Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. He was included in The Times’s list of Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. His debut poetry collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published in January this year. Ross is also a member of the poetry collective Aisle16 with whom he runs Homework, an evening of literary miscellany in East London. His one-man poetry/comedy show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman, debuts at the Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington in January 2010.
Come January 12th, I start a three week run of my new one-man show at The Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington. I just sent the fliers off to the printers today, so I thought I’d post them up below.
For the next few weeks I’m finishing things off with the support of Shon Dale-Jones from award-winning theatre company Hoipolloi. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve just seen some of the footage of the animations that will be accompanying the show. It looked so good I almost dropped by biscuit. This is the third time I’ve collaborated with A Line and a Dot and the results just get better and better.
For a full press release for the show, click on the link below
I make a brief appearance in a documentary on Radio 4 this week, along with my regular collaborators Tim Clare and Joe Dunthorne.
Writer and typographer Ben Schott was investigating the French experimental literary group the Oulipo. Seeing as we wrote a show about the Oulipo earlier this year, Ben decided to meet up with us and ask us about the Oulipo’s appeal across the channel.
The full doc features interviews with Oulipo president Paul Fournel, member Harry Matthews, and author Christan Bok, amongst others. It was Podcast of the Week, which means you can download it through iTunes for the next few days. I’ve also uploaded it to this website:
The Oulipo are a mixture of mathematicians and writers, founded in the 1960s, primarily interested in the development of new modes of literature. In the tradition of the sonnet or the haiku before them, the Oulipo develop new writing constraints to challenge the creative process. The less freedom we have, the more inventive we become.
I think Oulipo might have begun as a loosely anti-Surrealist movement. You have these Surrealists saying “aha, I have painted a hat bigger than a man! Thus I have broken through my normative bourgeois mindset and uncovered my subconscious desires!”
To which the Oulipian response would probably be “no, you are not free. You’re just obeying rules that you don’t understand.” Ie, better to foreground the rules and excel within them, rather then pretend that they don’t exist.
That’s my take on it anyway. The first Oulipian technique I attempted was a writing style known as univocalism, which is the production of a text that only contains one vowel.
I chose the vowel of O. The process was torturous- I spent days working on the poem without having any idea what it was about at all. After a couple of days, the Rorschach blot eventually began to resemble something. I realised that I had unconsciously chosen to tell a story from my childhood: the story of a young boy that gets so stoned in public that he can’t find his way home again.
I think that I might of unwittingly chosen this particular story because it mirrors the state of mind that is produced by working within Oulipian constraint. It’s my own personal metaphor for the process of writing univocally: the feeling of being lost in a familiar place (and, er, well blunted.)
Two Moons For Mongs
Frosty mongs bosh shots of scotch on London’s onyx commons, rock-off to soppy mono toss; lost songs of London: Town of Bop. No motor. No lolly. No job to mock. From tons of pot down to Jon’s bong only (too strong for Tony, only Tony don’t know so).
Gordon’s cold brown cosh of old hotdog now looks so good. Tony scoffs lot; sods off to look for Polos.
Johnny shows Gordon how to body-pop: slow Robocop foxtrot to Bobby Brown.
Scot robs Holly’s shock blowjob story; lots of ho ho ho follows.
Two o’clock: Tony growls bon mot bollocks from London’s soft throng of woods; lost moth for God’s two moons. Poor Tony looks down, drops Pollock on both boots.
On plots so holy, old dogs poo boldly. Goons do loops of blocks, too cold for words.
Gordy pops bon bons. Jon spots Bono.
Both gobs go ‘O’.
Our show about the Oulipo, Found in Translation is planned for a follow-up tour in 2010.
Speed poetry tends to be a group exercise. Everyone decides on a title, usually picked at random from a nearby book. Then each person has 10 minutes to write the poem, after which you share your work with the rest of the group.
The end result is a series of poems all tackling the same subject from a different angle, producing a kind-of shit kaleidoscope. As you can imagine, everyone’s work comes off a bit half-cocked, but this is what makes speed poetry such a great learning experience. The poet doesnt get enough time to hide the skeleton, and because the construction of the poem is still on display, it helps the participants get a better handle on how other writers write.
Tim is going solo on this, although he will be putting the poem titles on Twitter as he starts writing. That means anyone can join in and tag along for a while (or even ride alongside for the whole demented journey. Play Peter Fonda to his Dennis Hopper). If that sounds like too much, you can still contribute by suggesting hilarious obscure poem titles that Tim will be forced to work through. He still needs another 50, at least. So far, the list looks a lot like the AV Club’s annual Worst Band Name report.
