BLOG EXCLUSIVE: "People's Poet" Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac has just sent me this heart-rending masterpiece...

"Lines on the Blog" by Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac

Some things even Ja cannot fe to explain
Like de madness of Christopher Huhne in de outside lane
As him rocket like de devil wid a stomach pain
Treatin’ de speedin’ camera wid’ liberal disdain
An’ let him woman fe to tekk de blame
An’ points
An’ t’ing...

Nazis to the Right of me, Antifa on the Left... here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

Okay, it's The Guardian - what did you expect? Common  sense? Rationality? Respect for the vast majority of people who don't share their bizarre views? Of course not - you expect its writers to support any proposal, no matter how deranged, whose sole purpose is to upset anyone who doesn't read the Guardian, work for the BBC, go on demos, doesn't think all white people are racist, doesn't despise Judeo-Christian culture and doesn't hate this country, its people, its traditions and its history. I've tried my best not to swallow the bait...

The People's Poet, Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac, has regained consciousness long enough to deliver a rousing election message...

It has worked. Finally. The world's 21-month long agony is over. Late last night, I and an assortment of West London's most progressive thinkers were clustered (as we are most nights) around the hospital bed in which our great friend and teacher, the world-renowned Dub Poet, Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac (known as BZZ, Benjie or The Master to his friends and admirers, as Wutless,  Mengkeh, or Duncy bat to his countless ex-wives and "baby maddas" - and as Reginald Augustus Wellington Pules to the tax authorities). We were listening to the monotonous beeps of the various monitors attached to BZZ's wasted body and the occasional gurgles of his weapons-grade medical marijuana and Red Stripe Premium Lager drip-feeds...

For once, Daniel Hannan is wrong - I often finish a Larkin poem feeling better than when I started it

The arch-Brexiteer Conservative MEP Dan Hannan posted this provocative tweet earlier today:

I wouldn't normally bother rising to the bait, and Hannan's usually pretty sound on cultural matters (he's pretty sound on most things, actually) - but this time he's wrong. Presumably he'd just read something along the lines of the following stanza (although it would be a pretty odd thing to do before 9AM):

Benjamin Zephaniah's "Tribute to Muhammad Ali" will make you laugh and cry (and long for the return of Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac)

Given that Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac is universally acknowledged as "The People's Poet", it really should be him performing a eulogy to The People's Champion, Muhammad Ali. But we'll have to make do with his acolyte, Dr Benjamin Zephaniah (piles and lumbago a speciality). British broadcasters have been informing us for the past week (without pause) that the boxer Muhammad Ali was the greatest human being who ever lived, bar none: Ali deserves, their coverage has implied, to be canonised by the Roman Catholic Church as a matter of urgency in order to heal the world's wounds asap. (The minor matter of his not actually being a Christian could surely be ignored on this occasion, because, after all, he transcended religion, and, anyway, he was ill for a long time. Or something.) One British boxer has suggested, sensibly, that the great man should be awarded a posthumous knighthood - I'd second that proposal.

Noël Coward's "I Wonder What Happened to Him?" is splendidly smutty

I'm not terribly fond of comic poetry or comic songs (speciallywhen performed by a soloist accompanying themselves on the piano), or, indeed, of musical theatre in general. But Noel Coward quite often hit the mark, and "I Wonder What Happened to Him?", which was apparently a standard subject of conversation whenever British India Army officers got together, is one of his gems. It's from the 1945 stage musical, Sigh No More (which didn't do particularly well, despite containing some of Coward's classic songs). I was going to post a recording of Coward performing it - but I actually find it funnier on the page, and the recorded version misses out two of the filthiest (and funniest) sections, including one about gender reassignment. Here, for lovers of innuendo and double-entendres (i.e. British folk), are the complete lyrics (I presume "faggot" meant something else back then - although, with Coward, it may have been meant as a treble-entendre):

The "Some parodies - an anthology" website is an absolute delight

I love literary parodies. Well, any kind, actually. I wrote about some of my favourite poetic parodies here back in 2010. I featured the Telegraph sketch writer, Michael Deacon's glorious parody of "novelist" Dan Brown's work three years ago. And, of course, this blog has had the honour over the years of being the platform of choice for the work of Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac, who, sadly, seems to have fallen silent recently - a shame, given the wealth of suitable targets currently on offer. Perhaps he feels that, with Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn in the spotlight, parody has become temporarily redundant. Or maybe he's waiting for a LibDem revival to reinvigorate his muse. As a keen fan of the genre, I was delighted to stumble upon Geoff Wilkins's "Some parodies - an anthology" website a few weeks ago. It was based, its creator tells us,  on Dwight Macdonald's excellent 1960 anthology, Parodies, and contains many beloved classics, but brings us right up to date, ending with John Crace's take on the appalling Will Self. I've reproduced some of the more recent ones below, starting with an extract from the Diaries of David Hare, brought to us by the doyen of contemporary parodists, Craig Brown:

