I first encountered David Stuart Ryan in 1980 when I was fresh out of rehab and he used to run a weekly poetry venue by candle light in the gothic basement of the Troubadour Coffee House in Earls' Court, London.
Thanks to Ryan, the listings in Time Out used to bill me as "A Stormtrooper of the Mind." When the billing matter became, "Mike Burgess, humourist," I thought I had arrived. It was not easy getting my swollen head into the building for a Monday night reading.
For my own amusement, and probably nobody else's, I used to publically mock Ryan as a boring old hippy for his bongo rhythms and his reminiscences of the road to Kathmandu. I can still recite lines from his free-verse ballad about Dr. Death: so there's greatness in the work after all.
Our feud was always tongue-in-cheek. And I wish we were half as clever then as we thought we were.
Ryan gets the last laugh. He's punting out a bunch of books through his Web sites. He runs a nice little online horoscope business. And Dr. Death has not knocked on the door of 134 Elsenham Street even after all these years.
"One word we cannot use is good-bye..."
"For Cecile" — drum poem performance by David Stuart Ryan
Contact: Kozmik Press, 134 Elsenham Street, London SW18 5NP, UK
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The Cream of the Troubadour Coffee House
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