verve poetry press

Guest Post: ‘A Beautiful Way to be Crazy’ by Genevieve Carver, with poem ‘Champagne, Cocaine and Sausages’

Welcome to Week-Whatever in the big brother/sister PP lockdown showcase. Today we have something quite different, a little bit musical, a little bit performative, and more than a little bit rebalancing the gender imbalance in the music industry. The videos of her band The Unsung are a great watch. This all comes from Genevieve Carver’s Verve Poetry Press book, ‘A Beautiful Way to be Crazy’, which you can buy here. Oh, and download sales from the band’s music will go to ‘Refuge‘ the domestic violence charity. So without further ado, here’s Genevieve:

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credit: Alexandra Wallace*

“I’m a poet, but music has always formed the backbone of what I do. Song lyrics are always creeping into my poems, and in the past I’ve written about people whose death was caused by music, and the relationship between music and mental health. I perform in a gig theatre ensemble along with three multi-instrumentalist musicians (Ruth Nicholson, Brian Bestall and Tim Knowles) called The Unsung, and our latest show, A Beautiful Way to be Crazy, explores female experiences in the music industry. My debut poetry collection of the same name was published by Verve Poetry Press in February 2020.

Women make up just 30% of the music industry as a whole, and as little as 2% in certain, usually more tech-heavy roles. I decided to talk to some of that 30%, and gather together some of their experiences. I interviewed almost 50 people, including cis-gendered, trans, non-binary and intersex individuals. I spoke to singers, instrumentalists, sound engineers, producers and events promoters, covering genres from classical to folk, electronica, rock, pop and jazz. I interviewed performers in a sex workers’ opera, 4O2A2439 internationally touring DJs and members of an all-female band of adults with learning difficulties. My aim wasn’t to get famous names but to talk to women who lived and breathed music in their everyday life, either professionally or at an amateur level.

The show I ended up making, combines the themes I pulled out from these interviews with my own personal experiences. It weaves together music from my incredibly versatile band with original spoken word, readings from my genuine teenage diary entries from 1999 (aged 13) and audio clips from the interviews.

Two tracks from the show are currently available to watch in full:

Human Being – a pop song:

Little Green – a Joni-Mitchell inspired lullaby:

You can download our music from https://genevievecarvertheunsung.bandcamp.com, and all money from download sales is being donated directly to Refuge domestic violence charity.

The book that has been published by Verve includes the whole sequence of poems from the live show, as well as other poems from my performance repertoire covering themes including hangovers, roundabouts, existential dread and why I don’t do yoga.”

https://www.genevievecarver.com/; @theunsungpoetry

Champagne, Cocaine & Sausages

“I want champagne, cocaine and sausages” – Nina Simone.

I am Nina Simone’s anger
I am Etta James’s veins
I am Ani DiFranco’s middle finger
I am your little sister’s bedroom door.

I am the ripple in the pond
I am the rip in your jeans
I am wild and unwashed and broken
I am not taking it lying down.

I am shit at lots of things
I am difficult
I am wrong
I am tied in knots I’m free
I am simply trying to be me
I am frightened
I am flawed
but I am here
and I’m not going anywhere.

I am Kate Bush’s treble
I am Jacqueline du Pres’ tremble
I am Polly Harvey’s pedals
I am Kathleen Hanna’s rebel.

I am Clara Schuman’s manuscript
I am Stevie Nicks’s sleeves
I am Alanis Morisette’s misunderstanding of irony
I am Bjork’s clenched fist.

I’m just a girl
I wear my hair in curls
I wear my dungarees
down to my sexy knees
I am sugar and spice and all things
deep and lost and painful and real
I am fighting to be heard
and not only seen
I am a woman, phenomenally.

I am Tori Amos’s cornflakes
I am Sinead O’Connor’s skull
I am Taylor Swift’s reputation
I am Madonna’s youth.

I want champagne, cocaine and sausages
I want it all and I want it now
I want what I cannot have
I am hungry
I am greedy
I will bite off more than I can
vomit back into the void
it’s a new dawn
it’s a new day
it’s a new life
and I’m feeling ready for it.

