Northampton News: The Bardic Picnic

This year's Bardic Picnic takes place on Sunday 15th September, that's this coming Sunday, on the Racecourse at the Umbrella Fair Pavilion. The Racecourse is a perfect place for the artists of the area to meet and engage in friendly song, dance and poetical competition. The Bardic tradition goes back to medieval times at least. And the Racecourse has been a place of communal activity in Northampton for centuries.

Unofficial race meetings were held there until 1681, at which point they were stopped because of the number of accidents. As much as I disapprove of horse racing, I can imagine the roaring, cheering (and probably at times dangerous) atmosphere at the meetings. The sense of freedom gained by hardworking people as they watched those marvellous wild creatures charge must have been exhilarating.

Between 1778 and 1882, apparently, the area now known as the Racecourse was called Freeman's Common and local freemen grazed their cattle there. That name has resonances in the modern age even if ideas about farming and the use of animals have to change.

With the aid of Lord Spencer, the park had also been put back into service as a racecourse fifty-some years earlier, according to the histories, and races continued until 1904, when they were banned because of the number of fatal accidents involving jockeys and spectators.

What ghosts the bards and strummers and crafters will walk in the presence of on Sunday! You can sense them if you sit there alone for long enough anywhere in the park and open your mind.

For me as a poet it is the Racecourse's history as a place of public executions that resonates most strongly. Hundreds were killed there between 1715 and 1818 (and probably none of them rich).

My rhymers 'Jack the Bastard' and 'The Bastard's Return' were inspired by a gang of highwaymen who were hanged on the Racecourse. One of the Culworth gang, as they were called, left a poem when he stole from a farm. Artists and outlaws: don't they have at least a little in common when capitalism's clear mission is to flatten the human spirit and transform us all into homogeneous economic units?

Along with the annual contest to find a Northampton Bard who will hold the position for a year and a day, visitors on Sunday can expect live music from Jono & the Uke Dealers, Kenneth J Nash and Katie Paton, among many others, as well as vegetarian food and lots of stalls. It's free too, which is another great incentive to toddle along if you have nothing else to do that day.

Review: Once Upon a Nervous Breakdown

eBook from www.somapublishing.com

ONCE UPON A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN is a new book of poetry by John Patrick Robbins, boss of Whiskey City Press. It's a strong book. Occasionally it's an outrageous book (for all the right reasons), linked, if not sequentially, then thematically:

     What would I write about if not for women and whisky?

     Who the fuck knows but I doubt you would be reading my work.

      ('We All Got Issues')

Not all of the poems are about women and whisky. Some are about loyalty. Some are about the trials of publishing. But they're all about the poet's responses (or the responses of one of his characters), to what he encounters: a life lived in the raw, retold in the raw.

And it's an interesting quote, the one above, from somebody who founded a poetry site dedicated to 'all things bar-room.' Is John Robbins admitting he's just an entertainer giving the audience what he thinks they want?

No. But he's partly right about reader expectations. Some poets (and poets are the main readers of poetry) think that 'women and whisky' are the sole indicators of truth and authenticity, forgetting that to a lonely care assistant four walls and nights in with tea and beans on toast might be authentic.

There are at least three different voices in these poems. One is deeply, and credibly, cynical:

     […] large gatherings only seem to serve up victims to mass shootings.

     ('Zen')

Some poems push the boundaries of good taste so far, you might even feel a little guilty for laughing when you read them:

     Of course, I won't even go into that night I pissed in a friend’s fish tank.

     I believe I may have what some would describe as a drinking problem.

     ('Snub Nose')

That deliberately jejune humour is the hallmark of one of Robbins' other magazines 'Under The Bleachers'. It offends some and delights others and the magazine ploughs on regardless. But here it has an intent as serious as the poems that drip with cynicism. 

What's the intent? To be heard, I think, without being seen, or exposed:

     "The page is all I got sweetheart."

     ('And So It Was The End.')

I detect a fragile and deeply hurt man at the heart of these poems hiding his pain behind masks. He seems to reveal himself more than once and when he does, the effect is pronounced:

     I broke my soul somewhere along this journey.

     ('Mixed Signals')

     I contemplated suicide but you seemed more appealing than a fast ticket out.

     ('To My Best Gal')

But just when I think I've nailed him, through this book, I remember that Robbins is known to his friends as Coyote. Who's Coyote? The anthropomorphic trickster hero of Native American mythology. 

Have I been tricked? Is the fragile man I see another mask? Perhaps; perhaps not. Only John Robbins really knows that. And I have a hunch he won't be telling us any time soon. As he says in the final poem I quote for this review:

     Always keep them guessing.

     ('Disappearing Act')