LIKELY LADS


Queen Of The Cotton Cities by Adam O'Riordan; Lives Of Ghosts by John McCullough, tall-lighthouse, www.tall-lighthouse.co.uk, both £4.


Regular readers of Orbis may recall me taking to task tall-lighthouse in Orbis #138. This small press is run by Les Robinson, who selects, edits, publishes, publicises, markets, arranges events for, the poets on his list. I suppose he must be the tall-lighthouse keeper… You may recall me finding fault with some of his editing in the work of Aoife Mannix and Brendan Cleary, some typos in the former, a lapse of judgement in the latter. Vision is all very well, but when it comes to poetry publishing, an eye for detail is crucial.
I actually wrote in a spirit of some frustration on that occasion. Poets fret so much about their words, or should do, that to see presentational glitches after all the hard labour that goes into the ‘work of words’ can be a source of disappointment and irritation. Ask any poet how many times their work has been misprinted, misquoted, misrepresented, and no matter who they are most will have a story to tell of botches that would make tough guys turn prima donna.
I’m pleased to report an improvement at tall-lighthouse since my last inspection. Les Robinson has had the enterprising idea of launching slim volumes from authors under 30, and the books under review form part of a cycle of work from eighteen young poets to be published over the next three years.
Adam O’Riordan has studied under Michael Donaghy and Andrew Motion, and these two influences are most notable in ‘Manchester’:

A girl steps from a door, her cotton flecked shawl
is the first snow on a turf-plot back in Mayo…

Your little merchants, hawking Lucifers and besoms
to set a small flame guttering in a wet-brick basement:

in the straw and wood shavings a mother’s lullabies
bear their freight of love and typhus.

Motion’s nostalgic English pastoral is here shot through with Donaghy’s American-Irish sense of history as a past only imagination can fully restore to the subalterns, the girl stepping from the door, the ‘little merchants’, the mothers losing their children to typhus. Here, O’Riordan has his masters in hand. He perfectly replicates their voices, but takes their music an octave deeper, as it were, transposes the melodies to make his own music.
Elsewhere, I think this doesn’t quite come off. ‘The Moth’, for instance, is a little too redolent of Elizabeth Bishop and ‘The Whetsone’ too Heaneyesque to overcome the sense that these were drafted in class and finished with the assignment deadline looming. However, what marks O’Riordan’s true promise is not his influences but his sure hold on a poem’s drift, from the trivial:


A prayer then
for the men who sit,
pale as geishas,
by the glow of obsolete
computers

to the beautiful:

It’s getting light.
See how the dawn
seems to bleed
from Venus.

[Goooogle]

Here’s an almost Larkinesque aubade, from the delight in perversity of ‘The fuck you up, your Mum and Dad’ to ‘It deepens like a coastal shelf’, in the space of one poem, from larkiness to mortality in the blink of a winking eye. If O’Riordan can live up to the hype (puffs in The Guardian, awards from Peters, Fraser Dunlop and the Arts Council, his appointment as co-editor of Donaghy’s prose) he’ll need to plot a course where his gift for image making is allowed to fly free of the nets which have both cradled and contained him. He needs to ditch the dressing up box and fashion his own style. From the poems on show here, I’d say O’Riordan might yet step out into his own season.
Perhaps poets ultimately though will only take to hand-me-downs for so long. Perhaps their elders and betters are not as much fun in the end as the other kids in the playground. I think in John McCullough O’Riordan might find a mucker for their raid on the wordhoard.
‘Georgie, Belladonna, Sid’ is far and away the most striking and most moving poem in these two little collections. McCullough draws on ‘polari’ the gay slang used amongst others by Julian and Sandy (Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick) in Round the Horne, a rich source of coding and ultimately nostalgia for lost love, a lost life:

Cackle is ruthless: weather, duties, family –
buvare at mine? My favourite’s a Yank.
Ed Paxton, his fluent hands unknotting the rope

of my body, loosening dreams that have never been,
will never again be freer. Between his legs
I’m the right shape, intrepid, all-seeing.