I am the reason the caged bird sings
I am the thorn in the side of the boy
I am the fat lady telling you it’s over
I am spinning
I am floating
I am so close to the edge
I am busting at the seams
I am everything you ever hoped you’d be

so take a piece, just try it
there’s too much here
for you to even make a dent in me.

(*Alexandra Wallace’s photography can be viewed here)

Guest Post: David Turner of Lunar Poetry Podcasts, ‘one poem about sex and that’s it ok’

Today’s guest David Turner, is an indefatigable supporter of poets through his Lunar Poetry Podcasts, where you will find interviews with many/many of the UK’s contemporary poets. But I also recommend you buy his debut collection ‘Contained’; it is an extraordinary book both in its form and themes. It’s published by the innovative ‘mostly experimental’ Hesterglock Press.

You can purchase Contained here (there is a pdf version for £4)
There is also a Soundcloud playlist with has recordings of the poems here.

So without further ado, here’s David writing about being in isolation watching The People v OJ Simpson whilst aware of the outside movements of others.

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David T “I am very grateful to Peter for inviting me to submit a blog post and poem for this great website. It’s always nice when someone you respect shows an interest in your work and places you amongst a growing collection of talented artists… especially since I’ve been a little down on my debut ‘poetry’ book, Contained recently. It’s like staring at your own face in the mirror for too long – my features have lost all relevance and no longer make up what I remember. Perhaps, worse still, they make up exactly what I remember.

As so many are at the moment, I’m ‘looking in the mirror’ too much and procrastinating. I’m watching Netflix instead of acknowledging the reading list building up in a corner of the one-bed, housing association, flat I share with my wife. We binge-watch The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story – you know, because for what other reason was that streaming service invented, other than to hear the gruesome details of a woman’s murder?

…heavy footsteps thump the floor above in time to a joe wicks youtube routine, his instructions resonate through us…

Ross from Friends plays Kim Kardashian’s dad and her and her siblings eat French Fries in a diner. Cuba Gooding Jr can only ever be Cuba Gooding Jr and I always thought Johnnie Cochran was an early Rock ‘n’ Roll star. This is the first time I’ve ever seen John Travolta play anyone other than himself.

…downstairs, parents scream at their kids for going too close to their friends’ homes…

He actually looks like he’s acting, which is weird because presumably the whole cast is acting, so if I’ve only noticed JT does that mean he’s doing something wrong? Like, is it only good acting if you don’t notice it?

…we’re all now painfully aware of our neighbours’ work voices as their zoom conference calls pierce the calm in the yard…

I just keep thinking, ‘JT really looks like someone else here’, so taken by this that I miss several key plot developments. He’s executive producer (I think) so maybe he just got the pick of the best make-up artists. In many ways he actually looks like he’s wearing Nick Cage’s face. Finally.

…upstairs, on facetime, she shouts to a niece or nephew about how they’re a potato with a bum hole for an ear…

Watching JT commit, so firmly, to his Bob Shapiro makes my neck ache as I unintentionally mimic the tension he holds in his thick torso and absent neck.

…there are now loud boisterous gatherings on random weeknights as people struggle to maintain routines and the old bill hover in helicopters because they know that this city is only a sunny bank holiday away from mayhem…

contained I don’t know anything about film theory – except a short (but excellent) YouTube series narrated by a feature film producer, preoccupied by the ‘oner’ – but I’m sure every character in these dramas is supposed to have an ‘arc’. But all I see is JT standing there barrel-chested, mush-faced, wide-lapelled and NOT BEING JOHN TRAVOLTA. The whole thing is very distracting. And, of course, maybe he just looks like that now.

You have to find a way to remind yourself that being stuck in the same place/space can breed obsessions and try to enlist the coping mechanisms you’ve already had to consider many times before. And, of course, for certain sections of society the place/space they occupy can be much smaller and hostile. And, of course (of course), a global pandemic is not a writing retreat and that for many of us lockdown isn’t time away from anything.”

