A funny week... in a very 'literal' sense

Ian MacMillan welcomes everyone at the door

I don't get out much, but I've had four nights of laughter on the run!

First up was Eddie Izzard: Force Majeure at the Echo Arena. I've followed him since the 90's and he's one of my fave comedians. I love his surreal logic and improvisations. Genius!

Monday was my first time at Liver Bards - a rumbustious cornucopia of performance poetry. The co-hosts are a comedy double-act (but shhh ... don't tell them)- Steve rambles and disorganises while Dave attempts to keep accountant-style order. But you can't herd poets.

Next, as part of Liverpool City Council's poorly-advertised In Other Words literary festival, was an evening with Barnsley bard Ian MacMillan. With his BBC Radio 3 show and poetry aficionado credentials I thought he'd be more serious...and taller. But his gigs are inclusive (he met everyone at the door!), hilarious, fast-paced, anarchic and did I mention inclusive? This meant a lot of audience participation - singing and co-creating a unique epic poem to music. He's coming to Hoylake next year - you have been warned!

Last night was Flash in the Dark - the finals of a short horror competition run by Writing on the Wall . It wasn't supposed to be funny and much of it wasn't (my zombie mood piece 'Homecoming' had been shortlisted) - some truly gruesome offerings and well-deserved winners. But the guests, Les Malheureux, were even better than I expected - quirky short fiction performed by two of my flash heroes: David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon to a musical and visual landscape. Witty and unsettling.
*Note to self - MUST get them to Wirral!

What tickles your funny bone? Who are your favourite comedians?

The 70's called - they want their Noddy back

Noddy Holder, the famous cow top and me

After a lengthy hiatus, I seem to be back in circulation. For the last few months (years?) I have talked myself out of various soirees, forays, sorties and shindigs, but this week I have raised my head over the parapet that is my own settee, not once but twice!

Last night I was invited to the opening of Tate Liverpool's new 'Glam' exhibition*. In my 'what will I wear?' frenzy I discovered that my white, gold-studded 'Elvis' pants now fit me (they never have before!) but, in a nod to middle age, eschewed them for something more demur... my cow top. The arty types of Merseyside had gathered to peruse Bowie memorabilia, stroke their chins at images of androgyny and generally mingle under the lights of the glitter ball. It was great to see some poetry chums of yore (oh alright, of mine) but the highlight was meeting the very personable Noddy Holder of Slade! Groovy!

This was hot on the heals of a return to the Dead Good Poets Society open floor the previous night. I was prompted by seeing the lovely mini-documentary in last week's Guardian travel section about Marcel Theroux writing and performing his first poem at the Dead Goods - it made me miss going there, and the people involved. Having said that, my new poem about dancing in the library (replete with tongue twisters and many actions required) was a DISAAAAAASTER darlings!

*Careful of that Tate link by the way - one of the three scrolling pictures on the front page is full frontal male nude! I didn't know where to put my face.

Do what you please

I just read something very inspiring that Alabaster dePlume said at the launch of his recent album.

Who? You say. Whom?

I have touched on the odd poet names before - check out this post on the late great Hovis Presley and Elvis McGonagall (also great, but rarely late). But I don't think I mentioned Alabaster with his groovy hat and his gutter mouth and his gentle soul. I may not have mentioned Gordon Zola either (I was entertained the possibility of a double act with him... I was going to be Wendy Dale...but that's beside the point. Any ideas what MY whacky poetry name should be?

Here's some of what Alabaster said when he launched his new album recently:

“No-one will ever ask you for yourself... And if we wait to be invited, we will find ourselves forgotten.
“We don’t do this work because we’re good at it...We don’t do this work because we need the money. We don’t do this work because of culture… We don’t do this work because we are friends of the arts! No…
“There are greater, simpler, more human forces that drive us to perform all this nonsense, and compared to these things, the work itself is a puddle on the floor."  Keyhole Observations

What I read into this is that artistically we should do what pleases us, what we want to do, push on with what inspires us without too much thought into acclaim, commercial value, fashion and 'fitting in'.

