Wondermentalist

The topical poem at the top of the programme is always the hardest poem to write for Saturday Live. Elvis McGonagal agrees. Last Christmas I kept it simple. My top-of-the-show poem tied in Christmas with climate change. It went like this:

I’m dreaming of a mild Christmas,

Just like the ones we’ll come to know

with increasing global warming

there’ll be far less snowball forming

and some very sweaty Santas

ho ho ho

It’s somewhere between a poem and a squib. This coming Saturday I’ll probably do something like this, which ties Christmas in with, well, Christmas.

You can keep your Bah Humbugs

I’m not playing Scrooge

“But it’s all so commercial”

Look, I’m not in the mood

No man is an island

No woman is an isthmus

People are people wherever you go

Have a very Merry Christhmus…

I may even do it at the Wondermentalist Cabaret. It’s over soon enough. The poem, not the cabaret. And I could make play out of it’s not being very good. (The poem, again.)

My favourite of my own Christmas poems is a sonnet called Present Tense:

You speak to me in tones of urgent angst:

“Oh, where’s the sellotape! Who had it last?”

I place it gently in your sticky grasp.

You sigh a grateful sigh and mutter, “Thanks.

I’m trying to wrap my Christmas presents up.

We’ve only got nineteen or so weeks left.

That isn’t many shopping days. It’s best

to plan ahead, then you don’t come unstuck

on Christmas Eve.” I don’t know what to say,

but wonder if you’re like this very often -

or victim of a powerful lunar pull.

For if you live your whole life in this way

we’ll find you tucked up snugly in your coffin

a good ten years before your funeral.

I’m getting all excited about the upcoming Wondermentalist Cabaret. It’s looking good, even though Tom Addy’s had to drop out for family reasons – we’ll book him next year – and Pooja Angra’s having to scour the land for the right musical accompaniment. We are optimistic. Rather wonderfully we have no single replacement for Tom Addy, but three future Wondermentalist performers are each doing a brief ‘taster’ turn to titillate, infotain and whet the appetite for January, February and March. Jackie Juno, Nathan Filer and Stephen Park will also take part in the Dead Poets’ Slam, which now has six participants – the right number, I feel.

Yes, December’s cabaret is looking good. Overall. However, my thoughts now are turning to my own contribution. I’m the host, I’m also the warm-up man. And tone-setter. What to do. Where to begin. It’s a conundrum. How better to set the tone than with my kipper poem from my last Saturday Live turn. I’m conscious I don’t have the world’s best selection of topical Christmas poems, but I have three ‘kuh’ poems – Clouds, Kippers and Cows (this is unfinished but will be ready to go by Wednesday). Yes, this is my best bet. Read this. Now, tell me: How can the evening possibly go wrong?

Kippers for Life

you can serve yourself a kipper on a tasteful brekky platter

with a little bit of pepper it’s the perfect kind of tucker

you can mash it in a pate you can serve with toast and butter

put a little bit of kipper on the corner of a cracker

you can call it kipper canapés

Mmmmmmm

and should you come a cropper, slip or trip and drop your kipper

then there’s no need to agonise about the kipper’s injury

just mix it up with egg’n’rice and call it kipper kedgeree

it’s got such versatility – DHA oil, omega 3,

a kipper in a jiffy bag can liven up a postal strike

you can pop one in the pannier of a diplomatic motorbike

or

if you’re feeling moody

you can happy-slap a foody

lying there like leatherwear, eyes glazed like a teddy bear

familiar, yet foreign, like a smooth, flat smelly sporran

when they hang like golden ladies they are aromatic bunting

they can lay false trails for hounds so you can sabotage the hunting

(which is where the term ‘red herring’ originates…)

they enrich the English language and they’re quite nice in a sandwich

so let’s get a bumper sticker that will stick up for the kipper

“A kipper is for life – not just for breakfast”

I’ve just posted about the Wondermentalist Cabaret – an evening of poetry, comedy, music and pleasant surprises – whose blog this blog now is. Now I want to tell you about another blog, a blog yet to come…

Once upon a time this very Wondermentalist blog was maybe going to be called, among other things, Topless Thinking. It was to have multiple contributors and be a cheeky ‘unconscious living’ companion to ‘conscious living’ blog Soul and Soil. Next year there will be a Topless Thinking blog, and this is what it’ll be about.

