearly 50 minute long LP, in six sections, that is the finest achievement. Bankbusted Nuclear Detergent Blues sees my father on high polemical, savage, satirical form whilst Albarn, Coxon and Weller create a potent jazz-infused city soundscape of the failing New Labour/ConDemnatory societal tailspin that is Britain today, which draws in influences as various as Brecht and Weill, electronica, ambient, Ornette Coleman and so much more that it’s giddying to listen to.

All four are clearly inspiring each other to greater heights of invention, miraculous strangeness and dissonant lyricism, and they are performing out of their skins. Whilst Bankbusted Nuclear Detergent Blues is not perhaps the stuff of Top of the Pops and hit parade culture, which Blur and Weller have always been so good at but which, as the reaction of some of the audience at the Albert Hall suggests, can risk leading to the stultifying conservatism of “we want you to keep releasing art like the art you released before” (something that all three musicians have regularly bridled at throughout their careers), it is a potent challenge (to my somewhat biased ear) that offers a whisper of the sort of alternatives that pop culture needs to remain relevant.

I only hope that it will inspire other poets and musicians to stretch beyond their perceived limits into something new, collaborative and fresh, in the manner that my father has been trying to encourage for over five decades, and that more and more people listen with eyes and hearts wide open. If some, or all, of them then choose to run around the streets and gardens in joyously naked anarchy having done so, so much the better.

Both records, released by Gearbox and available in all good independent record stores on April 20th 2013, along with a box set of Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead, the debut release of an ebullient live performance of the early jazz poem by my father and Cream lyricist Pete Brown in collaboration with some of Britain’s greatest modern jazz musicians, including Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins, Jeff Clyne and more.

Excited about tomorrow’s George Barker centenary reading I may be, but that’s only a poetry thrill. The reading I’m doing tonight, for Poems and Pints at the Queen’s Hotel in Carmarthen, combines the simple pleasures of reading poetry aloud with that infinitely more complex and addictive thrill, nostalgia.

Carmarthen is the town that housed me as a somewhat shambolic student for two years a shockingly long time ago – back when The Stone Roses seemed thrillingly new, not comfortable as an old shoe you can’t quite bring yourself to throw out and contaminated by the legacy of Liam Gallagher.

I haven’t been back since, and only seen a few of the friends I made there intermittently in the intervening years. It doesn’t help that I left the place without ever completing a degree (in hindsight, I should have taken time out between school and college and worked).

That aside, Trinity College Carmarthen was a good place to spend time, and it was the people I met, staff and students, who made it so. I read a great deal, studied a great deal (though not necessarily what I was supposed to be studying), and began to take my own writing really seriously there. I also furthered my interest in acting, and performance.

One of the fondest in-college memories I have is of performing as Christy Mahon in the college production of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Playing my inconveniently alive father in that was the academic and poetry anthologist Patrick Crotty, then a senior lecturer at the college.

I was a little young and gauche to carry the lead role, but I had a wonderful time attempting to. That inexperience lead to my first bad review, however. The local paper praised the play as a whole, but found time to pick up on my inexperience and my rather erratic Irish accent (which must have been poor next to Crotty’s, not to mention Marie-Louise Kelly’s (she was playing Pegeen Mike and came from Northern Ireland)). My nice RP accent, copied from my RADA trained mother, must have slipped through, however much I tried to imitate Patrick’s voice.

So when I read at Poems and Pints at the Queens in Carmarthen tonight, I will not be attempting an Irish accent.

The other play I appeared in at the college was Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, which very nearly got cancelled after some excessively delicate visitors were shown around the drama studio by the college Principal in the midst of a rehearsal of a particularly explicit section of the play.

Anyone of a delicate constitution planning to attend the reading tonight, be warned… *

*if you enjoyed When Harry Met Sally you should be alright. And it’s only one poem…

I’m really delighted to have been asked at the last minute to take part in the centenary celebration of George Barker’s birth this coming Tuesday at Star Anise Arts Café in Stroud, alongside Barker’s widow Elspeth, Philip Rush, Jay Ramsay, David Clarke, Anna Saunders, Jeff Cloves, Dennis Gould and more (click here for more details).

I’d grown up with Barker’s name rolling around in the background of my consciousness, as you might expect given that my mother, father, stepfather are poets, but didn’t really connect the name with the work until I was in my late teens and happened to pull a copy of Anno Domini from my father’s poetry shelves one evening.

