Jem Rolls

Most pictures are more like comedy routines, get longer.

And so you have to, yeah, kind of watch out for them really.

But yes, generally there's just generally a lot of fat in there.

And yet frequently, only until you perform the thing, you've got something blindly obvious.

You're basically on the verge of something much better than what you had.

Frequently happens yeah, and you know you only find that in the moment and how you could have not when you read things through a hundred times you cannot realize the blind and the obvious but yeah, you're frequently do or people say things but generally it's just you're aware in the moment there's something that's not quite there you know you're being 95% and 95% isn't enough.

Well, I doubt there's ever been a poem published that wouldn't be better if they performed it a hundred times before it got to the page.

And I mean the most obscure non-performative types, you know, I still think...

It would actually help if they had to communicate their idea over to people.

I don't think aesthetically it would do their pieces any harm at all.

Right, okay, yeah.

Right.

Because, oh, he's just stuck at home all night, you know, I'm a genius, I'll just write another... I'll just write another couple pages of that.

No one's going to complain because I'm a genius, yeah.

Yeah, that's a plan.

Basically I get no inspiration whatsoever I think from poetry and I can't think of any really that's inspired me apart from John Cooper Clarke when I was a teenager you never get enough of the Daily Express it's enormous fun with rhyme really and I listen to a lot of song lyrics and old musicals

And novels really, particularly American novels, just upbeat, banging prose.

So I'm big on Tom Wolfe, you know, don't like politics, talk marvellous, right?

Thomas Wolfe, who seems to be one of the great lost geniuses.

And, you know, Henry Miller, Martin Amis for that matter, and then, you know, Tony Morrison.