{"id":12260,"date":"2016-12-11T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T08:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=12260"},"modified":"2020-12-09T15:06:50","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T15:06:50","slug":"matt-black-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/matt-black-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Black"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>getting to the gig<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>car full of poets,<br \/>\nbabbling and quibbling,<br \/>\nnoone wearing seatbelts<br \/>\nbecause of the metaphor,<br \/>\nnoone knows\u00a0 where they\u2019re going<br \/>\nbecause of the metaphor,<br \/>\none has to be home by midnight<br \/>\nbecause of the\u00a0 spouse,<br \/>\nthe woman with the big scarf is saying<br \/>\nI\u2019ll know the way when we get there,<br \/>\nand\u00a0 the man with the che guavara\u00a0 t-shirt<br \/>\nis banging on about\u00a0 walt whitman,<br \/>\n2 quiet ones in the back rehearse<br \/>\na haiku-rap set in a club called persephone,<br \/>\nand they all know the gig is somewhere in this city<br \/>\nso they pull over, jumping the kerb,<br \/>\nroll down the car-window, ask directions<br \/>\nfrom a man with sad eyes<br \/>\nand an interesting but faded suit<br \/>\nwhose clearly on the run from something<br \/>\nand whose directions they don\u2019t remember<br \/>\nbecause his missing back-story is so interesting,<br \/>\nand one of them says<br \/>\nlet\u2019s ring brian the organiser<br \/>\nbut noone has his number<br \/>\nso they turn left, by instinct,<br \/>\nand of course, political inclination,<br \/>\nat the next traffic lights<\/p>\n<p>and there\u2019s the venue shining<br \/>\nlike the pub in the advert that appears<br \/>\nfrom over the hill, and they all laugh<br \/>\nat the directional\u00a0 magic of poets<br \/>\n(though in\u00a0 another version, more lost,<br \/>\nit takes forty minutes longer<br \/>\nand they all arrive sweaty and bothered)<br \/>\nand they do the gig<br \/>\nto 5 general public, 4 local poets,<br \/>\n3 organisers, 2 bar-staff,<br \/>\n1 dog (barks all the way through the haiku-rap)<br \/>\nand on the way home they all agree<br \/>\nit\u2019s a stormer.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Matt Black<\/strong> lives in Leamington Spa. He was Derbyshire Poet Laureate (2011-2013), his next book is <em>The Leaking Boot<\/em> (Iron Press, 2017),\u00a0 and\u00a0he is currently working on commissions about\u00a0camouflage, and extreme weather. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.matt-black.co.uk\">www.matt-black.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>getting to the gig car full of poets, babbling and quibbling, noone wearing seatbelts because of the metaphor, noone knows\u00a0 where they\u2019re going because of the metaphor, one has to be home by midnight because of the\u00a0 spouse, the woman with the big scarf is saying I\u2019ll know the way when we get there, and\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[135,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-poetry-picks","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13046,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260\/revisions\/13046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}