I have a bot on Twitter, created by the excellent poet, coder, and person Joel Auterson. This fake-news-Dan scans through my old tweets and recombines words to write his own. Sometimes they’re nonsense. Sometimes they’re silly. Sometimes they’re downright poignant and poetic.
Poem: New Music Review – October 1985
I suggested a writing prompt on Twitter and it ended up being my most popular tweet of all time. Merriam-Webster dictionary have a Time Travel page: pop in your birthday and it’ll tell you the words first published that year. Then, use these to make a new poem! Here’s my effort:
Poems: Don’t Know What You’re Doing & Four Batches Of Chicken
I’ve just led my first lecture and seminar on the creative writing course at Canterbury Christ Church University, and some advice I gave was that you’ve got to take risks and put your poems out there. So, time to practice what I preach! I set the students the challenge of going out on to campus, overhearing some conversations, and writing down interesting lines to be the opening to a new poem. I took a couple of these lines for myself and speed-wrote these two pieces. Another piece of advice? Not every poem has to be an instant-classic masterpiece ;-).
Poem: Dad’s Black Cab (and live on the BBC!)
Yesterday was National Poetry Day in the UK, and I went on Robert Elms’ BBC Radio London show to perform a couple of poems and talk about Spread the Word‘s upcoming London Laureate tour. I’m Bexley’s poet for that, heading back to my home borough to run workshops and gigs for young people. During the broadcast I performed a very London-centric poem – a univocalism (that only uses one vowel throughout!) about my dad being a black cab driver. Here’s the text – and you can listen to it live (95 mins in) as part of my chat with Jason Solomons.
Dad’s Black Cab
Dad’s a black cab man:
grafts hard all day
– half a day, standard –
all warm chat and charm
a canny bard
that gladly attacks cab ranks.
All want a cab
a cast that spans all walks:
sparkly gymnasts
smart bar staff
daft granddads
brassy grandmas
sarky Yanks: blah blah blah
larky stags: lads lads lads…
A hand sharply flags
flat palm prays skywards
a brash man calls hymnals:
“halt! Cab!”
Dad parks: “ah! Canary Wharf?”
Dad’s a pathway analyst
starts a sly atlas maths
charts all maps, calmly tracks yards
smartly adds stray past strands:
gnarls at St Pancras
bypass Pall Mall
flyby Aldwych and Bank
anarchy at Trafalgar
at V&A, Shard, RADA
data synchs, standby: a plan
Dad says: “Away!”
Dad plays a part
talks backwards, chatty:
shhhh! says man, angry
and hand taps flatly at smart pad –
snarls at call alarm, blasts talk back.
Dad plays Adam Ant, ABBA
A-Ha, AC/DC
Alt-J, Frank Zappa, Alabama 3
as cars blast past.
Abracadabra: cab parks at Canary Wharf
“a grand” Dad says – a gag
man says: ‘nah’ at that
and can’t pay – ran away!
Dad gasps
tsks – a black cab hazard.
Dad adapts
day crawls past…
and dark.
At last, back at flat
Dad yawns
warm snacks, TV, a G&T
and, at last, Dad naps.
Fringe 2017 – Shows I Saw
I went to the Edinburgh Fringe for just ten days this year, and running just one show per day meant I actually got to see stuff. Here’s what grabbed me!
Dan Simpson: poet blog 