Taking a final bow

The first time I walked into the Labour Cub in Northampton I thought I’d been taken to the wrong place. I thought it was derelict. It turns out it wasn’t. It was tatty, it was unloved, but it brimmed with insanity, creativity and warmth. This was my first open mic night. I had spoken in front of hundreds of people from large stages, but tonight it was me and my writing, performing for a polite and giving audience. Somehow I got something right because I made one of the hosts, Justin Thyme, laugh so much he knocked over his beer. This was not going to be a one night stand.

I came back month after month. The second, or third time, I attended we went to Delapre Abbey and spoke poetry around afire and then under the stars. I had had a really tough day, but that warmth, appreciation and friendship moved me. I had found another way to express myself and to learn.

Tonight (Wednesday 2^nd December 2015) ‘Raising the Awen’ looks like it is coming to an end. So many people have shared their words from the stage, bathed in psychedelic lights, swamped in applause, drowned in alcohol fuelled anarchy and in those moments found clarity, found purpose, shared pain, love, laughter and confusion and in the past 18 months or so it is a place that I have always felt at home. I am not a bohemian, a tree hugger, a socialist or a schizophrenic. My politics differ from many. My ambitions don’t gel with some, but here is where we all find our family.

The love of words. The expressions of love. Of hate. Of frustration. Of hope. Of wonder. Where the shy become the confident and where the confident question their logic. We write and we spout, we swear and we curse. We have eaten together, drank together, smoked together. Hugged together and we have found the most intense comradeship together.

Tonight we will stand on the stage and express as we always have done. From our hearts. From the depth of our soul and we will celebrate the most intense form of love for each other in the sharing of our words. Ernest Hemingway said it best when he said “Writing is easy. You sit at a typewriter and bleed.”

The technology may have changed, but that desire to spill words from our hearts into others minds remains powerful and necessary. We conquer our fears by climbing the stage and speaking into a microphone. We risk rejection and yet always climb back down the steps with applause in our ears and passion in our hearts.

Wherever you may be, speaking at open mics across the country, think of us tonight (or when you read this) as the final curtain comes down and we evolve into something more powerful, but with less love. We become the wandering minstrels, the chosen ones of the word, the givers of poetry and spoken word. The lovers of free speech, of liberty, of laughter, of love. The Awen may not be raised again, but we were raised within it.

Yours passionately

Andy Gibney

@andygibneystwitter

A brief history of nonsense - Flarf poetry

 As a self confessed lover of all things pretentious I have a soft spot for Flarf poetry. Chances are you do not. Flarf poetry is as unloved as it is unknown, lost in the fog of the internet (ironically so vital in its creation) and the sheer volume of poets and poetry coming out of the wires nowadays. Those who have heard of it, or even read some of it, almost universally hate it.

 To be fair, it is easy to see why. But before we castigate it and push it to one side as nonsense for nonsense sake, we should have a look at where it came from.

Flarf was born in New York at the turn of the century, and its creation can be attributed to one man. Gary Sullivan created a nonsense poem to send into a scam poetry competition (no names here, we all know who they are!) and Flarf was born. The poem, the first lines of which are shown below, is meaningless and has no context or poetical merit, but was of course included in the poetry competitions winners;

Yeah mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! i got fire inside
my huppa chimp (tm)

Gary sent this masterpiece off to his friends, and pretty soon they were all involved in sending poems around the group. Flarf became a serious poetic consideration soon after, with people taking Google-search snippets and forming them into humorous/disturbing verses. This took Flarf from nonsense to something more, injecting it with a dash of pop/meta culture and meaning it started to mean.

You can read a lot more in-depth history on Flarf if you so wish, but to me that is missing the point. Flarf wouldn’t want you too. Flarf is only concerned with the now, the hyper-real and the nonsensical. In its brief history, it has grown only in one area. Now a few of the poems are good, whereas once they were uniformly awful.

If you love your hog of a oneself
grinding up against a dirty guitar
kung fu-style

in negative space
then you are cocked up with lollipops,
doggie style.

Expect toy ATM's next.

