Gordon in the morning: The Wanted are charmers

Oh, what larks, Pip: The Wanted have taken to pouring stuff onto people's heads:

Victim DR TODD SWIFT called cops after being drenched in champagne from a second-floor window.

He also claims he was verbally abused by the boyband, saying they called him BARACK OBAMA because of his accent.
[...]
“I came out of the gym and was walking down the street.
[...]
“Suddenly I was hit with a lot of liquid. It was not, as the police claim, a glass of champagne. It was a lot of liquid. It went all over my hat, jacket, shirt and face. I looked up to the second floor and there were three young guys laughing at me. One of them said, ‘P*** and beer, mate’.”

The police muttered they couldn't do much because it was difficult for them to know exactly who had thrown the stuff. It's not clear if the cops meant they were unable to tell members of The Wanted apart, or if, like the rest of the world, they struggled to differentiate The Wanted, One Direction and Union J.

Todd Swift is a poet, and has turned the assault into a poem, After The Boy Band Assault:

I became afraid of champagne.
Looked up for signs of spit.
No longer Beliebed.
Went in every direction at once.

Was the new kid on a scooter.
Danced to myself.
Heard my heart beat, beat, beat.
My voice was autotuned.

I walked out of sync.
My arms were full of broken dolls.
I ate scandal for breakfast.
I took it, and that, and that too.

I feared five star hotels.
I feared five star windows.
Sniffed tabloid paper for kicks.
I was a page three boy.

The stories I read came true.
I was in a shocker.
Called Simon Simon, Lou Lou.
I was backstreet frontpage.

I was electronic and empty.
I was hand-picked young.
My life went west.
I smelled like a back seat.

My shadow, my entourage.
My sanity was syndicated.
My doctors and lawyers called from LA.
My dry-cleaning was paid for.

My facebook was not my own.
I was blamed for doing too much.
I was hopped up on capital F.
I was not wanted.

I was a report being made.
I woke in the night screaming hits.
I was 2.30 am stumbling out.
Hit an all-time low.

The Wanted might also turn the incident into something creative, the next time they get the finger paints out.

Tripadvisor apparently not good enough for Bono

Bono popped over to Jerusalem and stayed in a swish hotel.

Rather than spending the time like a normal person, forcing towels into his suitcase and moaning about the sachets of UHT milk, he dashed off a little poem:

The poem Bono left behind at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. What are the 3 words above the dog? "Reading Am ..."? twitter.com/bethandbono/st…

— bethandbono (@bethandbono) April 18, 2012

I think they'd have preferred a tenner slipped onto the bedside table, but still, it's quite a nice gesture.

Obviously it's not a very good poem, and it's horrible overwritten, relying on clunking imagery to fumble towards a big political theme. But that's how you can be sure it's a genuine Bono work and not a forgery.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Punkobit: Jim Carroll

The death has been announced of Jim Carroll. Although best known as the author of hip-book turned DiCaprio vehicle The Basketball Diaries, Carroll's life took him from private school, through Warhol's Factory and Mapplethorpe's studio onto the New York punk scene.

Already known as a poet, Carroll stumbled sideways into music at the side of Patti Smith. She lent her band to him for a poetry performance. He pulled together a group of his own - the Jim Carroll Band - and, with Keith Richards rooting for him, he wound up with a three-album deal from Atlantic. From there, it wasn't the most obvious next step for one of his songs to be part of the soundtrack for ET.

Besides continuing with his poetry and spoken-word releases, Carroll would also write lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult, Rancid and Boz Scaggs. He would return to music for a 1998 album, Pools Of Mercury.

Carroll died Thursday, apparently from a heart attack. He was 60.

[Thanks to Jon for the tip]

Favourite son: Ireland rallies round Bono

With Bono's moon-june/peanut butter-was a nutter Elvis poem about to find a slot on Radio 4, the wackily-eyeclad one's work has come in for a bit of a lashing.

But today is his birthday, and as a special present, The Irish Independent has rallied up some experts to stick up for Bono as a lyricist:

"Bono has written his fair share of bad lyrics, but when he gets it right his words really stand out. Look at some lines from 'Ultra Violet (Light My Way)': 'When I was all messed up/ And I heard opera in my head/ Your love was a light bulb/ Hanging over my bed.' That's so evocative and works as beautiful writing away from the music. It can stand on its own on the page and, of course, it's even more effective when accompanied by the music."

Although given that's the opinion of Scott Calhoun, who is organising an international U2 conference, it's the admission that there's a "fair share" of bad lyrics which really stands out.

Calhoun -- who has to contend with the bemused reaction of his academic peers when he talks about U2 -- is not afraid to criticise Bono's less inspired moments. "I don't think he works on his lyrics in the pain-staking manner of people like Dylan or Lennon. Often, they change at the last moment and sometimes his words can come across as lazy or very silly. I mean a line like 'some days you can't stand the sight of a puppy' from 'Some Days Are Better Than Others' is pretty difficult to defend."

Yes, the Irish Independent did hyphenate painstaking in that curious way - as if the lyric is something on which you would gamble pain, rather than the more usual "something with which you would take pains to get right".

The most interesting part of the story, though, is this:

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail greeted news of Bono's recitation with unbridled hostility. "Why is the BBC so in love with Bono when he's a dreadful old hypocrite?" Thursday's headline screeched. And Mail journalist Christopher Hart offered his own poem: "Bono in your sunglasses, even when it rains/ Bono in your private jet while the rest of us take trains/ Bono with your tax affairs safely overseas/ Bono, oh will you shut up, please." The poem's title? Bono: Irish Twit. Readers of the paper's Irish edition won't have been able to sample Hart's poetic attempts: it was only published in the UK.

