WICKERLAND: poetry as middle class lifestyle choice

The Sunday Times Colour Supplement heralds Poetwee..

WICKERLAND? It’s like MOTHERLAND but without the humour..more AMANDA writes poetry…..god help us all. The above states

chance to talk about real things like connection, love ,loss, creativity, purpose….

thats so nice not fake things like Iran, Gaza, Ukraine…
at least it makes Class War seem so less futile..

IF THIS IS POETRY then POETRY IS OVER….dead, a Norwegian Blue, nailed to its Class based perch. I embarrassed to use the word any more in fact I hate POETRY and POETS as presently configured in the UK.


You know those so-called poetry geniuses clogging up the presses with their creative writing group white middle class drivel…..

There are hundreds if not thousands of people out there now calling themselves poets and entering endless stupid competitions and helping each other feel ‘better’. It is internet driven creating delusional poets and a lot of spurious nepotism disguised as networking. Poetry in the UK is a fraud.

In my honest opinion at best this is simply therapy not poetry ( typical career paths include ex hypnotherapists/ acupuncture/wellbeing/physiotherapyetc oh and made a pile in the City bankers and wives of bankers loom large) so they really have time on hands..none ever seem to have been in anything but comfortable white middle class environments.

This stuff makes me want to burn their publications if not actually the poets (don’t push me on that it negotiable) slowly in a bonfire of their own self-regarding writing..maybe a giant Wicker Poet..that would do nicely.

The present queen of this post millenium touchy-feely drivel is the recent winner of the National Poetry Competition which a flag-bearer for more of the same. Although what Nation’s flag she flys under dubious..Offshore banking maybe.

A poem about missing an affluent middle-class son who has a top job in Australia ( the author has a background in working at the Bank of England).
In a world where reality is increasingly bloody and desperate we get this genre-defining slice of interiority that avoids all aspects of reality apart from those impinging on the author’s sensitive soul. This is what poetry post millenium is all about. She is not the worst she can at least write but it not the work that the problem its the vested interests making this happen.

She represents the triumph of the establishment. The establishment Poetry Society doing its avowed job of rewarding somebody who so establishment it painful. Don’t expect comments on Gaza or the homeless it just isn’t fit for purpose darling in the poetry and book clubs across the shires they want world view views which shore up their sense of security not question it.

Her friends placed her BS book in front of Philip Larkin in Waterstones and shared on X that bastion of liberal views. A stunning example of posh lady Boadiceas ( there actually a luxury perfume called that seriously one cannot make it up) challenging the patriarchal norms as they trod carefully around the homeless on the way out of the bookshop….reverse the situation and imagine the shitstorm a male poet doing that to a female poet would engender. Sadly no male poet called Plath around to test the water maybe there a Moore, Dickinson or Shapcott though…it a sign of the arrogance and untouchability of a certain strata of post-feminist affluent women that they do this.

Larkin is not unusual at all in fact a certain level of financial stability is essential to their dominance. NO poor female or male poets make the grade these days as you need time (lots of it) and money (lots of that too).

A feted poet from Oxford lives in a million pound house travels to at least three Spa/Writing retreats a year and wins awards for ‘interviewing’ dementia patients whilst underpaid staff clear up the urine. Nice one must need the sea air after that tortuous supplement to your high end earners lifestyle.

Finally and not least Kit De Waal a warrior queen of new feminist poetry and a shining example of Working Class made good (genuine hard back story) but after marrying the barrister brother of Booker prize winner Edmund De Waal it all got a tad easier. That’s the reality of modern British Publishing it CLASS based and increasingly devoid of talent and genuine innovation.

Bookseller campaigns to increase visibility of Working Class writers are just that a tokenism to obscure the increasingly Class based control of publishing. Ironically Kit De Waal offering a Bridport Prize in Bookseller for older poets. etc more tokenism of course.

Bookseller tokenism classic is the Working Class Nature Writers award..

Lets not unpack that for what it is..oh ok then it is total bullshit simply take two boxes combine and tick. PR department inventions to boost sales of fairly mediocre talents and get kudos for defending the poor and disadvantaged.

