Corrugated iron, corrugated iron, brand new corrugated iron

A couple of dozen poets and three and a half hours of poetry, even in aid of Haiti, stretched my love of the English language this afternoon. It was worth the attention span, though, not least to hear Carole Ann Duffy's closing rendition of Premonitions, dedicated to the memory of U A Fanthorpe but written with the memory of her mother's death in mind.

Gordon and Sarah Brown were the unadvertised openers of the event, with Gordon announcing that the government had today decided to buy up every piece of corrugated iron in the country and ship it to Haiti to provide shelters for the homeless. This prompted Duffy to remark later that they should send the lead off Tony Blair's roof as well.

It reminded me of an old squatters' song we used to sing in the Seventies to the tune of Any Old Iron. Composed by Tony Allen, veteran of the Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Squatters Estate Agency and the godfather of alternative comedy, it went something like this:

Corrugated iron, corrugated iron, brand new corrugated iron,
Yer 'ouse looks neat, talk about a treat
Corrugated iron from the chimney to the street
No water, no gas and the mains all slashed
Can't even have a fire on
And the only thing you've got in yer window box is
Corrugated iron

Sign up for Haiti

Carole Ann Duffy, the first female poet laureate, is leading a 'Poetry Live Aid' for Haiti at Westminster Central Hall on Saturday at 2.30pm. She'll be joined by her predecessor Andrew Motion, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, John Agard, Dannie Abse and a dozen or more others. At £10 it's got to be the best value event in London this weekend as well as being in aid of one of themost important causes of the moment.

Meanwhile, I've just joined 300,000 other people in signing a petition for the cancellation of Haiti's US$1 billion debt. Haiti's people should not be made to pay back loans made to unelected dictators years ago even as they struggle to recover from the earthquake.

You can find out more or sign the petition here

http://www.avaaz.org/en/haiti_cancel_the_debt_12/98.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK

The petition below will be delivered to the IMF and G7 finance ministers at their crucial meetings in coming days.

Dynamite shoes

He breathed in air
He breathed out light
Adrian Mitchell was my delight

Roger McGough introduced Radio 4’s Poetry Please commemoration of Adrian Mitchell with this reworking of Adrian’s own tribute to Charlie Parker, whose ‘Lover Man’ opened the programme. Over the next half hour, some of Adrian’s many friends and fellow poets remembered him and read from his work.

Jackie Kay chose Adrian’s ‘Back in the Playground Blues’ about his childhood experience of bullying. Michael Horovitz took us back to that biggest poetry gig of all time, when Adrian spat out ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ (actually titled ‘To Whom It May Concern’) at the Albert Hall in 1965. Andrew Marr picked up ‘A Puppy Called Puberty’. And John Hegley gave us ‘Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow’ (‘Number One, patriotic: I didn’t lay down my life in World War II so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow; Number Two, snobbish: Unfortunately Samuel Beckett is using it’).

There was also Jonathan Price (‘Death is smaller than I thought’), Michelle Roberts, Carole Ann Duffy, Brian Patten and John Agard. And most of all there was Adrian’s wife, Celia, reading ‘The Doorbell’, which Adrian had written for CND in 2006. Celia said she had chosen because ‘it is about war and destruction and we met and fell in love because we were both wearing CND badges and we saw each other across the room’:

There, on the doorstep, stood the War.

It filled my front garden,

filled the entire street

and blotted out the sky.

It was human and monstrous,

shapeless, enormous,

with torn and poisoned skin which bled

streams of yellow, red and black ...

The War had many millions of eyes

and all wept tears of molten steel.

Then the War spoke to me

in a voice of bombs and gunfire:
I am your war.
Can I come in?

Roger McGough rounded off with a clip of Adrian and his daughter Sasha singing: ‘Poetry glues your soul together/ Poetry wears dynamite shoes.’ Sasha tells me that she and Celia have agreed to do some of Adrian’s regular gigs this year, including probably the Latitude festival, with Sasha singing and Celia reading his poems. Celia says they’re thinking of a big public commemoration for Adrian, maybe at the Hackney Empire in the autumn.