Only the Mail could actually be hypocritical about calling someone a hypocrite.

Bono: I had no idea you wrote such bloody awful poetry. Actually, I had an inkling, but even so...

Bono's 1994 poem about Elvis is going to get an outing on Radio 4:

Elvis, with god on his knees
Elvis, on three TVs
Elvis, here come the killer bees, head full of honey, potato chips and cheese

1994, this was. He was in his mid-30s.

And apparently there's some 14 minutes worth of this. But it manages to be ill-advised in ways beyond just literary:

Elvis the bumper stickers
Elvis the white knickers
Elvis the white nigger ate at Burger King and just kept getting bigger.

To be fair to the BBC, they're not actually making this programme. In fact... who is? Where would you find anyone fawning enough to think Bono's every utterance is worth fifteen minutes of hard-won time?

Des Shaw, director of Ten Alps, said:

Ten Alps, you say? You mean the company co-founded by Bob Geldof?

Anyway, tell us about it, Des:

“We’ve been tossing ideas around for two years, keeping on going back to it and trying to work out how we’d use it. It took a while to work out how to produce it in a very effective but bonkers way. It’s a difficult one for Radio 4.”

There's just something about the word "bonkers" which causes your anal cavity to expand to three or four times its normal size as it seeks to suck in all known life, isn't there? They might as well just title the press release 'You don't have to be mad to suggest Elvis is a pair of white knickers, but it helps!!!!!!'

Manics mate makes a holy show of himself

Remember Patrick Jones, brother of Nicky Wire and former Manics collaborator? He was worried you wouldn't, as it turns out, so has taken to trying to promote his new book Darkness is Where the Stars Are by sending copies to extremist Christian, Right-Wing and Muslim groups with a nudge that, ooh, he'd love to know what they thought of the poems that attack their deep-rooted beliefs.

Some think he was hoping to provide a common enemy that would see the likes of Combat 18, strident Muslims and Christian Voice uniting in the face of their common enemy, realising they have more in common than that which divides them, kissing each other and then rushing off to have a gay wedding in any place where they've not campaigned it out of existence.

Others think that Jones might have been working with a Far East betting syndicate, creating a market in bets on which bunch would react first. This seems unlikely, though: Combat 18 would have had to have found someone to read them to them which would have slowed down their riposte.

If it was some sort of gamble, those who got the tickets with Christian Voice on have won. Even they, though, seemed to spot they were being played:

Stephen Green, of Christian Voice, said he believed Mr Jones had deliberately "whipped up" feelings about the book.

"We got this stuff on e-mail from Patrick Jones and another e-mail from someone else telling us about his book signing," he said.

"His e-mails contained some of his prose and there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that he wanted to cause a frenzy."

It's perhaps not surprising that Christian Voice - an organisation whose understanding of the last couple of thousand years of culture is that it's some sort unspoken threat to their families - can't tell the difference between 'prose' and 'poetry in pretty much the same way they can't tell the difference between 'a different opinion' and 'an insult to their beliefs'.

However, even though they spotted that Jones was just trying to whip up some controversy to help stretch the promotional budget for his book, they just couldn't help themselves:

[A] campaign by activists Christian Voice [...] called the book "obscene and blasphemous".

It called on the chain to remove copies from stores, which Waterstone's refused to do.

However, Waterstones did cancel the planned launch event for the poems. Jones was delighted. Sorry, did I say delighted? No, no. Outraged:

He insisted he did not want to create any protests, but rather to spark a debate about the issues in his poems, which include religion and domestic violence against men.

"I sent a few poems to many different organisations on 2 November and I said 'Please find a few poems. I would appreciate your feedback'," he said.

"I was hoping that maybe they would come out and have a debate. That's within my rights to do that.

"Even if they had come out to protest, that doesn't mean Waterstone's should give up [on the launch]. That's freedom of expression.

"My book didn't set out to be provocative at all. I had support from people when I went to a book reading in Cwmaman last night. I'm really proud of my book."

You'll note that Jones, for a poet, is slightly loose with his language. Waterstones are not removing the right to freedom of expression from the perpetually-wounded groups; all it is choosing to do is not provide a focus for a firestorm which Jones has provoked.

The really strange this is: Jones claims all he was trying to do was provoke a debate - not, in itself, a bad thing. And yet at first, he denied that he'd sent the emails out. Maybe he'd forgotten about this debate he was desperate to get going.

Armitage on the prowl

Poet-turned-rockstar-turned-back-to-dayjob Simon Armitage is having three launches - three - for his new book of poetry, The Not Dead, based on his work for Channel 4's Remembrance Day programme last year.

The launches are in a range of locations at a mixture of prices:

Tuesday 11 November
7pm, The Showroom, Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1
Tickets £5.50/£4 (cons) from The Showroom - Tel. 0114 275 7727

Wednesday 12 November
7.45pm, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
Tickets are £10. Box Office: 0871 663 2586

Thursday 13 November
6.30pm, Free to students and the public.
Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, Rosamond Street West, Off Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6LL

Of hamsters and metre: Neko Case on poetry

Neko Case has contributed to the current number of Poetry magazine, although not without some misgivings:

About twenty minutes after sending my e-mail of acceptance I paused to triumphantly sharpen my claws on the bookcase when I noticed the blazing, neon writing on the wall. It said: YOU'VE NEVER EVEN PASSED ENGLISH 101 AND EVERYONE WHO READS THIS MAGAZINE WILL KNOW IT.

We're sure there's room for a sister article in Psychology magazine.

Haiku

Gnarls Barkley
Winter poetry comp
Offers prizes