But what was subversive, sexy, exciting in wartime is all changed, changed utterly:

The horrors of peace are many….

Each dusk I vada
the ripped-open, scattered rose sky and pray
to God for the safe return of my blackout.

Here is a brilliant flipping of the old Blitz spirit, when ‘things were better in the war’. McCullough’s 39 lines are as spacious as a novel by Rosamund Lehmann, as Julian McClaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties, as anything by Quentin Crisp. In Georgie he voices another of history’s lost witnesses, but goes beyond O’Riordan in giving depth and complexity to not only character, but to a whole lost scene.
Elsewhere, in poems such as ‘The Long Mile’, voiced for a taxi driver with ‘Knowledge’ that goes beyond shortcuts and ratruns, and his ‘Barman’ poems, McCoullough announces the arrival of a poet with a measure of what O’Riordan lacks: a world he seeks to evoke, a way of seeing that isn’t dazzled by the tawdry glamour of the urban night but somehow sharpened by it and brought into tighter focus.
Les Robinson’s Academy is off to an auspicious beginning. I wish him well for when the transfer market gets under way. It will be interesting to see whether he’ll be able to hold onto his star performers, or whether they’ll be snapped up by The Big Boys. His two Likely Lads at least owe him a testimonial.






THE BEACH GENERATION

Jackson by Brendan Cleary. 12pp; Dancing to Motown by Lorna Thorpe. 24 pp. A Solitary Pine Tree In Sussex by Tim Beech. 24 pp. requiem for a typewriter by Moss Rich 24 pp. All £6 + £2 p & p. Pighog Press, P O Box 145, Brighton BN1 6YU. www.pighog.co.uk


The pamphlet has a long and venerable history. From the Civil War to the Chartists the pamphlet is a shadow form of those manuscripts circulated at court for the amusement of the King and his retinue. The Blackletter Ballads of the seventeenth century, the Broadside Ballads of the eighteenth, the publications of the Chartists, have all left their mark on our history and our literature. Subversive, ephemeral, the pamphlet continues to provoke in ways that are unpredictable and irrepressible. The blog carries on this radical tradition: Mr Caxton looks down and nods.
Pighog Press, based in Brighton, has produced four pamphlets to date. These publications transcend the ephemerality of most poetry pamphlets by being exquisitely produced; they also contain work which has been, on the whole, judiciously selected and edited.
Brendan Cleary’s Jackson was the first pamphlet published by Pighog. Like the rest, it is in large B4 format, with good quality artwork and design. Comprising twelve poems about the eponymous ‘Jackson’, the poems are snapshots of an everyman/loser, a comic lowlifer whose obsessions with porn, paid-for sex, beer and the races reduces him to not so much a set of needs as a complex of addictions. The language has an American flavour, Cleary tipping his hat to Weldon Kees and Bukowski: ‘Crammed full of beercans/hoarded for the races away/or the sleepwalking sessions’ (‘Jackson’s Fridge’). There is a subtle, bleak humour to these poems which lifts the sequence out of mere homage, an Ulster familiarity with harshness and absence, with highs that seek to chase the lows away, which makes Jackson less a rarified chapbook, more a guy thing.
Dancing to Motown comes garlanded with honours. A PBS Pamphlet Choice, the citation commends: ‘Traditional poetic forms like the sonnet… intricate rhyme schemes… [which] achieve the fine balance between lyricism and narrative monologue, needed to explore the celebratory and elegiac essence of love.’ Thorpe is too subtle to use rhyme conventionally; hers is a cynghanned scattered where it lands, rather than plotted in the beanrows of conventional form: ‘After I sent you away/I ate the Christmas lady, a gift from Canada’ (‘Chase the lady’). The poem weaves assonance and alliteration through Thorpe’s tight lines, sensuously evoking first chocolate, then a distant lover: ‘I’m seeing a darkened room:/my nipples haloed,/your lips glistening in the streetlight/falling through the slit/of half-opened curtains’. Thorpe’s frankness, her musicality and cumulative erotic power deserve the PBS’s plaudits. She is a poet whose audience is sure to grow with her, and her first volume with Arc will be keenly anticipated.
After the cityscapes and transatlantic referencing of Cleary and Thorpe, Tim Beech’s pamphlet explores the Sussex Downs, King’s Hill, Darlaston, ‘the ridge at Crib Goch’, Fullmoor, placenames out of a personal Domesday Book. This beautifully produced pamphlet, with its dark green cover, pale lettering trailing leaves and branches, paler green endpapers, photo of a pipe-puffing author, and the Pighog logo – a stylised armour-plated boar – all enhance one’s pleasure in Beech’s exact, magical poems. His sonnet sequence ‘Winter’ reaches a high point with ‘December’, set on Christmas day: ‘A heavy mist, which hangs on hawthorn, makes/Me feel I travel through another world’ until ‘the noise of traffic on the nearby road’ brings him back ‘To Mammon and to plunder; greed and gold.’ And yet…: ‘Was it the breeze, no louder than a sigh/That made me think I heard a baby cry?’. Beech is a quietly powerful poet, rooted in England’s landscape, in a poetry as old as the hills of which he writes. I eagerly await his first volume. This pamphlet is destined to become a collector’s item.
‘They told me, O Lexicon, that you had typed your last./They said you had no future now – you only had a past.’ The title poem of Moss Rich’s requiem for a typewriter gives a flavour of what is to come. Simple forms, a way with humour – this is light verse, surely. Except: ‘It was done – it was done forever./Time allowed no return./A happening can’t unhappen./A fire doesn’t unburn.’ ‘The Crime’ is a poem about the Anschluss, which Moss Rich lived through: ‘Not all our floods of all our tears/Can wash an eternal stain/We may dry our eyes for Abel/We shall ever remember Cain.’ Rich’s work, for all its levity, has moments so plangent verse turns suddenly to powerful, affecting poetry. Another poet of whom one wants to see more.
There is talk of the ‘Beach Generation’ in Brighton. These four poets – and Pighog Press – are its first significant wave.

