Haiku for yesterday

The Go-Between? It's
A tale of lost innocence
By LP Hartley.

Finished reading it
And my Young Person's Railcard
Expired forever.

Back to Lowlands

I've been away. But now I'm back. Did you miss me? Okay, fine, FUCK YOU.

Oops, sorry. Anyway, I've just been to a music festival called Lowlands (I also went two years ago: this happened). It was in Holland. Got to Amsterdam on Wednesday and proceeded directly to a pub called The Flying Dutchman, run by a crazy American. Some hours later I was playing a drunken game of darts. I don't know where.

On Thursday morning, we all arrived at Lelystad Station, which is about 45 minutes on the train from 'Dam. It was pouring with rain. Raks, Sarah and I sat in silence in our taxi to the festival site, as the hostile weather lashed the windscreen. I was thinking things like, "Why didn't I bring an umbrella?", "Why didn't I bring bin bags?" and "I want to go home." I also had a hangover from the previous night's shenanigans; this didn't help. In fact, it was all so terrible, I'm going to slip into haiku.

We unpacked our stuff
Then walked. We got to the gate
And started to wait.

We queued, gloomily.
The rain cleared; everyone cheered.
It started again.

Well eventually the bastards in charge opened the gates and we all stampeded through. As there were several Lowlands veterans among our number, the tent-pitching location tactics were not a problem – and we had the pick of the park. Wooooooo. Lucky, too, because it gets pretty rammed in there. And I can prove it!

Before.

After.

See? But with tents up, the bad part – queuing and rain – was over. The next morning we went into the festival proper. First things first: we ate. Here's a tray of demolished chicken.

The Lowlands River God raised his hands in anguish from the lake where he lives, angry, I think, because we ate his sacred chicken. But the gentle rain forced him back.

What happened next? Well then I saw Jack Penate, Kate Nash, Editors, Kasabian, Eagles of Death Metal, Damien Rice, The Killers, The Rifles, The Black Seeds, The View, CSS, M.I.A., The Enemy, New Young Pony Club, Loney, dear, The Shins, Kings of Leon, The Pigeon Detectives, Arcade Fire and Groove Armada. Were they good? They were. (Except The Rifles, who weren't.)

Now I'm home, it's strange. I feel like I'm not quite here, but also that none of the above actually happened. Dislocated, you might say. Ah well, back to work.

Lit TV

There aren't enough highbrow literary programmes on TV featuring obscure academics, and if there were, they'd be shit. But here's the answer: why not just assimilate them, using established mainstream formats? And here are the pitches:

Candide Camera
A crack team of Voltaire scholars play a series of crazy literary pranks on unsuspecting members of the public, with inevitably hilarious consequences

Rupert Brookeside
A dramatic soap following the trials and tribulations of a community of World War 1 poetry experts.

CSI Murakami
A squad of Japanese literature fans solve gruesome but metaphysical crimes, helped along the way by a team of magical cats and kooky waifs.

Wife of Bath Swap
A pair of Chaucer scholars switch spouses for a week, with hilarious – and increasingly highbrow – consequences.

The House of TS Eliot
A group of prickly experts on modern poetry are forced to share a house together while they attempt to set up and run their own fashionable clothing company. Will infighting about the nature of postmodernism destroy their business?

Heartbreak Hiawatha
A youth-orientated soap in which a group of literate teens fall in and out of love, while discussing Longfellow in trochaic tetrameter.

How could it possibly fail?

Abstruser musings

This is totally cool: my friend Poet Jamie was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. The feature covered the rather ingenious issue of how climate change will affect poetry and they wanted to ask a proper stanza-man what the answer was.

Jamie did a sterling job, reeling off some Chaucer in middle English without breaking a sweat and namechecking Coleridge's ace Frost at Midnight, which we both studied at school - with most believing mind - for A-level. His words fell on mine ear most like articulate sounds of things to come.

Listen to the interview here

(If you don't have Realplayer, this clip will be as inaudible as dreams: download Realplayer here)

More Wilkes poetry

Poetry Corner

In Memoriam Billy Preston

So.
Farewell then Billy
Preston.

You played piano
With the
Stones and Dylan.

Also on the George
Harrison song
All Things Must Pass.

Now you have.

With apologies to E.J. Thripp (aged 17 ½)

More from the poetry corner
Chris Penn

Poetry Corner

In Memoriam Chris Penn, Hollywood actor

Farewell then, Chris Penn
You were the star
Of the film
Beethoven's 2nd.

When I say "the star"
I mean, after the dog
And the kids
And Charles Grodin.

Reservoir Dogs
Was your best known film
You played
Nice Guy Eddie.

Now you are
Nice Guy Deaddie.

With apologies to E.J. Thripp (aged 17 ½)

Take a haiku

Spent most of Saturday grappling with James Bond (feature I'm trying to write). Later, met Birdy and Emily for a brief drink in Arch 635. Cool bar, bizarrely situated beneath the train track - every now and again you could hear an ominous rumbling overhead. For some reason, the only place left for us to sit was a vaulting horse, the kind usually confined to gyms. Don't know what it was doing there (everything else was comfy sofas and bar stools), but definite haiku material:

On a vaulting horse
The three of us sat in line
And drank, legs dangling.