The naming of poets is a serious matter

'So why is it called Johns Hopkins?' I asked the poet who was hosting me on a trip to Baltimore as we drove past the town's famed university. 'Was it some kind of historical spelling error?'

My associate then explained that it wasn't: Johns with an s really was the name of the historical figure the university was named after. It's an incident that's always stuck in my mind, because something about Johns rather than John as a name makes it much more memorable. Names have always fascinated me: when your surname is Fish you don't have much choice about that. The inevitable ribbing on the playground will see to that.

When I started writing my concerns about the name became even more acute. It just never looked right at the top of a manuscript or the bottom of a poem. The trouble with Fish as a writer's surname is that it's a bit, well, unintentionally comic. Think of the baggage, the antecedents: Michael, the weatherman who failed to predict the 1987 hurricane? The lead singer of Marillion? These are not figures who are redolent of literary tradition. And the only other famous historical Fish I can think of is the child rapist and cannibal Albert Fish, and the less said about him the better.

So when I began writing I was always somewhat sensitive about this whole name business, what with being surrounded by people with good, strong proper writer's surnames like Cadwallender, Readman and Matthews.  But worse was to come, on one of my first forays on the road as a poet, when I went to the Hastings Poetry Festival. I arrived at the venue a little before the event started and was introduced to one of the other readers, a homeless guy who wrote poems for The Big Issue. When I said my name he reacted...unexpectedly, let's say.

'You're not Adam Fish!' he shouted. It took me some time to convince him that, in fact, I was entitled to that name, as he had apparently heard of another poet with exactly the same name working the circuit. We eventually compromised on the idea that there might well be another poet of that name, but there was also me, and the fact that two poets of the same name existed was clearly just one of those coinkydinks.

I never found out who the other poetic Adam Fish was, but a spot of googling led me to discover that there is, in fact, another Adam Fish who's more famous than me and is some kind of film-maker and anthropologist who, as far as I can ascertain, travels the world taking exotic drugs and doing funky yoga maneuvers. Jammy git. Clearly, when there is someone like that wandering about with your name, introducing yourself at parties is going ro be fraught with peril. I could just hear people saying 'Oh wow, that film you made about the tribe in Borneo whose culture is entirely based on eating the pituitary glands of monkeys who themselves eat hallucinogenic centipedes was amazing! Tell, me what insights did tripping for 17-hours on dried monkey-brain give you?' and imagine their crushing disappointment as I sheepishly explained that haha, no, funny story actually, I'm the poetry Adam Fish, not the one with the interesting life, sorry.

Still, it's not all bad. If there's any karmic justice then perhaps one day that guy will find himself in a beautiful house, in another part of the world, at a party with someone telling him he looks much butcher than they imagined, and asking him to 'do 'Eggshells', no, go on, do Eggshells dammit, what the fuck are you talking about that poem meant so much to me, you've changed!' One can but hope.

And none of this, by the way, was helped by the guy who spelled my name 'Adam Fisch' on an early poster for one of my gigs, apparently under the impression that my accent indicated I was some kind of North European dude. Though I have to say I quite liked 'Fisch', it had a sort of Rammstein-y quality to it.

It was pretty clear, then, that when I started writing seriously I was going to have to do something about this name business. But of course, I figured it could wait for a few years because I hadn't started writing seriously yet. Mindful of David Bowie's example, I took the view that switching monikers too early in one's career could be a problem, as it would make it easier for people to trace my embarrassing early output, and so, just as the Ziggy-to-be had stayed plain old David Jones during his time in various terrible mod bands, I decided that I would learn my craft as Mr AF, and swap to a more writerly pen-name when I felt I was good enough. (And I wasn't going to jump the gun like Bowie - if I was going to make the poetic equivalent of an Anthony Newley album, I would make damn sure to release it before I changed my name).

