Terreson

i can’t tell you what a great pleasure it is to be here tonight. It’s an extraordinary privilege to be reading with (insert name/s) and to be giving something back to people who have given so much – is the first thing you have to say, even if you’re reciting in a crack-den in the Hollywood Hills with classically trained musos addicted to hard drugs after a life of hell performing in front of millions and lost in a nightmare of having too much opportunity to know what to do with.

…to be able to do a benifit reading, is no small privilege for me – soo, thank you, all of you involved with making this amazing event happen… – at this point you must really care about the assortment of oddballs and weirdos who turn up to these do’s.

I’ve decided to force myself to stay on the theme tonight and printed all the poems out on the page so i couldn’t change my mind: so i can’t read (insert name of most famous poem) because i haven’t got it with me. – if you are in the audience, politely laugh then:

..switch vibe close-back slap down a marker and lash it out — some mid-seventies political Marxism a la Amiri Baraka, then dance around a gove of handbags with an imaginary Erato and watch your audience gasp in horror and lurve.

bah !

Poetry, it will do nothing for you unless you pack in now and stop writing.

don’t end up like me. 29 years i devoted myself to making a financially sustainable life and career out of poetry and all i got was open-mic hell, conspiracies round the dried up well – elbowed out and now the Muse has gone and left me, i am taunted from afar by voices circling a hallowed form at Ormskirk Civic Hall – creeping up paper-on-stone magnolia walls.

..poems also have unknowable fates. You write one poem thinking it will be used for one purpose and it ends up being used for another.

Experimental free flowing, finally a form has come, singing in long loud drawn out vowels and swift sharp city sounds of Paul and John — ring a ring a poesy a pocket full of George, by the telepathic act of wish-fulfillment which wrought well at source – Ormy boys forever, we loved an unknowable God – two distinct accents jostling in the voice searching for balance there, plastic or concrete always and everywhere love, codding it, faking sounds of something we were not, Ribble or Mersey, Brooklyn or the Bronx, two-faced turncoats we can blow either way, it’s all the same for a few from Coronation Park who end up talking straight.

…and then the one other thing running through a couple of the things i’ve chosen, has long concerned me, which is a theme of unknowability and fate. You know, what happens up to any person in their life is to some extent an accident of birth, out of control and this haunts me.

…it haunts me – my own good luck: the less good luck of others, and also the essential unknowability for us all of anyone’s life, including to some degree our own.

And then shiver as you realise, it wasn’t her but you who was the cod in a room of the few upright lot, each syllable weighted, each off-cut of air, precise and staccato, softened by an exact music which reaches toward song whilst never falling conspicuously into it. Uniquely American and very distinctive. Her chimes and rhymes not clanging, are very deft and her poems not woven with sing-song lyrical weft, but flawless sense and sensitivity. Go – listen to Hir

sh !

field a play softly sing of it -

Ah ! there was Poetry, on the cobbled streets of our market town, granted its charter by Edward I, to those Augustian monks from Burscough Priory – founded by Robert Fitz-Henry, Lord of Lathom in 1186.

History there also, in the original church built by Orm, a Norse raider, who settled the sandstone bluff on which he built his kirk, wrested from whatever Angle, Brython and Saxon fought over what became Ormskirk – in our control as the cohort reared on Wham and Wah, George and Pete, Michael and Wylie, all our youth now spent, living as memories painted in a grey mass sandwiched in the covering skull-dome, a place called home – Poetry singing in Lancashire, so.

Keep it up. Great stuff. checks in the e mail.

Lennon (says)

grá agus síocháin

The poem-net, capturing the butterflies of remembered experience. The poem-chrysalis, setting the butterflies free, transfigured.