Peter Urpeth

The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 & Mouth Music

by Peter Urpeth

I am delighted to announce the publication of my new poetry collection - The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 & Mouth Music.

The collection is available on amazon in paperback and ebook formats - click cover opposite for ebook purchase and for a look inside the book…

Click here to buy the paperback and hardback editions.

Click the box opposite for a preview, and to buy the Kindle edition on Amazon…

About The Collection…

Set in London and New York in the late 1980s, the title collection combines memoir, eulogy, epic, love, jazz and beat poetry forms in a fractured and confessional journey - an improvisation on love and loss, on memory and its broken and unreliable traces, with the spaces and culture of the two iconic cities as its backdrop.

The work stems from a brief relationship I had with the author Kathy Acker in London and New York in the late 1980s. I was not part of any literary set or circle. I had read KA’s work, and then came a chance meeting in a club I was running at that time in Dalston. The relationship, short as it was (I reckon in total about 9 days), had a profound impact on me, and that was compounded, ten years later, on hearing of her death. This work is both praise poem and eulogy, an intense exploration of unrequited love and loss. The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 was written in phases over three decades.

This work is intended as both performance and page poetry.

In this volume, The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 is partnered with another smaller collection - Mouth Music - which was largely written in the decade after the events in the title and in part in response to them. These poems came when I’d moved to a remote location in the southern Cairngorms of Scotland, and then to the Outer Hebrides.

They are an exploration of shamanic poetic forms and are focused on my relationship with the natural world, mental health recovery, of overcoming trauma and loss through writing, and through an ecstatic and immersive experience with nature and the wild landscapes of the Angus glens.

Two earlier poems, also written in Scotland, are also included, and one recent poem.

Cover photograph: Stephen Salmieri

Readings / Performances:

Saturday 29 July 2023 - Tartan Heart Festival / BellaDrum 3.45pm with Ray MacDonald (saxes)

Saturday 8 July 2023 - The Hundred Years Gallery Hoxton, London 8pm - with Evan Parker (saxes)

Thursday 6 July 2023 - Sound Cellar House Gig, Poole, Dorset - with Jon Lloyd (saxes), Al Swainger (bass) and Rob Palmer (guitar)

Sunday 2 July 2023 - Jazz Rumours, Finsbury Park, London, 4pm - with Ntshuks Bonga (saxes). Plus premiere of setting of Lullaby for the Self in Crisis by Sammy Hurden (performed by Sammy voice / piano), and Jim Dvorak’s setting for four trumpets of East River Blues - performed by Jim and the Adliberation Trumpet Qt. feat Jim Dvorak, Loz Speyer Charlotte Keefe and Kevin Davey.

Saturday 28 January 2023 - The Hundred Years Gallery, Hoxton London 7pm - with Evan Parker (saxes) - review of this gig is here recordings of Evan’s solos at this gig -

Saturday 14 January 2023 - The Jazz Centre UK, Beecroft Gallery, Southend, Essex - with Phil Wachmsann (violin), Trevor Taylor (Drums) and Mark Hewins (guitars) - 2pm

Saturday 15 October 2022 - The Wanstead Tap 3pm with Evan Parker (saxes) - full details and tickets via The Wanstead Tap eventbrite

Friday 14 October 2022 - Finch Cafe, London with Ntshuks Bonga (saxes), Trevor Taylor (Drums) and Mark Hewins (guitars) 8pm - tickets on the door or via Finch cafe

London Jazz News review of Peter Urpeth / Evan Parker performance at Hundred Years Gallery…

Poet Peter Urpeth and saxophonist Evan Parker go back a long way, some 40 years, to when Urpeth joined Parker as pianist in an improvising trio. Their evening at the intimate Hundred Years Gallery celebrated Urpeth’s new book of poems, The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988, which he introduced as an autobiographical collection, written for performance and relating to significant times in his life in Dalston, New York, and the Cairngorms where he now lives.

‘Evan plays, then I read,’ he explained before reciting Scald – A Mouth Rune, a poem riven with the earthily textured imagery which runs through a strand of his works: ‘To you / who soaked a bird corpse / in pine sap /to make a winter lamp’.