The Bookseller is a driver of all that face-on shit you see in Waterstones you know the umpteenth copy of the plot and sleeve art of The Essex Serpent – they marketeers of dross. They know how to shift shit printed in China like nobody else…Rowling is their Queen. Nobody can invent new income streams quite like her.

LEGACY: death of innovation and a lost generation

There are now few new kids from working class backgrounds in the media, theatre, music world becuase it ring-fenced by the ability (TIME IS MONEY)
to do it.

Mercury Prize Nominees – ALL public school last year.

Two of our finest female new poets

Hollie McNish – feigns humble ordinary gal did Classics at Cambridge father owns a Reading IT company is director.

Kae Tempest – father one of world’s top music lawyers…must have made the transformation from mediocre poet to music artist that much harder..

Two Poetry Review fave new poets have a background in PR…along with the wellbeing route this high on poets transforming their careers list. Editing others poetry a money-spinner alongside a nous built in years massaging social media accounts for Google and Nike..you go find the poets it not hard.

This list isn’t gender specific nor sexist it is CLASS specific. I sure there are male equivalents it just hard to find them although a few spring to mind. It is predominantly female because they have the lions share of success recently. This is because of the glass ceiling being not just shattered but then turned round and armour-plated. If you can add some diversity points or a tragic back story you in the money.

It harder to track male stories maybe because they not so keen to share their privileged upbringings whilst female poets appear to feel protected by their gender and generally share more.

This is the end of poetry as I knew it which in the late 1970s was predominantly male almost overwhelmingly so. The pendulum has swung very hard the other way now.and the birth of poetry as lifestyle choice is connected to this it is as simple as that.

A nice award bauble to add to Chanel perfume on dresser and a Tesla in the drive. Oh darling you won a competition most poets cannot afford to enter how marvellous. Lets have a dinner party soon.

As Nick Moss writes..

Their poetry is rooted in an attempt to maintain as essential to poetry that sensibility of interiority which is the core of the novel in its original form. Croft describes this as “the commodification of poetry, the privatisation of feeling.” Not every poem needs to be about a fucking geranium. Not when some people don’t have patios to decorate, because they don’t have homes at all…

https://www.culturematters.org.uk/no-them-only-us-review-of-the-privatisation-of-poetry-by-andy-croft-broken-sleep-books-2024/

None of it addresses the personal through oblique and politicised analysis but always through personalised tear-stained-contact lenses..

The latest fad write it and read it off your phone after all it is throw-away…social media led drivel..it doesn’t matter.

Have an issue lets talk about it, workshop it, send it to a press/ magazine that likes it and bingo..on we go…a carousel of poetry that makes Sylvia Plath look hard-edged rational…bring back the Confessional Poets at least they had some other things to say.

Here my guide to getting published today:

Write about YOURSELF.
Write about yourself in relation to an issue you may not have been directly affected by say suicide or alcoholism and write about it in relation to yourself.

Write about NATURE not ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Not actual nature as in commercial factory farming more how you like walking around a lake and looking at trees.This category sells well especially if decorated with pretty illustrations. Rabbits and cats best.

SUBMIT TO MAGAZINES RUN BY FRIENDS
Never ever stray away from your support networks it takes time to build up a web of equally vapid boosters who attend your monthly meetings and swoon over every syllable. They quickly become publishers as they move up the greasy pole of Brit Lit. Pay for high end agents they worth their weight in promotional uptick.

PAY TO PLAY
Go top end in Creative Writing Course choice that way you connect higher up the ladder. PAY out money in subscriptions and competition entries. NEVER express a unsuitable opinion especially about politics unless gender related and vague to show you on right side of history. Spend big on small presses and magazines and competitions INVEST in your future.

SELF-PUBLISHING
Never self-publish that s for commoners and such-like. Self-Publishing is akin to total failure. Poetry only really exists through approved channels. Get a Faber abd Faber or Cape badge and you in the green room of poetry and your every missive will be poored over in The Guardian and Times. Eat my shorts darlinks..or drink them in hospitality.

