Poets Down the Pub: Ernest Hilbert with Richard Price, Katy Evans-Bush, and Jon Stone
by Ernie on 11/05/10 at 10:10 am
“Poets Down the Pub”
Ernest Hilbert reads with Richard Price, Katy Evans-Bush, and Jon Stone at the famous Lamb Pub
Monday, May 31st, 2010
7:00-9:00 PM
Lamb Pub
Lamb’s Conduit St
Holborn
London WC1N 3LZ
0871 258 6137
The Lamb, a genial old boozer built in the 1720s, was Dickens’ local (also Ted & Sylvia’s!). The pub and street were named for William Lamb, who erected a water conduit along the street in 1577. The Lamb was refurbished in the Victorian age and is one of the few remaining pubs with “snob screens,” which prevent the well-to-do drinker having to see the common man drinking in the bar.
There will be a £3 charge at the door to cover the cost of the room.
Nearest underground stations:
Russell Square London Underground station (390m)
Holborn London Underground station (630m)
Chancery Lane London Underground station (740m)
Russell Square: Turn right out the tube station on Bernard Street then take the first right into Grenville Street and then left into Guilford Street. Go past the hospital and Lambs Conduit Street is the first right, you’ll see the pub on the left-hand side of the road. Holborn: leave by the side exit and turn right up High Holborn. cross the road and take the first left up Red Lion Street. Walk up Red Lion Street, cross the main road and carry straight on up Lamb’s Conduit Street. After a short while, you’ll see the pub on your right.
“The Crash (a love letter)” by Katy Evans-Bush
When you get to the pub you’re already drunk —
You’ve been down the old Globe or somewhere
Since lunchtime, and when you come in
You throw your phone down on the table
And start by picking a fight with Jan.
You’re questioning my eye-witness account
Of a crash that happened outside the office —
A man just gunned his car at the railing,
Right into someone — and not by accident —
And subsequent riot (this very statement
I note the police believed outright,
And even wrote it down), while you breathe
All over me, and fondle my arm.
You drawl, I’m playing the devil’s advocate.
As if he needs one. You go to the bar
And Jan says, I’ve never seen such rudeness!
She’s laughing: what a dickhead, man!
And there was me, trying to soften the rumours.
You bring some drinks and then your phone
Starts to play the Ride of the Valkyries;
Next thing I know you’re out on the pavement,
Pacing it flat, like a pent-up tiger
over the limit, for ten minutes.
I know you’re talking to her. Finally
You come back in and start to try
To engage our attention but it’s too late.
Jan says, I can’t take any more of this shit!
And leaves with a single toss of the silk
Hydrangea she keeps in the back of her hair.
What’s her problem? you say, five times,
Leaning on me, gripping my arm.
Next morning you wake me at 7.15
Beginning a half-hour fight on the phone
With the woman who uses her child as a pawn.
I’ve heard it before. I listen at first
From the top of the stairs, but then I get bored
And go back to bed. But I leave before 8.
Well, you get off the phone and ask me to go.
That’s your greatest character trait,
You always say — you’re straight as a die.
You kiss me — as always, perfunctory, dry —
So then I walk the two miles to work,
Which gives me plenty of time to think —
And you know, I wish things were different.
I’m fumbling for my keys in my bag
When I notice the bloodstains still on the pavement.
This poem was first published in The Rialto magazine.
“The Patriarch” by Jon Stone
I went looking for the New Orleans thieves guild,
mythical and dangerous
as the white alligator.
I didn’t find it in Rampo or St. Cecelia.
I didn’t find it in the Bubble Tea Café,
not with iced coffee and chocolips,
Sound of Silence playing.
I didn’t find it in the cemetery,
or on the Jaguar Plaza.
I didn’t find it in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
or in the temple of the voodoo priestess,
and I even snuck a look in the mojobag,
lifted up the trickster mask, and clacked
and clacked through cassette tapes—through
Cajun swamp-pop, the best of Zydeco and
The South Rampart Street Parade featuring the Fabulous Last Straws,
but not a lick of thieves guild.
I waited on the steps that led down to the Mississippi
while a trumpet snaked from a moored riverboat.
The roach-coloured floating rustpans of the Ingram barge company
sidled downstream—
five of them, in a train—
but no representative met me there.
No evidence either
in the eggs of the gulf coast ribbon snake.
In fact, I couldn’t
find the eggs of the gulf coast ribbon snake.
Nothing in the belly of the broadhead skink,
nothing in the depths of the Lower Pearl River,
nothing in the bottom of the skiffs or bateaus,
among the red ripe strawberries or orange blossom honey.
The red and grey foxes told me nothing
before they slunk behind the log pile.
I ransacked mattresses, tore out the Spanish moss
I spooned to the bottom of seafood gumbo.
I found nothing. So today I rule my own.
There’s you, me, the ghost of Jean Lafitte,
a dozen squirrels with tails like quill pens,
and wild goats that stiffen when threatened
and tumble like jacks.
“Channel Link” by Richard Price
Even stations move.
Can I meet you fifteen years ago
by the sprung chainlink?
We could watch together those ever-afters
waiting for a platform. The go-ahead
and they’re polite about it.
Sandstone dust, or not now the long settled past—
construction grit in a suspension of air.
I could meet you fifteen minutes ago
at the same coordinates.
I’m watch-wiping on the interim platform.
For once I’m not about
to be all that late,
give or take, and if you’d show up
not even half apologising (not that you—)
between yesterday and now, or simply tomorrow
I’d class that on time.
“Ashore” by Ernest Hilbert
The harpooned great white shark heaves onto sand,
Nudged by waves, red cavern of dripping teeth.
A crowd comes. Loud gulls wreathe the booming mist.
Blue flies cloud the fishy sunset, and land.
One, sated, is slapped to a smear beneath
A child’s quick hand and then flicked from his wrist.
Compass and munitions are sunk with skulls
In wrecks beneath old storms, glass angels
And hourglasses, flint of sunlight through motes,
Violence of slit sails, drowned crews, split hulls,
Quiet draw of dust, too, and all that it pulls,
The slow leak and loss of each thing that floats—
Flail and wild eye, flecked spit of crippled horse,
Crust of diamonds on the throat of a corpse.