It’s an electrifying book, one that I paced around my room reading aloud from as a teenager, and one which I return to regularly – it’s as relevant, quotable and fresh-sounding now as it was when I first read it in 1988:

at a time of bankers
to exercise a little charity;
at a time of soldiers
to cultivate small gardens;
at a time of categorical imperatives
to guess about clouds;
at a time of politicians
to trust only to children and demigods.

After that I began to work my way erratically backwards through his books, though there are still holes in my reading. I’m really hoping to encounter books and poems I haven’t discovered at this event, which is the first of many such coming up at festivals in Barker’s centenary year; this one falls on the actual day of his birth.

I’ve chosen to read a poem of his called ‘Circular from America’, a coruscating attack on the Beats written in a propulsive rhetorical style. I don’t entirely agree with Barker’s verdict on the Beats, but given all that I’ve heard from my father and read of Barker over the years, it’s clear that he liked a good argument now and again. ‘Circular from America’ is, whatever my reservations, a finely honed argument in verse and an absolute joy to read aloud.

The event is free, so if you too are free and near enough to Stroud this coming Tuesday, February 26th, come along. If you’ve not heard of George Barker before, it’s well worth finding out more. If you have, you’ll probably understand why I’m excited about this.

Last thing at night last night, I looked at Twitter. A foolish thing to do for anyone needing sleep as much as I do right now, but sometimes foolishness pays dividends.

I saw a tweet there from Live Canon, a troupe of actors who present regular poetry performances, and who were kind enough to ask to include my poem ‘Training Run‘ in their Olympic show last year. The tweet asked if anyone knew of any good poems about pancakes.

I didn’t. I had a look. I found a few sweet, trite rhymes, the best of which is attributed to Christina Rossetti. My rule of thumb with looking at Google at this late an hour is to give up if you can’t find what you want by page three. I gave up, but the idea didn’t give me up. I found I wanted to write something about pancakes, or at least something that mentioned them.

I wrote down a line: “Where does the mouth lead? Belly, heart or head?”

For some reason, this screamed villanelle at me. I went to Wikipedia and looked up villanelle. The first example I spotted was Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song‘ , which I remembered from reading The Bell Jar years ago.

It being midnight, on the cusp of the 50th anniversary of Plath’s death and of this year’s Shrove Tuesday, and given that the line I had written synced with Plath’s rhyme scheme in ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, I couldn’t help but start writing.

I didn’t even have time to step away from the computer to find a pen. I opened my word processor and started to beat out syllables with my thumb, as I typed on the touch screen.

The villanelle below is the product of this surprise. It is not a tribute to Plath, though it was very much triggered by the tone of her poem, as well as the words she used for her rhyming. It is not a nice poem about pancakes, either.

Instead, I found myself contemplating the religions of my ancestors (I’m Jewish on my father’s side, and therefore not Jewish at all in the religious sense, and CofE on my mother’s side). I have viewed both religions with caution for some decades now.

I’m pleased enough with this draft of the poem to post it here, largely because it is the first villanelle I have written that hasn’t been immediately cast into the Chinese tea chest I use as a bran tub for stray lines. Poems usually get put in there because they make up for lack of sense with an excess of music, or a lack of music with an excess of nonsense.

This poem I’m willing to share, for all that it may change or never breathe beyond this point. If you like it, please feel free to say so. If you don’t, please say so also. If, of course, you’ve even read this far. Here’s the poem:

An Agnostic Villanelle
written on Shrove Tuesday, and thinking of Seder

All my beliefs are swallowed or unsaid.
Bitter herbs and fruits sting my throat like guilt.
Where does the mouth lead? Belly, heart or head?

My mother’s pancakes. Sugar lemon spread.
A shriving, a taunt on memory’s tongue.
All my beliefs are swallowed or unsaid.

The Seder sandwich. Horseradish, flat bread;
an apple sauce, smooth and sweeter than truth.
Where does the mouth lead? Belly, heart or head?

One pinch of sweetness and one pinch of dread.
Salt songs of sorrow ground down to a meal.
All my beliefs are swallowed or unsaid.

Hope is a hunger, a sliver, a shred,
a tear in the cloth, a focus for fear.
Where does the mouth lead? Belly, heart or head?

The pancake’s flipped out, the matzoh’s a thread
and I have nothing to put in their place.
All my beliefs are swallowed or unsaid.
Where does the mouth lead? Belly, heart or head?