MAGAZINES THE REALITY
Most magazines are almost certainly dominated by the white middle class and may even be edited from a chateaux in France..most are post Oxbridge white middle class really affluent. Keeping control of the message all important not quality. The occaisional brown face helps tick boxes and helps establish a veneer of faux diversity.

BRIT LIT SICK NO CURE?

IF BRITISH POETRY has become a therapy circle for the white middle class is it virtually redundant now? Male female or trans no matter the lack of substantial content outside the domestic is in my honest opinion a total failure of modern poetry.

Whilst the hogweed of self chokes the landscape things like Smokestack folding show how bleak the future really is ….the ‘terroir’ of poetry is increasingly ring-fenced by the poetry of self..they want to erect barriers to reality.

I am against this stuff…give me a match we need new growth.

In the olden days my grandfather would set a match to a straw field after harvest…

The personal is political – poetry used to be political

before politics became dangerous ask Kneecap

Burn Baby Burn

Radiohead – met at Radley Public School….there you go…

Cold Spell: Poem for Windrush Day

Cold Spell

A pretend farm lies within these borders,
hedges, fields and muddy tracks.
One un-harvested by contract machinery,
unbounded by electrified fencing.

As I stand on a grass verge
a mile of tarmac bubbling behind me,
the horizon buckling in the heat haze,
I begin to build.
Wood for concrete, timber joists for steel.
In my head a new farm appears.
The old farm rising in the skeleton of the new.
Concrete cladding and corrugated tin roofing
splits and flies off over the hills.
The Thames Water sign on the barn end
floats like a stamp soaked off an envelope.

I am rebuilding my past in the present
when the daydream is shattered.
A tractor lurches towards me
cab dazzling like a sharp scythe
lifted from a grinder.

The driver asks me what I’m doing.
I mutter that I used to live here
— What, he says, in that ol’ wreck.
He doesn’t believe me
but the wary mouth under the goggles
and dirty John Deere baseball cap
lets go a few more words

-Don’t ye go in there, dangerous see.
I say yes, having already been in.

Standing on roots, brambles and branches
I got to peer through a broken window
at bare floorboards and a grate
littered with flakes of asbestos,
ash and plaster.
By that grate my sister entered this world
on a cold February evening during the cold snap of 1962.

A Jamaican nurse hovers over my mother
as firelight dances on the ceiling.
Black hands cradle the white bundle
as it is passed over the sheets to my mother.
I am three years old, drawing in the condensation
and watching feathers of snow melt against the window.

When I am asked what I shall hand on
I shall say this.

My dowry of words.
Fire, water, glass, ice, darkness.

Available in free Pamphlet ‘Last Farmer’
Available here: https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=452

How Not to be a Poet

Shaun Belcher gives some excellent advice on how not to start a poetry career.



July 1991
I had just completed an interesting but fruitless temporary post at The Poetry Library on the South Bank through 1990 and had my poems and songs illustrated by my sadly deceased friend Laura Stenhouse at St. Martin’s College of Art in the old building on Charing Cross Road.

My brief tenure as a photocopying assistant and customer service adviser (weekends only) didn’t do much for me financially as I travelled up from Didcot for several months but it did introduce me to poetry and poets which I had dabbled with in a thoroughly modernist way since discovering William Carlos Williams in my early twenties.

In six short months in 1990 I met( and served) a whole gaggle of new generation poets ( Dooley, Shapcott, Greenlaw, Donaghy all great and one Maxwell who was a rude prick) and also met some greats like Ivor Cutler, Bob Cobbing ( who equalled Maxwell for rudeness showing that manners and avant-garde no guarantor) as well as seeing a whole host of great readings.. C.K. Williams, William Trevor and best of all Raymond Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher.

Thus inspired I self-produced a small poetry pamphlet ‘Towns on Shallow Hills’ which I remember Ivor Cutler reading but not buying on account as he said he had read it…said pamphlet I sold to various friends and poets ( I still have a list) and I am pleased to say still in the National Poetry Library collection which is apt as printed on their photocopy paper between shifts.

It didn’t launch me into contention as a new generation poet that honour had been carved out almost exclusively for acolytes of the Poetry Review editor Peter Forbes who I had the misfortune to hear read one of his dull longer form poems out once and who was an arrogant SOB who virtually controlled poetry in those days. He loved Maxwell which figures ..birds of a feather etc.

