Latitude Attitude

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Latitude and Luke Wright (see former post) are somehow synonymous in my mind. I have never attended such a large gathering of almost exclusively white, middle class folk; this dominant whiteness was the constant butt of jokes in the poetry tent and was, frankly, embarrassing.

The whole event, like Glastonbury, Reading etc. etc, was organised by 'Festival Republic', a richly ironic misnoma if ever there were one. Festival Republic is responsible for the overall 'security' and running of the event. This amounts to a shockingly large number of newly appointed goons running round with walkie-talkie devices and wearing combat uniforms. However, their powers to 'stop and search' seem to be outside the remit of any normal legislation.

As a ticket-holder you have contracted in to the conditions of the festival, which include incidental 'stop and search', long-winded, random searches and removal of all matter that does not comply with festival rules, i.e. everything consumable including bottled water. All has to be bought and consumed on site, it seems. This kind of draconian measure was in evidence everywhere as you queued for twenty minutes to enter the arenas with megaphone-wielding attendants telling you to keep to the right or the left or wherever the hell they wanted you. It struck me and a bunch of lads on one occasion that this whole 'performance' compared strongly with the situation in which folk queued for the showers at Belsen. We had built up a bit of a busk on the topic by the time we were level with the FR guards (did they have ranks or am I imagining it?) and I was plucked out of the crowd for a random search by a female of the species asking: 'Step this way, sir, if you don't mind,' as she tugged at a stray strap on my bag and pulled me across the 4 or 5 deep crowd.

I protested. 'Let go of me. Take your hands off'

'I am not touching you, sir. I am touching your bag.'

By now this 'sir' was being spat through gritted teeth and, indeed, it punctuated all subsequent exchanges between me, the other security guard at a table who searched my bag and yet another kind of plain clothes variety who stepped in from nowhere to see what all the fuss was about. The refrain from all members of the team was along the lines of how they could have me ejected from the festival at any point. Was this what I wanted? they asked. They coaxed me towards the correct response after several failed attempts. I had to say 'please, I would like to stay at the festival' in order to meet with their approval. This too was said through gritted teeth on my part. I felt like saying: 'stuff you and your ****ing festival'.

This kind of interaction is worthy of some analysis. It left me reeling with contempt for the organisers, resentment that I should be treated in this way having paid a whacking £160 to be there in the first place, a profound sense of the collaborator's humiliation and hatred for the whole facade of moneyed promenading, everywhere evident.

By the time I got to see the Grace Jones Show, (queen of burlesque?), I had calmed down a bit. I thought she was astonishingly good actually but was amazed that she was cut off during her volumes-speaking personal response to what was, after all, a very muted appeal for an encore. This was something to do with a ‘curfew’?! However it typified the heavy-handed, anti-festival kind of organisation that seemed to be in place generally to manage the event. The audience were baying consumers, and I was among them: but I suppose this kind of multiple choice programme urges a sort of Edinburgh-style culture consumption: the need to rush to the next event on another stage or in another marquee.

Beginnings

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It's often difficult to begin to write. If you're an academic, then there are the familiar kinds of deferral; desk tidyings, note takings and ideas of comprehensiveness which necessarily precede the event of putting pen to paper. The idea of a blog appears to offer some liberation from all of this preparedness and randomness; whilst it also seems to offer a chance to be half-way serious or, at least, that's the way I'm viewing it. Otherwise there's the Facebook format in which everyone is glibly chirpy and finding necessary solidarity, keeping the last dance alive and the present flat search on the wish list. [Is this a manifesto? ED]

I found myself defending the idea of the blog on Saturday night at a party to launch George Hyde's and Larisa Gureyeva's new translation of the Mayakovsky poem, Pro Eto, which li

terally means "about this" but which its translators have rendered as the more forceful 'That's What'. I think this kind of vernacularisation is typical of the original text and they have done well to bring this poem which yokes together 'love, the class struggle and technological change' into such a compelling and readable condition. Urged by the indefatigable Eve Stebbing (soon off to Edinburgh for a three-pronged dramatic assault), George read a couple of passages which were well received. We were reminded of what a great worsdsmith and poet Mayakovsky was/is - and that's the great revelation. The translation is extremely fluid, up-to-date and refreshingly and evenly colloquial - modern as intended. The poem doesn't falter from its forward momentous rhythms, its rollings, its tumblings, its asides, its incidentals: it's a jazz epic with riffs, with chapters, with accretions, with melodies, with dissonance, with ellipses, with the white noise of a context, with a theme.....

