As the cop walked away with his sleeping bag he realised this was not the last thing that he had had taken from him. That had been years before when Jenny walked out on him. Not that he blamed her, he couldn’t control the drink and anyway it was 1997 and a year for new beginnings. Everything was going to change.
Author Archives: danpoulton
The Meaning of Russell Brand
Rather than being a well-schooled lefty having grown up around party conferences, meetings, socialist organisation and ideas etc (I’m thinking of perhaps Owen Jones, all credit to him) Russell Brand represents more clearly the kind of political journey that many “young” people (bit of a shorthand as Brand is himself 41 and his fans are as likely to be in their thirties as their twenties) have been on.
It’s the “Brand Generation” so to speak whose early adulthood was shaped by the financial crisis and the ongoing ‘War on terror’. They’ve become the most politicised. Brand has most support for his ideas in this loose social grouping, what has probably most accurately been described as Generation Rent. Brand’s engagement with housing issues is telling. His audience understand where he is coming from on this although his media attackers don’t. Brand has become a perhaps unlikely tribune of the oppressed. The right people get this point. Tribunes of the oppressed don’t need to be oppressed themselves, but I digress.
Brand has been on an obvious political journey. You can see this just by looking at his book titles. The first was called My Booky-Wook. The second, predicably, My Booky-Wook 2. The third book was called Revolution. Clearly something has happened to Brand between the publication of the second and third books.
We may not have all published books, but many of us have been on a similar political journey. My first political activity was the big anti war demos, against Afghanistan, and the really big one against Iraq. I got involved in organised politics by accident. I lived with a socialist at the same time the whole neoliberal system ran off a cliff. A perfect storm of interpersonal relationships, experience of what was going on politically in the outside world and reading stuff about socialism made me into a revolutionary. It’s the lefts job to maximise the chances that such transformations happen.
That in itself is a good reason to take Brand seriously and relate to him and his ‘audience’. I don’t know about you but I’m not so much interested in Brand the entertainer as Brand the political analyst and activist. The same goes I suspect for most his fans. A Guardian interviewer notes that all whilst interviewing Brand in private, fans kept coming up to him to talk to him exclusively about his Trews ‘vlog’ (a truly inspired political intervention in my view and one the left should start to replicate sharpish). Brand’s millions of twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of Youtube subscribers are signing up to hardcore politics presented in an accessible and lively way. It’s that simple.
Dan Poulton playing at Songs From Below next week
I’m playing a set of songs and spoken word at the fabulous Songs From Below music night, next Tuesday 26 August, 7.30pm at Camden’s ‘premiere live music venue’ The Fidlers Elbow (don’t just take my word for it, take theirs!),1 Malden Road, London, NW5 3HS. Entry is £4 and there are 2 other awesome acts.
I’d love you to join me. Please share the event on Facebook.
Clown/Turbine
o exploding sea of unknowing
o cracked clown, obsequious gloam
o leaning Tomahawk night
o careless chased nothings
how we fill your cracks with turquoise dawn
how you lean into us
spatial figure in the spiral blade
emptied stillness
in soft night
the turbine yaws into the wind
Seasonal Love
A belated Valentines repost from me…
I loved you in the summer
but I couldn’t stand the heat
and you were not contented
to flatter my defeat
with flowers or with virtue
that makes the wicked wise
I couldn’t even hurt you
at the summer’s cruel demise
The spring had taught me nothing
of the ground it spun above
but offered its distraction
and its temperamental love
and the autumn was a crusher
with its boredom and its hope
it scrambled my instructions
like a grey kaleidoscope
Now absence makes you fonder
of the memories you lost
when you waved a white surrender
to the winter’s holocaust
the seasons have their habits
to grip you or to shake
you from their tender grapple
or to mould you to their shape
and when it’s over gently
escort me to my room
where there’s cash to pay the piper
this infernal afternoon
Happy Xmas
Happy Christmas. Every. One.
Seasonal Love
I loved you in the summer
but I couldn’t stand the heat
and you were not contented
to flatter my defeat
with flowers or with virtue
that makes the wicked wise
I couldn’t even hurt you
at the summer’s cruel demise
The spring had taught me nothing
of the ground it spun above
but offered its distraction
and its temperamental love
and the autumn was a crusher
with its boredom and its hope
it scrambled my instructions
like a grey kaleidoscope
Now absence makes you fonder
of the memories you lost
when you waved a white surrender
to the winter’s holocaust
the seasons have their habits
to grip you or to shake
you from their tender grapple
or to mould you to their shape
and when it’s over gently
escort me to my room
where there’s cash to pay the piper
this infernal afternoon
The Glimpse
Slanting through the rain
(A crooked post, stench of wet grass…)
A creature stirs in the woods,
Sniffing the wind-
Feet caught by the wrists
Tangling the spine,
Thoroughly caught,
Going nowhere-
The whole scene an expired gesture.
Doggerel
A voice sings in the wilderness
the trees rattle their cage
the skylarks mourn
a bleeding gun
the outcry of the age
Dawn cracks and its open trails
outstretch every ear
the rivers run
wilderness done
open season’s here
The dog barks out its native call
its neighbours scrape their star
your face is clear
your gestures clean
the forest bares its scar
Beach poem
The ocean ejaculates its dead
white foamers spume
(the beach slick with oiled sands)
The wind doesn’t sigh, it fumes
the rocks smoke
detritus smoulders
(seagulls menace the horizon)
No one is out but you and me
we are firmly here
and can hold out all night
-mad in love with the
fierce, raging sea
Dan Poulton 