 We welcome all our viewers to the British Library – my name is John Forscott most of the public events programme here for the British Library It has been my pleasure to work with partners at the C 어려 International Festival of Literature to put together this weekend of events called the Irish Writers Week in London Mae'n gychwyn gyda'r ysgol ymddangos, Mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiadau a chael ffasgwylol. Mae'n fwy o bwysig i'w wahanol yn y maes yn y miolio'r ysgol. A yn y cwrthoedd y moment, mae gweithio'r llwyddiadau, mae'n gweithio'r lyfr i'r bywydau'r llwyddiadau a'r cyffredinol i Niall. Mae'n gweithio'r moment, mae'n gweithio'r moment gyda'r cyffredinol, ac mae'n ddweud, mae'n gweithio'r cyffredinol i'r cyffredinol i'r cyffredinol, for the call at that very last minute, and to all of you for being here. This is the manuscript's reading room, this is where some of the most extraordinary precious documents in the British Library collection are consulted on a daily basis, whether it's a letter for written by Elizabeth I, or, you know, a George Elliot handwritten manuscript, or whatever it might be on these desks every day are the most extraordinary treasures on the Выalum and paper that we have anyway. ac mae'n gwybod bod yn ystyried a'r cyfrifol, da chi'n gŵr fawr o'r fawr. Fawr iawn i'n gwybod, ac rwy'n fawr i'r cyfrifol i ffordd i gael ei gweithio ac i niw'r rhaid o'r rhaid i nyl i'r fawr. Mae'r fawr i'r rhaid i'ch gweithio, mae'n gweithio i nyl i'r fawr, mae rhaid i'ch gweithio i'r fawr, ac rhaid i'ch gweithio i'r rhaid i'ch gweithio i'r fawr, yn y gweld, i fewn gwirionedd. Mae'r ddweud wedi amser, rydyn ni'n dweud yn ychydig ymddangos eich ffordd yma'r fyddai, Nick McClouds King. Diolch i chi John. Rydyn ni'n ddweud yw'r ddweud, ac yn ddau'n ddweud gyda'r i chi. Fy'n gweithio gweld yma'r ysgol yw i gydig yma yn y rhan fyddech chi'n rhan, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio ar gweithio'r llesaf. Felly, mae'n ddweud ar y dyma'r cyfnod, mae'r ffordd yw'r ffordd wedi'u gweld i wneud o'r ffordd o'r ffordd, o'r ffordd, o'r ffordd, o'r ffordd ac o'r ffordd. Dyma'r mewn cyfeirio blaid cyfan yw'r gair. Fodd yma yn yr ysgrifedd yma, rwy'n fwy fwy yw'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd yma. Fodd o'r ffordd yw'r ffordd o ffordd o'r ffordd, ond mae'r ffordd o'r blyniad. ..a cycogeographer, actor ac activist. He was 55 when he passed in September this year. For his career he consistently fought against oppression and injustice in his poetry and essays. He wrote about the working classes, about Palestine, about power and about corruption in London and Ireland. His skills weren't limited to his writing. His gift for bringing words to life in his recitals earned him a stellar reputation as a performer as well. On top of his literary talents, Nile was a formidable internationalist with activist concerns. He was the poetry editor for The International Times and led several successful activism campaigns. He was able to assist in the preservation of Rambeau and Vallane's residence in London Royal College Street and in protecting the land around William Blake's grave from redevelopment. The fabled literary walks that Nile organised have been referred to as psychogeographic investigations, which treated greasy cafes and elite hotels alike as places of poetic pilgrimage. His works were praised by the likes of Ian Sinclair, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and John Cooper Clarke. Nile's older contemporary, Jeremy Reed, who had an impact on his early style, described him as a luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries. Joining us first on stage today, Tam Bern has been an actor and theatre maker for over 40 years, working with some of the biggest names in TV, including the BBC, Netflix and Sky, as well as adapting several novels for stage. Please put your hands together and a warm welcome for Tam Bern. Thank you, Nick. Delighted to be here. I've come down from Glasgow this morning in order to be with you because I really love Nile. I've been up in Glasgow living there 15 years now, so I didn't get a chance to see him as much as I would have liked to, but he describes Ken Campbell in one of these poems as a one-off, but Nile himself, he was a real one-off, no doubt about it. There are many performance poets who talk the talk, but Nile walked the walk and that's what I really loved was the walks that I would go on with him and he would get me to read some of Blake's poetry on the way. I learned so much wrong and I really honestly feel inconsolably sad that I'm never going to be able to walk with him on that way again. When I got off at Gatwag, I came up to London Bridge and I walked through many of the places I spent