***
Det blir faktiskt lite av en repris på mitt andra besök hos poesibiblioteken, även då skrev jag om en Literary Death Match och om Sasha Dugdale.
På måndag är det åter dags för en tävling i textframförande från scen, vid Southbank Centre. Deltagare är romanförfattarna Natashia Deon och Ayisha Malik, manusförfattaren Simon Booker samt World Slam Champion poeten Harry Baker.
Onekligen känns det som om den sistnämnde har ett litet försprång. Sen två år tillbaka finns ett TED-talk inslag med Harry Baker tillgängligt på nätet. I det klippet framför han de tre dikterna som gav honom World Cup-titeln 2012. De finns också med i hans bok The Sunshine Kid som jag nyligen njutit av. Här följer ett utdrag ur titeldikten:
The Sunshine Kid, by Harry Baker
(from The Sunshine Kid. Burning Eye, 2014.)
(...)
The Sunshine Kid was bright,
with a warm personality,
inside he burned savagely,
hurt by the words and curses
of the shadowy
folk who spoke holes in his soul
and left cavities.
As his heart hardened,
his spark darkened.
Every time they called him names
it cooled his flames.
He thought they might like him
if he kept his light dim,
but they were busy telling lightning
she had terrible aim.
He couldn't quite get to grips
with what they said,
so he let his light be eclipsed
by what they said.
He fell into a lone star state
like Texas,
and felt he'd been punched in his
solar plexus.
That's when
Little Miss Sunshine came along,
(...)
***
Nu skådar vi in i poesibibliotekens höstkalendrar. Den 7 september erbjuder Southbank Centre ett panelsamtal om framtidens poesi. Rubriken för programpunkten är "Brave New Poets: emerging to what?". Diskussionsledare är Caroline Bird vinnare av Eric Gregory Award och erfaren handledare för olika skrivarverkstäder. Hon är dessutom en suverän spoken word-poet.
Jag har läst hennes Watering can från 2009 och hittade följande roliga text.
Last Tuesday, by Caroline Bird
(from Watering can. Manchester [England] : Carcanet, 2009.)
I miss my Tuesday so much. I had a Tuesday today, but it wasn't the same. It tasted funny. There were signs it had already been opened. The seal was broken. Someone had poisoned it with Wednesday-juice. In fact, I think today was actually Wednesday, but the government was trying to pass it off as Tuesday by putting my tennis lesson back a day, rearranging the tea towels.
I sent a letter to MI5 and the CIA and the rest. I know they have my Tuesday. They're keeping it for experiments because it was so freakishly happy. I was smiling in my sleep when two men in body-sized black socks stole it from my bedside table. It was here. It was right here. But when I woke up, it was gone. Their Wednesday stole my Tuesday. Their frigging totalitarian cloud-humped shit-swallower of a Wednesday stole my innocent Tuesday.
And now it's just getting ridiculous: the days change every week, it's like an avalanche.
As soon as I start to get the hang of a day, learn the corridors, find my locker key, the bell goes and suddenly it's Thursday, or Friday, but not last Friday or Thursday, oh no, these are different ones with kneecaps like pustules, gangly eyes: you never know which way they'll lunge.
In the Lost Property Office, I held up the queue. "It's greenish," I told the attendant, "with a mouth that opens to a courtyard." But they only had a box of wild Fridays some lads had misplaced in Thailand.
(I took a couple of those, for the pain.)
Then I gave up. I ignored the days, and they ignored me. I drank Red Bull in the ruins of monastaries, flicking through calendars of digitally enhanced dead people: Gene Kelly downloading a remix of "Singin' in the rain" on his slimline Apple Mac. No one gives a damn about time anymore. Happy hour lasts all afternoon. You can put a hat on a corpse and send it to work. You can bury a baby. Hip counsellors in retro tweed jackets keep telling me to look ahead. There'll be other Tuesdays to enjoy, they say, new Tuesday pastures. It's a lie.
