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….
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…
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.
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’
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.
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.
Over the last six months I have wasted time on submitting to a list of poetry magazines. When I began my career (in brackets like above) there was no choice.
Pre internet the only viable visibility for a poet was through the list of poetry journals which I had to photocopy as a minion at the South Bank London Poetry Library. I was employed as a customer service operative whilst more canny and frankly dull people held the reins. Placing yourself there was a handy stepping stone for carreerists and I worked alongside many later ‘famous’ poets and such like. I never had a head for networking so left after a short time to move to Edinburgh.
At that time there was no other route into visibility unlike now. Also the main literary journals were well known and indeed about 10% of them are still extant and influential. The rest like many a online magazine now came and went .
I have a folder with all my paper based submissions from 1992-3 still and it makes interesting reading. The hit rate was approximately 10%. So 100 poems out may get 10 published. I had met and been known by influential poets then and that helped me place poems that for sure. My first poems were published in John Harvey’s Slowdancer because Maura Dooley liked them and suggested I send to John Harvey. Both poets I respected and a magazine I fitted in to. Having hit the jackpot with first submission I then slowly fell out of sight and favour and gave up on writing altogether by 2007 although actual output stopped long before circa 2000 as I went off in different directions.
Returning to poetry somewhat on retirement I decided to test the waters now and submit to all the free online journals around. This excluded The London Review of Books for instance. I do not pay to play so to speak.
My hit rate has been zero. Nothing at all. I not on anybody’s radar and do not fit into any of the currently fashionable cliques and niche publishing ventures out there. Most of these are frankly awful. Not just bad themed publications on whatever half-baked shit idea the editors had..waves, dolphins, trees and beetles..you get my drift but also the level of smug nepotism fermented by the social media groups is sickening.
A recent post by Irish writer Fred Jackson strayed into the ‘hung criminal blames the hangman’ syndrome when in fact the wider picture explains most of the way publishing works now. Poetry now is politically important as a viable conduit for dissent and raising issues be they trans rights, sexism, racism etc but this does not of itself guarantee good writing.
Occaisionally a good poet can combine both politics and verse but most of the time it is perMOANance not perFORMance…
i.e. Message outweighs form completely to the point where some prose poetry is nothing more than prose and bad prose at that but if says the right words it gets published. A Labour victory and the dream of increased arts funding (don’t bet on it folks as Starmer is a realist not a fantasist) will only increase the beggers at the gate.
So having put toe in water so to speak I can honestly say I do not care as I genuinely believe that this method of publishigng poetry is dead as a dodo. A majority of the online journals were barely internet competant being the dream project of people with little knowledge of the interent and a free WIX account. Even amongst professional journals the amount of design and presentational skills is low. There are exceptions like SALT which has a genuine designer at helm. Elsewhere it frankly embarrassing to see journals with art and poetry so bad you want to laugh out loud..you want elves you get elves you want dragons etc etc…
Based on this I have made an executive decision to waste no more time on submitting to editors I think weak or plain stupid…to magazines that cannot present my work better than I can and so it leaves one option and right now it the best course of action.
This blog and the associated substack have a far greater chance with time spent managing properly ( i.e. daily posting) than any magazine for raising my profile that is a fact not a illusion. I have made better contacts through substack than I ever would through normal social media (too overused and frankly a bucket of shit mostly) . Substack is the equivalent of meeting poets and writers in the poetry readings of old. You get to filter out the chaff and can walk away politely.
I now have two substacks.
One for general poetry criticism like this and one for a new Eco Poetry project so slightly different target audiences.
This is my chosen route forward and I recommend it to others as for Poetry Magazines online or otherwise (mostly online as the cost of paper too high now)
Shaun Belcher was born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before moving to a council estate in the small town of Didcot in 1966 just as England won the world cup..
He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81 where he sat under a tree with Adrian Mitchell.
Began writing poetry in the mid 1980s and subsequently has been published in a number of small magazines and a poem 'The Ice Horses' was used as the title of the Second Shore Poets Anthology in 1996.(Scottish Cultural Press).
He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams working as a minion at the University of Oxford.
He is currently enjoying retirement from 20 years of teaching and hopes to write something on a regular basis again. He has been involved in various literary projects including delivering creative writing workshops in Nottingham prison for the ‘Inside Out’ project.
He supports Arsenal football club.
Favourite colours therefore red and green like his politics.
We have not won the world cup again since 1966 and Shaun Belcher is not as famous as Simon Armitage although his songs are better.
