Couch Potato Poetry
Ghost Town Music, Bobby Parker (£7.00, Knives Forks and Spoons Press)
The words ‘irreverent’ and ‘anarchic’ are often used about things which really aren’t either. This is both. Even the front cover has a punk aesthetic: the same dark green, the same texture, as a school exercise book (and you’ll find no schoolwork – or even poetry workshop work – inside). The title is in teeny-weeny print on the bottom left-hand corner, as if saying: ‘O yeah, btw, I’m a poetry book. Cool, huh?’
It’s cool, but is it poetry? Yes and no, because it has at least one eye on that other overused word: ‘collage’. It opens with a comic strip: ‘Washing Up! A Short Comic by Bobby and Emma’, a tribute to Harvey Pekar of American Splendour fame, innovative for being among the first comic book writers to make autobiographical / mundane / blah life into publishable material. Pekar looked upon his geek world saturated with superheroes, and he saw an opportunity: a neglected readership. So has Parker, except that here, superpoets are getting the axe.
The poems are about relationships, sex, death and everything in between. Bukowski comes to mind, also ‘anti-poetry’, but this stuff feels even less sincere than those, like it should be ingested alongside the misery-groove of Beck’s ‘Loser’.
But, that elephant in the room trumpets: it would all be an epic fail, a self-indulgent novelty, without craft (and arguably without the pictures). So, do the poems work? Well, on the whole, yes. The mundane details here are sluggishly revealed line by line, so that the experience of waiting for a friend to hurry the hell up is reflected in the text (and in the final line, becomes something else entirely):
My friend made me stand
in the snow
outside a busy shop
for thirty minutes
while he waited for the stunning
shop assistant to lean over
and give him an eyeful of cleavage
God rest his soul.
It won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. But when so many collections say ‘this poet deals with the everyday’, and then every poem is about the flash of a skylark wing, it’s weird: the flash of a skylark wing isn’t everyone’s everyday. Whereas some lyrical epiphanies come from that skylark wing-flash (and I’ve written a few of my own), this one comes from a flash of, um, something different. O but then it gets serious; we arrive at that flicker of a memory of the friend who passed away. It’s real, surprising, affecting. It’s poetry – even if the rhythm, alliteration and assonance are harder to spot (because they’re all there).
And here:
I sold a painting & blew the cash
in the bookies & walked home
(THE EDITOR THOUGHT THAT THIS LINE WAS TOO
LYRICAL TO BE INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTION)
the soles of my shoes sobbing…
OMG it’s like Luke Kennard juvenilia!
The rest is full of photocopied typing, comic drawing and scrawling about drugs, sleeping rough and cheese sandwiches. But I’m going off-piste to comment on two section headings, ‘Dead Bugs’ and ‘Burps from the Armchair’. Visual poems, they continue the theme of splicing text and art together, a technique which – when it works – can communicate beyond the limits of either medium. The first shows a hand upturned on a sofa, opening out like a spider in the process of snuffing it. The second is an armchair, its seat cushion lifting at one edge like a mouth burping. It’s a picture of boredom: video-gaming and eating crisps all day in nothing but your pants. But then it hums with questions about death. Whose chair was this? Is it living on without company, getting so bored of itself that it’s burping for its own entertainment? The poem isn’t afraid of mixing emotion and toilet humour. Indeed, the entire collection assumes they are sexy bedfellows, going at it like rabbits.
I recently reviewed Radiohead’s latest, saying that it was possibly the most Marmite album they’d ever made. This is Marmite poetry (it reminds me of an album sleeve pull-out, back when album sleeves mattered, even said something). The trick would wear off if Parker wasn’t multi-talented – with text and image, found and made – but he is, so it doesn’t.
….reviewed by Mark Burnhope