Remember in those days Oxbridge white middle class was a defining factor and only Simon Armitage broke through that and that led to some tokenism in the New Gen list but overall the power base remained intact which not good for a politically orientated writer like myself. That Oxbridge dominance is still true to a high degree. If you want a current assessment of political make up of the poetry audience go see David Coates research here https://davepoems.wordpress.com which overly academic but is telling.

I myself come into the category of his category of cishet white men which ironic considering he neatly leaves out the ‘middle class’ bit of that definition which handy as if, as he is , you are from Northern Ireland studying a PhD on Louis Macneice you pretty much tick all the boxes of those you attacking…..but at least he trying to flag up the inequalities for which I have to say well done.

The poems published in the pamphlet were pretty hastily written but I left the Library confident that I as good as the above mentioned careerist poets (not knowing a thing about careerism) and wrote some much better stuff which through 1991-92 I started submitting to journals and lo and behold started to be published. I was pretty much unemployed and broke all the time so it led nowhere. I did some unpaid reviewing for the Arts Council met a lot of people who supportive but too busy providing themselves with opportunities and funding and ended up meeting a lovely Spanish woman and buggering off to Edinburgh where I continued and flourished as a poet.

Today is pretty much 30 years to the day since I received my first publication letter from John Harvey at Slowdancer Magazine ironically based then in Nottingham. I still have a copy. This in retrospect was the high point of my poetry career until the retrospective ‘greatest hits’ pamphlet Last Farmer from Salt in 2010.

So 30 years on I starting to look at the poetry world again. A lot of the magazines and editors who published me have disappeared or simply died. Some I happy to see like The Frogmore Papers still going and poets who supported me in Edinburgh like Stewart Conn still alive which amazing. I do not know what kind of poetry I will write or if there even a poetry world that cares in an era of selfie PR and diversity tick boxing. Even the working class ticket has been abused and moulded to generate support and funding. It is a more visual, less middle class landscape but the powerful still lead at Faber and Faber , Cape etc. It reminds me of a late Larkin poem about a mind folding under snow .. it feels a chilly climate to walk out into poetry land…..

I am just going outside and may be some time…

Hand-built poetry 1990s…..when paper was king…

A pdf of the pamphlet is available here which just as well as only 25 ever produced and I have a list of the owners….
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=129

SUBSTITUTE: Poems 2023-25

This pamphlet collects together all the poems written since my ‘re-birth’ in the font of poetry at Open Book. I have to thank Neil Fulwood for splashing the Eu de Blue Monkey on my face and waking me up to the possibility that poetry was not dead in Nottingham…well not yet. I have come to bury Ceasar etc etc..

Whilst enjoying seeing so many diverse and talented people offer their wares the biggest effect was to make me firstly engage with poetry world and once engaged become enraged with how shit most of it appears to be.

I will rant about that elsewhere but for now look out because by the time that Guy Fawkes is burning yet again this pamphlet will exist.

Here a taster of its contents much of it shared here at some point and some of it too acerbic yet to come.

As Raymond Friel said in a review many moons ago…

“Belcher cannot be accused of nostalgia or pastoral myth-making but is as vituperative in tone as Larkin

Nothing changed there then…

here a promotional video too using fake footage fake voice and real words….

THAMES VALLEY TEXAS – The Photobook

This PHOTOBOOK WITH POEMS will be about my hometown of Didcot, Oxfordshire.

I am a Working-Class boy from a council estate in Didcot, Oxfordshire which is the wrong side of the tracks from Oxford and all it stands for.

This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived for a good part of 30 years. The title is a reference to the love of country music that my family had instilled in me from a young age and the experience of hearing Dolly Parton at full volume drifting across the estate from the working-men’s club on a saturday night.

I would like to publish the poems alongside a sequence of photographs I took in 2011-12 for a multimedia project called TRACK which almost but not quite became a PHD in 2018…

Read the poems here:

https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=2693

CHALKLAND: The Collected Poems 1984-2024

This is an ongoing project I just started and will take time to complete.

