Happy Hour in Herne Hill

Just a quick plug, I got interviewed by BBc London news about the state of poetry, so all you bloggers from the big smoke can watch me talking bollocks on bbc1 from 6.30 tonight. ha!

...and I have defected to My Space! Sorry to the blog.co.uk bunch, but the other guys let me download sound files! If you want to hear recordings of me reading my own stuff go to www.myspace.com/niallosullivanpoetry or download some of my contemporaries at www.myspace.com/cellarpoetry
peace

The first time I read Bukowski’s poetry I was on my summer break from art school. At that time my family were living in a rented house in Slough. It was a respectable enough place, built around the fifties with a garden and even an outdoor shitter. I was the only person in the house that used it; a cold shock to the thighs from a freezing bog seat was still better than bursting something while waiting for your siblings to finish in the bathroom. There were three bedrooms in the house, and six of us. My sister had her own room, my mum and dad had theirs and I shared with my two brothers when I wasn’t away studying. I worked as a gardener in a theme park about six miles away in order to save some money for the next term. I wasn’t too good at the gardening, the saving or the studying for that matter.
I had already read some of Bukowski’s novels, but never the poetry. It was on a visit to Forbidden Planet in London where a title seemed to jump out at me from among the others in the “subversive literature” section. The book was called “The Last Night of the Earth Poems”. Wow, what a fucking title. At the time I was reading Keats and Henry Rollins, so in a way Buk was the happy medium between the two. Well, maybe not happy.
I couldn’t keep my eyes out of that book until I finished it a few days later. I ignored the girl I’d gone to London with on the train back, she got angry so I offered her a view of the page I was reading, but that was all she could get from me. When I was working I began the long tradition of sneaky reading while the foreman wasn’t looking. Poetry is perfect for clandestine reading at a job. What you wean from ten lines can contribute to a satisfying daydream session before the tea break.
Best of all, when I got home, I bought a few beers, climbed on top of that outdoor shit house and sat there with Buk in the sunshine. Reading those poems, stopping only to laugh, sigh or take another glug of the lousy American beer I was into at the time. My mother told me to get down from that thing before the neighbours thought I was a peeping tom and called the police. I told her I could always read the poems out loud to prove I wasn’t. She went back in, knowing the threat was serious.
About a month later I found out that my degree had been terminated. I had fallen behind with my work and had a few disciplinary skirmishes during the first term. Some lecturers stuck up for me, but it seemed the obscene note I had written to the head of faculty during a whiskey and amphetamine session had sealed my fate.
Even though I had brought upon my own ruin, I was devastated. I had fallen in love with the city of Bath where I studied and the prospect of pushing barrows for a living in a part of the country I had come to detest brought me down to the ground with a nasty bump. I had got into making short films and now I thought there was no way to express myself creatively. That’s why reading Bukowski was such a lucky thing for me. On reading the letter that said Thanks for studying with us Mr O’Sullivan, now kindly fuck off, I started writing about how I felt. That’s when I had my epiphany, even at college when I was meant to be a visual artist, when things got a little heavy, I always expressed it through words. Bad, slovenly adolescent angst ridden words, but words nonetheless. It made the next ten years of my life more bearable, the fact that when everything slipped beyond my grasp I could sit down at a keyboard or with a notepad and get to work. That was the one thing the fuckers could never take from me.
I know I’ve already mentioned this on the blog once, but please allow me to say it again. It’s been ten years since I was kicked out of that College (now a University) and they’re paying me to go back and read my stuff. Out of everything I’ve achieved and everything I pissed away in the past ten years, I can’t stop smiling about that. Here’s to you Charles, if it wasn’t for you I would never have cast aside my troubles, climbed on top of the shit house my life can sometimes be and smile with the poets in the sunshine.