The Different Instruments:
Thoughts On The Teaching And Practise Of Poetry

Poems can be quite easily taught: even professors sometimes do this. It’s poetry which is the difficult business to teach.

Teaching poetry is rather like teaching someone to ride a bike: it’s in the forgetting and letting go that success is achieved. And that is very difficult to teach.

Poets no longer serve apprenticeships. Instead, they go on courses or attend workshops. Where once the dead taught the living, now the dead have all but been eliminated.

Form is very easily taught. There are rules, and they are there to keep the ball in play. It’s what done with the ball that counts. We could all be Tony Adams, if we trained hard enough. But how do you become Georgie Best?

Certain kinds of teaching emphasise the transmission and acquisition of knowledge as ends in themselves. Teaching poetry sees these as merely means. The end in view is something very different: the preparation of the mind to see beyond knowledge to understanding.

A poem can be analysed, dissected, paraphrased. But what cannot be explained is why it haunts us, makes us shiver, gives us a momentary glimpse into another dimension.

In order to write prose, a pen will suffice. To write poetry we need an array of very different instruments.

To direct by indirection may be used by a teacher sparingly, for effect. For the teacher of poetry, it is the whole shebang.

Poetry for a novice will focus on technique; a master loses this focus in proportion to their mastery.

Poems are made of simple words in order that greater complexities may be expressed.

Indifference to poetry comes through the impoverishment of language.

The material world is fine for writers of prose; it is what’s immaterial which fascinates poets.

The clarity of a poem comes not from meaning but from effect.

Beyond the line, the stanza; beyond the stanza, the poem; beyond the poem, immortality.

Where two or more poets are gathered together, the Republic is troubled.

Prose offers words a hiding place; poetry is an ID parade where the usual suspects are very quickly found out.

If you teach the sonnet, the novice will write a sonnet. Eventually, they may even perfect the form. But have you taught them how to write a poem?

A curriculum for the teaching of poetry should include as many opportunities for indolence as can be arranged. Then work can begin.

