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Amsterdam

Edinburgh, 2009, I collect my award and sit back to watch the rest of the show. A lady called Camille O’Sullivan gets on stage and sings a song that floors me, rips my guts out and rises a lump to my throat. The song was written in french originally by Jacques Brel. Jacques' birthday was this week and I got on the tube to find the lyrics. It is pure poetry, the rhythm is tight, the words, the language so precise and powerful: In the port of Amsterdam There's a sailor who sings Of the dreams that he brings From the wide open sea

In the port of Amsterdam There's a sailor who sleeps While the riverbank weeps With the old willow tree

In the port of Amsterdam There's a sailor who dies Full of beer, full of cries In a drunken down fight

And in the port of Amsterdam There's a sailor who's born On a muggy hot morn By the dawn's early light

In the port of Amsterdam Where the sailors all meet There's a sailor who eats Only fishheads and tails

He will show you his teeth That have rotted too soon That can swallow the moon That can haul up the sails

And he yells to the cook With his arms open wide Bring me more fish Put it down by my side

Then he wants so to belch But he's too full to try So he gets up and laughs And he zips up his fly

In the port of Amsterdam You can see sailors dance Paunches bursting their pants Grinding women to paunch

They've forgotten the tune That their whiskey voice croaks Splitting the night with the Roar of their jokes

And they turn and they dance And they laugh and they lust Till the rancid sound of The accordion bursts

Then out to the night With their pride in their pants With the slut that they tow Underneath the street lamps

In the port of Amsterdam There's a sailor who drinks And he drinks and he drinks And he drinks once again

He drinks to the health Of the whores of Amsterdam Who have promised their love To a thousand other men

They've bargained their bodies And their virtue long gone For a few dirty coins And when he can't go on

He plants his nose in the sky And he wipes it up above And he pisses like I cry For an unfaithful love

In the port of Amsterdam In the port of Amsterdam

David Bowie covered the song to great acclaim, did this gentle man did a good job, But here is Camile’s which struck me:

Camille voice does the song justice, it is emotional, strong, she gives it everything... again the voice lifts poetry, combined they are greater than the sum of their parts. And Camille is Irish, yup, we run tings!

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Old Covent Garden Blog #1

Written on 03/04/2010. // His name is Ben.

We haven’t been introduced; I haven’t said ‘Hi’ to the waist-coated, blue blazered, artful dodgerish man smashing a red suitcase to the grounds of the courtyard. He is of the tribe of street performers I will meet over the course of the day. This is my first as Covent Garden’s creative in residence, I have a chesterfieldesq chair parked on the side of the courtyard close to the Royal Opera House. On my right is the rich food market, which to my unbreakfasted self, is both pleasure and pain. Sophie, who I have introduced myself to behind the Laveli stall waves, I make towards her but hear Ben, raw and relentless demanding attention, confidence thick as Covent Garden’s history cracking off his shoulders. ‘This is the home of street theatre’ he declares, ‘Not that that matters to you...’

He starts his act this way - cute, condescending comments at passerbys, ‘This is my mother’, he says gesturing to an older lady, who blushes embarrassed, playfully strikes his arms, but poses for a photograph. Five minutes pass and he has charmed the streaming pedestrian into a small pool of an audience. He spends the next ten setting the props for his performance about the grounds. He asks randomly, ‘Where are you from?’. Answers come thick and fast in varying accents, Spain, Portugal, Oslo, Edinburgh. To the American he asks, ‘You a tourist or have to come to learn the language?’

He then mime’s instructions on how to applaud and leads the gathered audience on a clapping and screaming spree until anyone within earshot is drawn. Finally, Ben begins the show. He juggles pins then knives. After the applause dies, he throws the pins at selected men in the audience asking them to hold up the objects. Keiron from Ireland, Tom from London and one simply called ‘Ipswich’. ‘Ladies and genl’men, for my grand finale, I need three volunteers and as these men have their hands up, give ‘em a round of applause!’

My phone rings, I find a corner for the call and when I return, Tom and Ipswich are on either side of Keiron, and Ben, Ben is standing on Keiron’s shoulder; ‘Stand Still! Keiron! I am speaking English!’. He proceeds to juggle knives. As he berates his ‘volunteers’, Ben asks for money, encourages the audience to be generous, that he does this full time, that this is the most honest way to earn a living, please give what you can. This is the show’s climax, a relatively unimpressive trick, I think.

