Our hostess-with-the-mostest Paul Burston was in full sparkly getup as John-John, "Jurassic Paul" and I trolled into the nightclub Heaven on Friday for our first sojourn to "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari in months...
It felt really good to be back and, as we joined our chums Emma and Toby at the front table, the air buzzed with anticipation.
After the customary welcome and intro, our first reader James McDermott took to the (dazzling) stage. Described by none other than "national treasure" Stephen Fry thus: "His eye, tone, language, wit, insights and power of expression are simply magnificent", he had a lot to live up to - and certainly did not disappoint!
He read a selection of poems from his new anthology Wild Life, all about "the nature of queerness, the queerness of nature, and the queerness of ‘natural’ masculinity", against the backdrop of his native North Norfolk - and here are two of them:
Excellent stuff.
Diametrically opposite in tone, our next reader Lisa Luxx - poet, playwright, essayist and political activist of British and Syrian heritage, who also lectures on revolutionary poetics and queer theory - was much more intense and dramatic, reading a selection of her heartfelt poems (that were also helpfully projected on the big screen behind her) about love, longing, family and political conflict, such as this one:
we don’t make love we make live
it will be the days no one
follows I died
with and was reborn like they used to
the days when everyone will be drunk
& asking
each other for help
it will have been a long while since two
passers by bumped into each other
like flutes on a wind chime knocking
accidental song out of a stranger’s body
two girls will be high as concrete
summoning
the moon
one will be knackered
from lugging sheet music out of rubble
the other
will be
holding up every shard
of glass to
the light
looking for
a scream
she may or may not have dropped here
with humidity blurring the mountains
air con drip
drips
& I
will roll
up another
one
stomach
churning in the heat
these will be the days when bone collectors in
cufflinks order our nations to forget
we will
become sudden to remember
one another
you & I
a reunion
resisting amnesia
then, I will be holding your small wet pulse
in my open jaw looking at you like a dog
cradling in his mouth what he’s forbidden to chew
two startled creatures in cotton t-shirts
practising
being alive
With that one, and her equally memorable paean to sexuality Dyke, I was stunned. [Here's another one of hers - Lesbian - that is just as powerful but was not featured.]
Mr Burston returned to the stage to read a rather poignant piece - the epilogue to his memoir We Can Be Heroes, his account of survival against the odds of the combined challenges of the AIDS era, drugs and alcohol. He's proudly sober these days, and thrives on adrenaline rather than other substances, thank heavens!
Then it was time for Paul and his "partner-in-crime" Karen McLeod to announce the contenders for The Polari Prize:
The Polari First Book Prize Long List:
- Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder (Wildfire)
- A Visible Man by Edward Enninful (Bloomsbury)
- The Whale Tattoo by Jon Ransom (Muswell Press)
- Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness by Kevin Brazil (Influx Press)
- Rising of the Black Sheep by Livia Kojo Alour (Polari Press)
- The New Life by Tom Crewe (Chatto & Windus)
- None of the Above by Travis Alabanza (Canongate Books)
- Orpheus Builds a Girl by Heather Parry (Gallic Books)
- In Her Jaws by Rosamund Taylor (Banshee Press)
- Is This Love? by CE Riley (Serpent’s Tail)
- No Country for Girls by Emma Styles (Sphere)
- Some Integrity by Padraig Regan (Carcanet Press)
The Polari Prize (book of the year, excluding debuts) Long List:
- Fire Island by Jack Parlett (Granta Books)
- A Working Class Family Ages Badly by Juno Roche (Dialogue Books)
- Other People Manage by Ellen Hawley (Swift Press)
- All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape)
- Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Picador)
- Mother’s Boy by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press)
- The School House by Sophie Ward (Corsair)
- Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador)
- Rookie by Caroline Bird (Carcanet Press)
- Cells by Gavin McCrea (Scribe)
- Screen Age by Fenton Bailey (Ebury Press)
- Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu (Dialogue Books)
Once the dust had settled after the break, Ms McLeod was nowhere to be found - and none other than Polari favourite Barbara Brownskirt barnstormed her way onto the stage, determined to read 125 poems from her "twenty-five unpublished works", starting (of course) with her tribute to her idol Judi! Judi! Judi! Dench!.
Other crowd-pleasers like Fabergé Eggs and Menopause were interspersed with some newer odes - including the bizarre Judi's U-bend and Sad Spare Room - from her latest anthology Brown Alley, with its accompanying launch video.
Utterly bonkers brilliance, as always!
And finally, it was time for the star turn - the artist also known as Ida Barr, Tina C, Fred Barnes and Christopher - Kit Green. A lovely person (and near neighbour to us here at Dolores Delargo Towers) we have followed Ida in particular for years - she was the pivotal moment at my sister's wedding reception!
Now a recording career in Kit's own name beckons, with a brand new album Always Here, from which they sang us a selection of fab songs.
The crowning glory was, however, a majestic cover of David Bowie's surprise 2013 single Where Are We Now? [little did we know at the time it was released that its lyrics were a portent of David's illness and death just three years later]. A tear came to my eye...
With rousing applause for Kit's excellent set, it was time for a (quite speedy, given the Friday night "curfew" - set by Heaven, so it could transform the place back into a nightclub) finale and curtain-call, and that was that for another night!
Another triumphal evening's entertainment.
We love Polari!
