'Blue Lamp Disco' - a cento from a lost friend

At yesterday's Music and Mind Festival in Whitehead, the young Belfast poet Zara Meadows read a cento, a poem constructed of lines and phrases from poems by other poets. I’m a massive fan of the found poem in general, usually based on non-literary texts, but the cento isn’t a form I’ve explored. It prompted me to share this, though.

A year or so before he died, my friend the artist, musician and designer David Hunter (known online as Speciman Yak) recorded a piece of music with lyrics taken from poems in my collection Blue Lamp Disco. It isn't a setting of any single poem, but a collage of lines and phrases that he said caught his imagination. So a cento of sorts, and certainly a work that exceeds or escapes its origins. He agonised over the vocals for a long time but resigned himself at last to the sound of his own voice. Which I suppose is something we all have to do…

Yak is gone now, and I miss our camping and hiking trips. Some of them are documented on his YouTube channel, like this snowy day on Slieve Commedagh in the Mournes.