Dodo Modern Vidpoets 2023: REMEMBERING EMILE SERCOMBE

REMEMBERING EMILE SERCOMBE

Our dear friend Emile Sercombe died on 14^th May 2023. Here we remember his friendship, his poetry and his art. Feel free to send us poems or comments about Emile and we will publish them as a separate post.

I met Emile in 1980 through London listings magazine Time Out – poets were invited to Worthless Words workshop in Kennington. There I encountered the finest performance poet I’ve seen. A poetry adventure began that would last over 40 years.

Worthless Words was formed by Emile and Pete Murry, now Dodo co-organiser. We performed as a group, touring arts and community centres and supporting Roger McGough at a Croydon festival, in a show directed by Christine Eccles. Performers included my sister Berni, Chris Cardale, reggae influenced Markus Jahn and 17-year old Mark Steel.

The eighties were a busy time. With Pete Murry and other union members I founded Ragged Trousered Cabaret, which staged benefits and shows for the labour movement. Emile performed in the first show, for Sutton Labour Party, and many subsequent events. We took shows to picket lines and to Snowdown Colliery during the miners’ strike. Emile also regularly performed for Apples and Snakes, founded by our friend Mandy Williams.

In 1984 Pete and I read at the St Ives Poetry Festival in Cornwall, invited by local poet and artist Bob Devereux. Emile came on our next visit. Bob and Emile immediately clicked – they were both artists and poets, both brilliant performers with a similar world view.

Audiences were amazed by Emile’s verbal and visual audacity, often combined with home-made props. They watched spell bound as he constructed an unreliable chair which fell apart at the poem’s end; they ached at the comic tragedy of Brian and Terry, where an innocent night out results in a fiery finale in a pub; they sighed for the fate of a worm eaten by a thrush. One of his potato poems used a humble spud to represent a cruise missile which explodes terrifyingly in a dustbin; in Kohinoor, the fabled jewel of the ages is shattered by a hammer; in Werewolf it turns out these sartorially sensitive creatures eat architects. Of course they do!

Emile was a brilliant writer. His poems are just as effective on the page as proved by collections Forty Best, God and His Mates and Worm Poems.

In 1989 Pete and I started Dodo Modern Poets, to provide a stage for new and established poets. Emile has been a regular performer ever since, appearing often at our London residencies, including the Poetry Cafe.

We took Dodo to Laugharne in Wales where Dylan Thomas once lived. Emile, Berni and London-based Cornish poet Sue Johns joined me for a gig at the Cors Hotel. The poets performed against a backdrop of French windows on a mild October night. Later, we joined Nick, the hotel’s owner, for drinks and a little weed. A fine mellow evening.

During the pandemic Pete suggested starting an online Dodo show. Emile contributed videos to many of these. Our latest show, Virtual Dodo Eleven, features two of his poems. These include the imagined reaction of a horrified T.S. Eliot when confronted by Tracey Emin’s bed in Margate’s Turner Contemporary.

I last shared a stage with Emile at the Canterbury Festival in October 2022, where Sue Johns and I staged an evening. Emile read Brian and Terry and a poem written on the spot, celebrating the festival. This was his party trick – writing something in the moment to read out loud. He did the same thing at our wedding reception when Ruth and I got married.

In 2013 Emile and his wife Berni moved to Ramsgate. The following year Ruth and I moved to Folkestone. We became neighbours by the sea.

Emile engaged enthusiastically with local poets, co-organising Eats n’ Beats in Ramsgate and appearing at the Landing Stage events at Turner Contemporary.

We last saw him at Berni and Emile’s house in May 2023. We shared fizzy wine and cake and passed round the Worthless Words broadsheet. We mused about those poets we had once worked with. Where did the time go?

My beloved poet had become my beloved brother in law. For anyone starting a new poetry adventure look no further than the extraordinary works of Emile Sercombe.

Patric Cunnane, June 2023

Here’s the poem Emile wrote on the spot at the Eleto Chocolate Cafe, Canterbury, 21 October 2022, during the Canterbury Festival.

POETRY AT ELETO

In this late Octobre when the trees in switch colour fold

and tempests drive leaves soaring into piles of gold

for kids and dogs and spadgers to kick and dance in

Then from ilke hamlets of Kentenland and een

from oure capital do poets come to be seen

and share their joyful words at Eleto chocolate cafe

by Saint Thomas’s Cathedral of blessed memory

in Caunterbury

And especially from Mitcheham Sue Johns has comen

And Patric Cunnane hot foot from distant Folke-stone

Frank Crocker feted poet of Londone

and great wordsmiths Aisha Celestino and Luigi Marchini

who live in towne

Yes

Welcome all poets and brilliant audience alle

To our festivalle

But now no silence more

Let us beginne

HURRAH HURRAH HURRAH!

EMILE AS ARTIST

Thanks to Berni Cunnane for permission to include extracts from the obituary she wrote for The Guardian.

Emile was also a gifted artist and muralist under the name Steve Lobb, working in south east London’s community arts movement. Together With Carol Kenna he set up artists’ collective Greenwich Mural Workshop in 1975. Public murals included The People’s River on the Meridian estate in Greenwich, designed in consultation with tenants. Other large scale murals included one in Floyd Road, Charlton, celebrating a successful campaign against demolishing the street and another at Rathmore youth centre which featured Gaudi-style mosaic benches.

In 1983 the Greater London Council asked him to produce a Wind of Peace Mural for GLC Peace Year. The following year it commissioned People of Greenwich Unite Against Racism for its Anti Racism Year.

The murals graduated from paint to mosaics, including the Hitchcock mosaics at Leytonstone tube station and the Glyndon estate mosaics in Plumstead. The workshop also made scores of banners for unions and other community groups. It restored a banner for the International Brigade, British Battalion, that fought in the Spanish civil war.

In 2019 Steve and Carol were involved in creating For Walls With Tongues, an online project with a book that gathered together some of the oral history of street murals.

Steve regularly exhibited his paintings in Greenwich and after moving to Ramsgate in 2013 staged several exhibitions of his paintings and constructions at the Pie Factory gallery in Margate.

A SELECTION OF EMILE’S DODO PERFORMANCES

Featured act, full set, in Virtual Dodo Six, May 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlETmD47SC0&feature=youtu.be

Single poems in other virtual Dodos

Virtual Dodo 1 Brian and Terry

https://youtu.be/TkELJG04DFk

Virtual Dodo 2: Brian and Betty and the Plane to Spain

https://youtu.be/iO7RqVMO-JA

Virtual Dodo 3: The Lockdown Drop

https://youtu.be/6SZJJbZGLYk virtua dodo 3

Virtual Dodo 4: Shenandoah

https://youtu.be/kKRgbSbRBoc