I seem to be missing everything right now. First up, my girlfriend has flown off to Hungary for a week. She’s going with one of our ministers to meet one of their ministers. She’ll have one day free to explore the delights of Budapest as temperatures plunge to twenty below. I got back, had some breakfast, watched a bit of the history channel, and bang, I started missing her. Not only that, I seemed to sink into a strange melancholy where I missed pretty much everything that wasn’t currently in my life.
It could’ve been the piano sonata playing on the radio or the residue of some poet I read the night before. I even missed my old job. As the sun rose outside and the urban landscape outside my window gleamed, I could see myself stood in a shrub bed in the middle of a housing estate, digging the frozen ground. I used to enjoy that. When you left your spade wedged in the ground and took a step back, a robin would always land on the handle. And there was something about the light, the kind of light you only get on a crisp clear winter morning, made the world look like it was born that morning, that everything was fresh and clean, even the old beer cans and rusting abandoned cars.
In a Zen koan, a teacher talks about how he has his morning tea in a certain room in the monastery at a certain time because the light that shines in is so strange it makes the tea utensils seem unreal. In another story Master Suzuki is on his death bed and his students are weeping. One of them asks When will we see you again? Suzuki holds out a finger and draws a circle in the air. The students fall silent and bow.
I think nostalgia, especially melancholic nostalgia, hits when the world seems less real and a memory of the past becomes more real. It’s a terrible feeling of disconnection, knowing that your body exists in an uncertain world but your mind is snug and at home in a place that no longer exists. Of course this, like everything is an illusion, more a way of seeing something rather than the totality of the thing itself. Well, that helps me as far as missing the old job, but I still miss my girl. It makes me want to drink all the beer in the fridge before going out and starting on the bin men.
Anyway, I’m a disciplined soul really, never touch a drink in the AM, haven’t been in a fight for at least five years. I especially need to keep my shit together because I’ve just been accepted onto a course that will end with me going into schools and prisons to do poetry workshops. I’ll be trying out all forms of education, but I really want to work with prisoners and excluded pupils. A few friends of mine have already done this and have had some fantastic experiences. One of my favourite stories was when a mate of mine worked with some excluded boys. He started by telling them they were allowed to express whatever they wanted, how there wasn’t a right or wrong way of seeing the world. After a brief silence one of the boys piped up and said, “Does that mean we can say…fuck?”
Anyway, my apologies to any readers of this blog for my lack of entries in the last week, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry and everything I tried writing on this felt a little precious, and the whole point of me starting this was to write with scant regard for anything or anyone. Fuck.

We join two poets in a bar, so far the conversation has been pretentious, ego preening and tiresome. What else did you expect?

Man is the measure of all things.

True, but only because things couldn’t give a fuck for being measured, it’s a bit like saying "Snakes are the slitherers of all things."

But man is higher than the snake.

Men are accidents, snakes are accidents, this table is an accident.

This table is man made, man-made things aren’t accidents.

The man who cut this lump of wood into a table wasn’t alive when the tree it was cut from took seed. Before that man was born, the tree had been growing for hundreds of years, absorbing minerals from the ground that had once belonged to millions of living things. It had absorbed water molecules that had been part of oceans and lakes, passed through the bladders of many a beast, fish and bird. This grain I’m running my fingers over is the slow, careful work of the centuries and man had nothing to do with it.

Until a man came along with an axe and chopped the tree down!

Yes, yes, man came along and had his little moment kidding himself that he could rule the universe through making furniture. But even now, the molecules within this table are shuddering restlessly. Without the life force of the tree, pulsing the soft message of its genetic codes through the fibres, this current form will eventually break down into minerals and energies that will assume many other forms and hosts. In the scheme of the aeons, this table is no more permanent that a raindrop on a car windscreen.

Okay, okay, in that sense the table is an accident, but what does that make man?

~

To Tu Tu from Shantung

You ask how I spend my time—
I nestle against a tree trunk
And listen to the autumn winds
In the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can’t get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you
Like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.

-Li Po

I don’t know much about Li Po, other than he was a wine guzzling Chinese poet from many years ago, who used write his poems on silk and send them down the river. Perhaps this is because he felt finished with the poem; he was a restless wanderer and he didn’t need to weigh himself down with stacks of previous platitudes. Maybe it was the other way around, the poems didn’t need him, didn’t belong to him, they were ideas that flowed through him like a leaf from a river to the sea.