I found my Tuesday in someone else's bed. Its chops were caked in velvet gel and its voice had corrupted. It pretended to be a Saturday, but I could see myself reflected in its eyes, a younger me, tooting the breeze with a plastic trombone. "I'm sorry," said my Tuesday, pulling its hand out of a woman,"I didn't mean to let you down, but I couldn't stay perfect forever, you were suffocating me. Even sacred memories need to get their rocks off."
***
För tre veckor sedan lovade jag att återkomma till nomineringarna för årets Forward Prizes. Bland de fem böckerna som nominerats till "Best collection" finns Alice Oswalds Falling Awake.
Fyra av nomineringarna till The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem är hämtade från magasin som omtalats i bloggen (PN Review; Poetry London; Granta Magazine och Times Literary Supplement). Tre av poeterna har jag skrivit om tidigare, bland annat Sasha Dugdale (redaktören för Modern Poetry in Translation). Hon är nominerad för en väldigt lång dikt, "Joy", som kan liknas vid en monolog.
Den 20 september får vi reda på vilka vinnarna blir.
Joy (extract), by Sasha Dugdale
(Published in PN Review, 2016)
The walls are wordless. There is a clock ticking.
I have woken up from a dream of abundant colour
and joy
I see his face and he is a shepherd and a piper and
a god
I see him bent by the gate, setting the fire, and he
is a fallen demon
I see him listening to the wind and sorrowing
I see wrath and misery, fire and desolation
A thousand fires in ancient London
And then the grass comes silent silent with the
hardest colour of all
The mirth colour the corn colour the summer
night colour
A thousand thousand summer nights pass
And children weave their daisy chains and place
them on the heads of fallen idols
He wept he wept more tears than there were days
And never changed the door lest, he said, we drive
an angel from it
And every morning he dipped his brush in wrath
and mildness
And out of him tumbled the biggest things of all
All of them righter than the rightest calculation
And truer than any compass
Yet where they were right and true none could say
And how they were right and true none could guess
But I knew I knew
He was an eye, and the eye wept and frowned and
smiled
The eye watched
The eye watered
The world was a mote in that eye
The mote was a world in that eye
And his brush was a blade and his tears made a
Lake.
På måndag är det åter dags för en tävling i textframförande från scen, vid Southbank Centre. Deltagare är romanförfattarna Natashia Deon och Ayisha Malik, manusförfattaren Simon Booker samt World Slam Champion poeten Harry Baker.
Onekligen känns det som om den sistnämnde har ett litet försprång. Sen två år tillbaka finns ett TED-talk inslag med Harry Baker tillgängligt på nätet. I det klippet framför han de tre dikterna som gav honom World Cup-titeln 2012. De finns också med i hans bok The Sunshine Kid som jag nyligen njutit av. Här följer ett utdrag ur titeldikten:
The Sunshine Kid, by Harry Baker
(from The Sunshine Kid. Burning Eye, 2014.)
(...)
The Sunshine Kid was bright,
with a warm personality,
inside he burned savagely,
hurt by the words and curses
of the shadowy
folk who spoke holes in his soul
and left cavities.
As his heart hardened,
his spark darkened.
Every time they called him names
it cooled his flames.
He thought they might like him
if he kept his light dim,
but they were busy telling lightning
she had terrible aim.
He couldn't quite get to grips
with what they said,
so he let his light be eclipsed
by what they said.
He fell into a lone star state
like Texas,
and felt he'd been punched in his
solar plexus.
That's when
Little Miss Sunshine came along,
(...)
***
Nu skådar vi in i poesibibliotekens höstkalendrar. Den 7 september erbjuder Southbank Centre ett panelsamtal om framtidens poesi. Rubriken för programpunkten är "Brave New Poets: emerging to what?". Diskussionsledare är Caroline Bird vinnare av Eric Gregory Award och erfaren handledare för olika skrivarverkstäder. Hon är dessutom en suverän spoken word-poet.
Jag har läst hennes Watering can från 2009 och hittade följande roliga text.
Last Tuesday, by Caroline Bird
(from Watering can. Manchester [England] : Carcanet, 2009.)