But in the crowd’s dispersal, in their reach for wallets, as the the walls of the street theatre created by their bodies crumble and disappear, I realise the real trick had little to do with knives or juggle pins. The real trick was the set up: Ben’s ability to pull the child like want for a spectacle out of an audience and make, in a world of iMAX cinemas, death defying stunts and special effects, make the idea of a man throwing and catching things, mean something more.

Wouldn’t it be Laveli? (for Sophie)

I stride purposefully, point at her sign scoffing at its stylised misspelling.

Her impish grin glistens like a young Oliver Twist’s. It’s a French bakery

Sophie says correcting my mistake. Name is combined from his family’s

daughter LA.ura, wife VE.ronica and LI.bor his name. Round the corner

Drury Lane boasts a classic musical. Coupled with tourist feet, a new one

from this cobbled street plays among the Italian cheese, Ethiopian coffee

and other stalls. Hoping for change in a pocket or two, wouldn’t it be Laveli?

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Sticks and Stones

The last 24 hours have been good. I went to Leeds yesterday and read poems to the audience crammed into the upstairs space of a bar called Strawberry. The journey was long, 4 and a half hours of numb bum cheeks and uncomfortable sleeping positions all to arrive in a strange city where I had one friend. His name is Andy and he organised the gig, the show called 'Sticks and Stones'. We go way back. When I first started this work spoken word artists: Polarbear, John Berkavitch, Andy and I, bonded in a field in Glastonbury because we were called the urban poets. We formed a group called ‘The Urbanian Quarter’, did two gigs and essentially disbanded. They were really good gigs. Anywya, Andy told me to wait for him at a certain location, but I turned down the wrong street and stood opposite a car park, under a ventilator that blew warm air onto my cold neck. The air was pumped out of a kitchen, they were making kebabs. Think I inhaled a meal’s weight in aroma waiting there. Andy, pulled up coincidentally and I got into his car, drove to his to drop a few things and went for the show. It was good, I mean, you could hear a mouse fart - the audience was that attentive. A girl whose name I forget, but who had a dutch surname (don’t ask) stood up and read in a quiet, gorgeous, melancholic voice, poems about her grandmother. Another read a moving poem about a mancunian prostitute and another guy read about quitting smoking after seeing a male relative die of cancer. Then It was my turn.

I read for about 30 minutes and made only two mistakes. Quite proud of that. I sold books and at the end was handed a glasses-case full of the takings at the door. Enough for a couple meals, a couple tees, and the journey to and fro. For talking poems, that’s a good nights work I reckon. We rolled back to Andy’s and talked long into the night about Kevin Spacey, Milton Freidman, a cat that can fetch (video evidence) and the Tsunami in Japan.

On the ride back home to London, I sat beside an old man who had travelled the coach journey to Leeds from London and back again 6 times in as many days. He did not believe in TomToms or maps and was trying to learn the route so that when his wife was released from the hospital, he could drive her back home. He did not want to rely on coaches on trains which would not stop if anything went wrong or if she felt nauseous or unwell. So he’d spent a total of 52 hours, memorising the 200 mile journey, so his wife would be comfortable. The man was 67 and used to be a steel worker. Spent 40 years bending iron, probaby as tough as men come. And they say romance in dead ey?

Rubbish.

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Bye Bye Covent Garden. Hello Tate Modern.

So, I am a writer in residence at the Tate modern. The Post began on the 1ts of January and will last for all of 2011. My previous residency was also for a year, posted at Covent Garden's Piazza to celebrate its 180th anniversary and this was written on the final day. 30th December 2011. My last day.

I arrive to find a street performer on his hands walking over and across four young boys lying flat on red carpets on the cobbled grounds. The crowd is united and clapping to the spectacle. Back on his feet, they fill his’s cap with five pound notes then dissolve into pedestrians. Another performer takes the stage wearing a kilt, holding a ladder and a wooden box, he begins to build the street magic again. I walk to the west side of the Piazza and there is a man bare chested save for suspenders, juggling a crystal ball with his elbows and a little girl is so swept into his performs she yells when her mother tries to feed her ice cream. There, I meet Davina and Jeanie biting hungrily into cornish pasties. They are from Little Hampton which they tell me is by the sea. Jeanie says her mum bought her an overnight stay in London for Christmas at a hotel just down the road. They arrived, dropped their bags and wandered up to the Piazza. They have not visited London in a year and a half. I suggest things to do and ask where in the piazza they had visited? Whittard, a shop round the corner. I follow their trail.

