Four poems

1

The poet's not talking bout
something that needs explanation
The poem is the explanation
It's the best they could do

I haven't got thoughts of a poet my thoughts
are entangled with the weeds trapped
clutched in the undergrowth where
metaphors come handy

The poet has higher thoughts
a mystery even to themselves

2

And now it's like
the lights have
lowered
and we're all
cowering before

the smack
and yet this was
always my anxiety
now written upon

the world
and so I'll send my time
ensconsed
wrapped in headphones
cloaked in Sarah
Davachi and German
abstract techno

and see people sitting in cafes
like the lady in Hitchhiker's
Guide who suddenly
realised the meaning

of life
Are we nearly there yet?

3

The world is Weimar
slipping
unease turns to tension
and anxiety and all of that
Caffeine's not helping
But still things are
Better than ever
Can still enjoy the sun
and the thrown off
froth as we suck on
our blood
and choose from 15
types of coffee filters
and eat peasant food
on reclaimed wood tables
and listen to poor people
singing about hardship and want

4.

Poets grab stardust and elemental gas and froth
and throw it together by means of their pen
great gas clouds are trapped
vapour is trailed

from out of the clear
undifferentiated sky
a bright spray of water
lands fresh on your face

Me, I lurk in the earth
my fingers are black with scientific concerns
ethereal coalescence is not my agenda
The dirt in my nails makes my metaphors stand

The sky and the air escape me
I grab only the solid
gruff material of the
earth

Bring down ink like rocks
from Mount Sinai
Stuffed in my pockets
Bring it down to my level

Where great poets will
write with ink
sourced in the skies
I'll plod on

perpetually on the verge of disappoinment
forever failing to understand
even the basics of
what I am trying to do

William Howard: Bach, Schubert and Skempton, Kings Place review – piano is not my forte

Let’s try a little piano recital again. I thought I’d try and make use out of Kings Place, seeing as I’m there all the time, and they have concerts on four or five nights a week and there’s me, you know, trying to be cultural, or at least find things to do that aren’t Twitter. So, a piano recital it was, this one given by William Howard, playing some Schubert and Bach spliced between two modernist sets from the composer Howard Skempton. Howard the lads, as they say up north.

I wasn’t in a great mood when I got there, an hour early, and sitting in the art gallery reading about Kierkegaard didn’t really help, so my first impression of the crowd waiting outside the hall was a) Christ, everyone’s so old; old people should chop all their fucking hair off so they don’t look so fucking old; and b) Lord almighty everyone’s very, very posh. Horrendously posh. So posh it made me want to go and vote for Brexit.

But anyway. Once the music started, my alienation abated and I enjoyed the first Skempton piece, a set of sketches called Reflections. The first few were quite ambient, using the piano more for its sound-design qualities than its melodism, then it turned a little plinkyplonky, more like Philip Glass. All the pieces were very short, and would stop abruptly, as if someone had lifted the needle off a record.

It turned out that Skempton was in the audience and Howard got him up to take a bow, and they had a conversation that I read as Skempton saying: “Marvellous playing, William, magnificent.” I don't know what else he'd have been saying, unless they were arranging to buy drugs.

Following that he played Schumann’s Four Impromptus. Up to now, Schumann has only been associated in my mind with the moody pianist in Peanuts, but it turns out he’s a lovely romantic with impassioned, rolling, playful music that put me in mind of a cat toying with a ball of wool. Somewhere between Chopin and Debussy, I’d venture, if I was feeling cocky; the heart and emotion of Chopin with added impressionism. But I might retract that, when it inevitably turns out that Schumann was before Chopin, and way before Debussy. (Quick Wikipedia break: they were contemporaries.)

