April is National Poetry Writing Month. In celebration of poets everywhere, and to encourage those who are just embarking on their literary journey, I will be posting poetry (not mine) each day for the month of April. Please take a look and enjoy this special art.
Dan Holloway
My poetry roots come from a mix of the Beat poets, certain strands of contemporary performance poetry and to a certain extent the Brutalists. In other words it’s a bit of a mish mash though the emphasis is on lyricality and emotional honesty and rawness. It would be truest of all though to say that my main influence is the confessional wing of Young British Art, in particular Tracey Emin. I like art that reaches deep down inside the artist, wriggling under every layer of artifice to get to the red raw truth whatever that may be.
My solo show “Some Of These Things Are Beautiful” will be premiering at Cheltenham Poetry Festival on April 24th.
http://danholloway.wordpress.com (where you can download my current collection “i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you have graffitied them with love poetry” for free)
http://eightcuts.com is a literary project I run that combines online exhibitions and spoken word shows
http://79ratpress.blogspot.com is my experimental publisher, launching 6 collections by new poets this June.
Hungerford Bridge
Remember
the day we lay under Hungerford
Bridge
And
London stopped,
just for us?
Like
balletic bullets in a John Woo film
We
toured the stillness.
Skateboards
and blades played our private soundtrack
Scored
from the clacketing
Backbeats
of the Thamesside track.
We
played hopscotch on Bankside,
Poured
pints of London Pride
And
downed them on the docks in Rotherhithe,
Embraced
in the space between Bridget Riley’s stripes,
Defaced
the latest White Cube canvas hype
With
lines of lust typed blind on absinthe
And
declaimed them to the planeless skies from Trafalgar’s empty plinth.
Neon
flared through our Soho lair.
Electric
reflections glared.
We
spotted pimps and toms in strip joints coming up
for air
And
in clip joints frotted by despairing gimps and johns,
The
silenced timpani of Dean Street ’s
daily song.
We
stole tubes of lube and 90 percent proof,
Got
pissed on Chelsea
rooftops,
Fisted,
lay on Wembley’s centre spot
And
kissed till our lips were blistered
And
our minds went missing.
We
met them by the river,
An
army of the alkies and the dispossessed,
The
depressed, repressed, the not so easily impressed,
The
inconsolable and unconfessed
Who
repossessed their lives for just one night
Howling
Baudelaire like loons
And
raving by a quarter moon,
Piping
crazy tunes across the water –
A
glorious guttersnipe Brigadoon.
Forget
the lazy days,
The
backward gaze, the haze, the sugar glaze we paint
upon our yesterdays.
We
tattooed London
in our veins,
Inked
in electricity and linked up to the mains:
Its
maze of urban arteries,
Its
winding streets that bleed from us
Plying
meths to find the key to us,
Suppress
the lethargy that hides our dreams from us,
That
lies against our sighing breast to squeeze from us
The
dying breaths that wheeze from us
And
leak into a lullaby that pleads with us –
Remember
the day we lay under Hungerford
Bridge
And
London stopped,
just for us.
I do like this poem of Dan's
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