I miss my Tuesday so much. I had a Tuesday today, but it wasn't the same. It tasted funny. There were signs it had already been opened. The seal was broken. Someone had poisoned it with Wednesday-juice. In fact, I think today was actually Wednesday, but the government was trying to pass it off as Tuesday by putting my tennis lesson back a day, rearranging the tea towels.
I sent a letter to MI5 and the CIA and the rest. I know they have my Tuesday. They're keeping it for experiments because it was so freakishly happy. I was smiling in my sleep when two men in body-sized black socks stole it from my bedside table. It was here. It was right here. But when I woke up, it was gone. Their Wednesday stole my Tuesday. Their frigging totalitarian cloud-humped shit-swallower of a Wednesday stole my innocent Tuesday.
And now it's just getting ridiculous: the days change every week, it's like an avalanche.
As soon as I start to get the hang of a day, learn the corridors, find my locker key, the bell goes and suddenly it's Thursday, or Friday, but not last Friday or Thursday, oh no, these are different ones with kneecaps like pustules, gangly eyes: you never know which way they'll lunge.
In the Lost Property Office, I held up the queue. "It's greenish," I told the attendant, "with a mouth that opens to a courtyard." But they only had a box of wild Fridays some lads had misplaced in Thailand.
(I took a couple of those, for the pain.)
Then I gave up. I ignored the days, and they ignored me. I drank Red Bull in the ruins of monastaries, flicking through calendars of digitally enhanced dead people: Gene Kelly downloading a remix of "Singin' in the rain" on his slimline Apple Mac. No one gives a damn about time anymore. Happy hour lasts all afternoon. You can put a hat on a corpse and send it to work. You can bury a baby. Hip counsellors in retro tweed jackets keep telling me to look ahead. There'll be other Tuesdays to enjoy, they say, new Tuesday pastures. It's a lie.
I found my Tuesday in someone else's bed. Its chops were caked in velvet gel and its voice had corrupted. It pretended to be a Saturday, but I could see myself reflected in its eyes, a younger me, tooting the breeze with a plastic trombone. "I'm sorry," said my Tuesday, pulling its hand out of a woman,"I didn't mean to let you down, but I couldn't stay perfect forever, you were suffocating me. Even sacred memories need to get their rocks off."
***
För tre veckor sedan lovade jag att återkomma till nomineringarna för årets Forward Prizes. Bland de fem böckerna som nominerats till "Best collection" finns Alice Oswalds Falling Awake.
Fyra av nomineringarna till The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem är hämtade från magasin som omtalats i bloggen (PN Review; Poetry London; Granta Magazine och Times Literary Supplement). Tre av poeterna har jag skrivit om tidigare, bland annat Sasha Dugdale (redaktören för Modern Poetry in Translation). Hon är nominerad för en väldigt lång dikt, "Joy", som kan liknas vid en monolog.
Den 20 september får vi reda på vilka vinnarna blir.
Joy (extract), by Sasha Dugdale
(Published in PN Review, 2016)
The walls are wordless. There is a clock ticking.
I have woken up from a dream of abundant colour
and joy
I see his face and he is a shepherd and a piper and
a god
I see him bent by the gate, setting the fire, and he
is a fallen demon
I see him listening to the wind and sorrowing
I see wrath and misery, fire and desolation
A thousand fires in ancient London
And then the grass comes silent silent with the
hardest colour of all
The mirth colour the corn colour the summer
night colour
A thousand thousand summer nights pass
And children weave their daisy chains and place
them on the heads of fallen idols
He wept he wept more tears than there were days
And never changed the door lest, he said, we drive
an angel from it
And every morning he dipped his brush in wrath
and mildness
And out of him tumbled the biggest things of all
All of them righter than the rightest calculation
And truer than any compass
Yet where they were right and true none could say
And how they were right and true none could guess
But I knew I knew
He was an eye, and the eye wept and frowned and
smiled
The eye watched
The eye watered
The world was a mote in that eye
The mote was a world in that eye
And his brush was a blade and his tears made a
Lake.
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