The 2nd half of the 1st Wondermentalist Cabaret was so good it has its own blog post. Just like the 1st half. It started with me reading a poem called “Cows. What are you like?” which is so good it’s already up on Traydio, here, ahead of the rest of the evening. It earned an exaggeratedly warm response from the audience who, it must be said, were so good we may never see their like again. Do you notice a theme of things being ‘so good’? I’ll stop that now.
Next up was the Dead Poets’ Slam – a chance for late great poets to be heard from beyond the veil, kind of, a chance too for the living to honour (and cover) the inspiring dead.
The Dead Poets’ Slam will gets its own page but for now here’s who read what and (sometimes) where it can be found. Where poets passed on/out/away within the last 70 years we need permission from their estates to publish their work, so we may point you to where you can buy a book or to a site which has both the poem and the relevant permission. We are trying so hard to be good.
Beryl the Feral read The Hand that Signed the Paper by Dylan Thomas
Simon Williams read Enter a Cloud by WS Graham
Jackie Juno read To be a Slave of Intensity by Kabir
Nathan Filer read The Little Boy and the Old Man by Shel Silverstein
Which can be found here
Stephen Park read The Laughing Song by William Blake, and
Jo Walton read The World is too much with us by William Wordsworth
Two volunteers from the audience functioned as clapometers, mmmmmometers and ooohometers, giving marks out of 100 for their perception of the warmth of each poet’s reception. And the slam was won by… …Kabir, represented on this earth by Jackie Juno (January’s hardliner, I mean headliner). She read Kabir’s To be a Slave of Intensity and a deep time was had by all.
TO BE A SLAVE OF INTENSITY
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think …. and think …. while you are alive.
What you call ’salvation’ belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecsatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all a fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
Kabir
trans. Robert Bly
Nomad Shuffle returned to sing a beautiful original song, by Graham Macey. This was a world premier and can be heard on Traydio.
Finally Jerri Hart took the stage, a sloping man with timeless quality, as if his material was dredged up from some deep, old place, a quarry perhaps, or rarely visited copse in some ancient woods. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, he delighted the by-now slightly dazed audience, and went down so well it’s been decided to ask him back, over and over again, to do short, strange spots in each of the following cabarets. It’s hoped that by close study his onstage behaviour will yield insights into the nature of chaotic systems and dysfunctional appliances.
Jerri’s encore was hijacked by Matt Harvey and the two of them wound up the evening with a moving adaptation of The Windmills of your Mind. Their version was called, topically, Tinsel of your Mind, and was, if anything, more beautiful than the original.