with Nile and learned so much from him. So I am delighted and honoured to be here with you today and I'm going to read some of the poems from his most recent collection, London Nation, sold out already on its first print, but it's in the process of being reprinted at the moment. So I'm going to do a few of these for you. The first one, Imperial Nostalgias, it says after the title, after Valeho and my learning from Nile continues. Valeho I've just discovered was a great Peruvian poet and playwright so I'm going to learn about that. So, Imperial Nostalgias after Valeho. One, by the Irish passport office in Cromwell Road, a flood of A4 motorway fumes drugs the pedestrian with Imperial Nostalgias. I feel my race in petrol sniffing muscles. In the Anglican sanctum it is a redress to kneel by the luxury of a vase of lilies exchanging street perfume for this incense indoors with its underfloor heating. I don't eat the Eucharist here or anywhere and soon lift my kneecaps from the cushions transferring weight to ass and pew. But feel a final epiphany in the south transept with its icon of Elliot candle hovering as if to lean over and ask what I'm doing. Two, my mother, silhouetted in Marlebone Sun, worried half-weeping at the bronze of Holmes. I assumed he'd be on Baker Street. My belated shadow falls like Moriarty. Years earlier in her car, a thord of feet, we foundered in the vicinity of Goldersgreen. Orthodox Jews strolled on their shabbat home to family feasts. She got out, sighing. Strapped in the passenger seat of the small vessel, I was helpless as the bonnet shot up and she began funneling water into the too-hot engine. The holy people walked to the end of the dusk. We were back at the beginning, then elsewhere, shipwrecked in Jerusalem with no sea to Bobon. Three, Irish males in the English capital saunter on Georgian avenues, kings in exile. Tho they feel like blue-skinned barbarians, they moved big-eyed and slow as market oxen. When they've had enough of royal facades, the brihon law of alcohol summons them to a mock-tuder in for more than small beer. Soon they're wading in false-staffian barrels. They are important men. Quips rise to crescendos as names and surnames translate to champion, red king and chief, father's toast prodigal sons, apes of John Tenniel in a numerical realm that never has nor will dain to notice them, the city bulls, the Pythagorean money men, for my sister of the French name is almost French among the plain trees of Holland Park Avenue. Flannars, she turns it to Paris Boulevard with the ire and trance of a protest poet. It was on this grid she saw the male eclipse through the looking glass of a French cafe. A man like a hooded falcon immersed in a shimmerer even more violent than hers. Then the masculine pilgrimage took sail, a riffraff transported to Australia, sparing only this martyr with hanged man Nimbus. I twirl my pen camera, spying on her, spying on him, father of raindrop children. I paint the portrait he could have done in fog. Now this one as well, yes, as the way of things, so many connections going to come back to some of those, but this morning on the pan before I set off from Glasgow I read this story in the Guardian about Oliver Cromwell and they're doing some symposium on Cromwell at the moment in Ireland. And there's this one guy there, Tom Riley, I think his name is, he's written three books saying Cromwell wasn't such a bad guy. He's facing trouble over there. I mean he is, someone's saying, I think Jay was saying, he was, you know, Nile was always for the underdog. Well, there's not any greater underdog problem than Tom Riley in Ireland at this moment. This is to the statue of Lord Cromwell. We cannot get through the bars to do what we would like to do to you. We cannot pass through the cordon of armed police who aim to guard you like a new model army but blue with silver nippled custodians on heads. Curiously, the protector is protected by some who remember one head, one neck, one life. How could such lush curls have been shorn by axe but care nothing for 600,000 Irish heads as collateral as cattle. Well, Dr Johnson keeps a cat, Lord Cromwell keeps a lion. That's got an exclamation mark there. Such a pet can't be easy to feed when all you have is a sword and Bible unless you recite from numbers while tossing it round head foreskins and ignoring its roar of rebuke in Gaelic. Gaelacht, Cromwell, Ort. That's not only got an exclamation mark it's in capital letters. Now you seem troubled by the latest debates regarding your own status. What would I do if I got through? Having thought about it long and hard I decommission your holier-than-thou book with immediate effect and place in your hand another book, the first folio of Shakespeare for it's what