Well, after the past couple of years in which my writing has improved a great deal, both in creation and performance, and with the likelihood of actual book publication drawing ever closer, I decided this week that if I was going to switch to a more writerly name, then now would be the time. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the author bio on this blog now contains the moniker AJ McKenna, and it's this name under which I intend to write from now on. When the book is published, that's the name it'll be under; any future pieces in mags or anthologies will be signed thus as well. It's not a massive name-shift - McKenna's my mum's maiden name, and A and J are my initials - but I like the heft of the name, the rhythm, the Celtic resonance, the sense of connection to the lyrical wealth of Irish letters; the paradoxical solidity of the initialised name (think CS Lewis, PD James, H.D., AA Milne, WN Herbert, JRR Tolkien, CJ Cherryh, AJP Taylor, TS Eliot...it's a long and honourable tradition) which is also, of course, gender-neutral and so more in keeping with the spirit of my writing too. It just feels, in an indescribable way, more me, certainly more like the writer me, and if I'm going to get serious about my writing then I think now is the time to adopt it. And so I have.

IT LIVES!

Hello. Yes, I've been away for a bit. I didn't plan to be, but a combination of work stress, christmas busy-ness and what, if it wasn't actually swine flu, I can only assume to have been some kind of weaponised rhinovirus, kept me away from blogging for a while. Plus, sometimes it's nice to take a little time off, y'know? It helps you come back refreshed.

Something else I plan to start back up soon is my writing, and performing. Again, these took a back seat for a while, but starting later this month I plan to get things moving.

On Monday 17th, I'll be doing a spot at the open mic at the Lamplight Arts Centre in Stanley. I read at one of their slams late last year, and am looking forward to having a bit of space in which to breathe with a set this time, rather than the do-one-poem-and-off rush of slam performance. I am also quite pleased that, because I have the day off after this gig, I should theoretically be able to sleep off the absurdly long journey back from Stanley that it involves (usually involving having to get a bus to Newcastle to get back to Washington - an absurd state of affairs, especially as the bus to Newcastle takes an hour). If all else fails, given that I have the day off, I shall just sleep in a skip and come home on tuesday when the buses are keeping a sensible timetable and going to Washington directly.

Then on Tuesday it's a trip down to Middlesbrough for the Electric Kool-Aid Cabaret of the Spoken Word. I've been wanting to go to this since I ended my last mini-tour in October by performing in Middlesbrough, and was ticked off to miss the November gig featuring Degna Stone. I will be going down to Middlesbrough this time, but will need to be back in Newcastle by early the next morning to take advantage of a cheap tickets offer which will enable me to read at one of two open mikes happening in London on the 19th: either Touch Me I'm Sick, hosted by the guys from Vintage Poison, who I was impressed by on my last gig in London; or possibly the Apples & Snakes organised Jawdance, depending on who can fit me in. Then it's another early start (required by the cheap ticket deal) to get back to Newcastle on the Thursday, at which point I will stop manically running about gigging and actually be able to indulge in the rock & roll lifestyle people expect me to enjoy.

Before all this, however, I'll be going to a 'scratch club' night in Newcastle occurring under the aegis of Apples & Snakes North East. Basically this is a night where you can experiment and try out new work. Obviously this entails actually having new work to try out, which is what this week will mainly involve. I'll be doing some kind of writing exercise every day, and will post the preliminary results, and a description of the process I arrived at them by, on here...hopefully Sunday will give me more of a chance to work them up, and maybe some will even be presentable enough to take on tour with me! Who knows? Well, not me, but I need to get back into a writing routine somehow, and this is as good an excuse as any. See you tomorrow, then.

Only Built for Hyper Linx (this joke TM & (c) pretty much whatever actual day http was invented)

Trying to keep the blog ticking over prior to next week's busy travelling, during which I will probably be Twitter only. So it's time for that standby of the blog world, the links roundup.

First, via Helen at Bird of Paradox, disturbing reports of Transphobic attacks being carried out at the 3rd European Transgender Council. A reminder that even in progressive places like Sweden, you still get cisfail. And of course I'm sure there's no connection between these racist, transphobic knuckle-draggers feeling emboldened to throw eggs and the recent increased profile of the far-right Sweden 'Democrats'. This is yet another reason why you have to oppose right-wing bollocks wherever you come across it, even - especially - when that right-wing bollocks is wearing a respectable suits and talking to you in a reasonable and patrician voice about how cuts are necessary and we're all in this together.

