Colouring in Guernica

Kevin Cadwallender

Kevin Cadwallender is a writer who lives in Edinburgh but is a Yakker. He has a first degree in English and an MA in Radio Production & Management. His writing has appeared on telly, the radio, the internet, in books, in films, in songs, on tape, CD and DVD. He has a pathological dislike for biographies like this and would prefer not to blow his own trumpet as he is much more at home on the flugelhorn.

He has worked as a clown, a roadie, a music journalist, an actor, a nurse, a santa claus, a night porter, a floor tiler, a lecturer, a learning mentor, a youth worker a, a care assistant and he has done all these jobs to try to make ends meet and to fill biogs. Lately he has discovered that ends don't need to meet.

He is a vegetarian, atheist, romantic, with GSOH but doesn't want a date with anyone. He runs Voxbox (with Anita Govan) in Edinburgh and is Red Squirrel Press's Scottish Editor and had many children all of whom are his.

Google me!

See also Kevin Cadwallender's second collection for Red Squirrel Press, Sagrada Familia; Red Squirrel are also the distributor of Kevin's collected 'Baz' poems, Baz Uber Alles.

Two poems: Colouring in Guernica and Dances with Vowels  |  Reviews

Colouring in Guernica

Take out your books and brains
You are going to experience art
whether you want to or not.
Well it's bit dull but it's only
a photograph of a painting.
And a black and white one at that,
I bet the colours are spectacular like Gaudi
Yes, Gaudi's the one whose buildings
look like melted candles in the Tapas bar
on Gray Street. He was Italian or Spanish and
dead I think. Was that a cathedral?
I thought it was a painting!
What's it called? funny name,
The Sagrada Family something or other.
I've got it, well not it,
No, a postcard, from my ex
Unfinished really (not my ex he's finished)
A bit of a building site not like ours
No, not like ours... Here are the felt tips and
For those of you who aren't allowed felt tips
Because of the spontaneous graffiti project
workshop we had in last week and the incident in
the corridor washable pens and Crayons.
Now then pay attention
we are here to learn something.
Let's imagine what colours Picasso used
In colouring in his famous painting, Guernica
Obviously it's about War
And War as you will all know is a bad thing
And none of you must start one,
Use lots of red and orange
Here is the blue in case
you want sky but we have run out of yellow
But that's okay because we don't need sunshine
today. Ignore the lightbulb in the top left corner
of the picture let's pretend it's not switched on.
I will order more yellow soon.
Try not to draw both eyes on the side like Picasso
because it's silly and we don't look like that.

You don't need to know anything about art to
teach it, my boyfriend is a painter... and decorator
Last week we had fun and education
Joining the dot to dots
on Starry starry night by Don McLean
And drawing alien arms
on the Venus Di Milo by Leonardo Di Caprio.

Now children, you see this man here
Impersonating Edward Munch's The Scream
He is our visitor today and he will teach you
Everything there is to know about poetry
He doesn't have a real job like me
And his name is Kevin.

Dances with Vowels

If I had known that Vowels
Was an anagram of Wolves
Or indeed that Wolves was an anagram of Vowels
I would have written this a long time ago.

I was raised by a pack of vowels.
Five unrelated aunties
Who gathered around my crib
Reciting the incantation
Aaah
Eeee
Aye
Oh
You.

When I said crib there I wanted to say manger
That might mean I have a God Complex
An inner sublimated Christ rising to the surface
However I am an atheist
Which means I don't know if God exists
Not that I don't care if God exists,
I don't know what Jung would have said about that
Maybe he wouldn't care by now.
Jimmy Young would have said TTFN
An acronym devoid of vowels.

I love You Has an awful lot of vowels
Except in Text messages
Where it simply says I LY.

If Little Red Riding Hood's Grandmother
Had been eaten by a vowel I suspect
It would be an 'e.'
I ate an 'e' once but that's a different poem.

I found a bag of consonants in my computer
Just rattling around, I tried to use them
Ffffffff Fffff Kkk
Swearing is rubbish without vowels.
I was raised by vowels

I speak the language
And flatten them like a carpenter making a cross.
My aunts are all dead now nailed into coffins
Howling like Werevowels.

---

"Kevin read from this at The Poetry Scotland Weekend at Callander. It's high-energy poetry, thought-provoking and sparkling with ideas and wit."

Colin Will (poet, publisher: Calder Wood Press, Chairman: STanza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival)

Colouring in Guernica was also reviewed by Andy Croft in The Morning Star in December 2007:

"Kevin Cadwallender is a northern surrealist, his sense of humour more cynical than Ian McMillan and drier than Geoff Hattersley. Colouring in Guernica (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99) is both funny ha-ha and funny disturbing.

"Cadwallender uses word play, good puns and bad jokes to defuse his anger about relationships in Imagine Nation and Foreign Bodies, about writing in The Poetry Register, An Apoplexy for Poetry, about geography in There are Loads of Planets with a North and culture in Everything Sounds Like Kurt.

"This is a poet who is never lost for a good one-liner - "love is a cheap kebab" and "the fog on the Tyne is/ a timeshare investment," he quips. Geography, he says, is just "the rules/they teach you in school."