you tried to do to him that should most vex your countryman. Your ghost hates stone, exhumed, cut up and scattered at Tyburn. The real you is bare bones through and through I'll not bother with on the statue of Baroness Thatcher. Instead, moving on, this one, a quartet for Lysat, homage a Shane McGowan. If you look on YouTube I think it's Croc of Gold, a film about Shane McGowan and Nile did the introduction to that and it features him with a baran performing this poem with Julie holding the book for him while he taps away and he does a brilliant job of it that I can't possibly come up to but I'll give it to you anyway. In that as well, that was the other connection he talks about all stems from this time he was in the Toucan pub just off Soho Square, a little Irish pub and Shane McGowan comes in with Jock Scott, another great poet who left us too early and was a dear, dear friend of mine. I compared his funeral and Shane McGowan was sitting facing me in the front row with a Zimmer frame. One. We had met gods in detritus of London. We had met you, tall, paddling buttermilk manna from an embas oven. Ro dagda, bequiffed in ether but available. Two. The polis groaning again, sounding itself. The pained birds, Baudelaerian or Eliotian. Herbs under belly, chiming you. Circles of hell, reserved for living, cloth doused in petrol. Three. Apollo landings and the glow of the sun, a shade of JFK. Lwch, pushing the wheelchair of Cuckoolyn up a never-ending London hill to clatter down again. Four. Through gel ignited holes in your mouth, spat, distilled airs, isms and versicles, Glenside and Rose Moon. Poetry, excarcerated, drudgery annulled. The city droning to a metronome of ticking clocks and judges' gavels. This one was referred to by Dicklers. Just round the corner from here, the house that was occupied by Verlain and Rambeau. It was a big attempt to save this house. They did the performance of a play that I had previously performed by a guy called Johnny Brown, a group called Banda Holyjoy, called The Assassins, which is about the relationship between Verlain and Rambeau when they come to London. I was delighted to discover this poem while commemorating that incredible day. This was first written, commissioned, for an event that happened here to celebrate Ken Campbell in the British Library. It's called Mauve Baudelaire, 23 quatrains I Am Ken Campbell. One. The day of the show was itself a one-off with alchemists and numerologists, and gastromancers, for once sportingly agreed. Two. Nothing was normal this autumn morning. The weather was shrouding wondrous squadrons in the impregnated streets below the high Mansard roof. Three. Which one poet had already dubbed The Ship of Horus, and a rival poet, the Arc-en-Ciel. No traffic was abrading the human ear or nose. How could this be? Four. The Sunday silence was a sage brush of noiswness to purify the space below the red herring garret, below the blue wine brig, which had once bled tiger stripes. Five. The house we were safeguarding stood angel white. But if you looked close up, paint flakes were peeling. Six. Like decadent feathers off-molting albatrosses. Below the meccan door with its goddess number eight was a cast-iron Georgine-era boot scraper. Seven. Which obviously our poets in question had luxuriated in never using. But this decoratoire was a talismanic aid as we time travelled from 2007 to 1873. Eight. Where thankfully too no steampunk traffic, not a chariot, not an omnibus, not a penny farthing was interfering with or molesting us. Perhaps Metatron or Astarte or Ogmius had arranged it. Nine. Perhaps Thespis himself. But. And here was the heroism of it. Incredibly, roadworks had blocked off the junction of Plender Street and Royal College Street. Ten. The whole perpendicular of it. Nay, the very highle circling floods inverted triangle with a cordon of illuminated red plastic crowd barriers. Eleven. Embossed with one word. Crowley. And Sunday being the workers sabbath, the arena lay empty. I had seen a cordon of Crowley barriers before, erected in a ffune filled car park in SE1 as part of another much bigger 24 hour caper. But when I pointed out the occult chic and uttered a ser name to Rhym with Fowley. Thirteen. The structure had spontaneously collapsed like a set of dominoes. How the Colin demon cursed. Here, I was more careful. Footfall, which too often passes by fourteen, was coming our way and stopping. Or hooffall to judge by the positively goatish pans and baphomets hopping to the zone. Auditors were pointed inside the druggy high vis surround. Fifteen. Where piles of cement bags and sand bags became the communal powdery seating of a novel but one off institution. Ladies and gentlemen, the Crowley Theatre. Sixteen. It was October. More and