Vik Shirley : CASSETTE POEMS : factory practice-room cassette-recording responses : Afterword

 

 

 

 

 

Twenty years ago, roughly, when in my twenties, I was in a band, once described as ‘like Portishead on speed’ in the NME. Cassette tapes were an important part of our writing process and practice sessions. We would often improvise and tape it and, me as the lyricist and vocal melody maker, would take away and craft a song out of it, writing the words. Sometimes we would all work on the structure. New songs we could listen back to this way to see how they were working. When I moved my belongings permanently away from my house in Bristol, when moving to Edinburgh, Scotland, two years ago, I found a box of these practice tapes and noted that they could be a potential project of some description. I remember doing the same finding discarded Polaroids of my mother’s which I ended up working with in my book Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid, which came out with Hesterglock Press, back in 2021. Within a couple of weeks of noting this interest, Steven J Fowler asked me to perform at a Writers’ Kingston Cassette Literature night. I took that as a sign and set about writing responses to the different tapes. In the band we had practiced mainly at Unit 3 in Bedminster, South Bristol, which now belongs to Massive Attack, a studio I have had the privilege to be in since their occupation. When we had to stop practicing at the unit, as it was closed for a time before Massive Attack bought it, we started practicing in a concrete tower block in the north-east of the city, in Fishponds. A strange building with a swingers club upstairs, which we all, of course, found highly amusing. We had some good practice sessions in the Factory Practice Rooms. With these poetic responses, I titled the poem as the cassette was labelled. I didn’t respond in chronological order (after the first). I felt the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with this project, as I traversed back through two decades, responding in the present, which was also the future to the past. These are the only poems I’ve written in response to the tapes so far. There are more for me to dip into, should I wish to. Most of these responses were written late night under the influence, in keeping with the mood and context of the tapes themselves and what life was like back then. A departure from my surreal narrative poems and different to my photo-poetry, which is often based around music, it is salutary, I believe, to investigate different sides of ourselves through our art. I hope people find something of interest in this atmosphere- and language-led short sequence, a realm of sorts, of sound, word and tape-based time-travel.

 

 

 

 

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor, educator and critic from Bristol, now living in Edinburgh, UK. Her books include Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock), Strangers Wave (zimZalla), Poets (The Red Ceilings) and The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN). Her pamphlet, Some Deer, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books and her second full-length collection, Nervous Tic, will be published by Sublunary Editions in Spring 2025. Her poems have appeared in such places as The Rialto, Magma, Tears in the Fence, Perverse and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, edited by Peter Johnson and Cassandra Atherton (MadHat Press) Her reviews have appeared in such places as Poetry London and PN Review and her regular column, ‘Commitment to Chush’, ran in Sublunary Editions’ Firmament magazine for three years. A regular performer at the European Poetry Festival, Vik is a Poetry School Tutor (teaching on the Surreal Narrative, Absurdism and the Grotesque in Poetry) and Director of Disrupted Blue Indie Press Publicity. She co-edits Surreal-Absurd at Mercurius and is Digital Editor at Sublunary Editions. She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham. Her chapbook, One by One, an Oulipian collaboration with the poet, Bob Brightt, is out now with Derek Beaulieu’s No Press.

Vik Shirley : Sestina for Rock’s Ghost

 

 

 

Mabel didn’t have the energy to land the plane,
so she kept flying, or cruising, rather, while passengers
looked at each other with bemusement and slight annoyance
at her playing such terrible music over the tannoy,
as almost none of them liked the genre of soft rock
and literally none of them wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi.

However, unbeknownst to those onboard, until this fateful day, Jon Bon Jovi
did want to be one of them. Probably the person you’d least expect on the plane.
I mean if you were looking at them all with a Columbo-eye, Rock
Hudson would be the last choice. Not just because he’s dead, but as there were other passengers
who wore a permed mane like 80s Jon Bon, liked the sound of their own voice over the tannoy,
donned tight leather trousers and had a tasselled jacket flicking about, to everyone’s annoyance.

But it was Rock Hudson that Jon Bon Jovi wanted to be, the annoyance
and confusion when the truth came out was widespread. What surprising taste Jon Bon Jovi
harboured, and how had Rock Hudson come back from the dead, someone asked over the tannoy.
Then it became apparent that it was, of course, the ghost of Rock Hudson on the plane,
not Rock Hudson himself. Jon Bon had met the ghost, along with another of the passengers
at a little soirée in New Jersey, where celebrities and ghosts of celebrities go to rock.

Jon Bon had never met anyone like him. Boy that ghost knew how to rock!
Jon Bon prided himself on his drinking, but Rock’s ghost was better, to his annoyance.
And, wow, his dancing, had all the girls and girl-ghosts dancing to Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger’.
The soft-rock God had never seen such a thing. “Hey girls,” he said, “my name is Jon Bon Jovi.”
The girls didn’t care. By then Rock’s ghost was telling an anecdote about flying a plane.
They were laughing, gazing at him when “Call for Mr. Hudson’s ghost” came over the tannoy.

