This is the first poem from Luke’s most recent collection of poems and short stories, The Migraine Hotel. This footage is from a book launch at The Slaughtered Lamb, Clerkenwell on 13th June 2009. Also reading at the event were Abi Curtis and Tom Chivers.
Luke recently performed at The Southbank Centre on Thursday 7th October (2010) as part of National Poetry Day Live. More details for this can be found here.
If you would like to find out more about Luke, please click here to visit his info page on this site.
The description for Everything’s Fine is, “it’s all cool and happy”. Matthew describes how he approaches writing his poetry:
I almost exclusively use existing texts as a starting point and edit massively, for example in ‘Verlaine’ I extracted all the words ending -ing from Verlaine’s complete translated works and ‘For Richard Dawkins’ I took out the first word from ‘The God Delusion’ beginning with G, then with O and then D, continuing this for 420 pages. I have just finished ’16 Big Bangs for Marcus Chown’ a piece extracting all the alliterative fragments from Marcus Chown’s book ‘Afterglow of Creation’. The book I used for ‘Everything’s Fine’? ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ by Frederich Nietzsche. Employing chance operations usually feature somewhere and in this piece, I used a present from a friend to decide the font sizes for the words. A bingo machine, my friend thought would be great for me, an update to the bucket of scraps of paper with numbers scribbled on which I’ve been using since I as about 14. I developed this idea in a piece called ‘The Thought of Suicide’ – a much longer piece, also using Nietzsche, who wrote “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.”
This is just one poem within a considerable catalogue of Matthew’s poetry from which we could have chosen.
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