Date:         Mon, 5 Jan 2004 21:20:19 +0000

Reply-To: UK POETRY <UKPOETRY@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>

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From: cris cheek <cris@SLANG.DEMON.CO.UK>

Subject: Re: Jeff Nuttall

Comments: To: British Poets <BRITISH-POETS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>

To: UKPOETRY@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU

I was just waxing enthusiastically only the other day to a friend about Jeff

as a point of access, person of access, who got me going

I pulled 'Man, Not Man' out and was lamenting having lent 'Bomb Culture' to

another friend and never having got that back so unable to share it, but at

least it went into further circulation. One of the great books on English

counter culture imho and due a reprint itself, although I understand that he

might have felt burdened by it.

The graphic novellas of the early-mid 1970s published by Jack Press and

Aloes are almost utterly unsung  -  yet prescient and somewhat in

anticipation of what Alan Moore has been achieving.

This was the same period as his Performance Art Scripts, the second volume

of which features the photo captioned 'the author bears a cup of saliva

around the perifery [sic] of the campus at Louvain le Neuve'. Here's the

beginning of 'Oh the Birds' performed by the People Show at the Oval Theatre

in Kennington in 1973 (Mike Figgis  -  film-maker, 'Timecode', 'Internal

Affairs', 'Leaving Las Vegas' . . - played Birdwatcher):

OOZLUM BIRD. I am up my bum.

TEL. POLE. Absurd.

OOZLUM BIRD. They were chasing me -- the Christmas Cracker.

   the Carpet Tack and Margaret Thatcher,

   Watching me for matches, flaming feathers,

   Washing leathers. Fooled the buggers. Slurp.

TEL. POLE. How bloody silly.

OOZLUM BIRD. From the depths of my bum I adore thee.

   I have always liked a good telephone pole.

   From the depths of my bowels I howl for thee.

   I have always fancied porcelain insulators.

   From the sink of my sphincter I fart thy name.

   I have always had a voice like a lovelorn euphonium.

   Come to me Telly Welly Holypole. I would not conceal

   myself from thee.

TEL. POLE. How revolting.

BIRDWATCHER. Hist!

I'm very saddened to hear of this news. Along with Heathcote Williams one of

the very few televisual and cinematic poet-actors, whose show reel must be

fabulous.

Jeff was a tremendously populist energy too, a genuine link-maker. His

mixture was intense, rich, urgent and passionate, even though I came to

distance myself from his more irascible later opinions. I find myself

reading through again, gob-smacked, arse-faced, drenched in the Rabelaisian

liquors of the human body, demotic geographics and an utterly humane eye for

detail otherwise too often air-brushed from the text.

the following two short poems form a double page spread in 'Sun Barbs'

(London: Poets and Peasant, 1976) left hand page first:

'Bradford Saturday'

Nothing as Gothic as the porcelain rows

The saints set facing the back of the niche

Shamed saints wetting the holy stone.

Nothing as stained as Bradford town Hall

Kings of England blinded by starling shit

Splashing the shoppers who throng the access

Of the glass Acropolis Coffee house

Their sweet heads open to the sky like yawns.

Miller's man has an eggshell bonce.

The pale skies pour in, freeze the quick

And the dead grey waste of his Sunday schooling

Is revived in anguish that crackles and cries

From the toucan beak of the skull's cracked halves.

Stone kings and Saturday piss-artists pour

Their salvos of presence into faces rubicund

That part in fragments ready for the rest of time.

'Bradford at Dusk  -  Half-Demolished'

In half an hour's time up comes the arsehole of the moon

A Cambodian private carries bandaged children through a

       holocauset. The wind is cold around the doomed

       cornices of the Mechanic's Institute.

The vertical fall of snowshit dropped by the dusklight

        starlings picks out Corinthian foliage white

        like the knotted breasts of a woman hanged. The

        Empress falls and all the ill-shod whores have

        nowhere in the world to roam.

the sky is a Delft plate cracking.

The roar of falling plaster drowns the starling songs

        which drowns out traffic.

The coming cold whittles at my ribs like grief.

Grief breaks my city, splits the moons arse.

I just wanted to give the smallest of flavor for a massive body of work and

in looking forwards to seeing his Selected I'm glad that he himself got to

see them out.

love and loss

cris

*

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Date:         Mon, 5 Jan 2004 22:21:02 -0000

Reply-To: UK POETRY <UKPOETRY@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>

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From: Lawrence Upton <lawrence.upton@BRITISHLIBRARY.NET>

Subject: Jeff Nuttall

To: UKPOETRY@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU

from a few years back

Tonight's Eric Mottram Celebration is made by Jeff Nuttall. I don't know what he is going to do. That is entirely up to him.

I would like, as usual, to say a few words of introduction. I am going to quote Eric, but it'll largely be me talking about Jeff. For those of you who are understandably keen to hear him, I assure you that this is short. And I apologise to Jeff in advance, but it is about time someone told him just what they think of him.

A year ago, when I introduced Bob Cobbing's celebration of the late Eric Mottram, I quoted Jeff on Cobbing.

Some of you may have not committed that to memory, so I'll remind you that the quotation was "A man of total commitment." Typically, it is colloquial, clear, not understated, and spot on... But here's Jeff Nuttall on himself, during his own SVP reading on 20th May 1997: "You know where you are with me; you know what you're going to get. Sex and landscape, that's all I write about, usually at the same time."

I agree with Jeff that one knows where one is with him, as a person. I think so, anyway. Sex and landscape? I'll pass that for a moment.

That leaves "You know what you are going to get."

I disagree with that. Beyond superficialities of style, I don't know what I am going to get from Jeff either as a poet or as a critic, except that it'll be well worth experiencing.