Children make fine poets, because of their imaginations. Adolescents struggle to become poets, because of theirs.

Craft is not about technique; craft is a reflex.

Form is not the superimposition of structure on thought, like a city grid upon a landscape; form is what appears in the gloom, like fog clearing to reveal the Statue of Liberty.

What was always there form seeks out and reveals.

Haikus that don’t obey the rules – like playing ping pong with the net down.

Refrains are echoes that have had time to think and come back slightly altered.

Rhyme is most effective when least heard. By all means rhyme – but let the line flow on and not thump in at the end. This is closest to the way we speak, and makes for a subtler kind of poem.

Just because a poem is strict in terms of form and metre does not mean that the poem cannot be quiet, subtle, elusive.

All art aspires to the condition of music, save poetry, which is aiming a lot higher.

The worst sin of all is to think of poetry as a ‘career’. Careers can’t even sustain careerists these days.

The villanelle is not programmed by a couplet which drives the poem forward to end in that aa the aba rhyme scheme has been suppressing; it is a poem in its own right, written in a state of suspense like any other poem, with an ending that is not pre-determined, but which comes as a surprise to every poet who succeeds in writing a good villanelle.

A poem should begin in delight and end in payment.

The sonnet reflects the Renaissance – a form that grew from scraps of song into magnificence.

The difference between the soliloquy and the sonnet is the difference between the stage and the chamber, between overhearing and listening at the door.

Those who would write poetry should learn that it is first a craft, second a means of self-expression.

Confessional poetry is emotion recollected on tranquillizers.

A poet who writes prose is like a singer who speaks.

A sonnet sequence should be as good as a novel without the bits you want to skip.

Editing is a translation of the text into its purest form.

The tension between the primacy of the text and the agency of the author is the forefront of utterance.

Cadence is all.

Rhythm is far, far more powerful than rhyme.

Poetry is oratory with no hidden agenda.

True poems appear to have always existed; they’re like formulae which explain the universe.

We live in times when the English language has expanded so far, its outer limits allow for the expression of a poetry close to that airy thinness at the edge of the world itself, the realm of Ariel and Prospero, enchantments for the few, caviar to the general.

Poets should know words in the same way a tradesman knows his tools: their usefulness, their handiness, their breaking point. And who supplied them.

Workshops are not where poems are brought for correction or approval; workshops are where language surrenders long-forgotten secrets all over again.

A prose writer may feel defensive in a workshop, but is more likely to correct and revise if he feels the feedback he’s been given is sound; a poet who does the same, by contrast, will feel the power going out of him.

Poetry makes nothing happen subtly.

The difference between writing poetry and teaching poetry is the difference between art in heaven and daily bread.

Poets are soloists, not choristers.

A poet these days needs a muse far more than a patron.

Purifying the dialect of the tribe is a form of linguistic eugenics.

Dabble in verses, by all means, but be very careful when they become your life.

Poetry continues to attract vocations, despite difficulty and hardship. But then who ever said it would be easy? To be fully human is to seek the difficult; what’s easy we can leave to the rest of creation.