Every Tuesday I host an open mike poetry reading in central London. On a typical night I get through 25-30 readers. People often tell me I must have a sage’s patience to do it every week. I’d like to think of that as true, but I’ve lost count of the times I’ve offended readers with my comments after they’ve been on. However there is a mindset you can occupy that makes the night more bearable. There are actually a good amount of talented poets at Poetry Unplugged, and a less talented poet always stands the chance of writing a brilliant poem, in the same way a journeyman musician can write a massive hit. One hit wonder? You only need one.
A lot of the time though some poets will return every week with a new poem, but ultimately it’s the same poem. The subject matter may seem to change, but really the poet is saying the same thing as before. The happy poet is still happy and the angry poet is still angry. A man is angry about injustice one moment, the next he’s angry about being cut up by a motorcyclist. When you take away the cause, is the anger really any different?
Actually, one of the biggest myths in all art forms is the myth of subject matter. People honestly think that the more powerful the subject, the more powerful the poem. Wrong. It’s always a question of style. Don’t believe me? Well, there are many painters who created scenes of battle and carnage, huge rolling landscapes and tempestuous seas. Their paintings are now destroyed of forgotten.
Van Gogh only had to paint a chair.

Oh yes, it’s all about furniture.

~

Whenever I get the feeling that I’m going to pull a concrete bollard out of the ground and brain some fucker, I visit the nearest gallery.
Wow, there’s a sentence that sums up the pros and cons of living in London.
When I’m near the Tate Modern I sit in the Rothko room and vibe out, when I’m at the National it’s Van Gogh’s chair. I walk in, stand in front of it for ten-twenty minutes and walk out again.
Many people talk of Van Gogh in the same manner as the Impressionists, the world viewed as light and energy, a simple enough response to the scientific discoveries of the time. But I always thought Van Gogh’s paintings were also about the emotional investment one makes in what we see. I think of most of his work as self-portraiture, even the landscapes. The perspective is always skewed to the effect that the world has been flattened out and slammed right into your face. The world was always closing in on the poor bastard.
The chair was painted when he was expecting Paul Gaugin to stay with him for a while. The chair dominates the centre of the canvas, rock solid, yet tipped towards the viewer as if the thing was about to fall onto you. It says so much about the artist’s loneliness and what he expected from human contact. We all know what happened next. Gaugin stayed for a while until Van Gogh attacked him with a razor, the same razor he used to cut off his own ear as a gift to a prostitute. If only she’d put the thing into a pickle jar her grandchildren would’ve been living in palaces.
Of course, nowadays Van Gogh’s chair is everywhere, posters, tee shirts, beer mats. This doesn’t bother me, after all look how much architecture and design is based on that other enduring image, the crucifixion. Van Gogh’s chair seems to sum up the psychological and spiritual void of our time. Our loneliness, the empty throne where God once sat. The chair could represent ourselves, the part of ourselves we seek someone else to fill. The reason people are willing to make fools of themselves in front of Simon Cowell. The reason people stand up at open mike events and read poems about what they’re angry about this week. The reason people like me send our lamentations out into the darkest depths of cyberspace.