That makes me feel better about the novel I've written - which I have enjoyed writing and still makes me laugh to myself. And the play - which was interesting to research. And the weird little stories which are coming thicker and faster now.

The album - Copernicus (or The Good Book of No) is most intriguing, by the way. I associate him with the sort of beat poetry I've seem him do at slams years ago, so the gentle, rather eastern melodies were a surprising counterpoint. Like the PR says: '...immensely personal and yet deliciously enigmatic, flitting as it does between caustic spoken word and beautiful instrumental lullabies.'  The digital version is 'name your price' and well worth downloading.

Here's a gorgeous stop-motion film for the opening track... I love the way the leaves follow her around!:

The Odd Couplet... and other Poetical Films

One of the things I love about Twitter is how it's become a natural home for the dreadful pun. I've blogged before* about Hashtag games, where people compete to come up with the worst puns on a particular subject - usually a mash up of film titles, songs, animals and some topical theme.

This week I had a lot of fun with #poeticalfilms ... I don't know who started it but was surprised how many took it up and ran with it. Here are some of my faves...

Faust Amongst Equals
@bingaddick

2001: A Space Ode Essay
@adrianbriggs

Crocodile Spondee
@hudsonette

Doggerel Day Afternoon
Raiders of the Lost John Cooper Clarke
@pifflechimp

Private Betjeman
Die Hardy
Whitman Can't Jump
‏@Balls_to_Monty

Silence of the iamb
@Tarawuski

Rimbaud: First Blood
‏@m_yates

The Men Who Stare At Goethe
Honey I Shrunk The Keats
Debbie Does Ballads
The Odd Couplet
@CosyFanTootie

Look Ted Hughes Talking
‏@AntBeal

Mad Max Beyond The Palindrome
PignusDominus

The Hitchhaiku
‏@FakePaulCoia

The Hughes Brothers
Dead Men don't wear Plath.
@martysm

Con Ayres
@Trudski2012

Haiku Fidelity
‏@standardbrit

Here are some of my own: ‏

For Whom the Belloc Tolls
Anapest in Show
Truly, Madly, Hegley
Baudelaire of the White Worm
Woolf Creek
Quatrain Man
and of course Carol Ann Duffy the Vampire Slayer

@ClareKirwan

and, a personal favourite... drum roll...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day of the triffids
‏@JimGall5

Go to it! You may not be on twitter, but you can still join in here...

* Why are there so many songs about librarians?

10 Best Christmas Gifts for Writers

Looking for a Christmas present for the writer in your life?

Yes, it's that time of year again: sleigh bells glisten, Santa is nipping at your toes and the mince pies are burning away merrily. And here I am again exhorting readers to use my link (on the right) when buying their pressies from Amazon so I get a few shiny pennies under my tree (not a euphemism).

Top 10 Stocking Fillers for Writers for under a Tenner

Writers need to back up their works in progress or perhaps move stuff from one computer to another.  Show them you 'woof' them by filling their stockings with this delightful Humping Dog USB flashdrive.


Or, if your loved one prefers a pen... and is writing something gruesome, look no further than this Novelty Syringe Pen at just 99p.

How about this Book Lovers Calendar - a page a day of great novels they didn't write, serving the dual purpose of reminding them of how unsuccessful they are and the swift passage of time, and hence their own mortality.

Anyone who wants to write for a living is a mug - so buy them one. This one is from the Literary Gift Company (see below) at £9.95 but there are loads at £11 from Cafe Press who will also make one with your own wording on (or maybe a quote from one of your writer's poems or stories?).

Oh, you want to give them books? Anyone who loves words will love The Etymologicon from ace blogger The Inky Fool - a witty and enlightening little book described in the Observer as 'the stocking filler of the season.'

Another gift for hungry word lovers is Scrabble with Chocolate Pieces at £8.50. There is a range of other classic games with a chocolatey twist... although the Twister with Chocolate looked disappointing. I'm sure I could have been more imaginative with that idea... but it wouldn't have much of a literary bent so I digress.