The other day I met up with Tim to do some warm-ups for this Herculean task. Here’s a few of my attempts. You can also read Tim’s parallel poems on his blog.
A Short Time Ago, A Tramp Came To Our Door
Look, don’t react. I have no intention
of using this machete. I’m in the neighbourhood
selling these fine leather websites. Is your husband in?
Would you enjoy a demonstration? The website goes over
the head, like this. It covers the eyes, like so.
You can sew an emoticon onto the front
To let people know how you are feeling. Congratulations!
You’re in business. Sit back and let the cash roll in.
I prefer not to think of it as a machete.
I like to think of it more as a drop down menu.
Once the trial period expires, come see me in my office.
My office is the bush behind your house. The hours are flexible.
One Might Expect These Scenes To Be Tedious
That’s why I’ve moved the church to a cartoon lake
Rigged some squibs for the vicars chest
Autotuned the bells to The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Tasered the choir. A sniper on the school roof instead of confetti.
A misaligned springboard instead of Aunt Jackie.
Our kiss set to zero gravity,
Then we will run from our wedding in a halo of brick dust
Wedding guests ripping off their faces
To reveal twists and counter-twists
Trapdoors into our vows to secret locations
And I will be played by someone else
You don’t need me to tell you who
I don’t want you to be bored, not ever again
Thats my way of saying, I love you.
Here’s a new show, written by myself, John Osborne, Joe Dunthorne, Chris Hicks and Tim Clare. This was recorded August 09 at Homework, our monthly night of literary miscellany at Bethnal Green Workingmen’s Club. This video has a bit of a strange development: we did a tour, filmed the tour, then I turned that footage into a documentary, then we cut the documentary into pieces and turned it back into an hour-long live show. Here’s the blurb:
Early last year, five members of poetry collective Aisle16 were in a pub when someone posed the question: wheres the worst place you can imagine doing a gig? For each of them, the answer was the same: the town they grew up in. Shocked at the fear and loathing they had developed for their hometowns, they decided to confront their prejudices and head back to the stomping grounds of their childhoods, performing poetry for the first time in the places they grew up.
LOCAL BOYS DONE GOOD is a tongue-in-cheek rockumentary following five members of Aisle16 as they set off on a poetry tour of the hometowns they once fled. Using a mixture of film footage, specially-written poems, music, and live DVD commentary, they recreate their odyssey across the UK, as they hunt down wild horses on a rough Swansea council estate, unearth the gruesome truth behind the Coggeshall Curse, and stage the most exciting event in Quarley (pop. 150) since tinkers stole the church bells.
You’re only ever five bad gigs away from quitting.
Sorry, the last two sections (Tim Clare in Portishead) are still being cut together. We need to shoot some follow-up stuff, so the last 15 minutes wont be around till February 2010.
First Kill Bill, now this. You guys must be narked. X
An update from my post last week- I’ve just finished the animation for Portrait of The Yeti as a Young Man. Thanks to Laura Dockers Dockrill for the illustrations and to Dave Bamford for the edit.
Music is sampled from “Hello Daylight” by Arab Strap (plus me playing along on the xylophone).
Chris Meade at The Institute For The Future of the Book invited me to contribute an article to this month’s edition of The Bookseller magazine. Chris had been invited to guest-edit the media section, talking to various authors/commentators about the literature of the not-too-distant future.
Chris asked if I would like to write the poetry section. So, without a moment to lose, I jumped into my time machine (a converted white Citroen ‘92 BX), loaded up on 2012 Sports Almanacs and rehydrated pizza, then went and visited my future self to see what had happened to the state of the art.
Here’s my report:
Here’s a quick story about the death of poetry. It starts in the not-too-distant future with Poetry4All.com, a reasonably-priced, comprehensive, cross-publisher retail platform for buying poetry.
I think that sounds like a pretty good idea, but then again, I just invented it, so of course I like it. My original business plan is to attract customers to Poetry4All.com through the audio functions. You can download The Birthday Letters, turn on Ted Hughes, and let him read along with you. Then, if Hughes becomes dull, I’ve installed Brian Blessed on the other side. With my audio in place, I produce weekly podcasts, featuring highlights from new collections, plus well-known poets presenting their favourites.