The Place Of Asylum


My parents were part of the post-war Brawn Drain. My father came over after the Second World War and worked as a builder’s labourer first of all, then as a fitter’s mate on the railways, and finally, when British Rail made him redundant in the early 70s, as a roadsweeper, but only at night, when I like to think he swept the moonlight along the dark and dusty roads of the parish.
My mother was everything from a nippy in Joe Lyons Corner House, to a nurse emptying bedpans, to a dinner a lady, to, finally, a cleaner in a local factory. That’s when she wasn’t shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, in our small flat in East London. We had the upstairs of a terraced house in Leyton, one remove from the East End, where the Irish hadlanded in the mid-nineteenth century. We were not quite the murphoisie, but we weren’t culchies off the boat either.
That my parents were culchies, or country people, was always there. My father, as the surname suggests, was from Kerry, from Killorglin, off a 30 acre farm, and Puck Fair, and wildness, and sometimes even, when the moonshine hit him, madness, never left him. But he had the good luck or the good sense to avoid the asylum. My mother wasn’t so lucky or perhaps so sensible. He was a native speaker, but me taught only the baby words he left me: bonya agus sucre: perhaps his way of telling me we had arrived in a land of milk and sugar. My mother, he said, was the one I should pay attention to, as she had passed The Leaving, which sounds to me to this day like the test every Irish person faces as the boat sails out of Dun Laoghaire. The Leaving… The test you take in order to emigrate…
My Irish formation took place not in my father’s county, not on the farm, not within spitting distance of Puck Fair, but in my mother’s place, up in Monaghan, in a small post-war settlement built in Lemass’s Ireland: Cappagh Ballinode, Little Ballinode, an adjunct to the old village up the road, past the creamery, and over the bridge. It was to her brother’s house, to Uncle Tommy the postman, to Auntie Lizzie and my six Murphy cousins, we came. It was in Ballinode that I realised home was where your people were, and that made the parish of St Joseph’s in Leyton a much more provisional place for me. It was as if I was learning to be amphibious, to acquire Irish ways and even a brogue – my palate was much softer in those days – as well as a Cockney hardness you need on the playgrounds, parks, and precincts of East London.
My parents’ deaths before I was twenty bequeathed me an interesting legacy. What now was I? Oh, officially I was a Ward of the State, fostered at 15, sectioned at 16, orphaned at 19. But what was I to myself?
My father’s death at 14 bruised me into poetry. I’d had exposure of course to poetry way before this, from Mother Goose to the rhyming riddles my aunt would recite, to the classic nonsense old John Traenor, a relative and neighbour, who would tickle our fancies with: ‘One fine day in the middle of the night/Two dead men got up to fight…’ to the subversive versions of carols we all told one another on those hard London playgrounds: We three kings of Orient are/Wearing Batman’s underwear/How fantastic/No elastic/In our motor car’.
But these were rhymes – the first, funny, distracting, naughty, and thus especially appealing – words we ever knew shaped into verses and designed to make you laugh, kinetic, as Joyce would say, not lyric. It was when my English teacher, the Mrs Puncheon, played us Dylan Thomas reading his own work of words that something deeper stirred within me. This would be at that tender age of 14, and as well as exposure to that voice of Thomas’s which seemed to come all the way from another galaxy, she also showed us the internal workings of English poetry, the horsepower of the pentameter. The first heave I was given was into the metrical engine of English poetry, and I’ve been largely under the bonnet ever since.
I then started to do the real homework every poet has to do. Not the sort even dear Mrs Puncheon set me, the learning by heart of speeches by Shakespeare, the pen portraits, the stories, the compositions, the ecker, as my cousins called it, but what Thomas himself set about, before homework that was never done. Kavanagh called this dabbling in verses, and in four red exercise books that took less than six months each to fill dabbling was what I did.
In my solitary pursuit of the call of poetry I worked away at all sorts of experiments, setting myself to follow the countryman’s lope of Ted Hughes, the slippered amblings of Auden about his City Without Walls, the solemn processions of early Dylan Thomas, the lyrical hwyl of late Dylan Thomas, the climb up the winding stair of late, stately WB Yeats.
And then – midway this life, as it were – I was sectioned, aged 16. My inner life, the life that had been a stay against grief, collapsed in on me.
