Writing the Monopoly Board

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Who cheated? Growing up in Oz, the places on the monopoly board were synonymous with bitter spats and the shame-faced cheating heists. So when I came to London in 2001 they were already famous, and colour-coded. They also became real gritty, noisy trafficked streets with layers of history like I had never experienced before. So, when the fabulous poet Roddy Lumsden (http://vitamin-p.co.uk/ ) commissioned some of the best poets in town to write about a place on the monopoly board I took up the dice.

I rolled Liverpool Street Station…. so perhaps a bit of research. Ha! It turned into a project, an obsession. The librarians at the Barbican where only too pleased to find me more and more books from the amazing London section, including the wonderful Peter Ackroyd’s London Biography (there are hundreds of poems to write from this), a history of Spitalfields Market, a pompous 1914 edition of the history of Bedlam mental hospital (pulled down to make way for Liverpool Street station: http://www.bethlemheritage.org.uk/explorebethlem/), an astonishing recent book on the East End: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview30 and 18 Folgate Street, a book on Denis Severs House http://www.dennissevershouse.co.uk/, an inspiring expression of place.

Swimming in books, some things stuck in my mind

Bedlam was the only place in London you could bellow ‘down with the king’ and not get arrested
They charged a penny entrance to watch the mad people and vendors sold sweets like you would when you go see a film nowadays
It was renowned as a pick-up place! (work that one out)
Liverpool Street Station was just outside the London city wall
Where rebels gathered
I like edges, outsiders
Where wild entertainment took place like bear-bating?! …http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear-baiting
The edge of the east end squalor
That had more music halls than anywhere in London
Whole streets would erupt with dancing at the sound of a barrel organ
Jack the Ripper, Sweeny Todd
The station’s statue of a kindertransport child evacuated from Hitler’s hell was of a real orphaned child
Denis Severs created a candle-lit museum near the station that is like being inside a painting of a Victorian house
He made up a family that lived there: who baked, left half written letters, were heard between the walls

I ended up with tons of questions, and about 6 drafts of different poems and still counting…

What if a barrel organ still made us all burst into dance?
How would Bedlam patients seek revenge?
Is the Bedlam visitors sport that far from some of the grimy reality TV nowadays?
What if the station was where you could let rip with any old thing on your mind?
What would it be like to arrive at the station a ten year old orphan?
What if you never emerged from those narrow alleyways?
What if electricity never happened?
Why are we so afraid of quiet?
Any wonder Shoreditch became such an artists’ hotbed?
etc etc etc

Some unfinished extracts (without line breaks)….

1. At the entrance to the tube, a middle-aged bloke in a fuchsia-pin stripe gives out papers from the whole of last week: a mixed stock of titles and headlines.

Only the Metro seller tries to edge him aside. A bemused stockbroker opens last Tuesday’s The Socialist halfway along the circle line…

2. I lost track of time, turned my head to see a message flickering on my phone. Suddenly, I imaged I was on a six lane highway, peak hour, waking for the rush, not able to get the buzz of traffic and the throb of electricity out of my skin…

3. You get to see what a man does when in the same year his sister dies, his business goes under, his wife leaves: five hundred stairs, one by one, naked, he jumps. Suicide is such a beautiful sport. See the breathtaking moments just before the collapse…

4. It’s 2001. I’m an outsider, a PA with tired pale hands. At lunchtimes, I cross through the invisible arches of Bishopsgate, collide with the starched city boys, who do not see me…

5. In winter, I come home in the dark with a mass of huddled black coats at Liverpool Street Station: half-blind creatures seeking home burrows by instinct…

My Place Or Yours

Writing the Monopoly Board

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