Saturday 21 August 2010

Poetry is the new Rock n Roll: Part 3.

True story this:

I was in the Nashville (a music pub in West London. Now deceased) in the late 70's to see a couple of punk bands. I got talking to the female guitarist from one of the bands at the bar. She talked about music, I talked about poetry. I asked for her phone number.

She told me to fuck off!

Thirty something years later I was in the Inn on the Green (a music venue in West London) to see a couple of bands. I got talking to the female guitarist from one of the bands at the bar. We talked about her music and my poetry and stuff like that. She asked me for my phone number.

I took hers.

I didn't tell her to fuck off, even though it would have rounded off the story. I'm a poet not a punk!

I wish I had told her about our previous meeting.

1 comment:

headsknowbest said...

The old rockers in France were hoping that you read her the one about the slow burn of the apparently doused firework. You know the one that has a single fuze attached to an innocuous looking box, cost more than it could possibly be worth, has 'Guy' in its title, but in fact relates to Guy Debord and not Mister Fawkes, and therefore makes a complete spectacle of society when it goes off in a Situationalist detournement; revealing to the doubting, and there are too many of them, most in fact, the beach beneath the pavement.

It may not be worth quoting in this context but it has been said by the Parisian Guy who full stopped the last sentence on the 30 November 1994 in his farmhouse in Champot Haut - a single well aimed shot to the heart like no other firework ever launched to finally quiet the toxic effects of alcohol on nerve tissue - that “Writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have drunk a long time before finding excellence.”

Standing at the bar exchanging phone numbers, after an interminable tuning of strings and finally being (un)recognized a second time around, might indicate some imbibing elsewhere and by somebody other. ‘Stand clear and light the blue touch paper' can also be translated into French with excellent results.