David Turner is the founding editor of the Lunar Poetry Podcasts series, has a City & Guilds certificate in Bench Joinery along with the accompanying scars, is known to the Bristol, Kristiansand and Southwark Community Mental Health Teams as a ‘service user’ and has represented Norway in snow sculpting competitions. Widely unpublished. Working-class. Picket line poet. Publications: Contained, Hesterglock Press, 2020; ten cups of coffee, Hesterglock Press, 2019; ‘Why Poetry?’ – The Lunar Poetry Podcasts Anthology, VERVE Poetry Press, 2018

lunarpoetrypodcasts.com; twitter.com/Silent_Tongue;
https://www.instagram.com/david_turner_books/

one poem about sex and that’s it ok

It isn’t clean and we don’t want it in our mouths. Returned pint glass with lipstick on the rim. We’ll drink any old piss before we’ll ask for a fresh drink but draw the line here.

You wake up in horror on the Northern Line at Kennington realising you’ve been resting your head on the day’s accumulated grease. The glass dividers are supposed to keep us apart and we don’t want any trace of the others lingering on us.

Walking through the vaper’s sweetshop mist is somehow worse than the traditional smoker because it’s mainly their breath, innit? They’ve entered you. Even though you’ve expelled all trace of them it’s sort of their memory hanging around. Clinging to your insides.

You’re sitting in one of those rigid plastic chairs in Café House Restaurant (the caff) on the Walworth Road and it’s still warm and you’d move but you’ve been fixated on your nan’s disapproving look (it only takes a look) for just long enough that someone would definitely notice you moving. Like a heat shadow.

As financially challenged teenagers we’d share bottles of MD 20/20. Our biggest fear between the ages of 12 and 16 seemed to be backwash. All this energy spent trying to avoid the ‘wrong person’s’ saliva getting in your mouth.

Eighty Four: Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope (edited by Helen Calcutt)

dav Last Wednesday, I hosted a very special event at Foyles’ Bookshop in London; the launch of the poetry anthology ‘E ghty* Four’ published by Verve Poetry Press in support of the charity the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). Why E ghty Four? (* the ‘i’ signifies a life lost)

E ghty Four is the number of men in the UK who take their own lives every week; twelve a day, one every two hours, 4,368 a year. More women experience depression, more women take anti-depressants, but men are four times more likely to end their life. It is a national epidemic, which is not confined to this country – the US for example has 129 suicides a day, half of which are carried out with a firearm.

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We Drink for Them by Casey Bailey

In 1999, we used to live in Camberwell, South London in a top floor flat that overlooked the Camberwell Road and all of its ‘activities’. Besides watching Concorde fly over in the late afternoon with my newborn son, there would often be exchanges of different points of view on the street below. Then into the night, the club across the road would see the usual overspill of happy/violent drunks. However, maybe it was because I had already lived in London for seven years, or had known violence from living in Coventry, but I never felt threatened or in danger. Up the road in Loughborough Junction, there was a number of gang related murders, but otherwise it felt relatively peaceful. (more…)

Why Poetry? The Lunar Poetry Podcast Anthology, with poem ‘what’s in yours?’ by Lizzy Turner

lunar poetry pod

Just over three years ago I was sitting in the garden of a Kentish Town bar being interviewed by two special people, David and Lizzy Turner of Lunar Poetry Podcasts. Like myself with Proletarian Poetry (I was that night hosting an event at the Torriano Meeting House with Tim Wells and Anna Robinson), LPP had been going for less than a year, interviewing different poets about their poems and craft. David’s style of interviewing is one of the most laid back, yet incisive techniques I have come across; a great interviewer makes the interviewee feel they are just having a conversation, as opposed to a simple Q&A, and David does this with such aplomb. (more…)

Mum’s Spicy Chicken by Nafeesa Hamid

Hegel infamously said that history was a process of thesis (the current paradigm) bumping up against antithesis, which then (through war, debate, demographics) becomes a synthesis, a resolve, whether it be chaos or calm. The rite of passage of a child is similar. The typical model is the young child being totally dependent on the carer, living by the values of their parents; they are helped, to walk, to speak, to read, etc.. Then, when reaching their teenage years, they become independent, at least in their eyes; wanting to go out more, liking different things, rebelling even. Eventually, in this theoretical scenario, the synthesis is interdependence, or rapprochement or mutual relationship of empathy; the young adult, gets a job, a family and realises what the other side of the coin looks like. (more…)