I began writing poetry in my hometown of Didcot in 1981-2 after a few perfunctory ‘poetry’ lectures at Hornsey College of Art introduced me to Larkin, Heaney and Hughes. Then a slightly tipsy Adrian Mitchell joined us under a tree in front of Alexander Palace.

My early poems were slightly surreal, landscape orientated and drew on the American Poets travelling selection I came across by chance in my local library. W.C.Williams especially affected me. From early on I was influenced by American and Scottish landscape and eco poets especially Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, Al Purdy and Canadian Prairie poets.

By 1991 having failed to make a living as the new Francis Bacon in London I ended up back home in Didcot and working part-time at the Poetry Library on the South Bank. Here I really started to write seriously as I saw that poetry not a dead end and my first publication was in John Harvey’s Slowdancer magazine which Chainlink tips a hat to. I quit the library to become famous elsewhere (Scotland ) which of course didn’t happen or if it did nobody told me.

I loved my time in Edinburgh and wrote some pretty mad or bad or great poems about that time that will appear for the first time in the proposed book above. Whilst in Edinburgh 1994-6 I joined the Shore Poets and was again influenced by people I met and read with.

Some of those never seen folders of poems…

The Back Catalogue:

Being ignored by the English poetry establishment on return from Scotland and feeling pretty tired of tiresome poetry types I put my career on hold. Oxford does that to one if you not from the establishment and not waited on…

The problem is that of the roughly 2500 poems written in the last 40 years about half are still typewritten in folders and never seen the light of day.

This is where I take on the task of producing a respectable collection as above. It will take time. Arsenal may well have become European Champions by the time I finish. Everybody has to have a hobby when retired now you know mine.

At the risk of appearing a bit deluded (most poets are some made careers from it) I’d say I am probably the best unpublished (currently) poet in Nottingham if not the whole East Midlands..time will tell.

Meanwhile I will stick my various irons in the fire and moan about lesser poets being funded and/or published (with no evidence of brain or talent) which to be fair I been doing for close on 40 years.

As for the various people who helped me survive and keep prodding the muse you will get your credits in due course.

There aren’t many of you.

To keep up to date with progress visit the writing blog here.
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing

Writing Poetry on an Old Laptop

I have descaled, decluttered..dissolved my old Sony Viao laptop back to basics literally. It has Xubuntu on and basically set up like a basic wordprocessor or electric typewriter of the early 1990s.

I also set all type to run courier so looks like typewriter text.


More imortantly it ‘OFF GRID’ cannot really run other shit so a peaceful place to just type…here two poems written on it about the experience of ‘De-Netting’

The Greenwash Recycle

THE GREENWASH RECYCLE

Starts in a marketing agency hand-out around the millenium
Social demarcation and quantifying statistics showed newer markets

More social class segmentation and new science of social media metrics
Identified new opportunities to market directly to the A B and C groups

Especially those spending more time at home, the newly affluent mothers
Work from homers and the general time on hands post 40 cashing in pensions

Post Thatcher there were more people with more time and more money
they were ripe for a new genrs to exploit their interests and feelings

Motherhood, environment and lower case gender politics especially
started to boom bringing a whole new set of genre specific design issues

The Bookseller began focussing on lower case issues…..ones that safe
You won’t find the Iraq War through to Gaza in their go to marketing

No it is books about birds, whales, fishes and green things in general
but without the dirty realism of actual politics, actual environments

Waterstones now replete with almost identical safe woodcut or retro-litho
Covers offering us profound poetry, novels and faction on the wilderness

Re-wilding, trees, paths, woods, estuaries, seagulls, wild places, the uncanny
Gothic landscapes, ravens, more trees, more woods, sparrows, shells, stars…

The list is endless as is the churn of third-rate authors producing this product.
It is greenwash, avoiding the inconvenient truth of the escalating climate crisis.

It is stay at home keep the fires burning comfort reading for powerless people.
Worried about the end of the world read this on how bluebells bloom in spring.

