Always unpredictable, he was known in some areas (like hospitals) as John Hawkins. As a poet, he was known as Spike Hawkins, and taxi drivers called him Frank.
In the late Nineties, my boss asked me to set up an international poetry book series, and Spike was the ideal person to lead it. Known internationally, he wasn’t part of a narrow clique, so he was able to suggest some excellent poets for the series, which we called Poets’ Voices. I wanted each book to include a CD of the featured poet, to take each poem beyond the page into performance – the poets read their work in their original language, and if possible in English translation.
Fortunately, before the publisher was conglomerated at the turn of the millennium, a selection of Spike’s own work was published in the third volume in the Poets’ Voices series. One memorable afternoon in Steve Dracup’s recording studio, he recorded Spike, who read all the poems in this book, a marathon performance with hardly any re-takes. (more below)
The relatively short, pithy and amusing poems in the book are everyday but surreal in character. What could we call this collection of distilled different experiences, word-plays and atmospheres? I suggested the title 250 Grams of Poetry, which Spike liked, as he enjoyed street-markets.
Years later I chose sixteen of my favorite poems from this book, and set Spike’s reading of them to film, in I’m Back, the title of the shortest poem in the collection. Films like this were shown in underground screenings I set up at The Foundry (no longer in existence) and in the Calder Bookshop, when the publisher John Calder was around to support such events.
Once, at The Foundry, the audience enjoyed Spike’s reading of his poems so much, (peppered with his amusing anecdotes) that it looked as if they would miss their last tube trains home. (This was before all-night underground services).
I wanted to capture audiovisually, before it was too late, Spike’s reading of his latest writing. I grabbed the large professional video camera from work, and filmed him in his home, choosing and performing his own selection of poems and texts from his notebook. The film is named Assault on Time, after one of his poems which he performs in it.
This reading took place during a brief summer thunderstorm, whose rumbling followed with providential timing a tragic poem about a soldier lying on barbed wire on a battlefield in World War I. At another synchronous moment Spike reads a poem which features the sound of dogs barking – and there they are: the dogs in Breugel’s famous painting of hunters in winter, they bark on the wall behind the poet.
Later, Death makes a brief appearance:
‘Met Death on the market –
asked him if he was on the ‘phone
He started waving and said he was
an unlisted number.
Why? I asked.
Nobody rings my number (he said),
But I ring everybody once.'
From Spoonflags
by Spike Hawkins (1943-2017).