more eccentrics kept popping up from the cracks like illegal mushrooms. The cast were flannering to and fro, limbering up. Seventeen. Sainly disguised as insanely French poets or the people they'd made suffer. Scripts in hands like real poets. Sticky moustaches nestled on limp-upper lips. Eighteen. Confirring on such pronunciations as club de ha-shashins, etc. And with a gamut of a low, a low accents. Transmogrifying London into lean dune. Nineteen. It seemed that the elemental, the aether and the imperian had deployed their full vanguards. When, just as the show was due for a final drumming and trumpeting, twenty, the man who was the very embodiment of the concept one off, materialised as suddenly as a genie from a silver spout. Twenty-one. With a presence both English and exotic, goblin-esque and goodifian, commanding the currency of eyes to flow in his direction. Twenty-two. Magician-like. He pulled a couple of items from his zebra wheelie bag. Two of what must have been one thousand and one comic mask tokens therein. Twenty-three. Is Moe okay for Baudelaire? He inquired before donning a starlet's Moe wig and a gold robe shimmering to the floor where we stood attendant. Just a couple more. If possible, that's alright. Okay, so, time? Two short ones? One more? Okay, one more. The other one is for you, Julie, in the shade of the brutal. You'll have to buy this copy to read that. But this one I wanted to read red bonnet and I presume that this was a reference to Blake who would walk these streets of London in his red bonnet with solidarity with the French. But I discovered from Hefcott last night that it's actually written as a eulogy to another great poet who has left us called Sean Bonnie. My son here on the front row wrote his dissertation on Sean Bonnie and Bouteau when we did a programme on resonance FM of Sean Bonnie's poetry. So, Niall wrote this when Sean died. Red bonnet. This is the head of Imbus. This is the crown of fire it wears in eternity. The analogy of the sun is no more the black and alchemical suns are out. The problem for classical and Christian cultures is that the dead seem governed in Hades, Tartarus, Gehenna Dis. In fact, they are free from interference. The red hot band about his forehead is slipped off. The police truncheon brandished at the cup of bone cradling his consciousness by way of warning is gone. No ruling class shades take a census. The dead are decentralised. One by one, they shake off bodies of finance, of law, of nationhood, of war. Here was Ork, branded poet. A red bonnet hemmed within. He snapped off chains from maps of England to firework on hot coals of Posey, spitting portals. Reading an extract from Nile's interview pamphlet, a writer and editor at New River Press, whose work has appeared across several media outlets, including The International Times, The Idler, The Independent and Vice. Please give a warm welcome to poet and Nile's stepson, Hefcott Ruthven. Thank you. It's a great honour to be here. It's a great honour that this event is happening for Nile. I've met the world to him. I really would not be the person I am if it was for Nile. So it's incredibly powerful. I couldn't compete with Tam and Alan reading poetry, so I'm going to read some words of Nile's in prose. He spent a long time doing this. Someone doing a PhD on William Blake wanted to interview him, and he refused to talk to her, Caroline Ritchie, on the phone. He said, I'll do it only by email. He sent ten questions, and he sent ten 2,000-word answers to each of the questions, which I think was more than she bargained for. I think it was really he was sort of writing his autobiography here. Some of the poems that you've just heard and that you're about to hear are mentioned. Several of the people who are here are mentioned. Let's get on. So I'll do the question. When, how and why did you start to take an interest in William Blake? As a secondary schoolboy, I performed the accustomed hop, skip and jump from the doors to all this huxley to William Blake. Irish Catholicism didn't stand a chance. Illustrated editions of songs of innocence and of experience and the marriage of heaven and hell were a denda to the popular music curriculum, and its break on through to the other side aesthetic. Blake was nothing to do with school or exams. His poem, The Schoolboy, took its place alongside pink floids and other brick in the wall and the smiths, the headmaster's ritual. I didn't know then that Blake was home educated but now halt him up as a great advertisement for not going to school. My own school was Belvedere College Dublin. James Joyce attended it. It features in the middle sections of a portrait of an artist as a young man. I learned early to circumnavigate Joyce's Dublin. Most kids I