The lines above are taken from Sharon Mesmer’s ‘I am cocked up from overpower’. This is a great example of Flarf starting to mean something rather than just be something. The poem is satirising the very culture and saturation it was born from, a key element of Flarf. Flarfist’s know how ridiculous the fact their poetry is seen as art is and have integrated that in to their poems.

awe yea I open a photo album I found under my bed 
uhhuh, The dusty, leather cover decaying and smelling of the years 
awe yea baby Regrets mingling with my tears 

The above is an exerpt from Drew Gardner’s ‘As Dolphins Langour’. Using the same technique as other Flarfist’s, Drew has constructed something with actual emotional heft. Not easy to do, in fact I would argue it is the more difficult task. Flarf poets limit their palettes (maybe I should write poetry with lines like that) and therefore making something worthwhile becomes more difficult.

The writing of Flarf poetry is not solely down to Google searches. Another popular method is to take a phrase and run it through translators until it takes on other meanings entirely. This juxtaposition allows for some interesting creations but also can have a subtext. What happens, for example, when we run ‘I shatter into a thousand porcelain shards’ through translate a few times, we get ‘I own a piece of cloth decomposition’ as highlighted in the fantastic (and free) E-Book ‘Ten poems ruthlessly mangled by Google Translate’ by Ari Eckols.

But is Flarf something that requires anyone’s interest, or is it just tripe for tripe’s sake. Does it have any meaning? Does it have any place in serious literary circles?

Yes. Yes it does. Flarf is the trip-hop of poetry. It’s the pop-art of the Meta-age. Taking samples and pasting them together to become more relevant is practiced in all art forms. Forming something beautiful from otherwise unrelated snippets. Flarf is this generation’s Beat poetry. When Kerouac wrote How to Meditate, I am sure people reacted in the same way as they do when they read Flarf.

the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
i hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all-not
even the shred of a 'I-hope-you' or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind

Not that different is it? Just as beat poetry was taken in and adored by those ‘hyper-intellectual’ enough to instruct the rest of us in what to enjoy, so Flarf was/should and will be heralded as a harbinger of cultural nirvana.

But what do you guys think? Is Flarf purely an attempt to cash in on meta-culture and not real poetry? Or, like me, do you love Flarf with all your heart!

Yours Nonsensically

Stuart Buck

@stuartmbuck

Cats And Other Myths Review

J. S. Watts’s collection of poetry was published by Lapwing Publications in 2011. The collection, Cats and Other Myths is centred on the theme of myths that find contemporary relevance. Many of the poems heavily feature animals and quite a few are written in the point of view of one, however there are two particular poems that caught my eye in this collection.

1.

‘Mirror’

Page 13 - 16

This poem is about a princess, longing for a prince to find her. She looks into a mirror where her prince appears, she’s blissfully happy and in love until he disappears. Two other princes appear, but her hope diminishes when no prince comes to claim their love for her and there is no happily ever after.

To me, this presented many similarities with present day life. The mirror felt like a metaphor for online dating, you never quite meet that true love in person, and the distance ends up being the downfall. As it was for the princess who needed the love of a man in person, and not through a mirror.

I like how there was an element of fairy tales returning to their roots and not always getting that “happily ever after” as we’ve all come to believe was the origin of fairy tales.

This is why this poem was one of my favourites from the collection.

2.

‘All Hallows’

Page 64 - 65

The first stanza is what immediately drew me into this poem. Watts begins by using antithesis by saying “nature demands balance” for every light there has to be a dark. Antithesis is something I enjoy reading in poetry as it shows both sides of a coin so to speak.

In the last three stanzas of the poem there are two descriptions of a woman.

Watts refers to the woman as a “She-Devil, Fire goddess, born from the flames;” in the first description. This was a particularly strong line to me as I could really see the image she was painting of this woman bathed in flames, with her hair wild.

In the last stanza Watts moves onto describe a purer woman, “meek virgin, I trip my way to church/Mousy hair tied sensibly; linens precisely pressed/If I lack, it does not show.” This tied up the poem perfectly for me.

I believe both descriptions of the women are describing the same woman, but the first one is the woman during the night and the second is the woman during the day when she’s “pure” again. Whether or not this is what Watts was going for, I loved this poem regardless; it was probably my favourite poem of the whole collection. The great thing about poetry is it’s all about the readers interpretation.

If poetry is your thing and you enjoy reading pieces surrounding myths, fairy tales, and animal points of view then I would suggest you give this collection a read. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read, particularly the poems I mentioned above. Give it a read, and let me know your favourites.

 To pick up a copy of this collection you can either find it on www.jswatts.co.uk or good old www.amazon.co.uk

Yours weekly,

Jennie Byrne

 

@mustbejlb (on Instagram and Twitter)

www.underthefable.com

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