Of course the classic gift for any writer - a literary equivalent of The Beano is the seminal The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2012 which is packed with useful advice we do not heed, how-to guides we do not read and lists of agents and publishers we keep meaning to submit material to. But as it's just over £10, why not look out for a pristine (unopened) 2011 one as they're not going to open it anyway!


Beware of buying your writer this gorgeous Handmade Leather Journal. Beautiful notebooks demand beautiful writing, and most of us need notebooks for demented scribblings. We will not sully our beautiful notebooks with such things and will never write another word.

Try something cheeky instead like this Marvel Retro A5 Notebook at £5.70.

Nothing says more clearly 'I'm a writer' than this typewriter pin badge which is £4 gift-boxed from the Literary Gift Company... except perhaps a pin badge saying 'I'm a writer' which would just be silly... but available from Cafe Press (above).

I mention the Literary Gift Company last because once you go to them you will be lost to me - and I don't get any commission from them!

The Shout

Simon Armitage* was the first contemporary poet I took a shine to when I stopped regarding poetry as a secret compulsion and started submitting, performing and reading poems.

His poem 'The Shout' had a powerful impact on me. You could read it HERE now but I worry you'll get distracted and go off surfing and end up looking at a series of knitted body parts on a Czech website! So I've embedded a video of Simon reading it below. (Followed, if you have the patience, by a delightfully quirky poem about whales.)

It's the last line that does it. I like the poem and the story which inspired it, but the thing I LOVE is that I will always remember it: like the man can still hear the boy I can still hear Simon Armitage reading out those lines.

That is the impact of a good poem. It is what I want to achieve when I write. The best thing is when someone quotes one of your own lines back at you years later, and yes, it has happened to me.

* Related post - Out of the Blue, Simon's piece on 9/11

Buy it from here: The Shout: Selected Poems

Going through the Motions

I saw Sir Andrew Motion last night as part of Wirral Bookfest and he was rather charming and very easy on the ear (also the eye, in a Charles Dance sort of way)

He said a couple of things which were really encouraging (to me anyway):

1. That he didn't come from a family that read. But a teacher - Mr Wade - opened up his mind to poetry and "...changed my life. Gave me my life." If I were a teacher I would be so inspired by this - and I needed to know this having just read in this article on 'the rise of rhyme' that:

"As recently as 2008, a survey
of 1,200 British primary school
teachers for the UKLA found that
22% could not name a single poet."

2. How poems are partly the creation of your rational, educated, manipulative, conscious mind (he was talking more about himself than me here!) and partly the murkier depths of the unconscious - so you don't always know instantly what they're going to be about or what form they should take nor should you try too hard to make them conform to shapes they don't want to be.

3. That he tweaks and twiddles, puts away, tweaks again, passes to friends, tweaks, leaves a while, gets published, hates it, tweaks again etc etc

4. That his Poetry Archive project - which makes available poets reading their own work - historic and contemporary is a massive success despite struggling for funds. And with 250,000 unique users and 1,500,000 poems listened to every month more poems are being listened to now than probably in the history of the world.

My only regret of the evening is that I never got a chance to get to the bottom of the story my colleague was telling me about a conversation she'd had with him earlier involving 'moist gussets' - it has to be some kind of 'favourite word' game... hasn't it?

Just wandering...

This Saturday I'll be joining fellow Wirral poets on a trip to mob the Wenlock Poetry Festival.

It's ok - we're in the programme. We're being egged on (as ever) by the ebullient John Gorman (he of Scaffold and Tiswas fame), who would have poets in odd socks on every corner if he could.

I've 'done' Oxton Secret Gardens' (right) a couple of times - where poets leap out from the rhododendrons at unsuspecting garden-lovers. After I had one irate chap going on at me for '...coming in here with your sonnetts and your villanelles and messing up the geraniums...' (I'm paraphrasing) I'm probably not doing that one this year, because here's the thing: Not everyone (whisper it) likes poetry.

Much Wenlock is different. It's a poetry festival, see - they'll be expecting poems and that's what they'll get! Last year they had a groovy giant knitted poem, sculptures made out of books and a Poet Tree where you hung your smaller works.