knew went to school in the suburbs but every day from the age of 10 I was travelling into the city centre. That was an education. A friend's father, John Ryan, author of Remembering How We Stood, had organised the first Bloomsday on June 16, 1954. Tracing the novels Root on Foot and Horse Drawn Carriage with Flann O'Brien, Anthony Cronin, Patrick Cavernor and Tom Joyce are relative. Finding out this history was extra-curricular manner. It showed how a literary walk could become a national holiday. There's hilarious footage of it on YouTube. Instead of bloom masturbating on the beach, you get Cavernor urinating. Though I didn't know it, I was rehearsing for Blakey in London. What's the origin story behind your Blake walks? I had an early poem accepted for a Poems on the Buses project, organised by Transport for London and Friends of the Earth. The theme was London, the Living City. My poem, Off Duty, described a drunk, injured man clinging to a lamppost. It was displayed on the 38 and 73 bus routes for a year. Apparently, there were 7 million passenger journeys in that period, so I could lay claim to a vast readership. At the end of the year, the poets gathered at the London Transport Museum to be presented with laminated poems and then taken on a mystery tour by bus. The destination was St James's Piccadilly. Poets stood at the Grinling Gibbons baptismal font where Blake had been baptised on December 11, 1757. We recited our poems and I did a bonus a capella London to a tune of my own. Though I doubt I'll be working with TFL again, I'm grateful. Going to such a powerful site, it was like I'd been introduced to William Blake, the human being. So I sought out more Blake sites with the help of Paddy Kitchen's Poets London and Lloyd's Biography of Blake. Another Londonist, the busy chronicler, Ed Glinant, had once done a Blake walk, but I only found out about it later, so I decided to do my own. I invented my own routes and routines and did it every Sunday. For a couple of years, just before and after William Blake's 250th anniversary in 2007, it became a well-known fixture. It was written about by journalist and author Nigel Richardson in the Great British Walks, featured on a Radio 4 programme, The Poets of Albion, and was the subject of a film, slideshow and article for BBC London. You've been very immersed in the London counterculture and poetry scenes for decades. Who have been some of your main influences and interlocutors in this period? In London, when I first took to a garret, I thought I was the last of the Bohemians. Such is an immigrant's lot. You don't know anything or anyone. I was an aesthetic migrant, not an economic migrant. In my Dublin, it didn't feel there was a bona fide underground or counterculture, I mean apart from the Virgin prunes. In London, the underground was as vast as Hades. In Ireland, I had seen many of the poets, but did not think it was possible to join their ranks. They seemed too robed, too druidic. In late 1995, Alan Ginsberg came to London. I saw him read Thrice in one week. In the Royal Albert Hall, Waterstones, Hampstead and Megatripellis. Even with terminal illness, he was a whirlwind, promoting three different books, chanting poems, singing with a harmonium, answering questions. He made poetry possible. It was heroic to witness him in action and hang out in his milieu, all poets themselves, such as Tom Pickard. The next magical poet I encountered was Jeremy Reed. In Dublin, where he was a scandalous import in the early 90s, I had shoplifted his books regularly. In London, I saw him do readings and eventually began doing readings with him. This is the best way to hang out with other poets. Poetry readings, direct transmission. I've learned immeasurably from Reed's presence and example. He's the psychic offspring of David Gasgoin's loss and Kathleen Reyn's enithamen and ferociously, hilariously anti-establishment. In his quintessential poem, West End Dilemma, he imagines William Blake leading two lions on a leash through Soho. His elegy for Kathleen Reyn homages the poetess as Blake's secretary. Once, I opened for one of his readings by chanting some of William Blake's poems with guitar. He sent me a cheque for 30 pounds written in purple ink. I wanted to frame it, but it was too broke. We did a wonderful joint reading at William Morris' clum Scott House in Hammersmith, right on the river. Even the birds enjoyed it. We have since co-created on Blake's steps a never-ending series of open forum readings at the sites of Blake's birth. They are outdoor in Soho streets. The last one we did was March 29th, 2019, now known in newspaper headlines as The Brexit Day That Wasn't. After visiting the site of the club de Hauchachines, he's in France now, I had eaten a ball