Iain Sinclair in Coventry... Saturday May 9, 2009...

Down to Coventry to attend a reading by Iain Sinclair (unofficial web site)... Touch and go I would make it as the old exhaustion has sidelined me since I got back from London – but managed to drag myself off to the station – missed the Waterstones book signing at 12 pm and had some time to kill so I went off in search of refreshment. I've been going to Coventry (no pun intended) quite a lot these last couple of years for gigs (Tin Angel/Taylor John's etc) but that was at night and we usually managed to get lost so the daytime city I know hardly at all. I found the Library fairly easily and went off to the marvellously named Medieval Spon Street as I vaguely remembered a pub in that direction. Duly found The Old Windmill, a hurried pint of Belgian wheat beer, some Indian guy tried to sell me a bed – and I consequently got lost coming back to the reading. I think they call it psychogeography... Only briefly however – course rectified, I made it back to the Library in plenty of time.

A reasonable crowd for a reading – I've seen less... High up on a level that overlooked the main library with people coming and going all around. It struck me as odd at first, but actually it worked very well and resonated with much of Iain Sinclair was subsequently to speak and read about. Engaging with the local... Probably better than being stuck in one of those doctor's waiting room cubby holes where they usually hold these events, it was oddly intimate AND open...

Sinclair is a tall man, balding, dressed in black, an amiable presence which disguises a sharp intellect. He did a stand up gig really, conversational, fluent, his patter seamlessly interspersed with readings of earlier work and sections from his latest extravaganza 'Hackney, that Rose Red Empire.' An old pro – a class act. But more than just an entertainer – there is a serious message here in his obsessive diggings deep into the substrata of London and beyond. The current preoccupation that haunts his new book - the looming shadow of the Olympics, that fiscal crack-up coming to a capital city near you soon, the manner in which London communities are being moved on to make room for the latest Millenium Dome debacle(farce repeated as... farce), the new 'Enclosures' – if John Clare was the signature poet of the old ones, driven mad eventually by the destruction of his ground and his encounters with London and fickle celebrity surely Sinclair is the bard of the new. (Although saner!).

Loops...

'Polis is
eyes'

(The Maximus Poems, Letter 6, l 1-2 by Charles Olson)

– reading this in Maximus, it struck me how this acted as a good rule for what writers should do – SEE through the murk, the bullshit. Then, during the reading, when he mentioned the Orwellian preponderance of CCTV cameras in this country, it suddenly struck me as a prescient joke – police have eyes, the Glaswegian spin in the word mutating it into a description of our present over-observed society with its increasingly overt possibilities for a police state – rather than the local anarcho-democratic politics hinted at in Olson's 'polis.' Connections...

I would have liked to hear some more of his poetry but given the time strictures we were still treated to a rich verbal feast - and there was the new book to plug, after all. It struck me that as Charles Olson had eventually surpassed his earlier master, Ezra Pound, with his Maximus poems, over the years Sinclair had transcended his early influences – Beats/Black Mountain/WCW – to forge a unique style that was rooted in his native culture(s) (in the broadest sense: prophets of the wilder possibilities rather than those 'canonised' by an academe that has grown ever-more stifling – who would have thought that possible?) while having the flexibility and energy that those American precursors brought to their own language. Moreover – a style that has evolved to describe as accurately as possible and further, to engage and criticise the contemporary world in a unique manner, the form evolving as the field spreads outwards. Olson again (from Creeley): Form is never more than an expression of content. A million miles away from the Brit lit scene – you know who I mean. The heritage farmers... In Sinclair's work, voices from the past mingle with the contemporary demotics in all their clashing multi-culti sprawl of contradictions and uneasy alliances. Gangsters, poets, artists, hustlers, the older cultures rub against the new on the London street, counterposed against the shadows of Post Thatcher New Labour Babylons... 'Moloch, Moloch, Nightmare of Moloch,' as Ginsberg had it...

Yet - the whole done with a light touch and liberal dashes of humour. However scholarly the underpinnings - and his research alone covers a massive range - Sinclair will usually break it up with a gag here and there. Polemic leavened with humanity...

Heady stuff for a cold afternoon in a Middle England library – and the provincial may yet be our collective salvation. Energies grounded in the local. Maximus to Medieval Spon Street...

Unfortunately I had to dash off back to God's Little Acre – but managed to grab a quick word with Kevin Ring, the editor of the fine mag 'Beat Scene' – and bought a copy of Mr Sinclair's Kodak Mantra Diaries from him which you can also get from his web site – scroll right down...

Update: Just found this which gives a flavour of his work: Sinclair on the Olympic Scam...