From the grim industrial wastelands of northern England to the grimy epicentre of Southeast Asia’s underbelly, John Gartland – making a rare appearance in Cambodia alongside Krom this month – recalls how he became the ‘noir poet’ of Bangkok.
Would you care to climb into The Advisor time machine and take us back to growing up in the grim North of England?
My town was a bit grim, heavily industrialised, quite memorably polluted, often smelly with chemical plants and soap works, wire works, aluminium box works… Coal mines not far away. As a student I always worked in factories in the vacations, all manner of jobs. Course, there were jobs a-plenty then. It was a very Northern childhood: terraced house, Catholic primary school by the Mersey, in the shadow of a chemical works and Sacred Heart Church.
Did poetry offer an escape from this industrial backdrop?
Yes, I loved poetry; Dad turned me on to it. He was a self-educated guy who had been into recitations and amateur theatre before the war. I tried writing some things as a schoolboy and walked away from it. Came back to writing as an undergrad at Newcastle University, in the English Department. Had some pieces published in poetry mags. There wasn’t a reading scene, though. Wilko Johnson, now a rock star, was a fellow student, poet and friend. He was also a brilliant artist. We did a weekly column in The Courier, the student paper. I called it A Groat’s Worth Of Wit. I wrote as Jodric Plinth, and did a verse satire; Wilko did a cartoon to match. We cranked them out every week. A lot of fun that; we could and did have a go at various cretins on campus and beyond. Wilko also introduced me to acid. He did rather a lot of it… didn’t everybody then? Stunning memorable psychic voyage together. Ahhhh!
Quite the mind-/third-eye-opener at that age, I would imagine.
Read Huxley subsequently. I’d been there and understood it. Jodric wrote satirical plays for the leftists on campus. Organised the University Arts Festival in ‘73, was it? 3,000 Years Of The Jesuits was its high point. Troupe of performing cardinals, poetry competition for a dustbin prize, auto-destructive sculpture competition. I’d just come out of hospital that day after almost auto-destructing myself, and waking up in an ITU, bristling with tubes… Basil Bunting, the poet from Tyneside, was poetry fellow in our English Department, and he was a wise old bird.
If you learned one thing from Bunting, what was it?
Poetry ID says it: ‘Go out and live some more.’ Drink it in, what else can a writer do? I first saw Bangkok back in the eighties. I was working as a lecturer at Assumption University, organised a poetry and music gig regularly on campus, and it thrived. I started reading at other gigs, open mic stuff, got into my stride.
And this led inexorably to Southeast Asian noir.
I got drawn into the Bangkok noir circle after being invited to read at a noir writers’ gig at Check Inn 99. They were all crime writers, apart from the American expressionist painter Chris Coles, who was giving a lecture on the noir scene, illustrated by slides of his fascinating paintings of the night world. I was the only poet. I’d read a few times with the jazz musicians at Check Inn. That’s how I was invited.
I worked a lot with Chris’ paintings, matching them to my poems on my Facebook site, Poetry Universe. Chris greeted Bangkok De Profundis by calling it the new Howl of the 21st Century. Started calling me the Bangkok Noir Poet. Chris calls himself an explorer and recorder of the Bangkok night. I’d describe myself as an interpreter and a survivor. You know poets, they tend to drink deep. It goes with the territory.
I explored Bangkok’s night. The trick is to avoid being devoured by it. Many are. My reaction is one of recoil from its criminality and total corruption, but of fascination by its delights. Heart Of Noir expresses it quite powerfully. Poets are never respectable people. They couldn’t make good poetry out of respectability, but out of delirium, lust, loss and rage, yes, they can make powerful art.
How deep did you plumb?
A writer can’t make some statement, some poetic arrangement out of chaos without plunging into it. I drank deep. Developed the technique of functioning efficiently despite the hangovers and the fuzzy head. I dodged the abyss, but I’ve looked into it a few times.
There’s a lot of rage in Bangkok De Profundis. As a poet in Bangkok I’ve been driven a lot by rage: at the Muslims, and the whoremasters’ treatment of women, the corruption of the authorities, the total, bulletproof hypocrisy of the society and its hierarchies of bullying, the incompetents posing as educators, and the criminals decked in piety and patriotism and totally screwing the public. But as the character in the poem says: ‘But what would I know / A reactionary swine / Reading Spengler, drinking wine / Getting laid on Freeway IX.’
Is there such a thing as redemption for the souls who get sucked into Bangkok’s world of noir? Or is it a one-way ticket?
One is inoculated by Bangkok’s savagery and selfishness; its remorseless dishonesty and theft. ZooTube says it for me. Leper beggars waylay you on your way to the subway. Mall drones step over the human wreckage to buy their designer handbags. And there’s a huge social iceberg you can’t – and I won’t – talk about.
Social iceberg? Define, please.
There’s just been another coup. The Eye says all I want to say on that issue. If I weren’t married in Bangkok, I wouldn’t stay here. That’s for sure.
You and Krom. Discuss.
I met Chris Minko via the web and his friends and enthusiasts on the noir network in Bangkok. I liked his work and he liked mine. I wanted to come to Phnom Penh and was delighted when he agreed to play guitar and accompany my reading at Meta House. Since then our friendship and artistic connection has deepened. Chris has set a lyric of mine as a track for their new album, Mekong Delta Blues. He’s also performing with me at all the Cambodia gigs of my Muzak and Murderers tour. His music has a dark eloquence that fits my material like a glove.
What will you be performing this tour?
Oh, poems from the first and second books of inundations, including Slippery God and Bangkok De Profundis. The Eye is about an ex-private eye, who is now a crime writer. He’s speaking at a crime writer’s gig at a Bangkok Hotel which, though now respectable, was once a legendary whorehouse (sound familiar?). He talks, sometimes scathingly, of his fellow writers and, comically, of the history of the place they’re performing in. He wryly remarks that, for all the posturing by the crime aficionados, the real crime is going on outside on the street, and it’s for real: ‘Bent judges and psychopaths, hustlers and has-beens / professional liars, Bangkok is a crime scene / More generals than doormen, tear-gas everywhere / there’s gold braid enough here to carpet a whorehouse / gridlock on the streets, and a coup in the air…’ Some of the characters characterised among the scribblers haven’t been in touch with me much since I put the poem out. Ha ha ha!
Has living in Bangkok’s underbelly taught you anything about the human condition?
Every place can teach you those lessons. And even in the abyss you can sometimes find a helping hand. You never forget that. And a poet is always, by definition, a loner.
WHO: John Gartland & Krom
WHAT: The noir poet of Bangkok meets the sound of Southeast Asian noir
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 8pm November 20
WHY: “The noir hero is a knight in blood-caked armour. He’s dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he’s a hero the whole time.” – Frank Miller