Published by Skill
Paperback – out now
I am a man out of time
I am a man out of touch
I am your perennial bad poet
It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing here about the ever prolific Johny Brown’s Corpse Flower collection. There’s also been the Band of Holy Joy’s 60 Minute Data Breach On Haunted Beach CD and mixed media package. And now he’s back with a truly epic piece of work, taking us all the way from Apollonian rites of ancient Greece to the present day iniquities of Trump, Vance, Epstein and their ilk.
It’s a seriously ambitious piece of work, 132 pages of poetical marauding through the social and cultural undergrowth. There’s a cool structural framework to the piece, starting with one line poems, then two lines, progressing up to nine lines. This effect is reversed towards the end of the book, providing a cool bookend/mirror effect to the proceedings. From the opening dedication “For No One” to the concluding “Actually For Someone – For Inga.”
Before going any further, it’s worth noting how nicely produced the book is. Really clear, legible print – black, not grey – good quality paper, no shiny stuff here or pages falling out. Keep an eye on Skill – I’m not entirely sure what a micro imprint is, but they’re doing something right for sure.
The book was originally inspired, I believe, by the author’s experience of being heckled and blanked by a group of French poets, who objected to his performance and vernacular. Locations, ideas and people shift as we embark on a quest for the soul of poetry. Who does it belong to? The proper poets with their rules, references to movements, elevated tone and respect for critics? Or is that all too careerist – follow the rules and get a job for life? Or is it to be found among the “poets of soul and tenderness and vision”, such as Seamus Heaney, Walt Whitman, “HD” and Salena Godden 2? Poetry of self-expression and emotion. Or to put it more bluntly, “fuck the poets of propriety”. There’s a distinctly psychedelic feeling as the journey melds into a series of scenes where people, locations an voices merge and diverge.
We take a journey on Eurostar to the French capital, but it’s the Paris of the French 19th century Symbolists – Lautreamont and “Maldoror”, Apollinaire, Breton, Huysmans’ “Against Nature”, taking a lobster on a string for a walk. From there, the journey moves to Marseille before spiralling off to the USA and Slovenia before hitting Cairo in time for a shape-shifting Antony and Cleopatra, culminating with a “bad old soul in the New Death Café”. Riffing on the lyrics of Bob Marley’s War and evoking the late Haile Selassie.
It’s hard to convey the strength of the cascade of ideas and places that tumble through the narrative. There’s a very Romantic feel to it all – not in the relationship/sentiment sense of the word, but recalling that the original Romantics like Blake, Shelley and Keats were inspired by the fall of the Bastille and were seriously revolutionary in their outlook, for all the elevated sensibilities and emotions recollected in tranquillity. As so often, William Blake captured the Good Poet/Bad Poet split best when he wrote “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.
The elegiac coda to Bad Poets at least leaves us on a hopeful note- “New styles will appear alongside new ideas The waking youth will find a precise way to make new truths out of this old world – Tyrants always topple, fascists fade and die – Know that all the religions lie – They always have and always will Search for the god within to heal yourself”.
~
Available at Waterstones here:
All words by Den Browne. You can read more on his author profile here:
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