How disappointing to read yet another ‘Poetry is Dead’ article, this time in The Independent, another round of gratuitous violence in the Punch and Judy show that is the mainstream media’s default position when it comes to poetry coverage.

According to Nathan A Thompson: “Poetry is dying. Actually, it’s pretty dead already for all intents and purposes and the rise of performance poetry slams is doing nothing to help matters. I know, I used to be a performance poet.”

The article continues as a sustained attack on slams, delivered much in the manner of a spurned lover discussing their ex after a few pints at the pub; sober enough to be relatively cogent, yet drunk enough to not worry about whining loudly and aggressively, for the whole pub to hear.

As with any such scenario, there are a number of ludicrous assertions littered throughout, not least of which is his suggestion that “poetry has always been words on a page, open to anyone”. The article closes, ironically, with a call for poetry to go back to whispering its art.

Poetry was, for a large percentage of its millennia-spanning history, a purely oral form, one which was reliant upon the use of received wisdoms, mnemonics such as rhyme and alliterative forms to help ease its preservation from poet to poet.

Certainly that changed rather rapidly with the arrival of the printing press, though the process had begun centuries before with Gilgamesh and with Homer’s writing down of two great Greek oral epics. The nature of communication shifted most dramatically in 1436 with the arrival of Gutenburg’s press, yet even when words were largely delivered on a page, poets were still considered to have a voice, an ear, a music. In other words, the oral tradition provides the backbone for our attempts to describe the art and craft of poetry.

I know of a large number readers who buy books of poetry to read aloud to themselves or others to capture the sounds, who go to readings and performances armed with a knowledge of the work which then comes further alive for them in an oral setting. If that happens now, imagine what must have happened in the information-starved past, in the same way that songs were disseminated via sheet music for people to play in the home.

There are plenty of people who attend slams in dingy pubs or readings in arts centres, bookshops, universities and do not find ‘performance’ and ‘page’ poetry to be mutually exclusive. What matters for many of them is the search for a poem or poems that move, amuse, inform, tell beautiful truths or lovely lies.

I’ve been a ‘performance’ poet – it’s how I started out, though I prefer to think of myself as a poet who is at home performing his work. I took part in the second slam in the country, at Glastonbury Festival in 1994, and it was eye-opening in that I was an abject failure, overcome as I was by festivalitis and nerves. What I took away from the experience was a need to hone my communication from the stage and a desire to make my words sing on page and stage.

In answer to Thompson’s assertion that one must aim one’s poem pretty low to win a Slam, I can only say this: I won a Slam in Cheltenham Literature Festival’s 1999 Spring festival, with three resolutely serious poems, which I like to think whispered quite as much as they shouted. Through Slams and performed events I have encountered a great many poets and poet performers out there whose work is at once subtle and intensely public: Elvis McGonagall, Kate Tempest and Polarbear are all names that spring immediately to mind from the performance scene, who sit happily alongside the triple-headed public laureateship of Britain that Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke and Liz Lochhead are conducting to such effect and who add enormously to the poetic landscape.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that Slams are the future of poetry, the idea of which seems to have irked poor, spurned Thompson most, but unlike Thompson, I do believe they are an excellent siege engine against the poetry stigma that some schools can build in children, as well as a very useful part of the make up of an excitingly polygamous live poetry scene which has been in development since the late 1950s, in Britain at least, when my father, along with Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, Christopher Logue and others took poetry out on the road with jazz, theatre, art and more under the banner of Live New Departures, as a reaction against the careful library-bound quietudes of The Movement.

In the past 50 or so years, poetry in all its forms has flowered, even as it has been restrained by the rise of ever-swifter forms of communication and easier forms of intellectual gratification. It has taken root and grown through the art scene, high literature, the jazz, rock, dub and punk movements, in rap and performance art, in advertising. Poetry’s utter refusal to go away, despite everything that is thrown at it, is one of the enduring testaments to it as an art form, and makes it clear that we need to shake the need for the sort of facile churnalism that can only find withering and reductive negatives or past-ignoring next-best-thingummies to shout about irregularly in the press.

Poetry, like Britain, like the English language, thrives on assimilation. It is at its best when it is at its most inclusive. The idea that any one strand of poetics can be held up as a totem to purity is, and always has been, laughable. About the only thing I agree with in Thompson’s article is his assertion that “the drawing of sectarian lines continues to damage poetry to this today [sic]“. It is a great shame that, otherwise, this article is a fine example of such sectarian thinking.

