1 – I stood on a bar and shouted poems at people who weren’t listening. Why aren’t these people listening, I thought, Tom Cruise never had this problem when he destroyed poetry for everyone ever in cocktail*, perhaps they’re all wankers, I mused. Then it occurred to me that they just wanted to buy a drink and that I was the dipock standing on the bar preventing them from doing so by shouting poems in their ticket buying faces. On reflection it became apparent that given the situation it was definitely me that was the wanker.

I AM A MASSIVE POETRY WANKER, I thought to myself as I launched nasal couplets into the shouty ether. It was a liberating epiphany.

It’s been thirteen days since my last post. I needed a break, this incessant textual harassment of you, well, I just began to think it made me come across all needy and stuff. I’ve been on tour, I thought I’d use my time away as an opportunity to cool things off, get some perspective. I’ve learnt a lot about myself in our time apart. I’ve learnt that I need you, I’m nothing without you. Without you around to read these words I’d probably just disappear, like a fairy with no child to believe in it.

Let’s not make a big frickin hoo ha of it though, I’m back now, we need to get past my mistakes and to look to the future. That’s why I intend to make up for my absence by posting a new blog every couple of days until I’ve tediously deconstructed every element of my peripatetic poesying. I shall be regaling you with memoirs, musings and if for no other reason than alliteration manifest truths regarding my time on the road. Think Kerouac meets Pam Ayers via the Peterborough tourist board, its gonna be well bum.

So let’s start at the beginning: latitude Festival.

Well what can I say about this year’s glasto, it started with me getting my Tipi nicked and went down hill from there, and I missed The Specials. In fact I missed pretty much everything. I don’t think I have the requisite fortitude for that festival anymore. It’s like Ong Thanh meets Blackpool during a dysentery pandemic. (”Hey maaan, you weren’t there Maaaan”)

Four quid for a tepid brew with a dead wasp in it, pfft. Maybe I’m just getting old.

If it wasn’t for Apples and Snakes very own Pete Hunter lending me a spare tent I’d have had to fashion a shelter out of spent glow sticks and discarded K wraps. Cheers Pete, you’re a gent.

The first thing I encountered as I entered the main site was a bar selling over priced, urophagic lager to a bunch of sludge sodden wreck-heads who probably thought ANC was a clothes shop for dyslexics. It was a massive red, gold and green marquee hilariously named the Nelson Mandela bar. Did someone really think that this would be a fitting accolade? Maybe it’s just me, but taking the name of one of greatest political icons of the last century and using it to extort money out of crapulent punters in a cynical commercial enterprise seems somewhat incongruent with the festival’s original ethos?

Two poems on the same theme here, both inspired by the unremitting marketing presented by Cabot Circus’ numerous chain stores.

The first is my personal favourite, although I m fairly confident I’ll be alone in that thought. It’s a bit strange and oblique and features clown committing a sex act in the proximity of a salad (those of you with a sensitive disposition have been warned). I really like its dark, acerbic imagery and the fact that its laden with words that are really satisfying to wrap your gob around means its going to be loads of fun to spit at an audience. Ten points to anyone who gets The Goonies reference.

In my last blog, the one about the seemingly* disastrous interview, I alluded to the fact that I’d once bombed at a festival. If you’re reading this blog there’s a fair chance that you’re an aspiring poet. Your unjaded mind may, as I write, be conjuring fanciful vagaries of exchanging gentle anecdotes with Seamus Heaney over a glass of complimentary Beaujolais in a velvet lined marquee at Hay on Wye.

Don’t get me wrong, that type of scenario is occasionally a reality, but for me it’s a rare exception. You’re far more likely to find me arse deep in cow eggs, picking the flies out of contraband no frills voddy as John Berkavitch tries to convince me he’s been inhabited by the spirit of a Zebra. Not that I’m complaining, the latter option suits me fine.

In the interview I had last week someone asked me the following question:

“So Byron, What has been your worst festival experience?”

I’m a proper mental me. I don’t mean I’m “a bit of a character” or a “whacky guy”. No, what I mean is that I’m a full on section 38, schnauzer licking head the ball. I have bipolar affective disorder, or so I’m told. It’s not something I talk about much, as people can’t help but perceive you differently when you fess up to something like that.