How did all this come out? What manifestation did it take years later over the plane tannoy?
For nearly a decade Jon Bon had been disguising himself and following the ghost of Rock.
In many ways he wished he hadn’t been there that night of his anecdote about the plane.
It was a hunch that told him to follow Rock to take the call. Annoyance
wasn’t the word for it. Red, then blue with more than a splash of green Jon Bon Jovi
turned, as he listened to the conversation. Rock called the girl on the phone Passengers.

This was the name Jon Bon’s girlfriend liked to be called! No one else was called Passengers.
It was too unusual. The ghost of Rock Hudson had won his girlfriend’s affections. From the tannoy
on the aircraft “shot through the heart and you’re to blame” from the song by Bon Jovi
made the ghost of Rock Hudson startle, ‘You give love a bad name.’ This soft rock
classic was no coincidence, he thought, and turned. On seeing Jon Bon, the annoyance
was subsumed by momentary fear. Jon had a gun and shot him, forgetting he was a ghost on a plane.

The aircraft went down and the passengers were killed as they hit the rocks.
Jon Bon sang ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ on the tannoy the whole way down, to everyone’s annoyance.
The ghost of Jon Bon Jovi emerged to see Rock’s ghost flying away in his private plane.

 

 

 

 

 

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, educator, critic, and editor from Bristol, now living in Edinburgh. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua Press) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her most recent publications are Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), and Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla), which both came out in 2023. She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.

Vik Shirley : (further) short takes on the prose poem

folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem

 

 

My Take on the Prose Poem

 

In the final paragraph of Charles Simic’s short essay ‘The Poetry of Village Idiots’ he says the following about the prose poem:

1/ “I regard the comic spirit as its true muse.”

2/ “Playful and irreverent treatment of every subject is usually the custom.”

3/ “In order to free poetry of its mannerisms and tics, the prose poem must not take itself too seriously.”

4/ “Impossible to write, illegitimate in the eyes of so many poets and critics, it must remain a pariah and an object of ridicule to survive.”

These are all reasons I love the prose poem so much. It’s the perfect playpen for impertinence. It knows full well that life is ridiculous. That we are ridiculous. This is why it lends itself so well to absurdism —to mocking the rituals we hold dear, mocking life, mocking death, mocking the self—and why it is the ultimate form for the surreal and absurd. The prose poem is doing what absurdity does, but in form. It is a mocking form. It mocks poetry, of which it is part of. The prose poem feeds on ridicule, its where it gets its power from. By mocking itself first, it takes back the power from the oppressor. Whoever or whatever that may be. The prose poem is a space to joyfully refuse to be oppressed or dictated to. It is a place to flip the bad stuff, and let it serve as entertainment instead.

To make us laugh and give us a release. To give to us, what Thomas Hobbes called, the “sudden glory” of laughter, that we so desperately need.

 

 

The Faux Omission of a Danish Physician

A lemming is eaten by an artic fox. I for one am not sure what to do with that information. Or indeed what to do with any of the information I have encountered today. Perhaps I should put it in my pipe and smoke it. But what if I don’t want to smoke it? What if I would rather snort it and use the pipe for something else entirely. Perhaps for a spin-the-bottle type game at a party. Spin-the-pipe has a ring to it. I for one would like to be at that party. Of course, I am lying. I would much rather be at the party where the pipe is used as a prize in pass-the-parcel, or one in which a giant pipe is used as for beating a piñata. This would not be utilising the pipe’s finest qualities, though. So, I can’t help but think I am doing it a great disservice. This all came from me googling ‘lemming’, by the way. For no other reason than today I was drawn to lemmings. Was it because Zeigler of Strasbourg in the 1530s proposed the theory that the creatures fell from the sky during stormy weather and then died suddenly when the grass grows in Spring? Was it the common misconception that lemmings are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs? No. But for some reason all this does add to the charm and allure of the lemming. Artic foxes are eaten by golden eagles, wolverines and grizzly bears, should you be wondering. But enough Wikipedia for one day, let us finish with a thought for all the pipes that won’t be smoked due to their decline in popularity, and for the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg, who doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page, despite starting this whole lemmings-out-of-the-sky thing, or for Ole Worm, the Danish physician who does have his own Wikipedia page, but, due to the fact his theory was only slightly different to Zeigler, claiming the rodents were merely carried on the breeze, I decided to omit entirely from this lemming (and pipe-based) prose poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, and editor from Bristol, England now living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her chthonic sequel to Corpses, Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), will be published in Autumn, as will Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla). Vik’s work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Shearsman and Tears in the Fence, in America: Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, The Indianapolis Review and Tiny Molecules. Vik’s work has featured in many anthologies, most recently in Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, edited by Peter Johnson and Cassandra Atherton. Vik has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham. She is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions and Co-Editor of Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius magazine.