I’ve brushed up my Shakespeare - all 37 plays done and dusted. So I’m one up on the new artistic director of The Globe!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The introduction to my Kindle edition of the The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare informs us that few people nowadays read the three parts of Henry VI unless they’ve set themselves the task of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays “like an obstacle course.” Well, I recently completed that obstacle course - and I thoroughly enjoyed Henry VI, Pts. 1, 2 & 3. I think the first Shakespeare play I read was Julius Caesar, for O-level, so getting from its opening line - “Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home” - to the last lines of Henry VIII - “All the best men are ours; for 'tis ill hap,/ If they hold when their ladies bid 'em clap” (which were presumably written by collaborator, John Fletcher) took me half a century.

How the bravery of a French SWAT team member reminded me of Noël Coward's, "Lie in the dark and listen"

Strange how the mind works, sometimes. As a French SWAT team initially approached the Bataclan Theatre in the early hours of Saturday morning, the murderers inside started firing on them. The police hurriedly retreated (as you would) - but there was one little bloke in front who, after initially retreating a few paces, promptly edged forwards again. And again. Nobody in that team was anything but heroic, but the chap in front was something else - a bit mad, maybe, but also magnificent. Watch him and his colleagues in action here:

When it comes to the need to experience Shakespeare on stage, Sir Ian McKellen is dead wrong

Ian McKellen as Richard III, apparently

Fruity thespian Sir Ian McKellen thinks the only way to truly experience Shakespeare plays is to see them performed on stage. Reading, he says, reduces them to “an examination subject”. As actors rarely talk nonsense, I’m surprised to find myself disagreeing with the old boy, but I do. I’ve seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream on stage several times (twice at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre alone), and it has always left me cold. I recently read it for the first time, only to discover that it is indeed a work of transcendent genius, as light, airy, joyous and gay (in its proper sense) as my favourite  opera, The Magic Flute. Not only that, but it actually made me laugh out loud (the rustic players performing Pyramus & Thisbe near the end, as you ask), something Shakespeare has only previously managed to make me do thanks to Orson Welles hamming it up as Falstaff on the battlefield in Chimes at Midnight and Roger Allam being sly as the same character in Henry IV, Part 2 (a televised recording of a performance at The Globe).

Sometimes, Radio 4 is simply beyond parody - like yesterday’s Front Row featuring a “Jamaican-American” poetess

Claudia Rankine

I sometimes switch the radio on while doing the washing up (I’m in touch with my feminine side). It’s always on Radio 4, because, like many women from her background, my wife has apparently been brought up with a confirmed disbelief in the existence of other radio stations (apart from Radio 4 Extra, of course). Consequently, the kitchen radio is always set to R4. Anyway, I’d just got stuck in to the pans when I heard the following mouth-watering introduction to the next item:

Hovering between peak experience and epiphany: from part IV of W.B. Yeats's "Vacillation"

I was leafing through The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (1963) the other day, as one does, when I came across a section from Yeats's "Vacillation" (see below). Yeats was in my mind in any case, as I'd been devising questions for a literary quiz (more of which in another post) and one of them involved having to identify four of his most famous poems from acronyms of their first lines (e.g. IWAAGNAGTI - hint: it's one of the best-known poems in the English language). Anyway, I was particularly taken by this description of an epiphanous experience, made all the more convincing by the humdrum setting:

The Labour leadership contest is over - the people's poet Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac has endorsed Jeremy Corbyn

I phoned my close friend Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac (the world’s leading dub poet, in case you don’t live in North London) just last week to ask him who he was backing for Labour leader. “Chah! A wad di rass clot yuh a chat bout, maama man?” he responded. It was rather hard to hear him, as, once he had identified me to the large group of somewhat boisterous co-religionists with whom he chooses to seek spiritual enlightenment, they began shouting out friendly greetings to me, such as “To rass!”, “Him a play numba two!” and “Battyfish!” After I’d repeated my question, BZZ simply said, “Gunkona, bowcat,” and hung up.

