Wider Reading | Eleven Reasons Why You Should Watch Misfits And Eight Reasons Why You Shouldn't

Because I, like so many others, took note of it when it was first on and dismissed it. Partly because it was on E4 and, at first glance, resembled Skins, that canny yet ultimately directionless exercise in pandering to the teenage market with sex, drugs, cynicism, violence and artsy direction that added nothing. Worse, it resembled ‘Skins Meets Heroes’, a television concept born in the darkest of zeitgeist-grabbing studio-executive brainstorming sessions.

I haven't seen the second season finale yet, but I'm assuming there's some drastic character development.

Because that’s not quite fair on it.

Because, set against the eerie, grey urban desolation of Southmere Lake, it actually – tonally speaking – has a closer resemblance to Warren Ellis’ award-winning weekly webcomic Freakangels, which features a group of oddball Midwich Cuckoos trying to survive in the flooded remnants of London. Which is itself rather good, even if the makers are a little over-concerned with trying to flog its readers T-shirts.


Because the little Irish kid started out being immensely irritating, but has since perfected an adolescent, cowardly Dylan Moran impression and is actually kind of a hoot.


Because the actors are…normal-looking. No Beverley Hills 90210 super-hunks here.


Because one of the female characters is by far the most badass. Sure, she’s portrayed as more lower-class than anyone else, so it’s sort of leaping from one stereotype to another. But still.


Because it portrays the suspicious conflicts of the modern generation gap rather well.


Because it has great fun being bloody silly with the whole superhero thing. It does the English spirit of pissing about with solemnity proud. These kids aren’t gobby little shites who eventually learn how to use their powers for good and understand that there’s a greater order than them; they’re gobby little shites, period.


Because it’s incredibly dark. Sometimes this is in a showy, ‘ooh, our hero keeps a corpse in a refrigerator’ way; at other times it’s rather better.


Because it’s a comedy, pretty much. Still a few too many moments where popular music plays in a slow-motion montage, but not quite so many that it becomes completely obnoxious.


Because the bit where the ankle-braceleted heroes protect themselves against the purity cult trying to aurally brainwash them into becoming fine, upstanding citizens by plugging themselves into their Ipods and playing loud music is awesome. No, really, it is. Not as on-the-nose as it sounds. Honest.


*


Because it sort of does resemble Skins, a canny yet ultimately directionless exercise in pandering to the teenage market with sex, drugs, cynicism, violence and artsy direction that adds nothing.


Because it devotes an entire episode to the kid who can turn back time, in which he repeatedly attempts to rectify the mistakes of the past and, shockingly, discovers that his actions have consequences. Yawn. Am I alone in being completely sick of the time-travel-as-a-science-fiction-morality-tale on our screens?


Because, frequently, the music might as well be from Hollyoaks. James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’, even used ironically?


Because it contains one of the most frightening ends to a sex scene I’ve ever seen.


Because the quiet one looks like Matthew Horne and that brings up bad memories of James Corden.

Make it stop! MAAKE IT STOOP!

Because some of the more powerful powers – mind-reading/time-travel – tend to get forgotten about.

Because there’s a gay episode. Why aren’t comedies capable of just…having gay characters? Why is there always one episode where the straight characters go gay for unlikely plot purposes?

Because even though the whole ‘kids on minor offences doing community service together’ set-up is surely reaching the end of its reasonable timespan, you just know they’re going to keep making episodes.

National Poetry Day | Poetry | Bust

(from left) Abigail Parry, Dylan Thomas, Phil Brown

But I can't say it like I sing it.

And I can't sing it like I think it.

And I can't think it like I feel it.

- David Bazan

You are so many people you can barely recognize yourself sometimes, aren’t you? You have so many faces and behavior sets to suit your various crowds that you struggle to keep up sometimes. Look at you. You’ve no idea which one of you is supposed to be reading this article. Is it the intelligent one? Or the one that likes staying out late at the weekends? Or the ironically fashionable one? Or is it the one that reads poetry?

What do you do when the situations merge? When you are forced to be more than one of those people at once?

OK, interrogation over… on with the article.

Last Thursday I had the honor of reading at an event called Poetry of the Future in London’s Poetry Library. The event was hosted by Simon Armitage and featured four of the 2010 Eric Gregory Award winners (we were sadly without the supremely talented Matthew Gregory).

Having spent the previous evening working out how best to deliver a lesson based on a couple of Armitage’s poems from the (soon to vanish from the syllabus) AQA Anthology it was a surreal treat to meet the guy. It was also somewhat of a relief to find that he was a really nice bloke – although I’m sure my pupil’s would have been delighted if I’d gone back to school the next day to reveal “oh yeah, you remember that Armitage bloke I was teaching you about yesterday? He got drunk and called Seamus Heaney a c-“

But alas, it turns out everyone is fairly pleasant.

