THE POETRY BUZZ

“We’re celebrating three decades of Allen’s work,” says his partner Paige Mitchell, “but it’s also a kind of Salon de Refuses on wheels for some of the poets who’ve been working away for years outside the Brit lit media establishment. And some new faces….” The Poetry Buzz. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Or buzz away under the cultural duvet like a wasp inching up a hairy inside leg.

Paige has planned free outdoor readings at Brixton, Vauxhall Gardens and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, followed by an evening concert /reading in a converted church. There’s going to be an art gallery on the bus and live performance via the bus PA system. Plus prerecorded sounds from absent friends – and music….

The poets troop up clutching books and bottles and cans. Over sixty of them. There are people Bro P hasn’t seen for years – venerable bearded figures of the Brit avant-garde like Bill Griffiths, perhaps the only man in England to have a Doctorate in Old English plus L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed on his knuckles. Here’s Harry Gilonis who’s going to be our Conductor of Chaos, collecting fares in his peaked cap; and cris cheek still slanging away in lower-case but mysteriously taller and balder than he used to be when he was doing free improv in the eighties at the London Musicians Collective.

New faces, too – lean young guys with brutalist haircuts and torn jeans. They call themselves London Under Construction but they look like they’d fancy taking a ball-hammer to 10 Downing Street. Chinese tourists are taking pictures of this quaint English gathering while a passing middle-aged bus fancier enthuses to us about the classic Routemaster and its superiority to its effete single-deck successors. An American tourist thinks the Poetry Buzz is yet another heritage attraction and has be gently dissuaded from boarding.

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