{"id":5501,"date":"2013-10-15T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T09:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=5501"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","slug":"ken-head-reviews-whitehall-jackals-by-chris-mccabe-jeremy-reed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-whitehall-jackals-by-chris-mccabe-jeremy-reed\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews ‘Whitehall Jackals’ by Chris McCabe & Jeremy Reed"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The poems and short prose passages in this collection carry a charge, they\u2019re alive with verbal electricity and a sense of the purpose defined by their authors in \u201cCoda Prefix:\u00a0 Accelerated Urban Highs\u201d, an introduction which both explains how the two poets came together to produce this first part of a projected two-volume \u201cLondon Collaboration\u201d, \u201cpoetry resulting directly from London as our creative experiental basis\u201d and, at the same time, takes the form of \u00a0a manifesto:\u00a0 \u201c… if a poem doesn\u2019t radically alter your sensory experience of the world and recreate it, then it\u2019s of no interest, and if it doesn\u2019t risk shooting holes in the corruptly-maintained system, it lacks dialect with subverting politics …\u201d.\u00a0 The message is clear:\u00a0 \u201cChris McCabe and I have tried in \u201cWhitehall Jackals\u201d to break laws rather than observe them \u2013 isn\u2019t that the best reason to write? \u2013 to disrupt convention and become in the process edgewalkers\u201d.<\/p>\n

Virtually all of the collection\u2019s thirty-nine pieces have as their title either the name of a district, place or specific feature of London, each intended to bring to life not simply geographical locations, because not all potential readers will know London, but, more importantly, the continuity of links between the city\u2019s ever-morphing present, its long past and the myriad individual ways in which that past may be viewed, a preoccupation which countless millions of the world\u2019s city-dwellers must surely share.\u00a0 Hence, the term \u201cedgewalkers\u201d comes to define not only the cultural and political positions the authors perceive themselves as occupying, their anger and contempt for those whose intention, in their opinion, is to subvert or destroy what they hold dear, but also their passionate interest in and long-term dedication to a particular way of life.<\/p>\n

In \u201cRed Snapper, Cecil Court\u201d, for example, Reed writes with relish about Red Snapper Books, the \u201clow-lit, book-stacked basement … a cutting-edge counterculture bookshop\u201d, \u201c… run as banditry \/ for poets, outlaws, dealers, criminals, \/ tumble-in types like skewed Pete Doherty\u201d until \u201cThe bailiffs squeezed us … and (we) lost it all\u201d.\u00a0 In a lighter, more ironic vein, although with no less edge, McCabe\u2019s \u201cElephant & Castle\u201d develops similar views about the importance of learning, internalizing, the life of the city and suggests \u201csomething light to read on the commuter\u2019s underpass: \/ A Beginner\u2019s Guide to Property & Culture<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 Tongue in cheek, but the point is well made:\u00a0 it is vital to care.\u00a0 In \u201cCity of London\u201d, by contrast, he makes darker reference to and quotes from \u201cThe Burial of the Dead\u201d, Part 1 of \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d, in which T. S. Eliot describes London as an \u201cUnreal City\u201d and says of it very bluntly that, \u201cUnder the brown fog of a winter dawn, \/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, \/ I had not thought death had undone so many.\u201d\u00a0 An interesting connection given the r\u00f4le played in this collection by decay and loss, death and the passing of time.<\/p>\n

As perceived agents of the destruction of a way of life, a culture and a value system the authors hold dear, property developers, money-men, the owners of international hotel chains, politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and, very particularly, Tony Blair, \u201cthe psychopathic jackal … his handgun grin \/ cold as forensics, czar to every war\u2019s \/ genocide, the killer autocrat \/ smeared in depleted uranium, Gulf blood …\u201d, come in for harsh treatment.\u00a0 In Blair\u2019s case more than once, firstly in \u201cWhitehall Endgame (depleted uranium mix<\/em>)\u201d quoted above and, later, very vitriolically indeed, in \u201cThe Right Hon Jackal Blair\u201d:\u00a0 \u201cThe guilt lodged like a bullet in his brain \/ he can\u2019t extract, a toxic leak \/ like slow-dose polonium. \/ His look\u2019s impassive as an army truck \/ an explosive self-propelled howitzer.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are, however, limitations to this perception of change as threat.\u00a0 Reed identifies one such, nostalgia, in \u201cHam Yard W1\u201d, when he concedes that, \u201cYou can\u2019t recreate history;\u00a0 it\u2019s a series of inaccessible space-times hijacked by imagination, but essentially wiped …\u201d, although there remains a sense, nonetheless, in which he and McCabe seem to want to have their cultural cake and eat it too.\u00a0 Ham Yard, we\u2019re told, began as \u201ca lowlife pub called the Ham in existence there in 1739 … used by robbers and stick up highwaymen\u201d.\u00a0 Thereafter and jumping a couple of centuries, it\u2019s been made over many times, as a venue for skiffle, jazz and R & B, a centre for drug-taking ( \u201cin pilled-up 1964, the site was also known as Pill Yard\u201d) and a \u201cderelict piss-drenched 0.75 acre Soho yard\u201d, until in 2010 it was sold \u201cfor around \u00a330M to build a luxury 100 room hotel, plus 50,000 square feet of housing on an indigenously proto-hipster landmark\u201d.<\/p>\n

That Reed and McCabe don\u2019t like what\u2019s happening, that they mourn the loss of what they define as the \u201creal\u201d, is obvious:\u00a0 in future the life of one particular corner of Soho and, by implication, other areas such as Docklands, will have nothing to do with London culture and people, but a lot to do with money;\u00a0 a venue that hosted great Sixties bands, \u201cThe Jagger phenomenon:\u00a0 135lbs of skinny dance compression on a compacted 10ft stage\u201d, will become a watering-hole for the moneyed and the monetisers, purpose-built to exclude London\u2019s hoi polloi.\u00a0 But while it\u2019s important to keep alive the memory of the city\u2019s soul, Londoners such as\u00a0 Shakespeare, Blake, Wilde, Chatterton and Marlowe, \u201cThe tattooed boozed-up brawler on Hog Lane\u201d, the past, as \u201cSeven Dials\u201d makes clear, was a country where they did things so differently that nobody in their right mind would want to go back:\u00a0 \u201cIf we died on the street, left to decay, \/ would rot be faster than a pizza box \/ or open jar of mayonnaise …? \/ We\u2019re a mismatched global academy\u201d, Reed says, \u201cat this dysfunctional take-no-prisoners site.\u201d\u00a0 Yes indeed, but if we all dance \u201cDeath Tango\u201d in the end and \u201cthe moment turns on language that the street deletes\u201d, \u201cwatcha gonna do \/ do baby blue\u201d?<\/p>\n

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Order your copy of Whitehall Jackals<\/em> by Chris McCabe & Jeremy Reed published by Nine Arches Press, here <\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a92013:\u00a0 Ken Head <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u00a0                 The poems and short prose passages in this collection carry a charge, they\u2019re alive with verbal electricity and a sense of the purpose defined by their authors in \u201cCoda Prefix:\u00a0 Accelerated Urban Highs\u201d, an introduction which both explains how the two poets came together to […]<\/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":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501","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=5501"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23716,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501\/revisions\/23716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}