I know the mannerisms and manner in which he will speak; I know some of his concerns, and for sure they do include sex and landscape; and so on; but as to what he will say at any moment I remain much more ignorant in his case than of almost anyone else I have ever met.

In that way he is unpredictable. That's not the unreliable kind of unpredictability, which is a lack in the person called unpredictable; what I am talking about is a lack in the persons experiencing the unpredictable.

Jeff Nuttall's mind is always on the move and often way ahead of the rest of us. His take on the world is, in some ways, unlike anyone else's I know and nearly always still changing. I don't always agree with him. I don't always follow him though he speaks with clarity. He takes big leaps. I think that sometimes he says things so that he can hear them said so that he can decide if he agrees with them himself! But I could be wrong, and I do say that partly in jest.

All this could be fatal weakness; but, in Jeff's case, it's anything but. He's never boring, he's never random. He listens to others. He learns quickly.

Preoccupations with sex and landscape might make him seem unextraordinary; but it is what Jeff does with ideas and sense data, the connections that he makes between them, which make him so extraordinary.

He has a fine intellect. He is one of the best extempore speakers I know. He makes connections between things which are multiple octaves apart, sometimes on different instruments, not all of those musical. He builds mental houses of cards you can happily live in and which don't fall down.

Eric Mottram said of him, much more than once, that he is a genius.

It's a misused word, but Eric didn't misuse words. He said what he meant; and I think I know what that is. If I could tell you easily, you can be pretty sure that Mottram would have said that. That he chose repeatedly to use that enigmatic word, indicates that we have with us tonight someone whose undoubted gifts are hard to classify, perhaps because rarely encountered, certainly in this combination.

Eric didn't say that Jeff is a poet of genius, though Jeff is a fine poet; nor story-teller, though he is a story-teller of the greatest skill, on the page and in the pub; nor painter, though he is a fine painter; nor musician, though he is a very good musician; nor actor, though he is an accomplished actor; nor critic, though he is a perceptive critic and a critic of criticism itself. Eric just saidgenius. In fact, once in my hearing, he went on and said "the only person of whom I say that without hesitation"

Here is a restless artist, who, I think, sees the world, in some ways, more clearly than most of us see it, who sees some of what many of us do not see at all, whose work renders workaday categories inappropriate if only because he'll change your understanding of those categories while you're talking - if you listen. It's always good to listen to Jeff. Which is why it's such a pity that he has often been dogged by people shouting "Sing Bomb Culture!" as if he hasn't been producing important work and commentary ever since that book, important and useful though it is.

I am hardly interested, in this context, to evaluate his individual books and projects. Not because they shouldn't be evaluated, not because some are inevitably better than others... A lot of artistic activity and criticism expends its energy on building monuments. Jeff's wonderfully contrary energy is not of that kind. It doesn't look back. It doesn't self-regard. It is restless, as I have said. It is the nearest thing to the Blakean "glad day" that I have come across, but with humorous mischief.

His performance of his poetry and his writing itself is various; he intones it, chants it, growls it. Voices shoot up in it and chase themselves off through the undergrowth of other voices while the narrative takes its own zigzag, but never out of earshot.

It is extraordinary writing, and of itself. It sets its own terms and rewards those who are attentive to it.

I've learned an immense amount from him and could have learned much more had I paid more attention. I find him energising... Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Nuttall

*

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Date:         Tue, 6 Jan 2004 01:00:18 -0000

Reply-To: UK POETRY <UKPOETRY@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>

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From: Geraldine Monk <monk@THEMONK.DEMON.CO.UK>

Subject: Jeff

Comments: To: BRITISH-POETS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

To: UKPOETRY@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU

What can you say.  I saw Jeff's name in the subject box and knew he was dead.  What a crying shame.  It should have been Chris announcing his new book but it wasn't from Chris so I knew he was dead.  It doesn't get much sadder than that.

The last time I saw Jeff was about 10 days ago at around 1.30 in the morning - I think it may have been Boxing Day.  He was on the telly playing Friar Tuck in Robin Hood.  How we laughed and delighted.  About a year before we'd sat through Robin Hood Prince of Hollywood wondering where the hell Jeff had got to. Wrong film of course.  Jeff was in the more intelligent, better researched and vitually ignorned version.  They came out around the same time. How unlucky can you get. 

Welcome to Hell growls Jeff with his inimitable mischievous glint - half boy, half rogue, half daft as a brush, half visionary.  And that's only four of his halves!

The thing about Jeff is that he was always more than his component parts.

Welcome to Hell had become a catchphrase in our Nether Edge household over the last few days.  Funny how things trip you up so.

But,  like cris said - and thank you cris for the touching thumbnail bio/bib - one didn't, couldn't follow him everywhere - he would shoot off into the cringe and sometimes the downright reactionary (feminist are not akin to the nazis - honest ) but he could also make a desperate almost divine sense of the senseless, a vision out of chaos.  It was all horror, love, repulsion, fascination,disgust, lust, loss ad infinitum. He confronted and terrorised the drag of inertia and mutability: it confronted and terrorised him.

This is turning into a ramble but without Jeff I probably wouldn't be rambling - well I would but not in public - he convinced me I was good enough to 'go public' - and put me in contact with my dear old friends Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths.  God he's got a lot to answer for - to think - I could have been a barrister - no - maybe not - maybe a florist - but at least a florist gets paid!

I've just told the sad news to Robert Clark (Bob was one of his students at Leeds Art College in the early 70's which is where we first met Jeff)  and he wrote and said:

'God knows there won't be another like him'

enough said,

in sadness,

Geraldine