After the break it was three of Bach’s prelude and fugue pairs, which were, obviously, great. I can't really say anything about them; it would be like critiquing the psalms. And then on to the second Skempton set, a London premiere of his attempt at 24 preludes and fugues. Most of these came in at the 30-second mark, so we were back to the abrupt stopping. In fact, even more abrupt than with Reflections, where the pieces were at least able to get out the blocks before being ruthlessly cut down. These were more like listening to the radio on a very windy day. Just as you were beginning to get into the mood or texture of the piece, it vanished. I know that Satie was adamant you should never bore your audience, but this seemed extreme. I began to resent the fact that I knew when I gave my ears up to the pieces (which were all lovely) they would too soon be snatched away (the pieces, not my ears). It got to be like going on Tinder knowing that everyone you connect with will immediately ghost you; it becomes difficult to allow yourself the emotion. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure why they had to be cut. It wasn’t obvious to me what was so great about outlining a lovely melody or rhythm and then yanking it from under you. I’m sure there’s a very clever reason, but frankly that was part of the problem. Brexit again, you see.

There was an encore, after a pronounced bout of bowing (do they teach them that bowing at the conservatory, I wondered. It's very precise, and always exactly the same). He played another Skempton piece, some kind of song of the Highlands, which he introduced as "one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve ever played”. I mean, that's just setting it up for a fall, really – and it wasn't helped by the fact that he’d played more beautiful pieces that very evening. Especially by that Schumann. One to watch, him.

Jerry Sadowitz, the Betsey Trotwood review – extremely versa-bile

A thinly attended (he had apparently reservations for the whole place but without taking money, so only half the people turned up) warmup show from the patriarch of scabrous comedy, the progenitor of Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and a heap of other hugely more famous close-to-the-knuckle comedians. An antihero of the alternative comedy scene – and also a world-renowned closeup magician – who made his name skewering the sacred politically correct cows of the 80s to audiences of right-on lefties. Sadowitz flirted with telly, flirted with some degree of success, but has in the end stayed true to his self-image as a chronically inadequate and underachieving figure, a better place from where to launch his rancid, bitter broadsides at literally all and sundry.

I had dimly wondered whether, in this so-called ‘woke’ era, at a time when fascism and the far right are on the march, when laughing at unfortunates has stopped being ironic and returned to a move of the powerful, Sadowitz’s comedy would still be funny or whether our new awareness of the victims of abuse – and perhaps of our increasingly perilious reality – would make the always unpalatable into the utterly unacceptable.

I suppose it is difficult to say, but from my perspective, Sadowitz, as energetic at nearly 60 as I can remember him, rolled back the years to when it was indeed acceptable to make jokes about pretty much every group in the world, from the most deserving to the least. Despite the fact that some of it could have found itself in the worst Richard Littlejohn columns (in fact, there was a riff on how Boris Johnson had stolen his line about Muslim women looking like letterboxes), somehow – and this was probably the most extraordinary magic trick that he performed – it (mostly) was, while despicable, extremely, outrageously funny.

I think it must be something to do with his unlikely charm, and perhaps the way that he performs it all from a place of extreme vulnerability, so none of it comes over as punching down. (Sadowitz himself claimed to have no truck with that distinction, saying that punching down is as acceptable as everything else; and there were bits that just didn’t land, although it was hard to tell whether he had overstepped a line or just not finessed the humour enough.) While he still looks like a Victorian scarecrow that has been Frankensteined into an imitation of life, he remains an extraordinary performer just to watch and I would have happily snapped photos throughout if I hadn’t thought he might smash my camera and boot me out.

Obviously I was bringing my privilege, as we say nowadays, but it was a refreshing experience to chuck all that neurosis out of the window and just watch someone unilaterally smearing the entire human race with bile. He made it, in his own words, a safe space for bigotry, but somehow the bigotry, being both universal and unconnected to any power, was joyous instead of vile.

It might be also the way that he point blank refused to admit the especial awfulness of our era, which while maybe nonsense, was at least a relief from the unrelenting rainfall of bad news. I guess your mileage may vary.

Outside, one of the few punters noted: “It’s not for everyone.”

In actual fact, it's not for anyone.