Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. I was on tour doing a stand-up comedy show all over Great Britain, Ireland, whatever, and I stopped to the university bookshop just randomly. University bookshops, I don't know if you're aware of this, they have some great

stationary bargains. So I went in there looking for you know not pads and yellow stickies and I saw a big fat

poetry book called the Norton anthology of postmodern American poetry and it was it was

expert I was put off it was it was it was 29 quid this book bar 982 pages so there was a lot of it I mean listen listen to this for a poetry book

that's me hitting it it's a big brick of a book and I picked it up about seven times and I'm thinking I can't paint 29 quid for a poetry book. I've got lots of poetry books, but I couldn't I put it down and picked it up and in the end I took it

away and I carried it for the whole tour heavy as it as it was there was a time on tour and I used to rush after shows to my

hotel rooms with beautiful strangers, but now I prefer fat books of poetry.

So I got this book and I did as I always do with an anthology.

I don't start from the beginning. I sort of flick through and this is, I know, slightly shallow of me, but I look for a title that grabs me and the title that I saw was a poem from

1994 by Caroline Knox, and what a title.

This poem is called Famous Big Shots.

I mean famous big shots. I absolutely dragged me. If ever there was a

Panini sticker collection called famous big shots I would be in there and it was weird

because big shots you think of it like you know it sounds the whole poem the idea of

famous big shots sounds It sounds like a sort of a sort of crass brutish celebration of success

and I wanted to see how that manifested itself. I knew nothing of Caroline Knox, still don't really, other than she wrote a poem that I love a lot and that is this poem. I'll just read the first

chunk of it to you I'm not going to stop on the way because it's a poem I don't like to I like to read it out loud it feels one of the the

poems that feels good on the lips I'm just going to give you a blast of the first, I don't know, eight

lines or so. Famous big shots of the world unite in black tie and nutria stormcoats,

omnipotent handsome dreamboats, totally snazzy and slightly snobby,

exclusive hot shots with prodigious bank rolls for clandestine

bombshells, gaslight escorts, splendidly outfitted armfuls of Kashmir a judge diaphinus.

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