What happened

From UoWiki

Rock n' roll exploded all over the lilywhite doyen(ne)s of comfort poetry. A girl called Emma riffed on the dead animals of her childhood; there was a song about the phantom bus that no-one gets off; Dave Russell sang about the evil little bicycle kid who cycles around harassing old ladies and grows up to be a white supremacist with a vicious dog. David Kessel slurred his beautiful Hackney cityscapes through a fog of forced selfhood and exhausted lunacy.

Vodka was consumed. The first half went off swimmingly. The visuals flowed spookily behind. Then the event's (dis)organiser chinned a member of the audience (something to do with a woman and other provocation,we think) and it got wiggy despite an astonishing collective and unspoken decision by the audience to ignore it and continue watching.

But that tipped the balance to the dark side: The last hour was somewhere between an open mic and a pack of wolves, with heckling and shouting and a lot of beer consumed, before Rob Windows wound it up with the comment that there were a lot of demons present.

The event was launched into free space from the word go: in an occupied/noncommercial building run on co-operative principles, there is very little between people and themselves. The only boundaries are the ones we set ourselves. We can invoke what we like, dark or light; the question then becomes how to create a space resilient enough to hold an audience clear and bright in its own freedom. Applied Poetics , banishing rituals, acts of affirmation. Anything but the stripped-pine herb-tea codes of behaviour that emasculate Covent Garden's dilettantes.

Suggestions on a postcard.

Or read: 'The Polka Dot Ceiling-Poetry For The Fucked'-Issue 6 out now. �2 From: Rough Trade-Neal's Yard and Infoshop@ 56a Crampton Street SE17-Elephant Tube. Or contact directly- theecopeman@hotmail.com Gated Community-Poetry is Threat. Edited hilites of event on CD-'Academies For Jesus'-�4 out March. See PDC email contact.

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