The reading itself was an enjoyable experience. I did that thing (you’ve seen it before) where I decided that I wouldn’t need the microphone and delivered the set unamplified. I’ve seen several people do this over the years and always make the snap decision of either ‘that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen’ or ‘that guy is a tool of the most rudimentary fashion’. Part of me wishes I’d got the audience to fill out a questionnaire to let me know which of these two options I exude.

 The most pleasing thing about the event itself is that I have spent such a long time in the Poetry Library over the past five years that it felt truly bizarre being invited to read at the place. If you live close enough to London to feasibly make a visit then I implore you to do so… it is one of the few places I know where there is the undiluted atmosphere of placid appreciation of literature needed to truly engage with words.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem about the place, which I dug out and read on Thursday. As my NPD present to you, here it is:

Poetry Library

Unabashed scream of pre-teen paddlers in a fountain

wafts through the skylight

undermining the room’s synthetic autumn.

A bronze bust of Dylan Thomas peers past me

to the pretty lady skim-reading Rilke

by the sliding shelves.

I am dwarfed by the nepotistic quarterlies lining the walls,

a paper network of favours

I will never be able to anything offer.

I replace the list of publishers in its plastic pocket

bin my books

and go to splash my feet in the fountain.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

See a LIVE Silkworm!

Phil Brown working the podium.

As you are all aware, 7th October is National Poetry Day. Silkworms Ink are chipping in by donating our poetry editor, Phil Brown, to do a live reading in the Poetry Library in Royal Festival Hall at 8PM. Also reading at the event will be 3 other 2010 Eric Gregory winners - a guaranteed treat for all. 

The event has been organised by one Simon Armitage, who we have discussed on numerous occasions on this website.

Tickets are free but you need to reserve a place by following this link here.

See you there!

Tradition | Poetry | Simon Says

‘The jacket does not at first refer to Seeing Stars as containing “poems”, but eventually relents, and uses the p-word. If you have a very loose definition of “poem”, you’ll concur. I make it seven poems and 32 fictions.’

-Bill Greenwell, The Independent

“Are they poems, or prose poems, or flash fiction? I’m not sure, but they’re very more-ish.”

-Paul Batchelor, The Guardian

‘Is it a dog? Is it a horse? Or is it a poem by Simon Armitage? To say these poems resist classification is an understatement”

-Kate Kellaway, The Observer

Good art leaves us with more questions than answers. When we read a book, see a film, hear a band or watch a play that we particularly enjoy, we instinctively go and find out what the critics thought. We do this for a variety of reasons; partly because we want to find out if we were ‘right’, if our opinions are congruent with the people who are paid to have opinions, partly to see if there is anything that we missed and partly because it is uniquely pleasing to have our reactions enriched by other perspectives.

I shall tie my colours to the mast here – I particularly enjoyed Simon Armitage’s latest collection, Seeing Stars. I enjoyed it so much that I took it on a night out last Saturday and was secretly very happy whenever the lady I was with needed to go off to the bathroom, not because of the quality of her company, but because it meant that I could read a bit more of Armitage’s witty, idiosyncratic new collection. I woke up the next morning feeling fairly rough around 6AM, incredibly glad that I was awake bright and early so that I could have an undisturbed run at finishing off the last 20 pages before the day had even properly begun.

That said, I was left with the exact same question that every reviewer to touch the book seemed to be asking – ‘is this poetry?’ Let’s take an exemplary opening section, from the poem Knowing What We Know Now:

‘The elf said to Kevin, ‘You’re probably wondering why

I’m sitting here at your breakfast table this morning,

helping myself to your condiments, Kevin, I’m here to

make you a very special offer – let’s call it a once-in-a-

lifetime opportunity. Today you’re forty-four years and

thirty-six days old, and that’s exactly how long you’ve got

left! …’

When I spoke to my friend about my ‘is this poetry?’ conundrum (the friend whose bathroom breaks afforded me time to read more Armitage) she said “well it certainly looks like poetry.” And she was right. Go stand a few steps away from your screen… that chunk of Knowing What We Know Now is an absolute dead ringer for a bit of poetry.

But then this is purely cosmetic – the only consideration for the line-breaks appears to be the aesthetic of making the lines look even, for there is no sign of a meter or stress-pattern or any of your lyrical hallmarks. We’re not dealing with blank verse, free verse, fixed form, OuLiPo, calligrams or any of the old faithfuls that would usually help me bullshit my way through a review.

The best-fitting hat for this particular collection would appear to be ‘prose poetry’ for the mellifluous, fictional absurdity of the various vignettes at play in the collection – but even this is somewhat out the window as Armitage has gone to great trouble to line-break his work into the shape of verse.

