As many of you may have read, the outsider folk musician, poet and painter, Ed Askew has passed away. The last Ed Askew album reviewed on KLOF Mag by Tom Blake was London (2020), a collaboration with Trembling Bells. Following the announcement of Ed’s passing, I saw that Tom had shared a poem he had written on his Instagram. In that post, he adds: “Ed was one of the finest, most big-hearted, most underappreciated songwriters of his or anyone else‘s generation. I wrote this weird little poem about him a couple of years ago.” Details of Tom’s book of poetry titled ‘Ƨ‘ can be found below.
Tom’s poem mentions Ed Askew’s song ‘Japanese Movies’.
He Is 82 Years Old Now
in the morning I read a terrible poem by Pound
the one about the girl in the tea shop
who has lost her beauty
in the afternoon I put on a song by Ed Askew
he sings about wanting to fuck young Japanese men
he is 82 years old now
sometimes coffee and toast together is a bad idea
I have a hernia that stands guardian over my stomach
these things are a part of you
sometimes it is obvious that the day will falter
it will be a day of discomfort or downright catastrophe
you won’t be able to locate the centre
the song starts like this
I watched Japanese movies in the morning
pretty guys to keep me going
I have a name for my hernia
I call it Gelert and it is the size of a thumb
of course it is just a part of something else
you think of coffee and toast as a good thing
that’s what we do here
Pound’s tea shop girl brought him muffins
I write about myself and a bowl of fruit
my children eat an apple a day
I can’t keep up with that
Tom Blake has a book of poetry titled ‘Ƨ‘, published on Red Ceilings Press (order it here – only a few copies left) and, as if to join the dots of this post, that book of poetry was reviewed by Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells.
“There is something sexily pleasurable in the pain behind Tom Blake’s Ƨ. It reports back from many different battlegrounds – bacterial, psychological, military – and talks dirty about the slow decay of our bodies as our fingers tighten around the neck of our planet. Blake’s vision is ruminative with huge gulps of melancholy. His verses have an oracular energy, unspooling in hypnotic, sing-song cadences while warning us against our baser natures. His lines reveal something about the mercurial priority of poetry itself, as the poet skulks between “loud cafes” and “sad beaches”. Ƨ crouches and snarls in the corners of the mind before bursting out of the mouth and turning to ash in mid air. The apocalypse has never sounded so sexy.”
Alex Neilson
“Blake is expert at capturing the minutiae of the everyday; impressive considering the enormity of the themes that circle and swoop like vultures, like parakeets. His verses sweep through cities, capturing mundane details as he goes while skirting the shadows of his own mortality.”
Tom Spooner