It’s at this point that I wish to turn to one of the founding myths of Irish poethood, Mad Sweeney. The legend has it that Sweeney is rude to a cleric, and is cursed into a bird, who haunts tree and canopy and sky, bereft of family, of status, indeed of humanity. In return he is gifted, like Orpheus, with song, with flight, with a curious kind of freedom. Sweeney challenges power, and because of that he is cursed. I too came up against a cleric, as Sectioned tells, not, I hasten to add, one of the priests I was taught to hold in respect and reverence, but a cleric of the Other Persuasion.
Unlike Sweeney, I hadn’t been cursed by this cleric into my poethood, that had already come, even though I was only a windy boy and a bit, but I was cursed into something I shared with Sweeney – I was cursed into madness.
I spoke earlier of the legacy my parents had left me, and it is here that I come to the nub of what I want to say to you. Before I entered the asylum, the old Victorian county asylum of Claybury, I had already entered inside myself into another kind of asylum, the asylum of poetry. In the grounds I came upon others there who were also astray: Kavanagh on a bench, Yeats by the lake, Hopkins in the chapel, Keats in a sunlit meadow. In my asylum I had begun to develop an inner life that tried to make sense of the deepest aspects of our condition, of the mysteries the priests advised me to accept, as if closing off the temporal from the eternal. Where have we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Those questions – Gauguin’s questions inscribed on his famous Tahitian painting – haunted me. A print of the painting hung on the wall of one of the small rooms where I went for Group Therapy in Claybury aged 16. You couldn’t miss them.
I do not say that I have plumbed these mysteries, that I have the answers to the questions Gauguin asks so mysteriously himself. But in the midst of my confusion and trauma, in the wounding curse I had received from the cleric, I was like Mad Sweeney. I was free. In that first asylum I was free. I was clean cracked, but through the cracks daylight gradually started to appear. I had been admitted to a different class of experience altogether, I had seen how suffering could be shared, and overcome, but I was also aware of the depths from which something beyond adolescence and its articulations might emerge. My inner and my outer worlds suddenly coincided, in an orbit at once terrible, and liberating.
It took a long while. Three times on that first admission I came back to sanity, and three times I slipped back. But I had found in myself that place all poets go, a place of refuge, of calm, of asylum, and I was given time and space to explore its airy green grounds. It seems like a dirty word now, asylum, a place where the mad are carted off to, what all those freeloading foreigners are seeking, a clinical, sterile, inhuman place in which no sane, healthy, ordered person would ever find themselves … But the word means more than that – it should mean a place of safety, of calm, of sanctuary, and God knows we have need of such places.
For me poetry and this inward sense of asylum have always gone together. I don’t of course mean the institutions I was placed in - I mean the place where the mind can come up against those mysteries I referred to earlier and find enough imaginative space to countenance them without being overwhelmed. I’m not making a case here for poetry as therapy, as a cure for soul-sickness as Kavanagh’s brother Peter called it. I’m talking about a place where inspiration may blow in, rather like I have blown in today, and like grace transfigure reality with some small fall of beauty. I think poetry is an outward sign of an inward grace, that poetry is an art that is essentially inspired, and that the poet must find some kind asylum in order to catch the wind that blows about their head.
Which brings me back to What ish my nation, who was I to myself, where have we come from? I know where I am from. I know what my identity is. And I am London Irish, as Irish in my way as the Dublin Irish, the Galway Irish, the Cork Irish, even the Kerry and the Monaghan Irish. I am as Irish as the Liverpool Irish, the Boston Irish, the Sydney Irish. I am a child of the Diaspora, of no imaginary Fifth Province but at once a local of London, and these days of that Greater London borough by the sea, Brighton. And I’m also at home wherever Green in worn. Or, for that matter, White, or Gold. As John Hume, one of the great political leaders who helped broker peace in the North of Ireland, said, ‘Over the years, the barriers of the past - the distrust and prejudices of the past - will be eroded, and a new society will evolve, a new Ireland based on agreement and respect for difference.’ I like to think the boundaries of this Ireland extend to all those places I’ve cited beyond these shores, and to the others where the Irish have settled, or are yet to settle, just as my own mother and father set off on their journey to become something more, not something less, than the Irish they had been all those years ago. For Ireland may be the mainland, the mother country, home, but I think the condition of C21 Irishness is not one of exclusive essentialism, but of inclusive internationalism. And it’s here, finally, that I seek asylum, and claim it for all us children of the poor immigrant.