Line-breaks or otherwise, the collection is still ideologically rooted in the prose poem tradition. Consider this passage on the subject of prose poetry from Luke Kennard’s excellent phd thesis, The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem (many thanks for the author’s kind permissions):

“When I first started writing about the prose poem I was drawn specifically to what I perceived to be its many authors’ sense of humour. Everything I read, from Charles Baudelaire’s Petit Poèmes En Prose to John Ash’s The Goodbyes engaged me first by making me laugh. Seeing as this wasn’t humour of the “set-up and punchline” variety – and that laughter in itself isn’t a considered critical reaction – I realised early on that I was going to have to formulate this response. Gradually it emerged that what I was really reacting to was self-consciousness, which is not necessarily a quality we aspire to in writing or life. Nevertheless, humour in the prose poem seemed to arise from a writer making a deliberate mistake: a metaphor which oversteps its own correlation; a situation woefully (if wilfully) misread or inverted; a self-deprecating aside after a sophisticated and complex passage; even a tacit admission that the very act of writing poetry feels somehow pretentious.”

I cannot think of a better introduction to the rich tradition behind both Kennard’s work and this latest offering from Armitage. Consider this idea of the “tacit admission that the very act of writing poetry feels somehow pretentious” as you read this section from Armitage’s My Difference:

‘I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my

difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as

much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my

difference doesn’t cut much ice. He wants me to dress my

difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it

on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May

Day Parade. ‘Tell me one interesting fact about your

difference,’ he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my

difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse

and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of

dental floss.’

So, in response to the satellite question, currently orbiting this collection – yes, it is poetry. And not just because I found it in the poetry section of Foyles. And not just because Simon Armitage wrote it. In eschewing the aurality of lyric poetry, the patterns of fixed forms or the margin-hugging shape of prose poetry, Armitage has left himself free to soak up a less worn out combination of elements from various traditions such as surrealism and satire.

If you like your deadpan wackiness and have a hankering for something that will leave you humming and giggling in equal measure, or if you simply can’t be bothered waiting for the next Luke Kennard or Ross Sutherland collections to come out, then you need to buy this book. Was this a review? Discuss.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Destruction | Mixtape | Mixtape IV, Thorn In His Side

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Music As Reading: Mixtape IV, The Poet With A Thorn In His Side (he only ever wanted to be a music-maker)

Armitage: “I really like your stuff.”
Mark E. Smith: “Got a light, cock?”

The poet who, really, would have liked to be in a band more than he enjoys being a really-quite-successful poet – an evocative, pathos-drenched, rather depressing image. And one of crucial import to the Music As Reader. For out of it buzz a swarm of questions at the heart of what the Music As Reading project is, really, all about: what is the relationship between the poet and the music he or she listens to – and what can one discover about both forms from that relationship? Does the poet who loves to music-listen read or write with, alongside music because of the benefits to be had out of this relationship? And is poetry (slash, the poet) not just ultimately, compared to goodmusic (slash, the musician) intolerably sad, po-faced, poontang-repelling, and does it (slash he slash she) therefore require an injection of rockandgoddamroll if it (slash he slash she) is to regain the reputation, readership and romanticism that once defined it (slash he slash she) as a mode? Because let’s face it, most people start writing poetry because they want to be Lord fucken Byron, not Sir Andrew Motion – ladies and gentlemen, we’re being cool-shortchanged… Why?

Armitage is so specifically important, though, because he did the unthinkable and actually started a bloody band – way late (perhaps middle would be the more appropriate word, actually) in life. Then wrote a book about it, Gig (published by Penguin) which contains the above two-line anecdote – and a full history of not-being-in-a-band-but-being-a-really-quite-successful-poet Northern miserabalia. In it, and generally, he is admirably open and generous about who he digs, who he adores, the kinds of artists he would have loved to be a part of. Unfortunately, his actual band, the Scaremongers (www.simonarmitage.co.uk for videos etc.) sound like nothing so much as Registered Trademark The Worst Band Of All Time, the Beautiful South. Only a bit less shit. Surely, Simon, there might have been another way? Surely, Simon, is not Music As Reading it?

Part one, Bands Armitage would like/have liked to be a part of.

Searching for Mr Right – Young Marble Giants
She’s Lost Control – Joy Division
Independence Day – Comsat Angels
Spoilt Victorian Child – The Fall
Wildcat Fights – Eyeless in Gaza
The Boy With A Thorn In His Side – The Smiths
Nocturnal Me – Echo and the Bunnymen
Diamonds are Forever – Arctic Monkeys
Ever Fallen in Love (with someone you shouldn’t’ve)? – The Buzzcocks
Blue Boy – Orange Juice

Part two, Bands Armitage’s writing/songwriting reveal would have, in actuality, been a slightly better fit (note, half the size of part one).

Lucky You – Lightning Seeds
Irish Blood, English Heart – Morrissey
Our Mutual Friend – The Divine Comedy
Perfect 10 – The Beautiful South
Put A Donk On It (original mix) – Blackout Crew*

* I suspect this one needs a wee explanatory note. Blackout Crew are, basically, the Beatles of the Donk scene, a relatively new species of drainpipe-techno defined by a quintessential northern-only-ness to compare with, say, Armitage’s rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Simon would surely approve – somebody should put them in touch with one another, get the poet to ‘drop’ on the next record (if there is a next record…) See the VBS donk-umentary (http://www.vbs.tv/watch/music-world/donk) for more information.