The idea of the blog, then... Well I found myself thinking, for starters, about the desire to publish, to bring something to the scrutiny of the world: a kind of 'That's What' impulse if you like. A conversation with Leif Ahnland seemed to confirm this as one kind of incentive. Leif, in his position as librarian, has recently created a blog with students from Hewitt school in Norwich and spoke of its positive value for them. (I will post a link when I can)

Tim Marshall however was less than positive. He considered the blog to be 'the domain of the loudest shouters'. He implied that blog writing was a debased kind of publishing. But then Tim had recently received some long-winded hate email for a letter he had published in The Guardian which had been critical of Will Self. Cyber space harbours violent dissenters then threatening real-time eradication by way of virtual identity. The internet persona is not exactly a fail-safe device. However it is curious how a little concealment seems to offer a licence for some people to bring out the bats, as Nick Cave once called it.

Presently I am in London. I am reading a volume of poetry called Stranded in Sub-Atomica by the excellent Tim Turnbull, who, followed closely by Yanni Mac, Simon Armitage and Thom Yorke, was the best turn I caught at the recent Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Tim represents all that is good about 'Performance' poetry, partly perhaps because he doesn't distinguish it from any more traditionally placid variant of poetry reading. Simon Armitage is in a similar camp, it seems to me. Both have a wry and humorous vision at the wonder of it all which they share between poems, for example. They also have written poems which embrace both humour and pathos, the comic and the serious. It is the admixture of the comic which is arguably most significant in deciding that poetry is of the 'performance' type. There is a kind of 'stand-up' comic routine which is the default mode of the 'p' poet. There is also a delight in the vernacular, the commonplace wryly observed and a kind of reveling in rhyme, meter, assonance, internal rhyme, alliteration, repetition etc. etc. indeed all that constitutes poetry on the page... So already we are in trouble with defining the difference. OK:

1) Humour

2) Use of the vernacular

3) A kind of delighted revelling in the aural palate.

Though where does that leave someone like Scroobius Pip, whose writing is mostly lacking in humour, and yet, who is clearly one of the 'stars' of the medium?

The main presenter of this daily 12-hour? event at the poetry tent was Luke Wright, who I remember from early Poetry 'Slam' events which featured friends Bernard, Henry, Karen and Kev of Weird of Mouth. He was the new kid on the block.

I heard a couple of his things at Latitude and thought them good. I also heard a very clever sketch referring to Luke's self-declared middle class white sensibility from Yanni Mac. It's evident that Luke Wright has done much to promote the corner of performance poetry and poets. The impetus seems to have been ideas of 'accessibility' and removing poetry from the hushed and hallowed halls of heckle-free environments: a kind of music hall event perhaps - and this may align with the currently hugely successful cabaret/burlesque scene.

You can find Luke Wright (see above) all over the internet, and a little research will uncover

a CV which includes a kind of 'day job' in which he will lead a group of youngsters in discovering their inner poet in a school near you. Alongside this sort of laudable stuff is a whole lot of jetting around in a kind of minor celebrity fashion. Luke appears to have bridged the gap between poetry and performance, if there ever was one, and, as a clarion voice for the new school, his ubiquity and celebrity is surely justified.

Meanwhile, by comparison, Tim Turnbull seems somehow old school. He's in the 'tradition' of John Cooper Clarke (some are in the shadow) in the sense of inhabiting his own skin. His observations are both witty and genuinely moving at times. He's real, lived-in. His sensibility appears kind of anti-trendy. He has edited out the hackneyed vision of the classroom youth or the revelation of the love affair from hell, which many up-and-coming poets espouse. (Actually, one more 'love in the classroom' poem from a possibly decent poet trying to do 'performance' and I'll be writing a letter of complaint to Convenor Luke Wright.)