Or indeed putting together badly-written blogposts in a pathetic attempt to slander people who oppose your policies, as Tory MP and oxygen-thief without portfolio Nadine Dorries tried to do this week. Dorries' juvenile dig at disabled Tweeter Humphrey Cushion, which Dorries launched on her delightfully retro blog (designed in the style of a rubbish turn-of-the-millenium geocities page), helped along with an underhanded little assist from inexplicably-popular right-wing life-fail Paul 'I masturbate wearing a Guy Fawkes mask' Staines, has so far had the effect of...getting the Talented Ms Cushion a shedload more followers and causing Dorries to be pulled from tonight's Newsnight, presumably on the grounds that anyone who thinks that's a good blog design is clearly incapable of reasoned discussion and probably shouldn't be allowed near electrical equipment for reasons of health and safety. Fine work there by the Dorries/Staines tag team, who on this showing are the worst male/female combination since Dusty Rhodes and Sapphire. Great work, guys!

In happier news, it was lovely to see that my friend Angela Readman has had a story accepted by Metazen: read it, it's good. Then buy her books, because they're even better.

Finally, while trying to motivate myself to get on with preparations for the Cheap Date Poetry Tour, I youtubed John Adams' classic piece 'A Short Ride in a Fast machine', and uncovered a number of versions of it, most notably two intriguing animations, and a nice bit of speeded-up video of Paris. Interesting in particular to see how each of these different pieces handles the unusually slow part of the piece, that brief pause in which it gathers strength for its final assault and its final leap into musical hyperspace.

And speaking of brief pauses to gather strength, today has been mine. I probably shan't be in touch with you again until I manage some breathless blogging at the end of next week's exertions, so until then, goodbye my dears *curtsies, waves, accepts bouquets* Until then, mwah! x

Bringing the war to the drawing room

I've read far too little of Alan Sillitoe's work - only really extracts from his two best-known books, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - but in an odd way the fact that I haven't read a lot of Sillitoe and yet remained aware of him, and of his impact, testifies to his success.

'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.

Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.

Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.

Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.

Weeks like these will happen to you (2)

I promised some more updates on what this week was like for me, and it's nearly over now, so it's probably about time I did that. From my vantage point here at the arse-end of Saturday morning, it doesn't actually seem like I did a lot this week, but the major achievement, the thing that really came to a head, was that I finally finished editing and sorting out the manuscript for what will now be the second collection.

The impetus for this was the Grievous Prize, which my fellow poet Sarah Coles informed me about on Facebook after I ranted, recently, about my annoyance when looking at the web pages of publishers who claim to be producing 'edgy, contemporary, risk-taking etc' stuff but whose lists are endless parades of photogenic cis caucasian Oxford graduates. That was not a night I'm proud of: not because I said things I shouldn't, though I probably haven't done myself any favours in some parts of the poetry community by calling some publishing houses on their BS, but more because my emotional reaction to this overwhelming onslaught of the Stepford Bards was to metaphorically curl up in the corner and whimper. To be fair, it was an onslaught: every tastefully shot picture of a fruity post-graduate cis girl, or neatly-coiffed young man looking deep in rimless spectacles, every sentence containing the phrase 'read literature at Oxford and went on to study creative writing at UEA', every little logroll-quote from another similarly clubbable poet, and, most of all, every bland, vacuous, and completely unengaging poem to which all these things were appended, was like a punch in the gut.

So yeah, it's fair to say I threw myself a little pity party. Thanks to everyone who chipped in with their thoughts and replies, esecially the many, many poets and writers whose work I admire who've talked about the same thing. And a very big thank you to Sarah, for posting the link to the prize, which gave me something to shoot for. Even if the manuscript turns out not to be what they're looking for, working towards this competition, and its deadline, gave me the impetus to pull together the poems I've been working on lately, along with a bunch of older work on the same themes, into what I think is the strongest selection of work I've done yet. Flicking through it, it becomes clear why I had to cancel All Haste is from the Devil: if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't forced myself to write more honestly, to throw out all the posturing and the parody of myself that I'd become, if I hadn't came to the conclusion that I had to write about what I feel instead of what I thought people would accept, I'd never have written this.