Topless Thinking

“Contains produce from more than one chakra”

Topless Thinking is Soul and Soil’s slightly immature yet well-meaning younger sibling. It’s concerned with the same subjects and issues but is less likely to educate and inform more likely simply to entertain and provoke. It is an opportunity for imaginative bloggers not just to think outside of the box but to box outside of the ring, to burst outside of the bubble, to sink outside of the pond, to dig outside of the allotment. It’s a place for meaningful mucking about – a chance to push the envelope of muddle-headedness through the letterbox of inappropriateness and extend metaphors beyond health and safety guidelines.

Where a Soil and Soul thread might discuss the pros and cons of small-scale education and the re-introduction of indigenous plant varieties, a Topless Thinking thread is more likely to debate who would win a staring contest between Shirley MacLaine and Deepak Chopra, or whether Hildegaard of Bingen would beat Stephen Fry in a pub quiz. (She would.) It might ponder whether tattoos really make you happy or, since the unexamined life is not worth living, whether the ungazed-at navel is really worth piercing.

Topless Thinking has its head in the clouds, its feet on the ground and its finger up its nose – foraging for truth and beauty in the least promising of places.

Topless Thinking is a celebration of unconscious living.

It is not very sensible.

[End of Topless Thinking concept note] 

There you have it. If, having read this far, you think you’d like to contribute to the above blog, write and tell me, either here at Wondermentalist (at the end of this post) or write to me at matt.harvey@copperstrings.com or matt@mattharvey.co.uk

This blog is changing direction. This blog is now the blog of the Cabaret known as Wondermentalist.

Let me tell you about the Wondermentalist Cabaret. It is an evening of poetry, comedy, music and pleasant surprises. It is happening, to begin with at least, at the Royal Seven Stars, Totnes. It is the cabaret whose inaugural gig on Wednesday the 19^th of December will be headlined by Jerri Hart. Jerri Hart is a purveyor of what has been (accurately) described as “surreal jazz nonsense”. Those who’ve yet to see Jerri in full flow demonstrating Jazz Knitting (and, if they’re very lucky, Scat Origami) have so much to live for, while those who have no intention of seeking out such thrills are, in all fairness and without wishing to be unkind, shallow-breathing marshmallow-eaters. Stick-in-the-muds.

Jerri is wonderfully, charmingly, masterfully supported by the likes of Pooja Angra, offering traditional Indian singing, warm and witty performance poet Beryl the Feral, the eclectic songs of Nomad Shuffle (Jo Walton and Graham Macey), plus cameos from future Wondermentalist turns Jackie Juno, Nathan Filer (I hope) and Stephen Park.

There will also be the Dead Poets’ Slam, a chance for late great page poets to perform vicariously from beyond the grave and impress a contemporary audience through the medium of ‘cover versions’ chosen and performed by poets and performers from this and next year’s Wondermentalist Cabarets.

I (Matt [Harvey]) will be hosting the evening, warming up the audience to the best of my mixed ability, insinuating poetry between the cracks, introducing the acts and overseeing the Slam. I’ll be the glue that holds the evening together and makes it difficult for people to move freely.

An additionally wonderful feature of the evening is that all proceedings will be expertly recorded, on a handy device known as a Zoom H2, with the express purpose of making podcasts that can be streamed from Wonderful Radio, the new online radio station available at www.wndfl.com. The podcasts will also be available for download from Traydio at the same web address. So if there’s anything you especially like you can bloomin’ well go and listen to it again, and again and again And you can log on to this very blog and tell us what you think, what you’d like to see, who you think you are and where you’d like to go. Isn’t that just kind of groovy and cool? (You don’t have to answer that. Yet.)

Future dates lined up for the Seven Stars are Friday Janauary 25^th, Saturday February 23^rd, and Saturday March 22^nd.

Look forward to seeing you there…