It’s a right pain in the neck. I’m supposed to take a cocktail of anti psychotics every morning to prevent me from going all R.P. McMurphy and streaking down the High Street in frenzied messianic delusion. The real problem with being a nut job though is that I’m never quite sure which elements of my behaviour are just my inherent character, and which are symptoms of the loony tunes. I often feel guilty of using my condition* as a means of justifying my all-pervading social inadequacy.

Yes, I’m a crazy person, science says so, so it must be true; but if I rummage through the more lucid and rational depths of my consciousness I’m forced to accept a far more disturbing and problematic truth. The truth is, and this isn’t easy for me to say, that I’m also a massive knobhead. I’m the kind of knobhead that uses words like knobhead in a poetry blog, even though I’m fully aware that this is exactly the kind of behaviour that emphasises my knobheadishness. I can’t seem to help myself, and it gets worse. Take last Friday for example:

Crack out your wellies. Spray Veet down your pants. It’s that time of year peeps. Festival season is upon us, and this year’s season kicked off with a proper belter.

Independence Day was a small but perfectly formed event in an astonishingly beautiful enclave of rural Devon. It was staged in a thatched barn within the grounds of a chocolate box cottage The views were impossibly beautiful, all rolling hills and wooded vallies, think how Turner might have interpreted Middle Earth and you’ll be somewhere close.

The last festival of the season for me last year was Leeds, it was immense. I had to shuffle on stage in front of a couple of thousand drunken punters. My knobbly knees were knocking together like epileptic castanets. I shared a trailer with John Cooper Clarke and got to pester him a bit after the gig. He was graciously tolerant of my obsequious harassment of him, a genuinely lovely man. Unfortunately as the day wore on, ten weeks of sleeplessness and debauchery caught up with me all at once, and by the next morning I was so ill I had to leave the site without my tent. This meant I needed a new one and being hopelessly impractical I decided to invest in a tepee. Its properly massive, you could fit Gigantes extended family in there.

I hitched a lift to Devon with the lovely Emma Harper, guitar wielding vocalist from folk rock combo Ten Ton Tongue. I spent the journey sprawled out in the back of her live-in and was schooled in the tenets of film noir by a flute playing ex law student turned film maker called Tony.

Konnichiwa reader. Sorry that I missed my blog yesterday. I’m sat in my pyjamas feeling sorry for myself. I’ve got some kind of infection that has made my eyes swell up to the point that I can barely see out of them. I look like a pathogenic Muppet. My face is like some mucus based facsimile of Angel Falls. I don’t mean to get histrionic, especially in the current climate, but the symptoms speak for themselves. I’ve obviously contracted a severe case of man flu. Let the whineathon commence!

I don’t tend to do many open mics these days, which is a shame because on the whole they give me cozy brain. Like most performance poets I started out testing my wares at open mic nights so I find attending them a bit like taking a herbal bath in an old pair of slippers whilst eating comfort food off the bellies of sleeping kittens. They just feel safe. Everyone knows that the newbie (and in my case oldie) performers might be a bit nervous, so audiences are usually friendly, sympathetic and attentive.

Open mike nights are a truly egalitarian form of entertainment; literally anyone can have a bash at flaunting their talents. I’ve been treated to an abundance of truly memorable performances at them over the years. Such as the six foot plus pianist who sang with deadpan earnestness in falsetto about being neither a mermaid nor merman but a merperson, or the twinset and pearls clad octogenarian who did an epic poem about the pleasures of eating a semen seasoned sarnie. Just the other night in Sheffield I heard a poem that broached the topic of homophobia in Ireland with the line “now he’s not here, because he’s queer” AWSOME!

I loves open mics I do, so I’ve been very much looking forward to road testing poems from this project at two of my favorites.

Eeek! I’m a bit trepidatious about deconstructing my writing process. I see creative offerings in the same way I see magic tricks, I enjoy them much more if I don’t know how they’re done.

For me the trigger for a poem can be just about anything. Something will occur that elicits an emotional response and I’ll scribble a couple of lines in my pad. I’ll leaf through these notes at a later date and if something grabs my attention amongst the often incomprehensible dirge, I’ll isolate myself from distraction and expand upon it.

Here’s a work in progress, have a listen if you have the time and I’ll explain a bit about its conception.

Welcome to England from byron vincent on Vimeo.

Talking to people in and around St Pauls the issue of immigration came up too frequently to ignore.