Machine Gun Love

Review of the Local Poetry Scene

By Ade Jackson

In his (still resonant) 1945 essay 'Poetry And The Microphone', George Orwell references Arnold Bennett's pithy observation that in English-speaking countries the word 'poetry' disperses a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. Face it, there's little the English public detests quite as much as poetry. However at the fiction@FACT nights that have been running monthly in the FACT centre for more than a year, the crowds have been staying and the fire-engines have been kept at bay. Nathan, Nick and Ross' nights of music, performance poetry and blue-eyed HipHop clairvoyance have been dragging in - and keeping - a varied, enthusiastic audience - often people who wouldn't normally be seen dead at an evening of live poetry, let alone alive at an evening of Dead Good poetry. In the high-glassed ambience of what can often seem a somewhat sterile space visuals float across artificial sky-lines, the Beat generation's after-life howls up to the high, high ceiling. It's hard to tell if culture bombs are being defused or ignited and, as usual, it kind of doesn't matter.

Despite the nation's historical antipathy to The Muse, there's a lot happening on the local poetry scene these days - a healthy cross-talk between formal reading and lyrical microphone jamming that's beginning to show itself in fresh imprints. There's Fiction's own hastily photo-copied broadsheet, ‘Neon Highway’, and Dave Ward's Smoke still smoking quietly away. Then back in May, fiction@FACT hosted the launch of In The Red, an annual publication featuring poetry and short prose from round the area. A small group of In The Red's featured writers have now gone on to produce a new harder-edged magazine. ‘Back To The Machine Gun’ aims to minister to the subterranean homesickness of the involuntarily holy (though the title comes courtesy of the killing wit of Charles Bukowski). Stopped time, low ghost poetics talking back from the continually present future - the editorial is the work itself: simultaneously formal, empty and rigorously wild. "The machine gun… chatters words of love…" everything for someone, something for everyone - for it's in our uniqueness that we're all the same. Like Kerouac's Dharma Bums: "Equally holy, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha!"

In The Red costs two quid and be can be purchased by e-mailing the editors. (inthered2@hotmail.com )

Back To The Machine Gun have got their breach wide open for submissions, rants, proposals for new religions, jokes, prayers, illuminations, free flying lessons…
(backtothemachinegun@hotmail.com)