April is not the cruellest month here November is as the industry gears up for Xmas
Need a stocking filler here’s a book on and following all google shopping choices

Wintering, Raising Hare, Trees in Winter, A Walk in the Woods, The lost Spells(Owls)
The Golden Mole, Birds that changed the world, More Birds, Bob the Robin,England,

The Language of Trees, The Hidden life of Trees, Finding the Mother Tree, Wildwood.
All printed on dead trees in China and shipped here …god bless container ships.

The world is burning put another log on the burner. Read about trees. Feel better.
Give to charity until they all end up in the business waste pulp bin.


It is time this drivel called out for what it is.

The last ten years have seen a huge rise in ‘Nature’ genre. Mostly how I’m feeling in nature and isn’t the environmental crisis bad type. This across genres. None of this has any connection to Deep Ecology, eco criticism or eco-philosophy or even the actual Green political movements as frankly they would call it out. It is the greenwash equivalent of mills and boon.

Most of it will be pulped.

Ten Books I Love

I accepted a challenge from Neil Fulwood on facebook to post ten books that I love, one book per day, no explanations, no reviews, just the covers.

The idea is to promote good books, encourage reading and create a wonderful reading list.

Here my 10 as posted and explanations of why chosen.

This book is the only volume I have kept from a bookcase full of victorian books which given to my country grandparents of whom my step-grandfather could not read. It was my introduction to books from being a small child but strangely never saw read. I wrote about them in poem The Hare Lip. Read that here:

Bought in 1985 when it came out from a bookshop in Plymouth (sticker on back) whilst visiting my sister. I heard a lot about Carver from muisc reviews at time referring to the ‘Carveresque’. Loved his writing and background fitted my notions of writing working class stories in poetry and song. Years later met his widow at Poetry Library also a great poet. Still a significant writer for me 30 years later.

Simply the greatest poet I have been in the same room as ( Norman MacCaig’s birthday party in Edinburgh) although I did stand next to him outside the Edinburgh Central Library as he lit a cigarette but was too shy to speak to him. Bought this in Scotland probably at James Thins. Edinburgh made me a poet Oxford made me give up being a poet simple as that.

Again a chance meeting meant I handed a signed copy of the original Goldmark publication of Whitechapel Scarlet Tracings one of his best and earliest books when I at a Goldmark exhibition private view Sinclair attended. Instead of that book I chosen this as John Clare was a fundamental inspiration that got me through A Level English thanks to my mad teacher Miss Millington a bonkers mid 50s spinster who regaled us with tales of dope smoking camel races from her previous lives…..years later Clare inspired a song that ended up the title of a Norwegian Country Lp..go figure..

I love this book more than anything else he written (hence three copies) and he written a lot ( I know I have all of them).No never met him so cannot name drop this time but this book defined my concept of americana long before it became fashionable. Without this book there no Flyinshoes and probably no Alt Country..this was the text book.

Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh a reading to promote this book and probably the best poet of my generation by a mile. Looked like the computer programmer he was still at this point. Opened his mouth and surreal suburban odes the like of which I not heard before or since. Favourite single poem is the Asylum Dance…….superb writer and sadly will write no more but what there is awesome.

A railway labourer from Swindon who learnt several languages and wrote a series of books about his region including this amazing collection done on a bycycle tour of the Upper Thames. The achievement alone is astonishing the writer almost totally obscure like a good few of what I call the English South Downs Spiritualists.Nature writing before the current faddists and big publisher bullshitters got in on the act. He, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas….ECO before the word invented…..my holy trinity.

I lived on a council estate where half the houses were better built in brick and known as ‘Atomic Houses’. They were built to house the workers at Harwell Atomic Research Laboratory. It about a mile and a half across fields from my town of Didcot. I knew neighbours that worked there. My mother helped place rods into reactors when a teenager and I worked there. It was where the UK atomic bomb was built it created the plutonium. I signed official secrets act just to do a shit job there. It was an airfield used to launch Arnhem and D-Day gliders it is the reality nobody knows…..gorillas dosed with radiation early experiments with a little understood thing called radioactivity one day I will tell my stories..

Full circle the only book my father ever owned. A school prize before he sent to fields as labourer at 14. He was denied further education left that to me….never wrote but thought and spoke a lot.

In a fire this the book I save…

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