Al Hutchins is one of Outsideleft's favourite poets! If you've ever seen Al perform you'll know why... if you haven't then 'Rebel Admin' - his new collection published by Culture Matters is a fabulous place to start.
In her introduction to 'Rebel Admin' TS Eliot Poetry Award nominee Fran Lock expanded on Stewart Lee's description of him as '...a howling faggot-and-pea fuelled visionary' by arguing '...what exactly is a visionary if not a fierce imaginaut, a subject who dares to see deeper and further than most into our dystopian presents and impossible futures? In that sense 'visionary' is right on the money.'
She continued '...'Howling' too, for Hutchins is not a utopian; his is a work of surrealist lament for a loved for a loved and unlovely experience of urban working-class life.
We are delighted to include 'None More Lovely Than a Lost Cause' today - we were initially drawn to this poem because it mentions both bus journeys and Roy Orbison. But, again, it is Fran Lock who explains it best: ' ...it works both as a sincere reflection on the melancholy of unrequited love, and as a commentary on the self-dramatizing gestures rife in mainstream lyric poetry'.
NONE MORE LOVELY THAN A LOST CAUSE
I went to love instead of war
I built a trench in romance
It didn't work
And then some.
Once upon a bus,
I'd just struck each match,
Then torn the box to miniscule:
A man gets on, and asks me for a match...
To pass the weeks and hours
A million things like this
Are done and said;
The red ink
High
And drying in the wind
And in the never-ending night,
The peacock tends to grins:
When you are older,
At the ripe old twenty something age,
The heart gets ripped to ribbons;
And heartache frames it all
In bucketloads,
With holes;
Detective, on that hopeless heath a million days
Orbisoned in shades and leather
Five full bins,
An Irish setter,
This scorched grass hurts
But who would want for easy lives?
You say
As if it was a case of handing out the biscuits.
Heartache's a home from home
There is patience-a-thrall, appalled;
You set out stall.
Something quivers
And a gong is banging in a foreign hall.
It's dandy fine to piss that time-
Acres of earth cry out
For wine
Or more.
Leave the days to bleed, amigo:
The copper hinge goes hanging from the door.
Everything's been taken in this sorry world.
There is none more lovely than a lost cause.
© 2023 Al Hutchins
Essentials
Cover image by Jack Varnell
To purchase a copy of 'Rebel Admin' from the Culture Matters website, please visit here
The previous Sunday Morning Poem from Christopher Hall, Junk Drawer, is here→
