Skip to main content

POETRY FOCUS: ELLIOT HURST

I am pleased this post-referendum Friday in London to feature a surprising new British voice in poetry, Elliot Hurst, a former student of mine. It's a voice that seems to erupt without much interest in decorum or politesse, guided by Surrealism, nihilism, punk, black comedy, the Beats - and, a what have you got, I'm against it - sort of vision - except, the fluent imagery is striking and effective.  It may be indie, but it's not fake.

 Elliot Hurst has a BA in Creative Writing and Film Studies from Kingston University and is currently studying for an MA in Publishing at Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies. Favourite themes include human behaviour and relationships, consumerism, industry, deterioration and body horror. Photo to follow.  

THE NORTH ZOO
The great apes

were petrol-bombing the

historic North Zoo

eating handfuls out of neighbours'

wheelie bins, for the dinner-dance. 


My eyes became useless,

his scrofulous sore wept

as gauze-eyed delinquent newborns

fraught with refrigerator burns

grizzled for their volcanic counterparts

in the bargain zone. 


Petroleum hag

like the tube worms of the ocean bed

sniffed it out keenly

with her long proboscis.


Tangles of dead weed like flayed crickets

a compact species.

Petroleum hag has her tickets

for the dinner-dance.


Impact on the skull

retained the fragments

within his hood

and stabbed into a thick pulp

like a mollusc's mucous

tangles of seaweed like

clumps of dead black hair

with roast dinner eyes


I have a dream of mass mobility

collected conveyance

sun extinguished his paternal spark

and shone

over his compacted skull.


He stole into the night

with a sixteen-fish roast

and a brach of gherkins

but kept it for himself

and fed his own thick pulp

to babes of the wilderness.


Which reminds me of Ben -

cast out from one wilderness

into another. 



poem copyright the author 2014.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?
3 comments
Read more

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".
1 comment
Read more

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise
1 comment
Read more