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.
If I cannot get a publisher to take this chapbook length collection on I will try and publish as a Horsehoe Press pamphlet.
Potentially in future 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…
If England was a target and you were looking at cross hairs In the centre of the cross hairs would probably be Didcot The most normal town in England according to the pollsters The 11th worst place to live according to crap towns
My home town, the town my family still live in, die in A town that should not really be there, a ghost town Only there because the residents of Abingdon and Oxford refused the nasty dirty mess that they called a railway
So Brunel bent the line through a village called Didcot They been taking other people’s shit there ever since First it was provisions for the railway and a huge depot Logistics was invented there to provide fodder for horses
Didcot has been a place to move stuff through and to ever since From the army barracks, to the brand new Tesco mega storerooms Where my family froze in huge freezers as warehouse operatives Work for people with nowhere to go or reaching the end of the line
It’s the town people joke about, Didcot Parkway, A place to glide through on the way to better destinations Poets and novelists mention it in passing never stopped there Never ventured off the trains to actually see it, a place holder
A place fit for commuters and immigrants, CHAVs and drug dealers No place that anybody wants to live in for long, or stay forever My parents grave is situated 500 yards from their council house Now partitioned and resold built on a prisoner of war camp.
Thousands of lifetimes wiped away now and brushed into the past Like the post-war immigrants who found a home there that could last From Poland and Italy, Germany, Slovakia and the death camps They preferred the dead centre of everything to anywhere else
They escaped the cross hairs and started again. Built new lives and blessed every day that was normal
I shall be reading from new Horseshoe Press pamphlet ‘Thames Valley Texas’ next Tuesday at the Organ Grinder on Open Books second birthday. Without the hard work of the T S Eliot of Bus Drivers there would be no Open Book so thank you Neil Fulwood here’s to the next two years…
Date for your diary: Tuesday 3rd October 2023, from 8pm. Open mic, headline sets from Shaun Belcher and Tony Challis; plus special appearances from some mystery guests. So head to the Overlook Hotel, er, I mean The Organ Grinder, Nottingham and join in the fun. Anyone missing out will be “corrected”.
One of the fabulous things about the modern poetry scene is the hatred of ‘self-publishing’ as somehow amateur or not professional…a opinion reinforced by those with most to lose i.e. the publishers.
GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth
Contains 80 poems and some illustrations.
Includes the following pamphlets and projects:
Drifting Village Poems 2001-2011
Edwin Smith Commission 2014
Burning Books and Buying time 2017 – 2018
My Father’s Things (illustrated) 2019
At the Organ Grinder I shall be reading from the new volume ‘Substitute’ which I am working on now.
Tony Challis has been writing poetry since the 1980s, as well as short stories and memoir. He has had poems published in magazines local to Nottingham, has had a poem commended in a national poetry competition, and is Chair of Nottingham Poetry Society. Tony is also keen on performing his poetry at spoken word events and at poetry gatherings. He is a member of a number of poetry writing groups within which he hones his skills. He now has a substantial body of poetry written which he is keen to share with the world.
A Quick Queerbashing
It was only a five minute walk across the main road to his ex. Well-coiffed, in leather jacket, fresh, smart and bouncing. It was on the way back that it happened.
Times come when the search for words is dry, when it is hard to maintain a dribble of chat. He could not reply, only smile with his eyes. The frame firmly placed over his face prevented replies; bolted in place to help his jaw heal.
I had to keep a conversation going, talk about my doings, mutual friends, shows…. He could write brief notes on paper, just. If I had had a companion there might’ve been banter, cross talk, jokes shared to liven his time.
I had read reports, how he had walked in amongst a group of five, innocent, blind to their baseball bats, uncomprehending of their anger, of how they had failed to find a victim at the hill-top water tower.
He would do; he was clearly queer. They gifted him a metal plate in his leg, a problem kneeling to unhelpful gods. Did their own hearts scare them as they struck? I recall the gratitude in his warm gaze.
Shaun Belcher is a multimedia artist and poet, originally from Oxford, now a retired teacher in Nottingham. He has written poetry since his mid 20’s, influenced by his rural upbringing as well as wider themes of dislocation and global technologies.
The planned new poems in a volume called substitute was held back as I had another year’s teaching contract to complete. I am now officially retired from Nottingham College so can concentrate a tad more on the written word.
To date I have written a baker’s dozen of new poems since last year’s reading and will be reading from the new collection at the Open Book Reading on the 3rd October.
In an ironical twist having selected the title because of The Who song I found out that Pete Townsend actually got married in my hometown and at the council offices I and my sister helped clean back in late seventies. My mother and nan were cleaners there in evening.
There no sustitute for a tie-in bit of PR in this case there were even photos taken. No I was not there but probably at home kicking a football against the wall as a nine year old.
Only subscriber based paper editions like The Poetry Review (UK) stand up due to being part of a subscription-model which was mentioned in Victoria Maul’s Poetry Review critique’ on Substack
Add all of this together and it not a very good prognosis in fact as Galleybeggar Books state…
This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.
In light of that and faced with a seeming mountain of online magazines being inundated by a million would be poets is there even any point in continuing down the old paper based path?
Now here we go. I read through the Galley Beggar stuff BEFORE looking at their list and I was struck how Londoncentric white middle-class it was. Not much diversity there more who you know London journalists who romantically dream of being the next Saul Bellow. fair enough but in that case would it really matter if they only published online or as digital ebooks. the answer is NO and here we come to the political point of all this. Far from beggers people of this comfortable a background are basically living a dream that probably never existed.
I am sure that some are Guardian picks (mates of mates etc) and I sure some write like angels BUT for fucks sake it a diversion from reality not reality in the present poilitcal climate and there isn’t a writer that deserves sympathy in front of the very real shit going down out there.
So oh dear Galley Press never mind there hundreds literally of presses and people like you but it does not fuckign matter in the rather prissy way you boost your list. Nobody on there is Saul Bellow and it nice you manage to knock a few books out every year but that’s it.
What is not touched on in the Galley Beggar description is a wider awareness of the fundamental shifts occurring in terms of phone driven distribution, reading etc. In a matter of a decade the very premise for the Galley beggar romantic Left bank writer dream will have evaporated. The technical disollution of the ‘literary’ scene is happening now and it will disappear before our very eyes.
I am old enough to have missed the literary dream first time around..that ship sailed without me when it did float. Now it sinking faster than Hugh Kenner’s original island. I met Lucy Ellmann’s father when he was still alive…he was a connection to a romantic life that now fading.
The future is bright, non nationalistic (even Parisian) based and always on always morphing. Today’s Samuel Beckett or Hemingway is on tik tok right now we just can’t see them yet.
The original nobody buys books article was mind boggling but one line from Galley Beggers Press sums it all up so that big name author reading down at Waterstones with the nice clothes and the air of superiority their fabulous avant-garde novel winning book of week in The Guardian or LRB……nobody fucking cares really apart from people like them that want to carry on the delusional times….meanwhile Waterstones..totally fucked..gone like Borders in a decade already sliding….it is over people you read it online first…Galley Beggers just wrote the epitaph of their own business.
the median sell-through for literary fiction (in the first year of publication) is 241 copies (Publishers Association stats).
Galley Beggar Press does not deal in anything but Fiction ( pace Salt new business model) as it the only sales left and it failing……Poetry..been fucked financially apart from a few better selling female poets for decades already.
Fake businesses stagger on maintaining the literary super-structure like a wasps nest with no wasps…paper thin..crumbling…
soon to be gone…
This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.
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.
