Growing up in Jersey in the seventies, before I left to do American Studies at Essex University, wasn't easy as an anomalous poet living in a largely pedestrian, materialistic society. My escape came by way of finding part-time employment with John Berger, part of the Berger Paints family, who patented Prussian Blue, the first modern synthetic pigment. John Berger, a wealthy, reclusive aesthete and compulsive bibliophile and antiques hoarder, kept his mother mummified in the living room of his property Tivoli, and my unusual introduction to his eccentric, serendipitous lifestyle forms the basis of this sequence. If arson had torched a property of his, left as a ruin in Waterworks Valley, then the shell of the house and the adjoining fields were used by a group of friends of mine to do LSD, and to set up large speakers in the ruin through which to play psychedelic music and the seminal rock albums of the period. We called the place Psychedelic Meadow as it was regularly coloured and shaped by acid. Paula Stratton's LSD documentation of her experience of the drug became a seminal influence on my poetry. When she committed suicide in the late seventies at a squat in Chester Gate, Regent's Park a big light went out in me, and my poem 'Elegy for Paula Stratton' can be found in the collection This Is how You Disappear, my book of elegies for dead friends. Nobody I know has ever come more beautiful. (Jeremy Reed)
Reed, Jeremy: - Jeremy Reed, born on a chip of rock off the coast of French Normandy, has been for decades one of Britain's most dynamic, adventurous and controversial poets. Called by the Independent "British poetry's glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie", his poetry, fiction and performances of his work are singularly inimitable in their opposition to grey mainstream poetry. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes such as the Somerset Maugham Award, and, on coming to live in London in the 1980s, was patronised by the artist Francis Bacon. Among his biggest fans have been the late J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty and Björk, who called his work "'the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world"' Jeremy writes about every subject that British poetry considers taboo: glamour, pop, rock, sci-fi, cyber, mutant, gay, drugs, neuroscience, the disaffected and outlawed, and the fizzy big-city chemistry of the London in which he lives and creates. His performances solo, or with The Ginger Light are unrivalled in intensity. In recent years he has published the first book-length poem on Elvis Presley, Heartbreak Hotel (Orion), Saint Billie (Enitharmon) a book-length poem on Billie Holiday, Orange Sunshine, an epic poem on 1960s pop culture, Duck and Sally Inside and This is How You Disappear (both Enitharmon), a book of elegies for dead and missing friends, a biography of Anna Kavan, Stranger On Earth, a novel, The Grid (Peter Owen) and his recent book of poetry Piccadilly Bongo contained a 4-track CD from the singer Marc Almond. Amongst his many other recent publications are John Stephen, King of Carnaby Street and the 1960s Look and a book of sci-fi poems Honey I Need, with an introduction by J.G. Ballard. He works and performs with musician Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light.
