This is how it feels to be back on the poetry pitch…. I creating a useful guide on How to Fail at Poetry as so many seem to effortlessly succeed these days going by the drivel being pumped out by little presses invented by poet’s mates so here how to avoid all that and really…
Open Book reading Tuesday 3rd October: Organ Grinder
http://www.openbook.org.uk/2023/09/08/forthcoming-event-tony-challis-and-shaun-belcher-tuesday-3-october-2023/ TONY CHALLIS 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…
GRASS CLOUDS: Twenty Years on the Poetry Bench.
I have been collating a selection of poems written since coming to Nottingham in 2002. It hasn’t been a particularly inspiring location for my poetry and hardly anybody realises I actually published in 2010. I surprised to find 96 poems in 20 years which was my yearly output back in the 1990s. So once I…
30 years a poet – I may be gone some time
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…
Two new poems
A Tiny Spider A speckcrawling from under Acrimonyseen under the spotlight A metaphorfor the last ten yearscrawling down the hard shoulder A tiny spiderpicks its way through booksand is gone I stare at the rainThe stationary carsThe Middle of England Wonder how she’s doingWhat webs lay aheadWhat sticky yarns The Lost Decade Travelling on the…
Backwater – New Poetry?
I have spent years listening to other people’s voices and learning ..now it is time to play..so here is the first product of my new ‘writing’ life….prose poem/short fiction who knows…This is a Berkshire boy rendering Raymond Carver’s ‘Deschutes River’ I make no apology for that. I cannot go round him so I will have…
Landlocked
LANDLOCKED Tied to a flat land Of reclaimed pits and winding river The railway has gone Coal blackened tracks have grown over Every wind caresses its absence The silent factories know their part But cannot speak, chains hold fast Beyond pale gates and security huts Poppies and cow parsley, ragwort and buddleia A necklace of flowers…
The Shipstone Star
THE SHIPSTONE STAR Red lead rain lashed to pink hangs like a soviet star on the left side of Nottingham’s tunic. Always east facing, a towering symbol. The dawn of a century personified, rusts above a city of casual workers, bicycles and the hard slogging dutiful dead who fleck fields from the Rhone to the…
Downland Ballad I :Photo-disintegration
Fully five acres further east and fifty years on from Harwell’s neutron beam photo-disintegration a clump of Queen Anne’s Lace* wavers like a bridesmaid’s posy above the quarried chalk and flint of this erased line. The track that gravelled and iron girded once carried trundling freight to Southampton docks and salt air. Like a distant…
a crow in barley
The wide white sky was gone. In its place, pale yellow stalks, dry cracked dirt and empty ears of corn. His world had spun seven times and on the eighth his face had come to rest here. He blinked warm blood as it trickled down his forehead and into his right eye. Already dust and…