Urpeth’s plain-speaking delivery of his richly crafted texts and upbeat anecdotal commentary, alongside Parker’s mesmerising playing on soprano sax held the audience’s rapt attention throughout

Many poems were reflective, formulated on long walks in Cairngorms, as he came to terms with the death in 1997 of American writer Kathy Acker, whom he got to know when she was living in London. Their friendship took in the Makeshift Club which he ran in Dalston in the ’80s, the subject of his second reading, Quixote in Dalston, ‘that scene of dykes and bois / and art jazz noise’ (Dudu, Moholo and Dyani are mentioned) and a visit to New York, where, when it came to reciting the poem that gives the collection its title, ‘not everything went to plan.’ New York, for Urpeth is, as he wrote in Morton Street, ‘… the city / that always weeps.’

Evan Parker’s multi-phonic, multi-layered playing on soprano sax was intense, transcendental and technically extraordinary, yet underlying it all there is a profound clarity in its essence. As always, concentration on the part of the listener yields a mesmerising experience and an appreciation of the emotional and structural complexity of his playing as layers are identified and revealed.

Between Parker and Urpeth there was a relaxed understanding, and their reflections on players in the New York jazz scene were amusing and insightful. Urpeth read a series of poems drawn from jazz-related notes, titled with consecutive numbers. In One, Parker is the subject: ‘Evan Parker was walking by Central Park. His hand was holding the handle of a battered sax case … brother Evan played a thousand notes to the passing skyscrapers …’, and in Three ‘Evan … could not tell where his sax began and his lungs ended,’ which prompted a ‘yeah’ from Parker. Others focussed on John Coltrane, Albert Ayler in Stockholm with Cecil Taylor, and Sunny Murray.

Parker countered with a story which had Coltrane entering the mens’ room at the Half Note playing 1,000 notes, followed by his own encounters with Cecil Taylor which led to them recording together, but characterised by Taylor’s disappointment that fellow revellers couldn’t keep up with him at 6am ‘when things were just warming up!’

Review of the collection by Ian Stephen for Northwoods Now Magazine…

‘Moody Soho streetscape (Stephen Salmieri photograph) but matt not gloss has the intervention of a typewriter-like script to suggest that this could be a howl of beat into punk into contemporary slam. We shuttle from London to New York in a microphoned burst of rhythm, arythm, scattered and disrupted rhyme, chime, repetition and stark plain short runs for breathers. But it’s not all like that.  A second section, ‘Mouth-music’ is mainly rural in subject and imagery. Most of these poems are short and many take a bird or other point of focus in the natural word as a main subject. But you can’t assume that the urban riffs are all in one style and the rural ones in another.

The title poem of the second section  (Mouth Music) beats with affirmation expressed in lyric. If like me you’ve been arrested by the rhythms of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ but pissed off by the aloof and shallow content you will savour the language and shamanism of a poet who has invested in the culture he is embracing. Celebration soars in the city poems too. The poet glimpses the Goddess of memory, mother of the nine muses, after walking Brooklyn bridge, passing by the stoker of an oilcan broiler. Urpeth’s Irish family background might have something to do with his openess to epiphany, as when the plover flies. His celebration of kite and dunlin but especially plover evokes, for me, Alexander Hutchison’s ‘Gavia Stellata’, surely one of the great modern Scottish poems.’

Original performance poetry event… 

The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988

Live performance poetry by Peter Urpeth

Premiered at The Dark Skies Festival at An Lanntair, Stornoway February 2022

Available for festivals / venues / writing groups as solo performer or with live trio

The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 is a stage poetry performance work that can be performed as solo voice or with soundscapes, or with a live band.

The performance is part-memoir, part-love song, which explores the nature and boundaries of memory and memoir, and the themes of love and loss.

Drawing on Orpheus’s mythic journey to the underworld to recover his beloved Eurydice, as its inspiration, this is a tale of love found and lost in London and New York, and is a lyrical beat sequence in the finest traditions of jazz poetry.

The sequence also features sparse works that cover the aftermath of loss and recovery in a remote Scottish glen, and explore the relationship between poet and the natural world to create an enthralling and accessible poetic journey.

But the story has a twist as we also follow Orpheus in and out of the Underworld, and ask the question what ever happened to Orpheus? With an intriguing conclusion…

Peter Urpeth is a musician and writer, whose poetry has been widely published and anthologised in Scotland and beyond. As a pianist, Peter has enjoyed a professional career working in improvised and experimental music across the UK and Europe and as a composer of scores for film and stage.

This work is the result of that endeavour and took as its starting point poems written over a 20 year period which here combine with new pieces to form the work.