And I'm not saying this is a better collection, I'm not saying it'll blow people away, just that it had to be written. Sometimes, the writing dictates what you do, and you only realise it's dictating after the fact. It's only when the poem's been written that you realise you had to do certain things so you could write it. And that's the feeling I have now, as I look at this collection.

The Grievous Prize manuscripts are submitted anonymously, so I'm afraid I can't tell you the title until I know if they want to publish it. I'm hoping they will, because there aren't enough poetry publishers doing stuff that genuinely takes risks, and it would be nice to be associated with some who are. But even if it turns out not to be what they're looking for, and whether I have to edit it or not, I now have the shape of the collection. Hopefully, in whatever form it finally gets published, you'll get to read it and see for yourself why it had to turn out this way.

Bindel PWNED

The Daily Quail have published my parody of Julie Bindel's recent transphobic brainfart from everyone's favourite right-wing reality-denial journal Standpoint. Have a read of it and, if you aren't doing so already, add the Quail to your blogroll. They do a fine job of parodying the fearmongers of our right-wing press -and, humour being the best weapon against fear there is, that's worth doing.

Life Reboot: Y/N?

In the 1970s, Batman writer Denny O’Neill decided that Stately Wayne Manor was too conservative and staid for a hipster playboy like Bruce Wayne, so he contrived to kick him out of the mansion and make him live in a flash penthouse apartment in Gotham City itself. Eventually, of course, a later writer decided that it was time for Bruce to go on home again. Because this is how it works in comics: your franchise-redefining idea will always eventually be shelved as an act of fanservice to the hordes who believe, with the zeal of suicide bombers, that comics are only right when they’re the same as they were when they were growing up with them.

(I think the fastest any company pulled this particular reverse-ferret was when Grant Morrison killed off Magneto during his New X-Men run. I don’t have the exact dates for this, but I’m pretty certain Marvel brought Mags back in a new iteration of X-Men tie-in book Excalibur not three months later. Even Superman was dead longer than that.)

If my life were a comic book – and I have often, in an experiment in what one might term applied magical thinking, imagined that it is – then it can only be assumed that its rabid fan-base consists of people who think this book was at its best, dammit, back when I was a scabrous adolescent wannabe poet living in one room of my parents’ rambling fin de siècle pile. Because that’s where I am now. In continuity terms, my life has been rebooted.

Except, of course, that, while I may be scabrous still, I’m hardly an adolescent anymore. I’ll be thirty-two years old this September. I was a crazy, damaged, pretty kid back then. Now I’m fatter, older, and uglier – but the crazy and the damage never really go away. I still have all of the parts of the old me that make life less liveable (and therefore more dramatically interesting, I suppose, if you want to sustain the conceit): it’s the good bits of the old me that have gone away. There are times when I feel like the Adam West Batman dropped into the terrifying crimescape of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

But that’s the thing about continuity-redefining events, I suppose. Whether in four colours or three dimensions you have to face them, as the Flaming Lips put it, when you’re not prepared to face them. So I guess this is the time to embrace the New Order and admit that this is Year Zero, at least in terms of my writing.

Some of the more keen-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that the little potted bio to the right no longer makes mention of ‘the forthcoming All Haste is from the Devil’, my planned second chapbook of poetry. The reason it isn’t mentioned is that it’s no longer forthcoming: it’s dead. And it’s dead because I killed it. Contacted the publishers and told them not to go ahead. There are all kinds of complicated reasons I could go into for why I did what I did, and the motives I had at the time don’t really chime with what I’ve came to think about it since, but in the end it all boils down to this:

I finished putting together All Haste... in 2004. Since then, there’s been a lot of re-editing, a lot of adding new and stronger poems to the collection and getting rid of weaker ones, a lot of checking and re-checking and let’s-try-this-again. And somewhere along the line it became clear to me that, essentially, it had stopped being a collection. It didn’t hold together anymore. Worse still, I no longer found myself quite as impressed with some of the poems that were doing the heavy lifting as I had been at one time. Two poems in particular struck me as, for want of a better term, lies. Egregious, attention-seeking lies: and these were two of the stronger poems in the selection. And as much as I liked many of the other poems therein, I realised that to let the thing be published as it was would be akin to erecting a building, otherwise perfect, which nevertheless contained a dynamic, if unsightly flourish which concealed a major structural defect. It would stand, for a while: but it would never really look right and then, at one point, inevitably, it would all fall to pieces.