Staring at me from my desk is the staff id card for the job I walked out from in September. It’s about five years old. The photograph is a passport photo of me in my waterproof top, with three tee shirts and a jumper underneath to keep me warm whilst working outside in January. Even though I’m twenty five in the photo, I’d probably look about ten years younger if I wasn’t sporting a dodgy goatee ( the moustache and beard don’t quite meet on the right hand side, it almost looks like a letter C )
Over the five years I worked for the council, I didn’t do much grass cutting. The grass cutters were the highest paid members of the gardening team. Their hierarchy started at the bottom with the strimmer operators, the ride on operators were at the top. They used to sit on those machines with their chins up, like they were sat on a throne. They got paid about ninety pounds a day for it as well. The ride ons would get on site first,
swishing regally across the lawns then the strimmer operators would turn up to get all the awkward spots that were left behind.
Strimmers were unbelievably awkward and dangerous to use, you would get pebbles and stones fired into your legs all the time, and if you weren’t carefully you could get something nasty in your face. The other hazard was that the strimmer operators, who were always busting their arses to keep up with the prima donnas on the ride ons, would be leaving a trail of smashed patio doors and car windows in their wake. The unofficial staff policy was always this: if you get caught in the act, give them the number of head office, if not, act like it didn’t happen and get the hell off site.
Anyway, because of these incidents coming to public attention, the strimmer operators were asked to slow down and I would spend my mornings relieved of my horticultural duties, helping them to keep up with the ride on godfathers.
At first I was pissed off at doing someone else’s price work, but after a few weeks I not only got pretty good at strimming, I started to enjoy it. With the protective goggles and the ear plugs, I felt slightly removed from the world as I squeezed the throttle halfway down and guided the strimmer over patches of grass. It became quite a meditative exercise, and with my ear protection the roar of the two stroke engine began to sound like a Tibetan chant.
A week after I handed in my month’s notice, I was strimming round the border of the Acton Park play area. It was a mild late summer, early autumn morning. The low sun sent the shadows of the trees skirting far across the park, the abandoned swings and roundabouts lent a graceful air of melancholy to the scene. Christ, this is beautiful I thought to myself as I sank into a trance. Maybe I was wrong to leave this job, maybe a man needs a trade to really connect to the precious moments of his life. And that was when I lost concentration and strimmed a lump of dog shit.
It must have been a big lump because the thing exploded and sprayed all over me, all the way up my shirt, across my face and some of it went into my mouth. I had dog shit in my fucking mouth. Now, I’m sure an enlightened Zen master would’ve swallowed and carried on , but that was enough for me. I unhooked the strimmer, lobbed it onto the back of the van, marched back into the yard and spent the next half hour scrubbing and spitting. Then I did the rounds, shook everyone’s hand and walked out of that yard.
I felt pretty good, the sun was high, it looked like it was going to be another hot one. I thought about all the other people round the world who were also walking out on the job, the feeling I was sharing with them. Okay, I admit that I had some work lined up for the future, while other people who tell their boss to stick it don’t know what to do afterwards. Still, I bet the shit they were forced to eat was a bit more metaphorical than mine.

The drivers I worked with
were angry,
because their money
wasn’t good enough,
because their women
didn’t want them when they
were drunk, and they
only worked up the will
after a few pints.

Some of them
were raw from
messy divorces,
their accounts drip fed
to children
they weren’t allowed
to see.

Others were many miles
from their loved ones
sharing a room with five others
so they could buy a house
back home within a year.

They were angry
about the other guys
about other races
about the queers
the paedophiles
that useless government,
everything those red tops
told them to be angry about.

They had slipped,
drunkenly, lustily,
bitterly into their own
failures, jobs they never wanted,
marriages that happened
of their own volition,
children they knew nothing about
and the only people to blame
weren’t the terrorists
or the paedophiles
or Tony
but themselves.

During break times
they’d interrupt me
while I read Dostoevsky
“Here, look what they’re up to now!”
They’d show me the page
with the hysterical
block capital headline,
a picture of a hated politician
or a riot at a football match
and on the other page
a picture of a pretty skinny
young woman, just above the age
of consent
with round happy breasts
a body that would snap
like a rose branch
within their clumsy
angry embrace.

As they sat and read
I’d watch their shoulders tense
their breathing hasten
sucking hard on their fags
slurping their instant coffee,
exclaiming fackin’ hell
before interrupting me again.

They were hooked
on their own anger,
sinking their venom
into their own backsides.

Some even listened to the angry
radio phone ins
where angry people got
worked up about people
they had never met
situations they had never known
except through the grainy lens
of newsprint.

This countries going to the dogs!
My workmate concurred.

No it isn’t, I replied.

He pointed angrily at the radio

It’s a radio, I said
whilst pointing out the window.

We were in the middle of a park
taking a break from cutting the hedge
The roses were pulsing
like magnificent gowns
from the wardrobes of their buds

Mothers and toddlers were
stumbling laughing together

Pensioners were parked on the benches
taking in every bit
of what could be their last day on earth

And the dogs were in their element
breathless, bounding
sniffing other dog’s arses
getting the ride if they were lucky

If the country was really going to them
then they deserved it more
than we did.

