Discouraging news reaches me about Dennis Beerpint. The weedy poet has, it seems, cast off his beatnik persona. In an interview with the magazine Ex-Beatnik Poets Speak Out! he says:

“People will accuse me of selling out, but quite frankly I am sick and tired of sticking it to The Man, you dig? There’s no money in it. I want to be a people’s poet, like Carol Ann Duffy or Ian McMillan, but I am neither the Poet Laureate nor an irritating professional northerner. So when the Co-op offered me the position of surrealist-in-residence, I jumped at the chance.”

“Surreal” is a much-abused word these days, but it is surely appropriate to describe Beerpint’s first effort on the Co-op’s behalf. He was asked to add an intriguingly madcap line to the allergy advice on their jam doughnuts, and came up with this corker:

These products have been prepared in an area that handles the following ingredients: Celery, Crustaceans, Fish, Lupins and Molluscs.

Clearly, though he may indeed have “sold out”, Dennis Beerpint has not lost his mojo.

NOTE : Many thanks to Gaw for drawing this to my attention.