Don't Start Me Talking
Saturday 28 April, 2007 From Everyone's Cup Of Tea: 'It's a risk for liars to improvise if people are going to ask them fundamental questions, and situational control gives all sorts of scope for manipulation. You buy a fish or a fruit, you can tell what you're getting: packaging dissembles (and what 'truths' they're forced to tell are data shaped by ludicrous anxieties about diet inculcated by the culture industry and government). Despite the phrase, nothing does what it says on the tin. In the 1980s boom, capitalist lies about profitability became epidemic, it actually ucked up their ability to function as capitalists! In this context, truth and immediacy become explosively subversive. I think the basic weakness in most mainstream middle-class poets is hypocritical sexuality and collusion in class society -- they wouldn't dare write automatically because of what it might reveal. They fear chaous because it'll make them look uncool. My plan was always to live a life I wasn't ashamed of so that everything that comes out is vital. That's why the idea of fiddling about with the words, desperately seeking substitutes and improvements -- 'polishing a poem' -- seems petty. I was pleased when Prynne mentioned he wrote at one blow, I'd thought his poems had that kind of gestural grace and unanswerability.' 'When you're revolting against everything and wearing a bog chain around your neck and a flasher's mac with OUT TO LUNCH painted on the back and bicycling of te work washing dishes at the Cambridge School of Languages and gobbing at schoolkids on the pavement as a gesture of pop absurdity, as I was in 1978, poetry had better be absolutely mind-blowing or you're not going to sit still for it, are you?' From Brandoshat: Don't Start Me Talking ed. Tim Allen & Andrew Duncan (Salt) 'In many ways, this is a historic book and tremendously exhilarating to read. I can't get enough ot it - I keep rereading bits of it. It's a series of interviews with contemporary poets - who are all innovative and able to talk about it. There are so many ideas running through it that it's hard to keep up at times, and it has been of tremendous encouragement to a poet like myself who often feels himself to be rather on the fringe of the innovative community.' From Salt: 'Main description: Named for a Sonny Boy Williamson song, this is a collection of interviews with 20 modern poets. The subjects are Kelvin Corcoran, Simon Smith, Michael Haslam, David Chaloner, Elisabeth Bletsoe, David Greenslade, Alexander Hutchison, Peter Manson, Harry Gilonis, Andrew Crozier, Tim Allen, Out to Lunch, Tony Lopez, Sean Bonney, David Miller, R.F. Langley, John Hall, Nick Johnson, Robert Sheppard, and Eric Mottram. The stress is on reflexive poets whose thoughts on language and artistic procedures shed new light on modern culture and on the interpretation of poems.'