So what could I do? Well, there was only one thing for it: I would have to go back and gut the thing, start from scratch, rebuild it in a way I could be happy with. Except...

Except that, if I did that, it wouldn’t really be All Haste... anymore. It would be, to all intents and purposes, a completely different book. It would still contain more than a few of the poems in the original – but these would be augmented by a new selection of material which would give the book as a whole a different cast, and reflect the older poems in quite a different light. And if that was the case, if it would really be so different, then the only thing to do was start completely from scratch, with the whole thing. Including preparing, editing, and submitting the manuscript.

So that was that. Five years of work would have to be given up, like a valuable chess piece whose sacrifice is the only way to release the King from check. Just as my marriage, just as my expectations of what my future held as a husband have had to be given up...so too would I have to abandon all the assumptions I’d made about my artistic future. Like the Fool in the Tarot deck, I would have to take no more than I could carry, leap smiling into the void, and see what happened. What happens when you lose everything? You start all over again.

At least, that’s how I explain it to myself. But cognitive science tells us that most of the ways in which we explain our behaviour are lies, post-hoc rationalisations for innate, preconscious drives of which we never become aware. Maybe I only think this is the reason why I abandoned All Haste is from the Devil. Maybe the actual reason is much simpler.

Maybe it happened because it had to happen. Because everything had to go back to square one. Because this is the reboot.

Because: this is Year Zero.

Are you still banging on about this, Fish?

They tell you men just want sex and women just want love. They're full of shit. When I've been on my knees crying my eyes out in hotel rooms, it wasn't because I fancied a quick screw. It's because I hate sleeping alone. Still do. That's why I'm still up now, typing these words at almost one in the morning, anything to delay that awful moment of going to bed on my own and giving in to that crushing sense that there is no-one. If you sleep alone in a house with other people, you have the consolation of knowing that there's somebody in the next room that you know, and that, if you had to, you could see them and talk to them and make the bad feelings go away. And most of the time you don't, of course, because it's bad manners to rob people of sleep just so you can unburden yourself of your problems. But the potential is there. Hotel rooms rob you of this, in the most mocking way: there are hundreds of rooms, and there are people in them, loads of people: but they're total strangers, and so are you. You're a stranger among strangers, and the only people who talk to you are those who are paid to do so, and they secretly despise you anyway.

This isn't as bad as all that, because I know this house. Hell, I should do: I've lived in it for more than five years. But there's a weirdness to it, a sense that it doesn't belong to me anymore. It's a stranger now, too.

But I've written more. I've worked on new poems. I've been tidying up work-in-progress. I've submitted work to magazines again for the first time in ages. I'm blogging furiously. I think since the divorce became a reality, since I got back to sleeping on my own again, I've probably written more, in terms of word count, than I managed in the whole of last year. Obviously an awful lot of this has been crap, but if you write more in general then the tiny fraction of your work that is any good will usually be bigger too.

So it looks like solitude is good for my writing. Being alone forces me to think about things, I try and grapple these thoughts into some kind of shape using language, every now and again this results in something good enough to publish or perform. I may hate the solitude, I may hate feeling cut off from the rest of humanity, I might sob late into the night, desperate for the consolation of another human body in my bed, but the fact is the solitude works.

Maybe the price of a productive artistic life is the knowledge that, no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, every single time you go to bed you go to bed unhappy. That's how it is for me, anyway.

Night night.

The Loneliness of the Low-Impact Writer

Middle of August, I'm going to Glasgow. Never been to Glasgow before, but that's not important. What's important is that I'm travelling alone.