of Nepalese black and there was no shower at my cheap hotel. Going through French customs at Calais on a hot sweaty afternoon, the sniffer dog went ballistic as soon as it saw me. I denied having anything illegal in my possession. The customs man uttered to the immortal line, I know my dog. I said I'd just had breakfast and there were crumbs on me. He moved the dog away and he put a sandwich in front of its snout. The dog didn't blink. Then he led it back towards me and it went mad again. I warned them that they were wasting their time, but they took me into the back of a lorry for a thorough search. Convinced I was about to undergo the most rimbaudian of humiliations, the anal examination. I was strangely relaxed. What could they do? You can't be jailed for possession of an aroma. As it happened, they let me go after finding nothing in my bag, but a few bottles of Saint-Emilien. Through my brother, the actor, musician, cartoonist, poet, Roddy McDevitt, I got involved with the 24-hour play The Warp. It was written by the poet Neil Orham and directed by Ken Campbell and Daisy Campbell. Again, I did a few readings with Neil, author of Beauty's Shit and many other books of poems. His poetry and plays are highly subversive. He dramatises the English counterculture from 1956 to 79 and beyond. One role I performed was Marty Mission. He's based on the real poet Harry Fainlight, another countercultural figure of importance, for whom I've organised several tributes. I worked very closely with Ken Campbell on his next project, Pigeon Macbeth, transpositions of Shakespeare into the Bislama language of the Republic of Vanuatu. Being a poet, I found I was able to master the language and so, though I wasn't Ken's best actor, I became the Pigeon Guru. I translated Yeats into Pigeon. We did theatre shows all over the country and gave workshops teaching the language in two days. We even spent two weeks in Newfoundland performing at the International Sound Symposium and the Capitol St John's. As anyone who's worked with Ken Campbell will tell you, it was another worldly experience. On the day he died, London was a veil of tears. Check out my elegy for him, Moe of Baudelaire, 23 cot trains. When 9-11 happened, it ruined everything. Jihad, credit crunch, austerity, Brexit, war on terror, war on drugs, class war on core. I've since worked with the influential Michael Horowitz, who wrote about this change in reality, in the new wasteland. Quite rightly inspired by Ginsburg's 1960 Surgeons in London, in England. Michael seemed to single-handedly open a door into Albion and through his poetry jazz concerts, anthologies and new departures magazines. It's like he stepped out of Blake's painting, Glad Day. He invited me on several occasions to his poetry Olympics at the 100 Club, Oxford Street, wonderful gigs. As well as Michael, I found myself fortuitously bumping in to other 1960s luminaries, including the filmmaker Peter Whitehead, impresario Fraser Clarke, mystical author John Michelle and the amazing poet-anarchist Hethcott Williams, after who I'm named. I feel extraordinarily connected to the cocaine-like moment of 1960s London. Not from watching documentaries, but from knowing these and many other characters. My copy, Dave Tomlin, Miles, their utopian auras are still intact. My biggest regret is not getting to meet or see in the flesh David Gasgoin and Kathleen Rain. It was just possible, but it didn't happen. Thanks to the visionary artistic director of the Irish Cultural Centre, Rosalind Scanlon, I was empowered to run a poetry reading series over several years at Blacks Road, Hammersmith, Irish and International Poets to Visit, included Trevor Joyce, Maggie O'Sullivan, Sean Bonney, Dmitri Prigof, Geraldine Monk, James Byrne, John James, Michael Donnelly, Tom Raworth, Fergal Gaynor and many others. Perhaps the most illustrious bardic poet to visit was Robin Williamson of the Incredible String brand. Another, Christopher Twig, is a supremely talented poet-painter musician with whom I've shared many Magico religious adventures. My closest interlocutor now is my partner, Julie Goldsmith, who is a highly magical painter and sculptor. We collaborate naturally. It just happens. It's not forced. Some of the characters she paints are from walks, including Thomas de Quincey and Anne of Oxford Street, which is the cover of London Nation. Her painting, Ghost of Marlowe, made the front cover of the London magazine. Her Wildflower Song is a lovely floral portrait based on a notebook lyric of William Blake's. Thank you. Our next reader is someone that we've seen on our screens for almost four decades. Widely known for his role in Young Sherlock Holmes, where he played a teenage version of Dr Watson, who also starred in The Dictator, A Voyage Round My Father, Mrs Dalloway and very many more. Please give it up for actor and producer Alan Cox. So, four decades. Let's cast our minds back one decade. So, 2012. 