It’s happening happening, like really happening
The upstairs room at Walthamstow Trades Hall is cackling, the odd guffaw, a poorly concealed snort (mirth, not contempt). No it’s not that modern bard, the stand-up comedian, it’s David Floyd reading from his new collection, A night at the snooker, to a tightly packed room, his motley crew of friends, poets and the occasional, bemused, other.
To celebrate the launch of his first full-length collection, a stylish green-pink square of comic genius, David & I meet in the pulsating and mood-lit atmosphere of a post-4 pm RSA House in Charing Cross. A terrifying task, slipping into interviewer/interviewee roles with a poet you’ve been working with for much of the past two years. Not to mention the added anxiety that comes with interviewing a titan of local news media, a bulwark of the London poetry scene, someone who is more often in my seat than on the other side of the table.
Despite a 20-year poetry career, this collection mostly comprises poetry from the recent three, set down in history (here) as David Floyd’s period of creative renaissance. This builds on his background as a steadfast organiser, devoting energy to Torriano’s weekly open mic, and to the board and editing work for Magma poetry magazine. One of the few exceptions from the opus of contemporary commentary, being the devastating suckerpunch of Execution, a poem you wish would just be ‘of its time’, but is instead a sickening window from 2008 into our present reality: “a theme that never goes away”.
There are few topics that David veers away from, no subject unearthed, from the manosphere to home-turf protectionism, from the climate catastrophe to that other universal tragedy of the stubbed toe. From the death of the high street, to the simple delights of grilled cheese. Is it ever just about the halloumi?
Befitting his dual badges of local news media legend and poet of the absurd, David’s discerning gaze shows his deep curiosity for how things are, and his interest in drawing connections, noting that many of our commentators either can’t, or refuse to see the world in all its layers. Richard Dawkins in the curry house (Oxford) speaks to the more benevolent and benign in UK religious culture, a nuance that is often lost in this, and similar debates. Here, religion is less a tool of mass control, and more a quietly deteriorating necessity of community and goodwill, propped up by an increasingly elderly constellation of parishes. Without deflecting from systemic failures, David simply presents, without judgment, what is disintegrating around us, offering the reader his “poem as a toy” to create their own conclusion.
Across the span of a collection, these sharp eyes accumulate a body of work that speaks to a world that I’ve come to think of as ‘David’s England’. His nostalgic, witty and excoriating take on the best, worst, and the plainly mundane of English, and British, identity, lands as bittersweet in a world with right-wing populism fogging the windscreen. “As with any country, there will be things you love, and things you don’t love–”. David’s work on love, toxins, and how to tell the difference, is a much-needed remedy for the exhausting reduction of British culture to ridicule and extremism.
“What people like is their business”
He sees much to preserve and to value. In David’s England, silliness is cherished: our penchant for dressing up as trees, or going on holiday to our beaches to play on slot machines. His poetry seeps with football ‘unhooliganism’ and understated activism (“stand up, if you love clean air”), discerning community-building patriotism from the insidious and permissive umbrella of exclusionary nationalism.
The final few works in the collection strike a familiar chord, crafted in company with fellow Wild Thing Poets. David shared with his launch audience how he blends our “concern about the imminent apocalypse with a few laughs”. A few laughs rippled through the room at that one. A newcomer to environmental poetry and since joining the collective, he has found the space to explore an authentic way of embodying climate concern as part of his creative and ideological identity. Committedly anti-didactic, David’s balancing act of humour and sincerity enables him to handle the fragile tension between the serious and the silly, masterfully evading the temptation towards evangelism, shock-factor politics or reductionism. Discussing the often exclusionary ‘aesthetic’ and lifestyle perception of the ‘stereotypical’ climate activist, David sights the middle pathway, operating a plainclothes role as an “activist for normal people”.
David believes in the unique role that poetry can play in complicated contemporary discussions. Creating a different kind of conversation, to bring to light the obvious, whether monstrous, or bittersweet, and to offer a bridging role: the vibrant gulf between policy and lived experience, between statistics and human reality. That is, David’s poetry illuminates the gap between theory and human experience, to communicate the severity of the age through the necessary fog of daily concerns, that are, after all, our lives.
RSA House, Charing Cross
A night at the snooker, published by Hearing Eye, can be purchased here (UK postage;international postage ). David’s 2012 Protest pamphlet can also be bought here. But seriously, reading it isn’t good enough. Get yourself to one of his performances, or you’ll find him most often at Poetry Lounge, Venn Diagrams, or one of our own live nights.
Interview & media by Tara Brown, therealtarabrown@gmail.com