Write Club 412 (from Latest 7 magazine)

Brighton’s poets seem to rely as much on readings, launches, slams, and get-togethers as they do on slim volumes, books, and publishing. Sometimes indeed print seems like an afterthought to them, a by-product of all the hanging out. Here the event is as mighty as the collection, and I thought I’d take you along this week to where the latest wave is rising…
The Red Roaster is buzzing. There must be about 60 to 70 people here, sat at tables chatting, others getting a drink, and there are the poets themselves, a glow on them. It’s a friendly scene, and if there are stars they’re trying not to outshine anyone else in the constellation.
The night’s been organised by Queer Writing South, and we’re here to celebrate the launch of Maria Jastrzębska’s new collection, I’ll Be Back Before You Know It, the latest from Pighog, whose exquisite works are becoming collectors’ items. John McCullough MCs, introducing two poets from Whoosh!, an anthology of work from local queer writers. Cathy Ives is up first, a sparky performer with a fine line in self-deprecation. She goes off to thumping applause, the laughter greeting her wry work still hanging in the rich coffee air. Vicky_Ro is on next, with a fine poem about New York, how you can get everything on Fifth Avenue but a ‘self’. She’s slightly surreal, quirky, and then Vicky too is off and we’re in the presence of Seni Senevitatne, a Peepal Tree poet, here by invitation. Seni’s voice is warm and Northern, as Yorskshire as the dales, but her hinterland takes in Sir Lanka, Ireland, and the whole vast continent of poetry and song.
She holds the room transfixed, reading poems about the Indies Columbus never found, about war and love, her ancient grandmother. And she sings – a capella, sweet, strong, and clear, folk-tinged numbers that take all the air out the room, and make everyone shiver with something spooky in them…
Then there’s a break, and we come back for Maria. She’s a consummate performer, her set clearly worked out to show the full range of her brilliance, from post-war Europe to her Beloved’s shoes. There’s a subtlety, a seeing-round corners perspective to her poems that could be Polish, could be Queer, or could just be pure Jastrzębska. I think of Herbert and Milosz as I listen, but I also think of Sappho, and I’m sure I see them all, standing, smiling, by the bar as she comes off, close again to her Beloved, and to the crowd whose hearts she has in her pocket. ‘nothing/ can divide us,’ she says, ‘not even air’. And here, now, at this moment, we know she’s absolutely right…

I’ll Be Back Before You Know It by Mara Jastrzębska
Pighog Press
www.pighog.co.uk


Write Club 413 (from Latest 7 magazine)

I got the message on Tuesday. Maxim Jakubowski was going to be in Town Friday night. He ran rackets in the Charing Cross Road, books they said, dark ones, as dark as any night you ever woke up screaming. His HQ – Murder One. Filled wall to ceiling with novels your mother wouldn’t like and your father dreamt of reading. I heard he also fronts Crime Scene, held every July in some joint called the NFT. I decided to go down a few mean streets and check him out.
Western Road was its usual Friday night gumbo of fever, panic, and mayhem. Two guys in the street sparred as I strolled towards Bedford Place, just for the hell of it by the looks of them. By the time I got to The Permanent Gallery I could hear squad cars…
It was the kind of place nobody respectable ever checked out: bare floorboards, a naked bulb hanging from the celing, a kitchen out back. There was a heavy on the door, but I flashed my Press Card and was in. A blond guy called Jay Clifton was MC, and soon Tight Lip - no stoolies allowed – was underway.
A few acts later and suddenly there he was: The Big Jakubowski himself.
He looked like a guy from the Lower East Side, a crazy mix of Polish, Russian, French, and God knows what. About 180 pounds, steel grey hair, a nose so Roman he could have broken it off of Julius Ceasar. He knew a guy who’d been to Rome, he said. Bought his piece with him. Was going to whack some broad he had the hots for. You couldn’t tell if he was making it up, or if he knew the guy personally.
I decided to split. I’d managed to get what I came for: Rome Noir. Check it out: there’s enough clues if you for look for ‘em…
I filed my copy Sunday night, the soft, haunting sound of his voice still in my ears…
Maxim Jakubowski: one guy you never forget…

