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MATT HARVEY - resident of Totnes, writer of sharply witty poetry and prose, performer on the alternative circuit, radio 4 broadcaster, co-author of the captions in Stone's Glastonbury book... and new Connect columnist. Here's Matt's - MOVING EXPERIENCE.
SINCE my last Bard’s Eye View in Connect I’ve changed my outlook on life. I’ve shifted my position. Not a full hundred and eighty degrees. I haven’t started writing for Connect’s shadowy sister publication The South West Separator, penning articles on new ways to burn fossil fuels and Ten Top Tips to avoid talking to your neighbours.
No, I’ve just moved house. And I’m quite excited about it. It’s amazing how literally looking at the world through a different window can change your metaphorical outlook as well.
We’ve moved from high-up-flat looking down on trees to house-in-a-dip looking up at the pavement, thus simultaneously down-sizing and upgrading. And, whereas before I’d gaze out on greenery, clouds and birds and write airy-fairy stuff about the play of light, cloud sculptures and the flight of migrating thoughts, I now gaze out on a coalyard, garages and trains and write airy-fairy stuff about heating appliances, traffic congestion and thoughts that commute. Or at least I intend to.
My first poem in my new home arises from a sense of place, inner and outer. I’d like to share it with you:
Matthew takes you down
To his place by the coal-yard
You can hear the trains go by
You can mooch about for ages
And you know he’s quite cerebral
But that’s why you want to be there
And he feeds you whelks and winkles
That come all the way from Brixham
And just when you want to tell him
That you’ve recently turned vegan
He gets you on his wavelength
And he lets the seafood answer
That you sound just like your mother….
Okay, it’s just a work in progress. My neighbour Mr Cohen described it as weak, derivative and dull, but I know that’s just his way of getting me to leave.
I was recently invited to write a piece on the paranormal for a Radio 4 discussion programme. I took it as my cue to canvas public opinion and I’ve been stopping people randomly on the street, without a clipboard, and asking for a comment on the paranormal.
Responses ranged from a genial ‘bollocks’, via an enigmatic ‘gravitons’, through to intriguing and frankly moving tales of signs, portents and unlooked-for visitations. But my favourite response was the man who stopped, looked me in the eye, paused, smiled, and said, ‘Did you get that?’ He was called Steve.
I sometimes wonder where beliefs come from. It’s tempting to believe our beliefs arise from the three Rs of reason, reflection, repetition and arithmetic. But I suspect they’re more influenced by the three Ts of taste, tradition, temperament and tidiness.
Some of us just have a low tolerance for untidiness. I’m partial to tidiness in day-to-day life – I would be, I’m a Virgo – but I like my philosophies left open-ended and raggedy-edged.
I don’t know much about reality, but I know what I like.
I’m not sure why I was deemed an appropriate person to offer a perspective on the paranormal.
Perhaps they’d heard about my spirit guide, Hank, an ardent sceptic who argues vigorously against his own existence and then gets depressed.
I used to do a bit of material in my act where I claimed to be the first person in the South West to be diagnosed as Shamanic Depressive. "Oh yes, Shamanic Depression," I’d say, "affects sensitive people – poets, complementary therapists and the like. My homeopath had it so badly she became suicidal; took a massive underdose. And there wasn’t the help then that there is now. No counselling, no cognitive behavioural therapy. You were handed a Devon Social Services leaflet called ‘Coping with Ectoplasm’ and left to get on with it…’
And so on and so forth. And people would laugh. Out of compassion, partly, but they’d laugh.
But I’m sensing - telepathically and pre-cognitively - the question: what do you mean ‘in my act?’. This is Bards Eye View - you’re supposed to be a poemy sort of person. You’re not a Jethro, or (God forbid) a Jim Davidson. Maybe a complementary Richard Digance, but without the guitar. Or the popular following.
Officially, I’m a stand-up poet. I stand at a microphone performing poems and patter, for money (on a good day), to audiences of mild-mannered and occasionally wild-mannered people. Its true. I’ve been doing it for years.
"You’re so brave, Matt, doing what you do," some people would say, occasionally, when I started. And I would say, "No, true bravery is to be found elsewhere." But secretly, in my heart, I agreed with them.
It’s no accident that metaphors used around stand-up tend to be gladiatorial, martial. If you do well you knock’em dead. You storm it. If you do badly, you die, in front of everyone, on stage. Mortifying.
My own pre-performance fight-or-flight evacuations are eloquent testimony to the visceral, do or die nature of stand-up. Nevertheless I can count the number of times I’ve seriously embarrassed myself on stage on the fingers of one hand. Although I do use a unique binary system, which ascribes high values to index finger and thumb.
Why should you die if you don’t do well? Because it’s so live. You don’t wait for reviews, for test results, it’s continuous assessment. With no protective fourth wall, the stand-up lives or dies, thrives or withers, according to the unpredictable response of this evening’s audience - this capricious, unrepresentative cross-section of society which tends to be crueller than the sum of its parts and younger than the mean age of its constituents. They want instant gratification. And they want it now.
But that’s all we have time for. Enjoy the rest of the issue. Thank you very much and good night.
Matt Harvey
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