But without that context, I confess I'm wary of spouting in the streets. (Apart from that time, giddy from the Glam Slam in my 2nd Most Glamourous Poet in Liverpool' sash, I did an impromptu recitation on the platform of Central Station, Liverpool.)

Faced with a clerihew or sestina, some people will quite literally run away (except the captive audience in the queue of Much Wenlock's famous butcher shop, who don't want to lose their place and will suffer anything). And if everyone involved doesn't do their best, most accessible poems, won't it just confirm people's worst opinions of poetry? Doesn't it then become the opposite of evangelism?

What do you think? Would you be delighted or provoked to mindless violence if you were accosted by a poet in the street?

Poet Films

Another classic hashtag topic on Twitter has had me giggling this week: #poetfilms

I know many of you haven't got into Twitter so you miss the terrible terrible puns that are rife if you follow the right people (ie witty, clever types, not celebs!)

So I occasionally share some funnies here. Over the last few days, the topic has been films renamed to include famous poets (or poet-related terms). Here are some of my favourites (the @name is the Twitter i.d. of the perpetrator in each case)

@AsininePoetry: The Silence of the Iambs

@Sophie2608: The League of ExtrAuden-ary Gentlemen and Woolfe Creek

@firmpear: Batman Beginsberg

@ _jonb: Baudelaire of the White Worm

@Gerrarrdus Bring me the Head of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

@StevenBettles: Who Framed Roger McGough?

@fulhammatty: The Strange Case of Betjamin Button

@robinbogg: wall-ee cummings

Personal favourite: The Pantoum of the Opera

Oh no! I was going to do my Top Ten but Twitter just got 'overloaded'.

Anyone want to supply any more?

Driving John Hegley

I was going to entitle this post: What to do if kidnapped by a 'comic beat poet' but to be fair - I wasn't exactly kidnapped and it was all my own fault.

Comedian/ performance poet/ 'people's poet laureate' John Hegley came to my library to do a writing and drawing workshop* today. And blooming marvelous it was too. He dealt very nicely with all ages (7 -70) with an intoxicating mix of comedy, rapid-tempo songs and mind-bending tasks that left everyone with a home-made booklet of their own thoughts, pictures and ideas.

It was life-affirming dammit.

I made some special big glasses for the event (see right). Sorry the picture's a bit blurry. (You can't get the staff you know.) He's mostly famous for is glasses and his dog. I didn't make a big dog. That would have been silly.

Here's a short example which includes both:

My doggie don't wear glasses

my doggie don't wear glasses
so they're lying when they say
a dog looks like its owner
aren't they

© John Hegley

Anyway, I could have just walked away - but I offered to give John a lift to the station... and then felt bad because he had lots of stuff to carry so said I'd take him to the Everyman Theatre where he has a gig tonight... but I was a bit over-awed and went into garbling mode...and then I didn't have my purse so had to ask for money for the tunnel... and enough to come back again please?... and then he was too early so he said let's have a drink ... and I didn't like to ask for money for the parking metre but I did want to have a drink because this was John Hegley - famous poet!... and we had a nice chat, then he said and by the way could I type fast? (I can!) and could I type some new stuff he'd written on the train... so then I wasn't in Kansas anymore - I was carrying a mandolin up Hope Street (rock 'n' roll!) and I was in a back room of the theatre, typing and trying to read his crazy-paving hieroglyphics while he distantly yodelled a sound check ... and I had a bite out of his quiche when he wasn't there and then tried to cut a straight line across it with a breadstick so it looked less like a bite (which doesn't work - in case you're wondering)... and then it was time to go so we filled my handbag with Green Room goodies and I came home. If I'd had any money I'd have stayed for the show. But hurrah - no parking ticket!

But I digress. How great was this cake - made specially by the sugar-craft group that meets at the library - with a dog shaped like a carrot and all his book covers on ( the most well-known are Glad to Wear Glasses and Dog)

Visit John's Wild World Website and have your own fun and games, or listen to his unique style of mandolin-backed performance here.

My favourite poem is Love Cuts - a fine antidote to Valentine's Day excesses.

* Every time I hear the word workshop in this context, I think of my friend G who always used to say: 'It's not a workshop unless it involves heavy machinery'

You don't have to be mad...