Haven't gone on holiday alone since 2004. Scarborough. In the off-season. That was an exercise in boredom tolerance, but at least I got some poems out of it. And I got to come back to see M, my then-future, and soon-to-be ex, wife.

This time, I go alone, and I come back to my old room back in my parents' house. While I'm there I'll be spending time in the company of some good friends, and I'm sure there's a hell of a lot more to do in Glasgow, but...five years. Part of me is worried about how I'll handle it, and this is an easy trip. A couple of days staying on a friend's couch and exploring the city with them. What happens when I'm having to deal with being properly on my own, rushing through dinner in strange cities and coming back to an empty hotel room?

Get back to basics, I suppose. Hand luggage only. Don't draw attention. Short trips: do what you came for and get out. Keep yourself to yourself, don't strike up conversations with strangers and for god's sake don't introduce yourself to women. You're a 32-year-old lower-tier poet who works in a bookshop, not James Bond.

And take a notepad. Write. You never write anything of lasting worth while travelling, but the exercise, stretching your mind to describe something outside of the usual comfort zone, observing and reporting, keeps the muscles limber for when you do have to write something important.

Keep quiet. Keep yourself off the radar. No-one cares who you are. No-one cares where you came from. No-one cares why you're here. They have stuff to be doing. So do you.

Write.

That's how you deal with it.

Shatila Social and the Great Sponsored Poem Experiment

Shatila Social
The Cumberland Arms
Ouseburn, Byker
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE6 1LD,
Monday July 13th
Doors at 7.30 starts at 8.00
Admission £5.00
(All proceeds to the Shatila Project)

Special Guests: Ray Laidlaw and Billy Mitchell of Lindisfarne
Blues singer Annie Orwin
Comedian Steve Drayton
Plus, Plus, Plus, Scott Tyrrell, Kate Fox, Simma, Nikki Hawkins, Yvonne Young, Adam Fish, Catherine Graham, Kevin Cadwallender, Annie Moir, Richard Makepiece, Kyla Clay Fox are just a few of the other wonderful performers who have agreed to help us raise money.

The writer Peter Mortimer spent two months working in the Shatila Refugee Camp in Beirut. Peter spent time working with the children of the camp school to create, and for them then to perform on camp, a 30 minute play, which incorporated music, dance and physical theatre. Peter is bringing 10 young actors, (and four of their teachers) to perform the play in the autumn on Tyneside. However, in order to do this, funds are needed to help pay for the travel and accommodation for the performers, and to organise the performance itself.

If you can come and pay the £5.00 entrance fee (which is, I know, rather expensive to watch ex-Lindisfarne personnel but you do have to remember I’ll be there too, so on those grounds it’s a bargain), then great, if not, I’d love it if you’d contribute some money by contributing to

THE GREAT SPONSORED POEM EXPERIMENT !
GREAT SPONSORED POEM EXPERIMENT, YOU SAY? WHAT, PRAY TELL, IS THAT?

It’s an innovative, forward-facing, innovative, audience-focused, innovative, interactive and innovative method I’ve devised of getting people to sponsor me to perform at the Shatila Social gig. Obviously, with such a packed bill, I can only do one poem, and I can’t go on too long, so that rules out sponsorship ideas like, say, 50p per poem or a pound for every minute spent performing or whatever. So what I’ve came up with is this: I will write a new poem especially for the event, and if you contribute some sponsorship money I will mention one thing of your choosing. It might be a specific word you want me to use, it might be someone’s name, it might be a number, a concept, whatever. It could be your favourite football team, a line from a song, or a convoluted and embarrassing double entendre. Literally anything you want, if you sponsor me and pay me the money to mention it for the gig, I will mention it in the new poem.

By now, you’re probably saying ‘gee, Adam, this sounds swell, but how can I sign up to be a part of this incredible experiment?’, or you will be if you’re an American 1950s schoolboy anyway. Well, Timmy, it’s simple – simply comment below with details of what you'd like me to mention and how much you're willing to pay for it...