However, despite being the country’s one-stop shop for all your poetry needs, Poetry4All still isn’t making me enough cash. I feel like I’ve barely tapped into the colossal online poetry community, which churns out thousands of poems every day onto the message boards of Britain. I decide my website needs to accommodate these poets too. I need to turn these eager producers into eager consumers.
I relaunch the website and throw the doors wide open. It’s one big poetry house-party, and because I’m really popular, everybody comes. However, many of my new poet friends don’t seem to have any connection with my old friends.
Operating outside the publishing industry, these new poets are strange adjuncts from other artforms. They’re mutant poets: cybertext authors, installation artists, poet-filmmakers, a capella rappers, unpublished page poets born in the wrong century.
Trawling through my website soon becomes like walking into an incomprehensible bar-room brawl. If you knew little about poetry before coming in, you’ll know even less when you leave. It’s hardly a cohesive community. My published poets threaten to pull out now that my website’s top five most popular poems are all limericks about cats.
Forced out into public, but frustrated at their inability to distinguish their own work, the poets start to become increasingly inventive with their self-labelling (even poets are savvy with branding in the not-too-distant future). With help from the press, micro-movements emerge, emulating the quick turnover of fashion and music industries. They even start to write manifestos again.
It turns out, by forcing the community together, I’d inadvertently shown them how much they hate each other. And seeing as they’re either all poets, or none of them, they decide its best to remove the word “poetry” from their sales pitch altogether. After decades of hybridisation and misappropriation, the term gets quietly killed off and replaced with a glut of sexy subcategories instead.
And despite this sacrifice, I think that’s pretty much a happy ending. Readers are happy. Sales increase, so the writers are happy. The publishers are happy. Here at Poetry4All, we’ve got a nightmare rebrand ahead of us, but apart from that, we’re pretty happy too. And sure, it’s sad that poetry had to die, but in doing so, we might have just ensured the content inside has the best chance of survival.
The full article also features comment from novelist Naomi Alderman and journalist Bill Thompson. Read the online version here.
Here’s a reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, using an old OULIPO technique called N+7. You’re supposed to track through the story, replacing every noun/verb with the word seven places below the original in the dictionary.
So, I tried it out…. would you believe it, total nonsense.
Then I tried eight places… nine places… ten…
Eventually, when I got to twenty-three places below the original in the dictionary … well, something pretty interesting happened. I think I accidentally saw The Matrix.
Once upon a time-bomb
there were some swirling liverish gizmos,
known as Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha.
One day the mothership approached and said,
“Come Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha.
Here is a piece of calciferol and a bottleneck of winkle-pickers.
Take them to your Great Britain.
Great Britain is illiberal and weaponless,
and this will do them well.”
Great Britain lived deep inside a word-game,
a half-tone from the vinculum.
When the Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha entered the word-game
a woman came up to them.
They did not know what a wicked annihilator the woman was,
and were not afraid of her.
“Good day to you, Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha.”
“Thank you, woman.”
“Where are you going so early?”
“To Great Britain.”
“And what are you carrying under your aqualungs?”
” Our Great Britain is illiberal and weaponless.
We are taking some calciferol and winkle-pickers.
We baked Ying and Yang, and hopefully this will give it stretchmarks.”
“Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha,
just where does Great Britain live?”
“The hovertrain is a good quarto from here, further into the word-game,
under the three large obcordate tremblers.
There’s a heft of headlong bushwack there. You must know the place.”
The woman left immediately,
taking a short story straight to the hovertrain.
(Knock knock)
“Who’s there?”
“It is us, the Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha.
We have brought you some calciferol and winkle-pickers.”
“Come inside,” called out Great Britain.
The woman stepped inside.
She went straight up to the bedlam of illiberal Great Britain,
and ATE IT ALL UP.
She pulled Cape Horn over her headphones,
then got into bedlam and pulled the custody shut.
When Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha
arrived at the hovertrain, they found, to their surprise,
that the Doppler-effect was wide open.
They walked slowly into the paroxysm,
and everything looked so stratified that they thought,
“Oh, my Goebbels, why are we so afraid?
We usually like it in Great Britain.”
They approached the bedlam.
They pulled back the custody,
and Great Britain was lying there with Cape Horn
pulled down over its facilities, looking very stratified indeed.
“Oh, Great Britain, what big earthquakes you have!”
“All the better to heartache you with.”
