Cover, Contents & Preface

Vers Idiotique Eleven

  

 

by

Victor Adereth & Andrew Seear

London & New York, 2012

Contents

Preface by Sir Corbet Woodall                                              

Report From The 2012 Seoul Conference                                                

On Dietary Illnesses In Horses                                                                             1

Northampton: Where Sibelius Went Wrong                                                                     2

An Advertisement For War                                                                                            3

Desire                                                                                                                          4

The Silence                                                                                                                  6

Evening Bells                                                                                                                7

The Excursion                                                                                                               8

Concerning Idaho                                                                                                         10

The Ballad Of Joseph Smith                                                                                          11         

Things People Did                                                                                                        14

Freedom & Liberty                                                                                                       16

The Beach                                                                                                                   18

Things We Learn                                                                                                          20

Welcome to Sweden!

Välkommen Till Sverige                                                                                                23

En Älskare Reser Norru                                                                                                25

Here’s… Johan!                                                                                                           26

Möjligheter för alla I den svenska flimbranschen!                                                            28

Trevligt Att Träffas!                                                                                                     30

Pain Without Ceiling, Men With No Feeling                                                                    32

In Violation Of Norms                                                                                                   34

The Courage of Thomas J. Underwood                                                                           37

The Ballad Of Steve Jobs And Lief Ericsson                                                                    40

A Swedish Lullaby                                                                                                         43

Taking An Interest                                                                                                         46

Aquatic Absolute                                                                                                            47

Oxenstierna Faces Down The Pessimi Exempli                                                                 48

Dear Mary:  Your Problems Solved                                                                                50

Letters to The Daily Telegraph                                                                                         56

Preface

by Sir Corbet Woodall

Former BBC Newsreader and Author ofThis Is Sir Corbet Woodall And Here Is The News In Heroic Couplets

Victor Adereth vigorously maintains an address in East Ham, despite the devastation wrought by the Olympic Games. “Three months after the Olympic Flame was extinguished armed policemen on horseback are still demanding to see my passport,” he told James Naughtie during the November 15th edition of Today, the popular early-morning Radio 4 news programme. When Naughtie himself added that the Paralympic Games, which followed on directly after the Olympics proper, had “granted the civil authority unprecedented powers of search, arrest, detention, torture and summary execution,” listeners were perturbed to hear what was later understood to be riot police entering the studio and arresting Adereth and Naughtie amid sustained gunfire. When Naughtie was returned to his duties the next morning he assured listeners that the police had been obliged to discharge their automatic weapons and percussion grenades simply to restore order. He thanked them for responding so promptly to the emergency call he had put in when the interview with Adereth had become a threat to the safety of listeners.

Adereth was attacked three days later in The Mandarin Palace, Gants Hill, by a young man armed with a shoulder-mounted water-canon who identified himself as Leslie Thruxton, a former pupil of Adereth’s who chanced to be in the restaurant that evening. Recognising his old teacher, he seized the opportunity to wheel his 3000-gallon water compressor over to Adereth’s table and “take him for a bit of a hop, skip and a jump down Memory Lane”. When he was asked by reporters if he remembered Thruxton, Adereth replied, “I remember Leslie as petite and rather shy—and she didn’t have a beard when I was helping her to an appreciation of Sir John Suckling. Mind you, that was twenty years ago.”

At the turn of the New Year, as the nation was crossing the Tropic of Capricorn—I speak in electoral rather than nautical terms—Andrew Seear lifted his political telescope to his already somewhat jaundiced eye and watched November 6th drop down nearside from the horizon and hoist her mainsail. The two-year electoral voyage had become a lethal drudgery for Seear long before 2012 appeared, came about and fired a broadside that left USS Common Sense in a burning and sinking condition. He felt he had no option but to go over the rail and let the Ship of Fools sail on without him.

As early as mid-February an op-ed intended for publication in The New York Times sounded an ominous note: “As we contemplate the field of Republican hopefuls as a representative group, or herd, we are not only entitled but obliged to feel a deepening concern for the future of the GOP. When we consider in particular Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, the vital supporting trio of Candidates Without A Chance, do we not have a responsibility to—at the very least—question our faith in American democracy? But when we gaze into the dark, dead world that waits behind the beseeching vacancy of Mitt Romney’s eyes, I believe we owe it to our shared humanity to stop for a moment, take a breath, and utter—I mean ask out loud—the most serious question in the world:  If we all die, who will mourn for us? Romney faces us as from some dreadful Easter Island of our common soul and we turn away, terrified and humiliated by the sudden realisation that we don’t matter."

Never a substantial presence wherever he happens to be, Seear seemed during that short and painful spring to hang and fade on the air like an uncertain memory of a building that you feel sure was there once but can’t quite visualise. Then he was gone. Hot spring gave way to the hottest summer in recorded history, prospective candidates slithered painfully out of the delirium of debate like frogs off a frying-pan, and in the end there was just Romney. Many readers felt that Seear’s reclusive mistress, the poet Mishkin, had no right to indulge his withdrawal and that her first duty, like his, should have been to them and not to him. His agent, Sam Yodel, is a notorious Buddhist who maintains and demands strict silence from his colleagues, employees and clients in and out of his office when he observes the practise of Sudoku from May to November. And Adereth was of course unhelpful as a point of principle when he wasn't being harassed, arrested and detained at the pleasure of George Osborne et al.

The poet Bashō says crystals never form in turbulent waters, that butterflies never fly in thunderstorms, and that flowers fail to thrive on the field of battle. But we know better.  Armed policemen galloped the streets of East Ham and Hurricane Sandy hurled the ocean at New York. The Spice Girls reformed and The Reverend Billy Graham prayed for a thunderbolt to strike down Dan Savage. The combined might of George Osborne, Mitt Romney, Rupert Murdoch, John Sununu, Mrs. Rupert Murdoch, the late Sir Jimmy Savile OBE, Donald Trump, Kenneth Branagh, Hank Williams Jr., Tony Blair, Eric Idle, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, Russell Brand, Ann Coulter, John McCain, Lionel Asbo, Mark Thompson and Coldplay conspired to silence the roaring pens of Adereth and Seear, but here they are as ever, clearing their throats to deliver more bad news.

These are desperate poems, written by, for and on the run from desperate men and women. This is traditionally a time of peace and goodwill, but these are not traditional poems. These poems acknowledge the crucial difference between mercy and kindness—and their authors know, crucially, the value and the worthlessness of each in unforgivable times.