OUR MAGAZINE IN THE CENTRE OF LONDON

The Eccentric Poet.

Joseph sells his poems near the Embankment Tube Station.

I am a poet and I sell my poems on the streets of London. I started with a stock of lyric poems I suppose, public verses, love songs, mystical and religious works. Through encounter with the public I was led to make edition. So I have Occasional poems, people ask me for birthdays, for weddings and for parting of friends. Sometimes I saw children so I provided myself with children's poems that were written by my daughter and my nephews. A lady came up to me one day and said, "Could you make a poem for my daughter? She died aged sixteen years in her sleep". I made a memorial poem for her called 'Elegy for her daughter'. Another chap came up to me one day and said, "My girlfriend is a heroin addict. I've been helping her. She is going into a clinic now for the final stages of her treatment. Could you give me something that will help her? ", so I wrote a poem called 'The Ordeal'. A beggar girl came up to me and said, "Can I have a present for my mother? ", so I wrote a poem called 'The Child'.

I see myself as a sort of servant. I sit on the streets and there are a lot of things going on on theses streets. There are a lot of drug addicts, drunks, deranged people and one gets into contact with that. There are friendly beggars. I have had a beggar come up to me and say, "Recite a poem for me. ". I recited a poem for him and he gave me a pound. Some of my customers have been beggars. A man came up to me who could neither read nor write and asked me for a poem for his mother. I wrote a song for him called 'The Dialogue'. There is a lot of disorder and derangement and if you stand out on the streets you are bound to contact it.

Sometimes wonderful things happen. I had a homeless fella just out of prison who befriended me and he became a poem seller for a week. I used to give him bundles and he would go out and importune the public. So I had a little bit of companionship. If he hadn't had a weakness for the drink he would probably still be selling poems with me now.

I live a totally eccentric existence now. There is something about being an artist, you just run to the edges. I never could earn an ordinary living by the prescribed routes. I was an actor for a few years with an acting company. It would be a long story to tell about what I've been doing over the years. When I was about thirty I discovered that I was a poet. Since that time I have devoted myself to poetry. By miraculous means I seem to have survived. It has to do with not being able to fit in with things.

The reason that I got homeless was that when I first came to London I couldn't handle the madness of it all. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was living in a room out in Tottenham and I used to keep passing this beggar on a shop corner. One night this was preoccupying me so much, it was cold, it was January. I had reached right to the edge of things so I went out and I said that I was going to spend the night with him. It was a frozen night. He was a lovely man, an absolute saint of a man, quite lost to normality, deranged, but in the night times I spent a bit of company with him and we would often say, "The children, the children, how cold it is for the children." I found out from a few people that he was actually born in that locality and he was haunting the ground of his parents. I used to see him trudging up and down Tottenham High Road bent under the weight of a cross. He seemed to be like a Genus Loci for this place, keeping it going, whereas those coming out of the tube station came rushing past like people out of Dante's hell. He was serving a purpose; he was at a post, the beggars' post. Lazarus. That was the preview to my living on the streets for a while, roaming round the country, sleeping in parks and generally having encounters that one should not be having if he wishes to preserve his sanity. Somehow I managed to.

England is a very dead place. It is like Blake said, 'Mind-forged manacles' everywhere. The city is quite insane with all its corruption. You go to the country and you find a curious deadness there. That of course is an historical thing. The history of how we have used the country, how we turned it into a factory and all this profane, our profane relations with our animals. I think in some ways, if you are sensitive, the country is more Satan's city. I spent a bit of time in a park in Bath. If you live in the under-belly or you go to the other side where you are no longer preoccupied with the normal transit from home to work, perhaps one just picks up these things. The fact that we are living with terrific depths, spiritual depths. Sooner or later there will have to be some correction. We will have to come back nearer to some kind of natural life.

I am from an Irish Catholic background which, I think, places you removed from English life with the Catholic faith having become an alien in England. I was brought up mostly with Irish people. I didn't see many English people and I never have been able to get on with them. I'm quite grateful to the Catholic Church. One thing I particularly remember was that I was told as a young man that every person had a vocation. That had a deep impression on me and I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to find out what mine was, until it became manifest what it was. That is a very helpful thing to be told. I'm half-English as well so that has presented me with a divide to bridge between the Irish Catholic inheritance and the English inheritance. The world I lived in was the world of art and most of the English poets are Protestant and belong to the indigenous English thing which happen after the Reformation. So, in some ways, my artistic work is an attempt to unify separate streams of Irish Catholic inheritance with an English literary artistic inheritance like Blake, Milton and Shakespeare.

I have four children so my timetable is controlled by my responsibilities as a father. I get up in the morning with my wife and we've to see to four children. We've to see that their nappy's are changed, get my daughter to school which is a mile and a half away, and then the immense tasks of laundry and shopping and so on. I have to collect my daughter at three p.m. from school and then we go home and have some dinner. I don't come out to work as a poem seller till about half-five or six p.m. and then work till ten or eleven p.m.