I’m bored of lit events, open mics, spoken
word, or whatever they call them. I don’t go any more, or at least I try to
avoid them. But for two years or so, back when I was doing my PhD in Creative
Writing, I used to go – at the time I thought I should make an effort and get
involved. The one event I had almost never missed was called Shindig (with an annoying exclamation
mark at the end, omitted here), which took – and still takes place – in a pub in
Leicester, off Narborough Road.
I got to meet the poets and the prose
writers there. Unless their fingers were trembling during their reading or the
voice quivering or something similar that showed internal terror, I grew to
mistrust them. How can you stand up there, opening up your soul for everyone to
see, without feeling like you’re dying? Most of the poets that I’ve met at Shindig were good people, but I had a
few dealings with some of the so-called established poets of Leicestershire and
I can confirm that they are little dictators who go about pretending that they
love art and fairness – bullshit: they are crackpots, full of injustice, whose
only need is to try and dominate you with their arty-farty words. The prose
writers were more human, although, naturally, they had their issues, and I’ve
only met one real bastard.
Anyway, enough of them. My poet isn’t like
them, he’s a loner, he belongs to the margins, he’s a man who hasn’t given up. He
had appeared as a guest writer at one of those depressing Shindig evenings, years ago. And so, when his name was announced, Robert
Richardson dragged over a chair to the mic, left his rucksack on it, and took
his time sorting out his stuff. He made his intro with a tiny smirk, which
remained on his face throughout his reading. I liked him for that smirk, I
hadn’t seen it from any other poet. Maybe he had that smirk because he didn’t
do what your usual poet did, he didn’t take himself seriously, he could see the
funny side of the whole thing, and that’s why his fingers weren’t trembling.
When he read out his stuff, he had a sharp
way of letting the words go, and his pauses between lines were longer than I
was used to hear, heavier, calculated but not fake, and that made them powerful.
I didn’t have to listen, curiosity led me. Notepads, sheets of papers,
magazines came out of his bag as he read one poem after the other, somehow turning
the experience, for a change, into pleasure. He seemed to be a man in perpetual
motion, he moved a lot during his reading, even his pauses were moving, even
when he stood still and silent I could feel a sparkle in the air and the waves
of reaction that came from that haunting smirk. At some point he took out a
tiny book and read from it:
THE
ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER
It’s
easy to think
you’re
right–
you
just think
you’re
right;
this
could be
either
right or wrong,
so
I think
I’ll
have a cup of tea.
And again, from that same little book:
THE
YEAR 2000
I
switch on
my
3D
octaphonic
wall-to-wall
television–
to
watch
Mick
Jagger
on
‘The Good Old Days’.
As years passed by I became friends with
Bob (who thankfully identifies himself mostly as a photographer). My friend can
talk, and so he talks in our rare meetings, he talks lively as I sit back
listening and smoking, he’s a man with bright and funny stories, he hasn’t got
this boring proper-manners thing where one will do the talking for a while,
then it should be the turn of the other person, no, not with Bob, he’s
authentic. Although I noticed that he’s like that – that is, being himself –
only when he feels comfortable with the other person, and I’m glad to be one of
them. And as he talks, he lives the stories he tells me, his hands move here
and there, he jumps from his seat as he narrates how this and that happened, he
throws his head back and pushes his tongue out and laughs, shoulders shaking.
One day, I think it was two years ago, he stopped talking for a few seconds, and
I grasped the opportunity to mention that Shindig
evening and his English Philosopher.
He said it came from a book that is out of print, nowhere to be bought, but he
might have a spare copy in his loft, then he went back to telling stories. But
he didn’t forget about it, and another day he brought me the book:
A
Set of Darts: Epigrams for the Nineties
by Peter Dale, W. S. Milne and Robert
Richardson
It was published in 1990, in Grimsby. In
the poem-into, Peter Dale gives his definition of the epigram:
The
epigram’s a blade of light
a
shaft through storm-cloud, flash
of
a secluded pool, this bright
flick-knife,
the headlights’ clash,
the
teeth of laughter, a smile’s sleight,
lightning,
shimmer of dream
across
the old familiar night,
a
knot-hole’s moted beam,
the
shiny elbow of commonsense,
gloss
of the ominous rook.
It
comes and goes like truth – and hence
the
darting of this book.
Smashed
jars refract along a wall;
the
gold nib glitters with the scrawl.
Right, I’m getting bored of writing now, so
here are three last epigrams, one by each author, and I wish you all a good
evening.
DYING
Dying’s
like going to the lavatory;
it’s
best to do it on your own.
More
so of it’s at all cathetery
or
you want to grunt and groan.
[Peter Dale]
OUT
OF COURT
The
House has banned another word.
Along
with ‘guttersnipe’, ‘murderer’,
goes
‘fascist’ now. It’s pretty clear
‘truth’
itself will disappear.
[W. S. Milne]
A
LESSON IN PATRIOTISM
Only
Salute
Flags
Which
Wave
Back
[Robert Richardson]
About
the reviewer
Alexandros Plasatis is an
ethnographer and writes fiction in English, his second language. Some of his
stories have been published in Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud, Unthology,
Crystal Voices, blÆkk, and Total Cant (forthcoming). He
lives in Leicester.
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