2012, in the anarchist bookshops, two books appeared. Royal Babylon by the previously mentioned Hethcote Williams, poet, magician, friend to the Hyde Park Corner Speakers, and Portalew by Niall McDevitt. On the back, Niall describes the book as, Portalew is the most lavatorial offering to date. Well, it's written as if it's by someone else, but I suspect it's by Niall. Portalew is the most lavatorial offering to date from Malcolm Tent poet Niall McDevitt. This temporary public convenience of vulgarity, resentment, poverty and insolence. Its assault on conservatism is tinged with the rancidity of a low-flying Irishman. No friend to the Windsors, the Daily Mail, the London Met or Tesco. He, in fact, seems to be entirely friendless. One of those unenviable men who sits alone in weather spoon pubs looking for someone to whinge at. And Hethcote wrote an introduction to this collection of dismal poems. Headed Insurgent Poetry, and he says, he quotes Lawrence Ferlingetty. Now, we've already mentioned Alan Ginsberg, Harry Feinleit, and Lawrence Ferlingetty was part of that international poetry incarnation that happened in 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall, organised by Barry Miles, Jeff Nuttall, and filmed by Peter Whitehead. Anyway, so Hethcote mentions Lawrence Ferlingetty. In his poetry as Insurgent Art, Lawrence Ferlingetty says, if you would be a poet, invent a new way for mortals to inhabit the earth. This is what Niall McDevitt courageously attempts in both his poems and in his life, the two cross-fertilines. Niall publicly denounces at the right wing historian Niall Ferguson, who has, with a grating crassness, insisted that the concept of conquest, as in the case of the British and the US empires, was decided since Ferguson regards imperialism as liberation. At one of Ferguson's appearance, it was reported that security men removed a self-styled shamanistic poet, Niall McDevitt, from the lecture when he accused Professor Ferguson of trying to alleviate guilt about the empire while reciting a poem in Pigeon on the imperial legacy in the New Hebrides Island in the Pacific. This is just what insurgent poetry is for. Niall Orham quote. Niall was the author of the warp that was mentioned earlier. Niall Orham quote was once used as an epigraph to an anthology of contemporary French poetry, which simply said, what is going on is a war between those who believe in poetry and those who don't. Niall McDevitt also was a staunch believer in poetry as an instrument of change, poetry designed to create a new mindset where, for example, the homeless intent cities being blasted by water cannons can be firewalled by poetry. And remember, 2012 is the time when Mayor Boris Johnson got a new water cannon, if you remember. He didn't actually get a chance to use it to clear the occupiers around St Paul's Cathedral, but if David Cameron and Niall Clegg hadn't been more effective, he would have. So this is a poem to get us into an Elizabethan mindset, which we've just left behind us, but also back 400 years as well. So this being written in 2012. Elizabethans. We tell thee, thou angust us, cot quen, and we will thunder thee in pieces for thy cock quenity. We will lay this city desolate and flat as this hand for thy offences. These two fingers are the walls of it. These within the people. Which people shall all be thrown down thus? And nothing left standing in this city. But these walls. Ben Johnson. One. As we were once Elizabethans the first, we are now Elizabethans the second, and may one day be Elizabethans the third. The scaffolding won't come off the building site, and we'll never get to see or use the building. The French yawned and grew tired of their ornries, but still live among pyramids, Sphinxes and obelisks. We won't be Elizabethans the second for very much longer. Caroleans the third, or Williamites the fifth in waiting. But we go on making honey in our collapsible beehives because there's nothing wrong with making honey. So bring it ten years forward to this, going into reprints soon to be available, and also there are some copies I believe for purchase at the end of this gathering. And from chapter three, Psycho-history, not only did Nile do these Blake walks, these walks tracing out the memories of Christopher Marlowe, the collective memories of Christopher Marlowe. And like Hethgurt Williams, he felt that Shakespeare had been allowed to steal too much of Christopher Marlowe's thunder, and boy, what thunder it was. And if Marlowe hadn't been stabbed to death at the age of 29, who knows how he might