Here’s a poem about Wilko Johnson, his music, and his strange encounter with cancer. Text followed by video.
This poem comes from a sequence called ‘Sound on the Lip of Silence: from the photographs of Trev Eales’, which itself is a distillation of a project that hit the buffers very late, just into the Pandemic (the two instances are aligned in my memory). I talk about that project here: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Wilko Johnson
I’ve
seen him leaping in the freshness
of youth across the stage of my
miscomprehension, his body in
percussive jounce, frenetic frenzy
of mopped hair. Later, much later,
he seems
in decline, terminal, a
meat-head butting mortality. But
misdiagnosis
or miracle
gives him back to time, as
continuity, and from it he quickens
a pattern like rising chords
on wild frets, a finale
that becomes a prelude in late style.
Fresh prickles of hair rise on his scalp.
I saw Wilko twice, I think, once with Dr Feelgood, whose hyped-up blues I didn’t get at the time, and once solo, when I equally didn’t get his proto-punkness, though I remember being impressed by that energy, also captured in Trev’s photo, and captured in my memory (of the stage at UEA). And, in my poem I hope. Now, both strategies make sense. Indeed, my friends and I were discussing him on Tuesday evening, ignorant that he had already passed away. I don't think he's going to 'rest' in peace.
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