Arguments & Nosebleeds at the Fringe

On Thursday 19th and Friday 20th August, I will be performing alongside Jane Overton, Alex Frew and Robin Cairns in an evening (well, an hour) of comedy performance poetry - for FREE (Laughing Horse Free Fringe). Time: 8.30-9.30pm. Laughing Horse @ Espionage (Venue 185) - Pravda Room, middle floor. (4 India Buildings, Victoria Street, Edinburgh  EH1 2EX. Entrances on Victoria Street and Cowgate.)
www.argumentsandnosebleeds.co.uk

The arrogance and the ignorance...

I've just been watching a rather interesting edition of Horizon on BBC2, "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?". It details how little cosmologists actually know, and how so many conjectures, without any explanation or proof, have been assimilated into the "standard model" which purports to explain the universe. This gives me the perfect opportunity to show off my own insights in a poem I wrote a few years ago. It may be completely off the mark (I am not an astrophysicist), but maybe not...

Through a bottle, darkly

When we look back in time into the sky,
How do we know our lines of sight are ‘straight’?
Perhaps, through all our telescopes, we scry
A cosmos bending under its own weight.

Klein’s bottle is a never-ending loop
Where 3-D space curves inside-outside-in,
A four-dimension ‘Möbius hula-hoop’
With all points sitting on a single skin.

When we look back in time into the black,
Do we re-see the self-same points in space?
Does substance reappear along the track,
Back-formed and in its former time and place?

Dark energy and matter need not be
If all there is is less than we can see!

© Chris Young

Everything clearer now? Now all I have to do is explain why galaxies spin with near-uniform velocity despite relative distance from the centre and what exactly gravity is...

It's not the winning...

I have never won a poetry slam. By the end of tomorrow night, that will probably still be true. But I'll still give it a go. I will be joining my fellow poets at the Rio Cafe (Hyndland Street, Partick) from 8pm to perform two 2-minute poems in front of an expectant audience keen to get their money's worth (having got in for free). Three judges will award points for the quality of the writing, the performance and the audience response. The three highest-scoring competitors after the first two rounds will get a further 3 minutes each to fight it out for the prizes in the final.

I do this sort of thing quite a lot. Sometimes I get absolutely nowhere. Sometimes I get the audience completely on my side, and still get nowhere. Sometimes I get the audience on my side and the judges on my side, but end up just not quite managing to clinch it in the final. I know that lots of it is luck, but I also know that I need to raise my game to make the best of what luck I have. So, you'd have thought that by now I would have rehearsed my poems for tomorrow night at least a few dozen times. Well, you'd have thought that if you didn't know me.

It is ironic that one of the reasons I have not capitalised on my pole position in slam finals, according to a poet friend of mine, is that I don't appear to be "political". I do, in fact, have several poems which are of a political nature, but they tend to be either (a) not very good or (b) more stealthy or full-on funny than in-your-face earnest. This is my challenge for tonight: write two or three poems, preferably funny, at least one of which is overtly political. Wish me luck!

Yes, I sometimes use props and costumes...