Some people think I'm mad to want to be a poet. (Some people just think I'm mad.) But is there a link between poetry and mental illness?

A fellow blogger recently shared this link to a BBC article with me, which seems pretty keen on the idea.

To quote:

"Depression, madness and insanity are themes which have run throughout the history of poetry...poets are 20 times more likely to end up in an asylum than the general population."

I think there may be a link. But then mental illness is much more widespread than you might imagine. According to the World Health Authority, more than 1 in 3 people will suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder at some point in their lives. That means 20 of my followers ... actually probably more since you're my followers!

A few years ago I had a period of work-related stress and basically went to pieces. I ploughed on for a while, then left my job and went off abroad for a bit and when I came back a year later, was still shaky. I managed to have a panic attack during the relaxation part of a yoga class! - ended up bawling my eyes out uncontrollably. My friend's husband - a clinical psychologist - said it was 'cathartic' and 'people would pay good money for that'. I had some anxiety therapy, read self-help books, stayed at home a lot and eventually came out of it quite recently.

During this period, I didn't try to pretend I was ok. It wasn't anything to be ashamed of, was it? Although in a way I felt it was. But the surprising thing for me was just how many people I know (and yes, a lot of them are poets!) who told me they had suffered similar episodes. People I would never have thought of as having those sort of difficulties. There's a lot of it out there - but I suppose a lot of people don't talk about it.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that those people who perhaps examine the world more closely ('creative types') are the ones most likely to find it wanting. The more deeply you look into the world, your own life, society, the more demons you are likely to find.

"Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence"
Edgar Allan Poe

There's more about the links between creativity and schizophrenia here.

Small packages - poems that punch above their weight.

I blogged yesterday about short, short stories but as a writer of fiction and poetry I'm here to tell you that it's a helluva lot easier to write short, short poems instead... or is it?

Stories are supposed to have a plot, character development, conflict and resolution. You can get away with anything in a poem. The basic aim of a poem (I believe) is to make you look at something slightly differently than you otherwise would, or to provoke some kind of emotional reaction.

I'm going to ignore haiku's for now, because you'll be expecting them (although you're probably not expecting zombie haiku's so I'll let you have them.)  I'm talking about really, really, really short rhyming poems that stick in your mind forever.

Here are some of my favourites. First, one for writers everywhere from the intriguing Hiliare Belloc:

On His Books

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

Hilaire Belloc

Ogden Nash, an old favourite from the wonder years of the The Penguin book of comic and curious verse has many fine examples of tiny rhymes including this early examination of the proliferation of advertising and its impact on the environment:

Song of the Open Road

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.

Ogden Nash

And, even more pithily, on lounge lizard methodology:

Reflexions on Ice-Breaking

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Ogden Nash

I'm sure Oscar Wilde will have had something to say in this form, but not going to quote him here, because he is overly quoted, as Dorothy Parker points out:

Oscar Wilde

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Dorothy Parker

I particularly admire the work of Wendy Cope who isn't afraid of brevity and even named an entire collection Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 for a two line poem that says reams and reams about romantic love:

Two Cures for Love

1. Don't see him. Don't phone or write a letter
2. The easy way: get to know him better  

Wendy Cope

I have written one on a similar theme, so I'll just slip it in here while no-one's looking:

Relationship Trouble

I don’t know what it is with me
I haven’t got the knack. 
First of all you wouldn’t leave
And now you won’t come back!

Clare Kirwan

I'm afraid my own shortest poem cheats rather badly by having a very long title. Nor does it change the way you think about anything of provoke anything other a small smile, which means it probably isn't even a poem at all by my own definition:

Love song for the first engineer on the Starship Enterprise

I’m potty
for you, Scotty.

Clare Kirwan

Oh, and I nearly forgot. I did promise you the shortest poem in the world.

This isn't it:

An Attempt at the Shortest Poem in the World

Already
This is too long

Gareth Owen

(From Roger McGough and Giles Brandreth's jolly, celeb-packed fundraiser The Big Book of Little Poems)

But this one might be*, although the author is unknown or disputed (I'd like to think it was Ogden Nash too):

Lines on the Antiquity of Fleas

Adam
Had 'em.

