** Who is still alive.
Dear John:
You are an epoch-making genius. You created the contemporary spoken word scene in the United Kingdom. What you were doing in the mid-1970s was ahead of its time.
My spoken word practice, in comparison to yours, is a miserable thing, but its mere existence is, indirectly, attributable to you.
Be that as it may.
You created what I call “the Salford machine gun”. Automatic syllables thrown out for the sake of throwing them out. Whether you did this well or not is neither here, nor there. You spawned three generations of incompetent imitators.
Your poetry is yet another example of what I consider to be the triumph of form over meaning.
When you were chosen as the face of the Leeds International Festival of Ideas in (I think) 2019, I just could not believe it. I was staggered. Stunned. Amazed. Filled with wonder.
Why would anybody appoint somebody for a “Festival of Ideas” who had been doing the same set, since 1976? You could give me 10 seconds, and I could think of 6 poets with more ideas, and as much verbal craft, as you, and every single one of them would be able to read and hold an audience.
I am writing your obituary.
It remains to be seen who outlives whom.
John, I love your work. I hate the way you seem to have degenerated into some kind of right-wing lunatic.
You created the spaces that we now occupy.
We could make more use of them if you would just shut up.
iamhyperlexic 