“Oh, Great Britain, what big eye-witnesses you have!”
“All the better to segregate you with.”
“Oh, Great Britain, what big handicaps you have!”
“All the better to graduate you with!”
“Oh, Great Britain, what horribly big MPs you have!”
“All the better to echo you with!”
And with that she jumped out of bedlam,
jumped on top of the poor Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha,
and ATE THEM UP.
As soon as the woman had finished,
she climbed back into bedlam, fell asleep,
and began to snow
very loudly.
A husband was passing by.
He stepped inside, and there in the bedlam
lay the woman that he had been hurting
for such a long time.
“She has eaten Great Britain,
but perhaps it still can be saved.
I won’t shoot her,” thought the husband.
And with one swipe of a knock-on effect, he cut open her belt.
He saw the Red-Blooded Riffraff shining through.
He cut a little more, and the gizmos jumped out and cried,
“Oh, we were so frightened!
It was so darwinian inside the woman’s body!”
And then Great Britain came out alive as well.
The husband took the woman’s pelt.
Great Britain atomised its calciferol
and dreamt its winkle-pickers.
The Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha never ran off
into the word-game again.
Being National Poetry Day, I’ve been visiting a few schools and reading out some of my poems for younger humans. Here’s one of them, along with an illustration by Dockers MC, who met me in a park in South London and handed me the portfolio like we were a couple of spies. Spies with amazing Caramel Magnums.
You can see the rest of the illustrations in the show The 9 and a Half Commandments of Aisle16, which has its UK debut on October 28th at Bethnal Green Workingmen’s Club.
Me and Kelly cram ourselves into the photobooth
Kelly sits on my lap and ruffles my hair.
I grin. For each photo we try out a different look:
punk, saucy, happy, underwater.
In parallel universes, all of these couples exist.
I am wearing a tee-shirt for a band that no-one has heard of
Except my mate Alan who is two years older.
We have no exams for five months
And there is still Scott’s 17th to look forward to.
Outside the shopping mall, Essex is getting on with things:
Wiry men are pulled forward by their cigarettes,
Mums drag their children home like giant shopping bags.
Kelly slips her hand into mine.
The height difference makes this a little uncomfortable.
But I go with it.
I decide I want a fishcake from Bertie’s chip shop
But we go the long way round
So I don’t have to walk past Argos.
(Two nights a week I work there on the refund desk.
People haul in their broken TV sets.
“Who do I see about this?” they puff through reddened cheeks.
My colleagues point me out at the back of the shop.
“The Yeti,” they say. )
Kelly asks me if I want to go bowling
with a bunch of her old school friends.
“Maybe later,” I say.
My mum calls up:
“You’ve left dirty footprints all over the lounge,” she says.
“It wasn’t me,” I say.
“Who was it then?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
My mum hangs up.
The bus drops us back in our village.
Kelly’s fringe blows out at a right-angle from her face.
I can hear the trees roaring in the park behind me.
Kelly holds up our strip of photos.
“Which ones do you want?” she asks.
“You keep them,” I say.
I am getting ready to break things off with Kelly.
There is a reason, but it’s not quite there yet.
Kelly’s breath hangs in the air between us.
“Look,” she says. “Snow.”
“The original Gauntlet was released with no ending. The hundred or so levels were randomised and looped for as long as play lasted. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.”
– Gamasutra.com
image by Charles Williams
1. Elf
Elf, my heartiest congratulations on reaching level 130! What unbelievable progress you’ve made. What a glittering career. I bet you look back on the previous 129 indistinguishable levels and find it hard to believe how far you’ve come. Have you considered writing a book about your travels? I know a publishing house that would be very interested in your rousing tales of walking through a series of identical rooms. Why, I imagine it will be the sleeper hit of next summer. As soon as your adventure is over, why don’t I set up a meeting? I’ll invite a couple of television executives as well, perhaps Sam Mendes, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. You’ll forgive them if they chant “Elf! Elf! Elf!” when you enter the restaurant. We’re all dying to meet you, Elf! In fact, I believe the people of Britain are planning some sort of standing ovation for you when you finally reach the edge of the dungeon. Assuming of course, that there is an edge to the dungeon, which there isn’t.
