Books & Poetry

‘The POT! Anthology’ isn’t stuffy. Don’t be fooled by the Aladdin-esque teapot on the cover, ‘pot’ and ‘tea’ being codewords for cannabinoids.

This little blue book takes as its starting point the First International Poetry Incarnation – the definitive ’60s
‘happening’ in front of an 8,000-strong crowd at a marijuana-fumigated Albert Hall. Contributors include ‘the Ancient Bard’ William Blake as well as his great latter-day successor Allen Ginsberg. (Interestingly, both men lived to be 69.) Hardcore Ginsbergians will enjoy the photo of him naked-partying in London, and the Ferlingetti elegy ‘Allen Ginsberg Dying’. Sex and death, as quoth WB Yeats.‘POT!’ is something of a collective elegy for a generation of poets who’ve moved on, such as Stevie Smith, Gregory Corso, Jeff Nuttall, Basil Bunting and Alexander Trocchi. Blake’s illuminated books are a spiritual template for this collection of songs, poems and stories with accompanying photos, drawings, paintings and engravings – Adrian Mitchell’s poem ‘Slavery and War’, for example, is paired off with Blake’s ‘A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows’.

Songs include ‘Music’ and ‘In the Ether’ by Pete Townshend. Of the more contemporary songwriters and poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Reggae Sounds’ is a masterly workout which seems to sum up his whole aesthetic in one short lyric:

‘Shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncingrock-wise tumble-doun soun musicfoot-drop find drum blood storybass history is a movingis a hurting black story’

Meanwhile, John Hegley fans will relish his clever ditties ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘Pop’ as well as a remarkably good drawing of Horovitz, ‘Poet with Bag’.Roger McGough’s ‘WHO?’ – a tribute for the Grand Old Man at 70 – has fun finding words that rhyme with ‘vitz’:

‘Who’s the scourge of the pseudo-lits?
Who writes those fearless literary crits?
Whose Blakean vision is as clear
as Schlitz? It’s Michael Horovitz’

Though the original reading on June 11 1965 was an embarrassingly all-male affair, ‘POT!’ atones with works by Stacy Makishi, Fran Landesman, Grace Nichols and others. It’s a stylish book which, in a light-handed way, bridges the gap between the ’60s and the new millennium, and carries the torch nto the  twenty-first century.