Now before I get started, I'm have to admit I'm not the biggest fan of poetry, it seems like the least practical way of getting an idea across. Song lyrics I can understand because you have a melody to carry the mood but a simple poem usually leaves me cold and bored. The great American comedian Doug Stanhope once compared poems to looking at other people's baby photos - "They're beautiful....to their creator....but to other people they're silly and fucking irritating".
However I think I know good writing when I hear it (and my friend writes some good stuff) so I went along, by way of the pub to reward myself for the 'culture' I was to endure.
I actually ended up arriving late....my friend was already halfway through his "set" when I came in. I squeezed my way to the back of the hot, packed basement room as if I was pushing my way through a Northern Line tube at rush hour, trying to find a small spot I could stand without having someones middle aged arse rubbing against my crotch. By the time I reached the back of the room my friend was onto his 2nd or 3rd piece....As I already knew the poems he was planning on reciting I concentrated on his delivery. It was actually pretty good and I later remarked to him that he has a cool poets stance....sort of a half-slanted lean at the microphone stand, a cheeky sideways grin relishing every filthy line in his verse.
I looked around the room and noticed that everyone in the room had a notebook, or some piece of paper. It dawned on me I must have been the only one who wasn't actually reading something that night.
The poems came thin and fast. The group could be roughly split into 3 categories; First I noticed the middle aged Hampstead art crowd who probably are livelong "Friends of the NFT", perfectly nice people, all in their 40's with money, large houses with bookcases full of important leather bound books, peppermint tea drinkers, dressed in baggy clothes, longing for the 70's.
Second were the posh art school graduates, trained in how to make something empty look like it has content, fresh out of college or universities and having to work as waitresses in expensive Bloomsbury cafes, probably back from travelling around Nepal or India with boyfriends called Ramsey, Finnegan or Rollo.
The third group was by far the most interesting. These were the 'true' artists. Desperate to show how 'raw' and 'precise' their genius was. Aggressive and desperate for everyone to understand that they were the only true poets in the room.
The first example I saw was a guy wearing a Nirvana T-shirt, with a shaved head and an ear-ring who read a poem about a boy who (I believe) stabbed another boy or man on a disused railway line either before or after being gang raped....I'm not sure really as the verse was fucking muddled and the guy could hardly read two lines without shouting things like "Yeah you fucking listening", "You better be fucking listening, or I'll fucking wipe that grin off your fucking face" to the poor listeners in the frint row.
After he finished he stormed to the back of the room saying loudly "What happened to doing it for the fucking art? This is bullshit" whilst wearing the cliche's of a dead man on his chest.
Then there was the utter loser sitting on the table next to us....he was especially hilarious. He was wearing sunglasses in doors, muttering and shuffling about constantly, clearly playing the heroin addict or gonzo poet, loudly whispering his uninformed two cents on every single poem to anyone who made eye contact with him and conspicuously checking out every female poet as if he was some Russell Brand-esq Lothario just because he had wankers facial hair and an alcoholics complexion.
He couldn't wait for his 5 minutes of ego inflating superiority, his moment on the stage reading his profound thoughts to the room. Rocking back and forth, standing up, then sitting down, he looked like a dog locked in a kitchen desperate for a shit in the garden.
And I think that's the problem with these places, they sustain a self-created delusion for people who want to put themselves in the outside role of the genius artist, not yet understood and appreciated. In the basement of a small cafe off Covent Garden they turn up week after week believing that they're actually saying something important, paying their £4 for 5 minutes of attention to their pretension...knowing as soon as they step outside they're just another replaceable, insignificant and pointless bag of guts stumbling about this steaming, rotting vagina we call London.
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1 comment:
Ah I'm full up with cold, off work and in need of stimulation...and I pretty much agree with you.
For me the greatest poets are lyricists, and therefore mostly singers. Good lyrics deal in stark images that the listener can relate to, or feel something for. Plus there's the music to drive, compliment or contradict the mood in the words.
Lyrics will always have the upper hand in that they are far more likely to ingrain themselves into culture. There is no incentive for anyone to expose themselves to poetry, where as music is everywhere, and people can therefore recite Dylan or Cohen but would never cling to a line from Ginsberg or Plath as a way of reflecting how they might be feeling.
Music is often described as 'the soundtrack to life', and while I'd quite like poetry to offer a similar role it will NEVER happen in such a blinkered microcosm as the open mic night we went to.
I'd rather write about things that affect me than rivers or boxes. Which is why I look to lyricists for my main source of inspiration.
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