He seems pleasant enough, perhaps too pleasant. He stands in a shop doorway and greets everyone with a chirpy but servile hello. His posture is slightly hunched with his hands cupped together, not that different to a picture of a mouse in an Enid Blighton novel, stood in front of the doorway of a cosy woodland cottage. He’s not employed by the shop though. Other times you’ll meet him at a street corner and the hello will seem more startled, like you’ve caught him doing something naughty. He’s a large fellow, you can imagine he has quite a good right hand too.
Other times he stands in the middle of the streets and shouts at a person that doesn’t exist. He sometimes walks way from this other person, but comes back shouting “ fucking cunt, what did you fucking say, I’ll fucking kill you, cunt!” waving those big fists. Obviously the shadow had called him a coward or maybe worse. I have noticed that other locals tend to say the same thing about him, “Oh don’t worry about him, he’s harmless.” This often strikes me as strange; we only say that line about dogs and the mentally ill. No one says it about professionals or the bourgeois. Oh that’s my uncle Frank, he’s a Policeman, oh don’t worry about him, he’s harmless.
I agree with the sentiment though. If you don’t believe me, get on a tube train at rush hour. Take a look at peoples faces when get bumped into, or deprived of physical space. The hatred, the unguarded malice is amazing. If these people found a gun in their hand, you bet they’d use it.
A long time ago, while working as a gardener for a theme park I attended many nauseating seminars. Many of them detailed how to act around guests; we weren’t allowed to refer to them as customers. The most nauseating mantra I was force-fed was “A smile is a passport to a better attitude.” That one got me close to chundering, but it hits the point bang on the head. When thinking about my schizoid/ tourettes suffering chum, and the viscious glares and tuts that ripple through commuterville, well it tells me this: Your sanity is nothing more than your ability to keep your venom caged behind a smile.
Dear reader, if you ever get bumped into by me on the Victoria Line, do me one little favour. I am much more happy to be called a cunt than I am to be tutted at.

Read at an open mike in a Borders book store in Islington. They still have a copy of my collection on the shelf in there, same one that was there two months ago.
Anyway, I don’t normally do open mike, even though I host it, and wow, I’m going to be a lot nicer to the open mikers from now on. I turned up because my good mate James Byrne was doing a feature slot at the end of the evening and I also had a few flyers for my own event to toss about. I think I was first up, so I got up there and read a polemic about self help culture, followed by one I knocked out yesterday about watching gorillas on TV and watching foxes on a railway line.
The entire audience were poets, who spent most of my set flicking through their own stuff to see what they would read. Combined with that, there was the hubbub of the in store Starbucks and the staff tannoy system adding some interesting ambience to the performance.
Sometimes, being on stage or behind a mike can be a lonely experience. When it’s good and you’re on form and the audience are up for it, you feel like you’ve found the cure for cancer. But when you’re bad it doesn’t matter whether the audience are good and when the audience are bad it doesn’t matter whether you are good. There’s a great story about Larry David getting up on stage during his stand up days, taking one look at the crowd, saying No, and walking back off the stage. That’s the sign of a man who has learnt all he needs to about speaking in public.
I’ve performed at squat parties with trustafarian punkers booing me. I’ve stood there on stage, reading at the same steady space, lapping up their hatred. When you’ve decided the audience are wankers and you’re getting grief off them, it can be a wonderful and liberating experience. You know deep down that if you were mediocre, they wouldn’t be booing. So, you’re either very good or very bad, and I consider both to be an achievement.
I pride myself that I’ve never stormed off stage once, I’ve always believed that you can be spoilt by a good show and expect the next audience to love you. There is always something to be learnt from a bad show.
A lot of poets make some kind of acknowledgement at the end of a poem to let the audience know they’ve finished, some say cheers or thank you, others nod or make some kind of gesture. I’ve stopped doing this, apart from perhaps slowing down and annunciating the end of the poem as I read it. If someone hasn’t listened to me, that’s fine, but they don’t have to clap just because I’ve given them the signal to do so. Some of my best audiences have been the quiet ones, they’re the ones that come up and talk about the poems in detail afterwards, most importantly, they’re the ones that end up buying the book.
Tonight the duchess will be reading at The Island Queen, again in the fancy manor of Islington. There will be some good readers including Clare Pollard , Francesca Beard and Jonathan Asser. Other legends and good mates of mine like Hugo Williams, Salena Saliva Godden, Tim Wells and Roddy Lumsden should be in the crowd. They’ve got Leffe on tap and Duvel in the fridge, so not being part of the line up won’t be problem for me tonight, heh heh.