To work, me hearties! 

*Even this is disputed. Me/Whee! and the Dutch U/ Nu! being quoted here

Hovis Presley and Elvis Mcgonagall - more great poet names

I can't leave (for unfinished business north of the border) without mentioning a couple more Great Poet Names: Hovis Presely and Elvis Mcgonagall. Happily they belong to Great Poets otherwise it would be a Great Waste. I don't know if these guys ever met, but I like the way they took the Elvis Presley icon and reformed it in their own image.

Hovis Presley

Hovis - who came from Bolton and died tragically young a few years ago - wore the name ironically, being a pint-swilling down-beat Northerner. His dead-pan delivery, dreadful puns and perfect timing made him idolised by the likes of local lads Peter Kay and Johnny Vegas. He wowed them at the Edinburgh Festival and was tipped for greatness, but he was a shy man and backed away from fame.

I met him a few times and he was tremendously supportive and encouraging. I'd have chatted more but I thought there'd be plenty of time. There wasn't.



Small but tasty volume of his work Poetic Off Licence available here including the immortal:

I once spent an evening with Lola or Layla
She said make me breathless I hid her inhaler.


Elvis Mcgonagall

On the 3rd of March 1960, Elvis Presley spent two hours at Prestwick Airport, Scotland en route home from national service in Germany. Big Agnes McGonagall, a starstruck baggage handler, was left with the memory of a lifetime. Nine months later, on 22nd December, 1960, Elvis McGonagall was born on Carousel B in the North Terminal.

Elvis cleverly combines the name of a rock superstar with that of William Topaz Mcgonagall - the The Worst Poet in the World. He is more rock and roll, is normally dressed entirely in tartan and is generally a bit shoutier than seen here, but this must be sacrificed on the altar of topical comment because I can't resist using this clip:



(American readers tired of the Brits harping on about the election may prefer his: This Land's Not Your Land A Republican Party Protest Song )

He's been our guest at the Dead Good Poets and is currently on tour but not to us this year *sad face*.

p.s. Incidentally both men's real name is Richard. Perhaps they just didn't want to make Dick of themselves.

p.p.s. Elvis Presley was known as Elvis the Pelvis. I've often thought it was good he wasn't called Sydney. Sydney the Kidney wouldn't have the same ring to it. Or, indeed, Shamus.

See you all next week!

It really IS 'Poet's Day'

Visiting the hospital, I stopped by a bed and asked the woman how she was feeling.

'It's a braw bricht moonlit nicht the noo,' she said.

I nodded sagely and moved on. The chap in the next bed smiled . I enquired after his health.

'Wee slickit tim'rous cowerin' beastie,' he said. 'A man's a man for aw that.'

Hmm, I thought.

Then I realised. It was the Burns Unit.

The Scots have some dire things to answer for - the Crankees, the word 'Hootenanny' and obviously Rab C Nesbitt (I don't include the deep-fried Mars Bar here, as they're rather good) - but they've brought us good things too: I've no complaints about whiskey or haggis, I like the accent and I'm a fan of Annie Lennox.

But the best thing the Scots ever did was to have a national holiday celebrating a poet!!

Not been to a Burns Night? You imagine a mysterious event shrouded in the skirl of the pipes, the swirl of tartan, the swill of 'the water of life'. It is all of this - but more. It's all about Burns. A poet. OK we're easily frighted by the daelect. But he's worth pursuing. And anyway that's not the point. He's a poet. And he isn't shut up in the back room of a pub, missed off arts listing pages, considered an embarrassement, of no value. No - he's a Poet! His words are celebrated. Even at the moment you bring out the steaming pile of offal that is the 'Great Chieftan o' the puddin-race' there is a pause for 'To a Haggis' (the poem the line 'Devil take the hindmost' is from). Fantastic.

Hurrah for the Scots! and hurrah for Haggis! and hurrah for my hurdies* which really are like a distant hill now.

Happy Burns Night everyone!

*Buttocks.