Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, Clicky McPhotographer spent much of his youth in the company of William Butler Yeats. The poet and modernist exerted a profound influence on the young lad, in his artistic walk and lifestyle choices. Clicky’s diaries from this time are a veritable joy, a bildungsroman of intense emotion, personal growth and discovery.
Here follows an excerpt from the summer of 1913, when they first met, Clicky was just 13 at the time, impressionable, certainly, but already showing a glimmer of the genius he was to become. Over the next three years, they developed their fondness for anonymous sex in public places into an art form, political movement and philosophy. Cottagism has been overlooked by history books and university professors since the royal felching scandal at the first ever Pulitzer Prize ceremony in 1917, which rocked Georgian society to its very core. This gross oversight must be corrected, this is part of my humble attempt to do so.
Mungo Clacton-Jackson
Official biographer of Clicky McPhotographer and editor of The Clicky McPhotographer Diaries
“Friday, July 4, 1913, Regent’s Park, London, UK
“Met that old poofter poet again today. Told me to come to the park with my Brownie D70s, he had something special to give me. We met by the duck pond, thought we’d be alone, but WB’d brought that cunt EP1 along. Not sure what he sees in the retarded fucking Yankee. We spent an hour or so chucking stones at the ducks. It was a fucking scorcher, soon I was sweating buckets and getting really itchy. WB said I should take off some clothes if I was that uncomfortable, I’d been working out a bit, doing fifty mangle-lifts every night. I was starting to look like a real man, so I knew I’d give the old scrote a bit of a thrill and put pudgy P to shame.
The sight of my erotic man/boy body gave WB a massive horn and he dragged me off to this massive buddleia bush for closer inspection. EP got the right hump but stuck his head in for a good look. After WB had sucked me off, we went and laid out in the sun. It was then that WB told me he’d written the best poem of his life, and it was me who had inspired it!
To a Young Beauty
DEAR fellow-artist, thou art Clicky
Beloved, beholden, precious to me
Is your beauty nought but a trick?
Take your companions to the bush;
Slay a man with a shake of your tush
I die the day I see your dick.
Take my head and lead it down,
I may be a poet of renown
But I am yours, you feckless knave.
How is your chest so toned and trim?
Blessed lack of tits and quim.
Truly, dear, I am your slave.
What a pile of pretentious wank, but WB was so proud of it, I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was utter shite. Especially as it had made EP fucking jealous, WB never wrote him a single line. HA!
After EP calmed down we decided to go and have a look at the public conveniences, we’d heard tell of some that they were particularly spacious and had glory-holes you could get two cocks in at once. The marvel of the modern age! Sure enough the place was heaving with gents and me being a nubile slip of a thing, I got all the attention and a really sore arse! It might have been wrinkly aristocratic attention, but a boy can’t be picky if he wants to get ahead.
WB Yeats, Ezra Pound and some strangers they and PPWP picked up in the park.
All in all, a good day’s cottaging, earned myself a few bob and got another poem that I can sell to some dumb cunt who thinks it’s art.
I’ll show the world what real art is one day, just you wait.”
Footnotes
1 Ezra Pound.