The election campaign truly kicks off with Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac's angry, searing, elegiac polemic, "De Coalition an' t'ing: Part 1"

I was feeling a trifle melancholy last night, isolated in the top-floor study of our £3.5m Islington mansion. Tamintha and I had just returned from an election fund-raiser at Ed Miliband's place round the corner. The reason for my disquiet? It started early in the evening when Ed managed to slit his thumb open on a screw-cap wine bottle top: no idea how he did it, as they're supposed to be fool-proof. It got worse when he somehow gashed his lip while drinking from a perfectly ordinary wine glass. Then he burned his hand quite badly during an "ordinary bloke" photo op, trying to extract a tray of cheesy tid-bits from one of the cookers in their third kitchen. "Would you like me to drive you to A&E?", I asked as his wife applied a bandage. "The way I would answer that particular question is this..." he began, but then lost his train of thought as he momentarily passed out from the pain.

Poems to read while micturating : No.1 "The Fall of Rome" by W.H. Auden

I have written this as a contribution to World Toilet Day - which is today, apparently:

One of the many things oldsters don't warn us chaps about when we're in the full vigour of youth is that it's quite likely you'll end up spending a lot more time peeing. Whereas you were once able to sleep through the night and wake up with a bursting bladder, you'll probably find yourself having to pay several visits between saying your prayers and the alarm going off. And when you "go" - or, if you prefer, wee, micturate, urinate, have a wazz, point percy at the porcleain, piddle, take a leak, spend a penny or pass water -  whatever time of the day it is, it may take you longer than it used to.

BREAKING NEWS: world's leading poet willing to serve as Benjamin de First, King of Scotchland!

One of the things I've been brooding about regarding the possibility of the Scots voting for independence tomorrow is their seeming determination to keep the Queen. Personally, I'd prefer it if Brenda threw a complete wobbler, told the ungrateful ginger pillocks to get stuffed, and ordered the RAF to flatten Balmoral. But now Britain's dub poet laureate has presented us with an excitingly alternative left-field plan which would - at a stroke - confirm the SNP's determination to turn Scotland into a multicultural nirvana brimming with hard-working immigrants who, as BZZ so eloquently points out, would create a northern equivalent of sunny Venezuela. Arise (presumably with the aid of a spliff the size of a marrow and a twelve-pack of Tennents Extra) the new Monarch of de Glen!

Ten poems that might stop young people being so astonishingly ignorant about their Christian heritage

I imagine that if you asked most Britons under the age of thirty what Good Friday commemorates, they’d shrug and mumble something about it being good because you don’t have to go to work or school. A teacher of A-level English here in multiculti London recently told me that her pupils are so bereft of the slightest knowledge regarding Christian traditions and beliefs that she has to explain The Fall in painful detail when it comes up – yes, many 17 and 18-year old Londoners are unacquainted with the story of Adam and Eve, the snake, the Tree of Knowledge, the serpent, Eden, the apple… the whole shooting match, in fact.

I’ve decided to skip all coverage of the First World War centenary until Remembrance Sunday

Judging by how much there’s already been about World War One on television and radio this year, I have a horrible feeling that the BBC’s seemingly obsessional coverage - much like the war itself - is going to going to go down in history as an example of massive overkill. As tales of military heroism and self-sacrifice invariably make me blub (for some odd reason, I mist up at the very mention of Passchendaele), as both my parents served in the last war, and as films, books and poetry about WWI have been a mainstay of my cultural life, I'd better explain why I won’t be eagerly checking the schedules for programmes about the Somme or early tank warfare or what was happening on the home front for the next eleven months.

A reading from William Shakespeare's "Antony & Nigella"

A retired actor at last night’s Chiswick Pass On A Poem gathering told us that the first Cleopatra he’d seen on stage was Edith Evans, then well into her fifties. “I was 17 at the time, and she didn’t really do it for me.” Well, no, she wouldn’t: regal, no doubt, but erotic and exotic? One doubts it. That’s the problem with all of the actresses I’ve seen play Cleopatra, whether Shakespeare’s or anyone else’s version of her: they usually combine one or two of the necessary elements, but never all of them.

Douglas Goldring's 1922 biography of the poet James Elroy Flecker is an absolute delight

Douglas Goldring

I'm reading "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" (which I wrote about here) at a gathering
in Acton this evening. I've read two of his poems before at this sort of event - "The Old Ships" and "Oxford Canal" - so I was hunting for something new to say about him in my introduction when I came upon I was casting around the web for something new to say about the poet when I came across James Elroy Flecker: An Appreciation with Some Biographical Notes by the left-wing writer and journalist Douglas Goldring, the whole of which can be read here, thanks to the The Library of the University of California Los Angeles, who posted it.