I’m sure they’ll be unmissable. In the meantime, you can listen to the whole of the Poetry Please commemoration at http://www.topicdrift.com/qt/PoetryPleaseAdrian.mp3

Pictured: Philosophy Football’s t-shirt, with which Adrian was delighted and distributed to various friends and family members, is available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com

Adrian Mitchell

I’ve just returned home after a weekend of unseasonally mild weather spent trail running to learn of Adrian Mitchell’s death. The first message on the answerphone bore the news, the tone of the first words enough to know what was to follow.

I’ve known Adrian and his wife of 47 years, Celia, for a long time, and in one of those twists of life that make some think beyond coincidence to meaning and fate we’ve had much more than usual to do with each other these past few weeks. Celia and I have been engaged in wrapping up the Medical Aid for Iraq charity, of which we have both been officers since the first Gulf War. And I had been trying to get Adrian to pick up his journalistic pen again (his writing career began in journalism), specifically to write about David Tennant’s Hamlet as he’d seen all the great Hamlets of the past half-century.

As it happened, Tennant injured his back, so he wasn’t playing the part at the press night. Adrian said he was too ill to write anyway, spent the next day in hospital and was ‘desperately trying to rest’ – a notion that barely entered the vocabulary of a man who felt an almost moral imperative to fulfil every request to appear, no matter how remote the venue or small the audience. His unwillingness to rest, his reluctance to miss a reading almost certainly delayed the diagnosis and exacerbated the consequences of the pneumonia he developed this autumn. And as if his writing, his performance and his other work was not enough, he remained a tireless campaigner in the cause of peace.

In his last email to me, a week before his death, he wrote of ‘trying to get Ian Hislop to set his hounds on the New Statesman for regularly printing full page colour adverts for BAE Systems and asking his investigators to trace the effect of the ads on the editorial side of the Statesman’. I had made Adrian poetry editor of the New Statesman when I edited the magazine in the 1990s, and his was an importance influence on my editorship well beyond poetry. From Benjamin Zephaniah to Brian Patten, and from Alex Comfort to Paul McCartney, Adrian’s pages – like the man himself – sparkled with enthusiasm, commitment and verve. I’m glad that in what I never dreamed would turn out to be my final email to him, I took the time to tell him how those pages were among my proudest achievements at the Statesman.

The world will miss him, and my heart goes out to Celia and their family.

Postscript: I've just unearthed one of five poems that Robert Graves wrote in his seventies and Adrian published as part of a 'Poetry Extra' in the NS in 1994. It seems absolutely fitting to Adrian's memory:

How is it a man dies?

How is it a man dies
Before his natural death?
He dies from telling lies
To those who trusted him.
He dies from telling lies -
With closed ears and shut eyes.

Or what prolongs men's lives
Beyond their natural death?
It is their truth survives
Treading remembered streets
Rallying frightened hearts
In hordes of fugitives.

Polarbear politics

Polarbear wasn’t sure about appearing at the Red Pepper/Philosophy Football ‘Long Hot Summer Party’ on Friday because he reckons he’s ‘not really political’. If the left had one vote for every person who’s ever said they’re not really political at the same time as doing things that demonstrate a brighter political spark than virtually anything the parties of the left have come up with in eons, it would have won a landslide election victory years ago.

Polarbear writes poetry – or rather he performs it, which, as every half-decent versemonger, from Bob Dylan and Eminem to Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell (who also appeared at Friday’s event), understands, is more than half the point. In doing so, he gives rhyme and reason to the lives of ordinary people – a voice to those who have historically been voiceless, if you like – and if that’s not political, socialist even, I don’t know what is.

He’s bloody good at it, too. Don’t take my word for it: make your own judgement. This is him performing Jessica, one of the poems he did on Friday.