Rome Noir, ed Maxim Jakubowski & Chaira Stangalino, Akashic Books, £10.99

Maxim Jakubowski will be back at Tight Lip May 1, reading from the Ultimate Burlesque anthology, in aid of Burlesque Against Breast Cancer

www.tightlip.co.uk

Write Club 415 (from Latest 7 magazine)

You’ve answered your emails, opened the post, and made a few phone calls. You’ve done 500 words on The Book/added a scene to The Play/polished up the poem you wrote last night as moonlight streamed in through the window. There’s something not quite right, but you need to get out, so you mooch around the North Laine, digging around upstairs at Brighton Guitars, browsing in the Amnesty Bookshop, checking out the Moleskines in Pen & Paper.
Where can you take your ease? Where’s the best place to go for a drink and some staring into space time? Where is Brighton’s Deux Magots, her White Horse Tavern, her Café Central?
It’s 2.30pm. You walk through the doors of The Basketmakers. The lunchtime crowd is starting to go, back to the little studios, workshops, and garages nearby. Blue, the guv’nor, takes your order, and you settle into your favourite seat, the one by the door, pint in hand, where you can see the clock on the far wall and the whole bar. It’s practically empty now, only a few regulars and some out of towners, down for the day, sitting round the walls, watching the afternoon idle by.
There are a hundred old boxes around the walls, tiny tin chests from yesteryear. Oxo, Bovril, Colman’s Mustard. You watch some students across the way open one, phone a number they find on a slip of paper, an artist looking for models, giggling all the while.
Your food comes, and then you’re onto chocolate pudding, another pint and a whisky, cakes and ale on a cold winter’s day, Fleet Foxes playing quietly in the background. ‘Good to see you on a balanced diet, sir,’ says Blue, and you both laugh.
You’ve got that deadline, but for now you don’t care. That tricky bit in Chapter Five/Act Two/the final stanza – you’ve sorted it. The Basketmakers has worked its magic, and that column you’ve been fretting about – it’s done too.
You put away your notebook, and slip out quietly. The fire is in you now, and you carry the light weight of your happiness all the way home.


Write Club 416 (from Latest 7 magazine)

Who has opened for The Sex Pistols, toured with The Fall, lived with Nico, played himself in Control, and got name-checked by Alex Turner of The Arctic Monkeys? Could it be the same guy who played straight man to the Honey Monster in a Sugar Puffs advert?
Step right up John Cooper Clarke, at the Komedia tonight in a rare outing. Johnny Clarke, ‘the name behind the hairstyle’, will be delighting punters who love such all-time classics as ‘Evidently Chicken Town’, ‘I Married A Monster From Outer Space’, and ‘Kung Fu International’. Christened the first ‘Punk Poet’ by Tony Wilson of Factory fame, JCC says his biggest influence is Peter O’Sullevan, the old BBC racing commentator. Not for him the namby pambyness of iambic pentameter – Cooper Clarke rhymes to the rhythm of pile-ups, and gets more f words into a poem since Philip Larkin complained about his Mum and Dad.
I first heard him in the 70s, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. I even have his very rare book from the early 80s, Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt. It cost me half-nothing, and now it’s going for a hundred pounds a pop on Amazon. Beat that, Mr Motion. In fact, now we get some say in the choice of new Poet Laureate, I’d like to propose John Cooper Clarke for the role.
The man has everything: elegance sartorial and syntactical; wit to match the best of Prince Philip’s; and a great love of corgis. And dinky toys, I hear. Anyone who can write: ‘Belladonna is your flower/Manslaughter your meat/Spend a year in a couple of hours/On the edge of Beasley Street’ would get my vote. Hell, I’ve never even been to Beasley Street, but every time I go down London Road I’m there.
So it’s John Cooper Clarke for me. I suggest you check him out. Johnny Rotten, Mark E Smith, Nico, Ian Curtis, and Alex Turner can’t all be wrong. And nor can the Honey Monster.

John Cooper Clarke appears at the Komedia 24 Mar 2009 20:00, doors open at 19:30. Tickets £15.00 Box Office: 0845 293 8480

An interveiw with John O'Donoghue in the Irish Times