There, I meet Dunia who has worked here for five months. She is dark in complexion, open face, wide smile. She spells out her name, says it means ‘world’ in Arabic. She likes the atmosphere here, a great place to work but how sometimes, it does not seem a part of London. There is a queue building behind me, so I thank her for her time and follow a couple as they leave the shop, turn left and walk towards the pit where a string quartet strums the khan khan and has visitors dancing. The couple, Adam and Chloe from Derbyshire, came to see Ghost Stories at the Duke of York Theatre. Adam describes it as a really good show and deconstructs its structure: three short stories within a story. They come here once or twice a year for its atmosphere. Where else in the piazza had they visited? Regents Gifts. I follow their trail.

And it is a little shop of wonders winding out from a small staircase. It sells glass sculptures, hand-painted venetian masks with brass bells, scented candles, porcelain cats, leather jewel boxes, hip flasks and hand crafted cufflinks, there is something Aladdin-cave-like about it that counters Florence’s accent. She is French and speaks with the flourishes of her language. After introducing myself, we briefly talk about the Christmas period and her hopes for the New Year. A gentleman, older than I, buys a gift and I slip after him downstairs, back towards the pit where an opera singer has replaced the string quartet. I brush past a couple clenched and kissing, romanced by the tenor’s voice, turn left, left again and come against a crowd gaping at yet another street performer. This time it is a girl a pink leotard on stilts, juggling knives. There, I walk into Ludivine, introduce myself, but before I can speak to her, there is a sudden throng of human traffic and I am swept into an army of push chairs and laughing kids and hear snatches of conversation.

The lady immediately in front of me chats to her friend about a dress bought the night before. Two teenage girls discuss boyfriends. A man in grey slacks says to a boy in black jeans ‘do you know the nicest thing to do?... A young lady declares to an even younger one as the walk past, ‘you do not need anything, just masks, and you can tell stories’. A boy in bright yellow shoes shouts the word ‘sweet’. A man in a brown bowler hat points at the giant baubles dangling from the roof ‘look at these’. An older lady in a Russian ushanka says ‘I am not leaving yet, there’s so much to see’ and immediately to my right, a photographer captures the scene as I do: moments in time, snatches of life seized with his fingertips. There is still a lot to be seen here, over 300 languages are spoken in London, not counting the different inflections of English - from SouthLondon street-speak to East-End cockney, most pass through the piazza’s cobbled streets. Perhaps this is what Dunia means; It doesn’t seem like A part of London. It is ALL parts of London, all the time. I’ll miss this of the residency, these vistas of life, my vantage point to write and and the belief that strangers will share their lives. As I finish, a boy in a hooded sweater stops before me, asks what are you writing? I take down his name, where he’d come from, “this” I say, and thrust my notepad into his hands.

Inua x

ps, here are some shots from Covent Garden's Anniversary Celebrations. [nggallery id=22 template=inua]

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Directions

Fresh off the boat!a poem heavily based on a poem of the same title by Billy Collins. This is his. // This is mine:

Directions - after Billy Collins

You know the wild bushes at the back of the flat, the ones that scrape the kitchen window the ones that struggle for soil or water, and fail where the train tracks scar the ground? And you know how if you leave the bush and walk the stunted land you come to crossroads, paved just weeks ago hot tar over the mangled roots of trees, and a squad of traffic lights, red-eyed now stiff against the soot stained fallen leaves?

And farther on, you know the dilapidated allotments with the broken sheds and if you go beyond that you hit the first block of St Thomas Street Estate? Well, if you enter and ascend, and you might need a running jump over dank puddles into the shaking lift that goes no further than the fourth floor, you will eventually come to a rough rise of stairs that climb without railings to the run-down roof as high as you can go and a good place to stop.

The best time is late evening when the moon fights through drifts of fumes as you are walking, and when you find an upturned bin to sit on, you will be able to see the smog pour across the city and blur the shapes and tones of things and you will be attacked by the symphony of tires, airplanes, sirens, screams, engines and if this is your day you might even catch a car chase or a hear a horde of biker boys thunder-cross a bridge.

But its tough to speak these things how tufts of smog enter the body and begins to wind us down how the city chokes us painfully against its chest made of secrets and fire how we, built of weaker things regard our sculpted landscape, water flowing through pipes, the clicks of satellites passing over clouds and the roofs where we stand in the shudder of progress giving ourselves to the vast outsides.

Still, text me before you set out. Call when you reach my door and I will walk you as far at the tracks with water for you travels and a hug. I will watch after you and not turn back to the flat till you merge with throngs of buses and cyclists, heading down toward the block, scuffing the ground with you feet.

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