Culture Matters Presents: Al Hutchins, Fran Lock and Bobby Parker

Culture Matters Presents
Al Hutchins, Fran Lock and Bobby Parker,
at Centrala
19/12/24

Centrala is always a fucker to get to. The wrong bit of Digbeth but often home to fierce work, stuff too many people miss. Round the back, the canal carries its filthy sheen along steady and. 

We’re in on a secret, which is to say there’s not enough of us here.

Al’s first up. I’ve seen him read a good few times but, this evening, I’m struck by the tenderness of the work. Everybody knows he’s the lad who prowls, bellows lines from behind that’ll crick the old neck if you turned too quick. The beauty though when he gets quiet. The known and lovely needs in the home against the baby in Thimblemill Brook, a run of water that’s hardly there. A Midland Red carrying a whole world with it, pages of Gibbon caught in glances splinter making way for an innervated vision. 

Fran is awake and alive, having survived a year as Judith E Wilson Poetry Fellow surrounded by smug, legitimate smiles of Cambridge still-eyed Lit priests. With a necessary rage, she rips the fuckers to shreds. but they don’t know, do they, being all too in thrall to their own limitations, touching that longstanding filigreed fence of theirs softly with unhurt hands. Our anger they call ressentiment and set it aside, there with the immigrant cleaners and scratch cards and buses. They’re unable to imagine Fran, to see or hear her. Such poetry on fire can’t be placed. So she stands a marker in their well kept heads. The thing is she is angry but she is funny: lines burn and fizzle and I cackle too loud now and then. The welter and force of the allusions; they spread out across history and place showing up the hope that there’s something there for us in language other than the “swindle of English”. They think the tradition is their sole business and the only proper response is such impropriety. 

Bobby Parker sits on the stage. It always hurts a little to hear him read. He tells me after he likes telling on himself and there is that; the wounds and the errors and everything. There is beauty though, images flecked with the love that the world wants to fuck and kill. The growing pool of piss from an ex nun becomes a portal, a way through to something other than the tyranny of exchange systems. Brightness of life despite. I follow the final poem rapt, all the shifting scenes, radical openness, safe from the blithe hygiene of certified recollection.

Three poets that matter with their own music reading in a small room. You should have been there.