have surmounted Shakespeare's artistry. So one of the great mystical figures over the Elizabethan moment was the Geomancer John Dee, and one of Nile's walk took in the ompolos in Greenwich, which is where it is said that John Dee initiated Christopher Marlowe into the mysteries of the British Empire. So this is Nile's poem, John Dee. And bearing in mind that just past Barns Railway Bridge is a council estate called John Dee House, and just round the back there's a little blue plaque which says that Queen Elizabeth I would meet John Dee on this site. John Dee. The name appears to derive from the Brethonic Dave River of the Goddess, or Holy River. John Dee. Your name is Talismanic, magic mirroring friends to your occluded house for consultation on the shores of Mortlake. Not progressing on a steed or a bark today, but by red bus, stopping off at St Mary's to divine your bones, feet shuffling from chancell to a Christian plaque. Remembering you as cleric. O man, named after the Holy Delta, a stained glass, honeycombs, empty pews. In the green-brown Thames there are red shrouds, a dust of ochre, Elizabethan wigs. One of your 20th century friends steps into the water to test the new souls of his leather boots, measuring as if in Louvain how fast it's rising. Soon the bench he picked on is swallowed, then the towpath as the river climbs to its apex at four o'clock in Beltane's sun, flexing like a Chinese dragon, then magically, impossibly stopping and about turning to flow east again. Lundrunguffa called. Isn't there, O man, named after the Holy Delta, but only an atmosphere of D, D, D, a tree trunk touching my forehead, whispering of seed sown grounds, a library of cifers. And among this collection are a series of masks, which just makes me wish that Nile had embarked on the challenge of more verse drama. But this is one called The Heads on Poles, and as you may know, up until the 19th century, the heads of traitors were exhibited on spikes. Up until the restoration, they were at the stone gate on the old London Bridge, which was kind of like the Oxford Street of the day, except it had severed heads welcoming you on the way in, rather than Christmas decorations. And what would happen is that the litigant would be hung till they were nearly dead, cut down, emasculated, namely their penis and balls would be cut off. They would be cut open, disembowled, and then decapitated, and then they would be split in four, they would be quartered. We still hear of hung, drawn and quartered. Then the head would be tied with a piece of sacking, it would then be dumped in tar to preserve it, and then it would be put on a spike and exhibited on stone gate as a reminder to what might happen to anybody who said bad things about the Queen. So, the characters in this mask is Francis Bacon, friend and advisor at this time of the Earl of Essex, who indeed ended up as a head on a spike on London Bridge. And one of the candidates in the wacky world of Shakespeare and scholarship, which Nile did not have any truck with, P.S., by the way. Francis Bacon, William Blake makes an appearance and three heads. The heads on poles, a mask. Francis Bacon excerpted from his essay on travel. As for triumphs, masks, feasts, weddings, funerals, capital executions, and such shows, men need not to be put in mind of them. Yet they are not to be neglected, first head. Why hanging? Why drawing? Why quartering? What for? The national self-interest? The holocaust of the poor? No, it was for Christ. Well, the schism of England. My entrails evisorated like a fish in front of thousands. My privy parts inflamed. Second head, this failure, this head pinned on as badge of defeat by a peeler state. Uprising, underground, die in the grimace. I once smiled through this show, third head. The living heads look at me, dropping tears of pity. Retuning to their meals, their indenture. I have no followers now. Who would follow me here? Fourth head, I behold the vaults of power. Freed, not praying, but halting. Their schemes, their stratagems, the little ease of their religion. Please hate them too. Crossing the garden bridge, carting me with you into the bowels of Rome, William Blake. Bacon, supposes that the dragon beast and harlot are worthy of a place in the new Jerusalem. Excellent traveller, go on and be damned. Corus of heads. Black sheep warped in our natures, imagining we could outmaneuver the black shepherds, yonder without the pen. Witness the petrification in iced eyes as dragged and swung, as pressed and cleaved. The ghosts were deciphered from our bones. Rocks smashed backs. Ropes singed necks. Blades cut bladders more. And colon. It was much better than it is on television. Our message is truncated. I'd now like to introduce two people to the stage.