THE HOT PRESS HAIKUS
by Kevin Nolan
Starting in April 2007, Kevin Nolan, a poet and musician from Dublin, contrived to have a haiku unwittingly published in the classified section of Hot Press magazine every fortnight. He did this for several years. Following the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic structure, the haikus were published in the guise of musicians' adverts. For the near half-decade that Nolan submitted his camouflaged haikus to the unsuspecting magazine, he had to continually provide new contact email addresses and phone numbers - often those of friends and family members unaware of or uninterested in his project - to prevent the editors from becoming suspicious. As the years went by and his haikus continued to appear regularly, Kevin told nobody about what he was doing. Because the magazine permitted many of the ads to run for several weeks before retiring them, Kevin would sometimes buy the latest issue of Hot Press and find that his fictive musicians had fully colonised the music-ads section.
The Hot Press Haikus are clearly the doings of a man with too much time on his hands. Nolan, now in his early thirties, has spent a large part of the last twelve years as a patient in St Patrick's mental hospital, over a series of lengthy stays. Diagnosed at nineteen with schizo-affective disorder. Projects such as the Hot Press Haikus, he says, are a way of both allaying and contemplating that sense of detachment. (Another project saw him taking photographs, over a period of years, of thousands of individual passing clouds, which he imprinted with the date and time at which they had been taken.) The haiku series, he says, is a reflection on artistic obscurity, transience, and obsolescence.
The following is a selection of the haikus, which appeared in Hot Press from 2007 until 2012, and whose total figure ran into the hundreds (Nolan himself has lost count).
The Hot Press Haikus
Lambeg drummer seeks
experimental outfit
based in Mayo Balla *
saw-man Joe aesthete
seeks musicians and poet
to form Dublin band
Saxophone/harpist
in Tralee. Prefer rock, Eels
Steve Stills. Contact Steve
Tea chest bass player
wants musicians for jamming
2I live in Dublin
Dublin ensemble
‘Burmese Violin’ looking
for cello player
Singer/lyricist
required for Dublin band
Beefheart meets The Fall
Drummer required
for punk rock band ‘The Hicoos’
for Dublin based gigs
Drummer seeks to join
Dublin band for summer gigs
Love Cohen, Cave and Waits
Need a bass player?
or a piano player?
well then I’m your man!
Piano player
starving for Dublin rock band
been playing ten years
Bullroarer player
back from travels in Queensland
seeks to play with band
Seeking Christmas gigs
guitarist available
know loads of covers
Bouzouki player
seeks Tipperary rock band
into Grinderman
Didge player searching
for like-minded musicians
Loves no-wave music
Musician seeks band
Proficient with keys and bass
Loves Christian music
Piano player
looking for Dublin jazz band
Can start right away
Musician seeks band
multi-instrumentalists
are preferable
Violin player
seeking barbershop quartet
Playing ten years now
Singer/composer
looking for CD art work
for debut release
Captain Beefheart fan
Looking to form tribute band
Based in Galway West
* This is the first of the haikus that Kevin Nolan ever had published in Hot Press magazine.
The Hot press Haikus were published in the Irish experimental journal, Colony.