You just have to look at the work of outfits and people such as Penned in the Margins, the current poets laureate, the Poetry Archive, the just-launched Verse Kraken website or POEM Magazine, my father’s Poetry Olympics, the Poetry Society, Hammer & Tongue, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Jo Bell, Luke Wright (especially as curator of Latitude Festival’s poetry stage), Benjamin Zephaniah, Poems on the Underground, Glastonbury Festival’s website, which commissions a poet in residence for every festival, Write Out Loud, Carcanet, Bloodaxe, Bang Said the Gun, last year’s Poetry Parnassus, Poetry Live and so many, many more to see what possibilities poetry can encompass.

In amongst this list are people and organisations whose ideas of what poetry is differ wildly, be it on a political or poetical basis. Yet it seems clear to me that there is as much out there for people who prefer their poetry found in quiet contemplation as there is for those those who like it delivered through the bassy thrill of speakers. Equally, there is something for people who want something of everything.

“Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people” wrote Adrian Mitchell, long ago. Things have changed since then, but internecine bickering is the only sure way to risk ignoring the people who matter; the audience, the readers and listeners. Continue ignoring the audience in this vein and more and more of them will start ignoring poetry all over again. If only the press would take the long view, and stop employing people to write about poetry in such mealy-mouthed and angry fashion. Any fool can see that there are so many better, more productive arguments to be had.

Further Reading:

I can’t recommend these two articles highly enough – Poetry is Dead and Poetry is Alive

Ah, gigs! This is the way to see in the New Year, especially after a feverish, bed-bound Christmas. Busyness and travel, microphones and friends old and new, new sights and sounds.

If you’re in or near Bournemouth tomorrow, I’ll be headlining for Freeway Poets at the Winchester, alongside poets and performers including: Chris Coppen; Paul David Beard and Anathema. Click here to see their Facebook event page.

On Friday, I’m in London at the Poetry Cafe, Betterton Street. I’m particularly excited about this one – it’s the spoken debut of The Open Cage, a pure verse libretto I co-wrote with Adam Donen. The libretto grew out of poetic spat, about mythology in general and Icarus in particular, after a Poetry Olympics Superjam at the 100 Club, which became a sequence of poems and then, at Danyal Dhondy’s suggestion, an opera.

It’s this Friday at 7:30 pm and you can book tickets here if you wish. There will be also be more poetry from me, from the manuscript I put together on the Hawthornden Fellowship last year, as well as from Turning, plus music from Adam Donen, and a selection of fine refreshments.

Then, next Monday, I’m up in Leamington Spa reading for the PureGoodandRight open mic night at the gloriously-named Sozzled Sausage in Regent Street. Tickets are £3 or £2 on the door.

Hope to see you, dear reader, at one of them. If I don’t have the pleasure, however, Happy New Year!

The Open Cage was performed as an opera at The Yard Theatre in Hackney last October – here is the YouTube.

There’s a marvellous little festival happening in Stroud at the moment, a celebration of all things papery and information-packed, organised by Dennis Gould, printer of sublimely anarchic letterpress objects of beauty and poet. It is…

I’m sorry I’m a little late in posting this blog – I’ve been dreadfully busy with job searching and manuscript editing etc – but if you can get to Stroud before it closes on December 8th, it’s well worth it.

Included in the festival is a selection of the 10 favourite books of 50 Stroud people of all ages, all of which are on display and there to be read, and it’s marvellous to see the range of interests and excitements on display, from poetry to children’s books, anarchist colonies to art.

Novelist Jamila Gavin, who opened the festival, gave a speech suggesting that we may be at a similar point, with digital publishing, as we were at the time of the invention of the Gutenburg press, a time of revolution where technology utterly changes the way we absorb information. I’m not so sure – walking around Stroud’s Old Town Hall, it still strikes me that the book is an almost perfect technological advance. With care, these beautifully bound, splendid-smelling objects could outlast any oil or energy apocalypse, whereas a Kindle would give up the ghost within weeks.

There are also free-to-enter daily lunchtime talks and readings – still to come: Rosie Bailey; Celia and Sasha Mitchell reading Adrian Mitchell’s work; myself (Thursday 29th November, 1pm, gratuitous plug, apologies) and many more. Click here to find out who’s coming up.

There’s a plethora of magnificent things to see, read and hear but, in my opinion anyway, any festival that proudly features a display of every single edition of Ian Serrailler’s magnificent The Silver Sword, alongside a tender history of the book written by his daughter Jane, absolutely has to be worth a visit.