John Webber
was born in Waterloo, London in the year that Elvis first entered
the charts and the Suez crisis began. In the same year, Johnny
Rotten, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Jan Peter Balkenende, currently
Prime Minister of the Netherlands, were also born, none of
whom has yet had a book of poetry published.
After an
unsuccessful dalliance with Victorian style education at his
local grammar school, John’s academic potential was finally
stirred by a series of young female teachers at the college
of further education which took him in at the age of sixteen.
Here he discovered the delights of art and drama and the metaphysical
poetry of John Donne, the latter, once explained, appealing
to the baser elements of his teenage psyche.
His own attempts
at poetry at this stage produced no more than a series of dubious
limericks however, and he was lured by the more immediate gratification
of stage and screen to Reading University, where he embarked
on a degree course in Film and Drama. Having spent four years ‘poncing
about in make-up and hanging around the student union bar’,
as one of his non-student friends put it, he graduated and
entered an uncharacteristically responsible period as an English
and Drama teacher, also in Reading.
The
ravages of the Thatcher (spit) era on the teaching profession
persuaded
him that his destiny lay elsewhere, however, and fate sent
him for an interview for a job in IT
where he was re-trained in the dubious art of computer programming.
Whilst providing him reasonably with the necessary ‘beer
tokens of life’,
John’s desire to make his mark on the world was never
entirely ground down by his office career.
Creativity
reared its beautiful head once again, and, re-acquainting
himself with his volume of Donne, he decided that writing
poetry was
the way to go.
Eventually
the poetry magazine Envoi gave in to his tirade of submissions
and published three poems in one edition, thus convincing
John that he was on the path to laureate-dom and that he
might not
have to spend the remainder of his working life grappling
only with the latest fiendish machinations of Microsoft after
all.
Buoyed by
this success, he branched out into prose and made an immediate,
if hardly noticeable impact on the publishing world with his
first book, A Slow Boat to Moscow, the travelogue style story
of his hilarious adventures in Russia.
Finally
the previously disparate worlds of writing and computing
came together
to form ABC Tales and UK Authors, the perfect playgrounds
for John’s unique skill-set, and he was at last able
to fulfil his destiny as barenib, the internet bard, inflicting
his now
distinctive brand of cyber-performance poetry onto an unsuspecting
world wide web. His first collection of poetry, Private
Histories,
is published by the UK
Authors Press.
e-mail
John Webber
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