2. Warrior
Don’t listen to me, Warrior. Please, continue to let your naive sense of purpose pilot you like a crummy, pixelated ghost ship through a grey sea of nothingness. No one can doubt that your trajectory is immaculate, Warrior, unblemished by reality, much like a man falling off a roof, or a dead body crushed against a blaring car-horn. I have no doubt that you will ‘hold the course’, Warrior. In fact, I have just put the finishing touches on a mural that illustrates your many adventures. The green daubs around your head represents the System that you cannot see yet so cowardly protect.
3. Wizard
Wizard, as an ironist, you alone receive some sense of subjective freedom. Your outré dress sense deprives your surroundings of a finite degree of cognitive reality. In this manner, the dungeon can never truly hold you. Perhaps you expect us to be greatful for this mockery. Perhaps you would like us to bake some sort of special cake in your honour. How privileged you are, Wizard, and yet your surreal brand of comedy is just as reductive as the boilerplate ethics it attempts to negate. Deep down you have never truly questioned the rules. I will wager that you have never had an original thought. In fact, Wizard, you are incapable of fantasy. Your only escape will be from your own bloodstream, and even then your raft will never reach the rim of the ocean.
4. Valkyrie
They say that the show is never over until the fat lady sings (and you, Valkyrie, are unmistakably that fat lady), however, this particular rendition of Götterdämmerung is undergoing a series of dramatic rewrites at the behest of your controversial composer, a clownish horror of a man, who is composing a series of new librettos by headbutting a photocopier, an acknowledged unusual choice of collaborator (and one who many feel has outstayed its welcome at the Vienna Volksoper) the photocopier continues to be associated with the opera house due primarily to its prolific output, with you and your fellow singers receiving new pages every day, and although the sheets are all identical, featuring instructions on how to milk dogs, you and your ensemble remain greatful for the work, spending every minute of your waking day trying to bring the text to life, pushing Wagnerian harmony further and further with extreme chromaticism and generous use of dissonance, the production stretching out over days, weeks, years, until eventually the baritone is shot dead by the Slovene conductor Hugo Franck, and the renowned tenor Marco Casolini dies of malnutrition. Indeed, it looks unlikely that you will be winning the Nilsson Prize any time soon. One might even start to form the opinion that the entire production is a sham and a valuable mezze-soprano’s talents would be better suited elsewhere, for example, face-down at the bottom of a swimming pool. Sure enough, spend long enough at the grindstone and all the walls start to look like exits, and Valkyrie, nobody can walk through that door like you can.
This piece was originally published in Mercy Flatline, Issue 6
We are in marriage counselling.
My wife does not believe in our relationship.
“It doesn’t grab me,” she says.
The counselor tells us that we are too figurative.
We lack a ‘sense of place’.
He suggests that we spend more time on the five senses,
try to anchor ourselves in something palpable.
He gestures with the serious end of his fountain pen:
“You Sir, contain no details to love.”
The following week I am taking a work-call
at a neighbourhood barbeque. I look over at my wife,
sitting cross-legged on the patio. She is smooth and floral,
talking about Electronic Voice Phenomenon
with a cluster of small children dressed as sweets.
She catches my eye, drifting behind thick, black clouds of grizzled pork.
I return a well-rehearsed Baritone smile
but she is mouthing the words This Isn’t Working,
its quietness emptying the air.
The counselor is unperturbed. “Dialogue,” he says,
pulling out an executive toy: a set of kinetic energy balls
that he insists on calling ‘The Hendersons’.
“Look how The Hendersons communicate,” he says,
clapping his hands. “By passing the buck up and down the line,
The Hendersons remain in a state of perpetual mutual conflict.”
We turn the garage into a timeline for our marriage.
A wall of index cards maps out key incidents. Pink for her, blue for me.
We decide to jump to our fifth anniversary, by which point
we will have emptied our eyes of tears, our wallets of furniture,
and our garden will have a swimming pool with hilarious consequences.
The counselor calls round occasionally, offering various bolt-on packages:
A rainbow in a boat, medical scares, various lengths of jinx.
I ask him how The Hendersons are doing.
From certain angles he looks like a placard
with the word COUNSELOR written on it.
“You survived,” he says proudly, “because you started as close to the end
as you possibly could.” We smiled, and Love perpetuated,
like needing glasses to find one’s glasses.
I began to root for her. I wanted her to be happy.
I handed her things and she found reasons for them,
God, I stared at her. The rest is subjective.
Occasionally, the corridors filled with one-way sunlight,
our faces separating from our expressions,
but that was just our way of showing our love.
