Filmed for poetry slot on Oxford 6 one of the first local TV channels in the country. Filmed direct off TV hence quality. Summer 1999? I am stood on location i.e. in the Bear Pit it still there 🙂 I am a lot younger (40) thinner and beardier… The Bear Pit – Long Wittenham –…
poetry
The Broken Brush: Writing and Painting?
I have not posted in this writing blog for a while due to a full-time commitment to painting in preparation for the Lady Bay Arts show in West Bridgford on the weekend of 16th and 17th May. The actual physical act of painting has made me look at my writing ‘block’ in a different way and…
Dead Cat Bounce
The photo above shows in their entirety the new  poetry books I  have aquired since the defining moment of the Salt pamphlet ‘Last Farmer’ in December 2010. The only other books missing are the Helen Mort Wordsworth trust pamphlet and my fellow Salt Modern Voices. I have separated them as I regard December 2010 as a break…
Substitute: My problem with poetry
Now I have always had a problem with being a ‘poet’. I come from a straightforward working class council estate background and the only thing worse than being a poet there was becoming a ‘fine artist’ so I killed two birds in one bush there then with my double non-career. I remember digging up a…
Poundland Sonnet 2: A Wreckless Scheme
A WRECKLESS SCHEME Paradise is a gold throw on a white leather sofa Under the buttocks of a call-girl blowing a footballer Indiscretion is a national pastime after cup-cake baking Facebook ramming lives with other people’s misfortune Clear-eyed dreams of making it with the boys in the band Dissolve in bleary orgies in the…
Poundland Sonnets 1: A Poundland Sonnet
A POUNDLAND SONNET In the vacuous naughties the affluent thrum Their chubby fingers on the card-less tills As the slippery accountants of PWC and RBS swill Their caviar down with Vive Cliqout at the parliamentary bash The air is full of Quangos and insider trading slang As the parade of yesterday’s entertainers head for…
Writer’s Block…..smash the piano!
IGGY POP IN A SIDEBOARD Too much thinking fucks you up Too much time slips through the cracks Worrying about the rain, the funerals The way the poplar trees creak in the wind And all along the drip of ice melting off The corrugated asbestos roof a metronome The beat of a disillusioned parade…
The Armitage Stomp
I have delved a little into the Armitage biography and it quite worrying. He has received just about every award and opportunity it possible to get including four Phds (Honourary of course no laborious referencing required). So when Martin Stannard in his review of Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 raised the possibility that this was…
Simon Armitage: Who’s he kidding?
‘The Martian Owl’ Photo Credit: Paul Wolfgang Webster This post brings together some thoughts I posted online today in response to the attention being given a negative review posted on the Stride website by poet and critic Martin Stannard of the newly published ‘Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014. Review available here: Martin Stannard Review Me…
Let’s go to Sacramento…Diesel on Gravel again
OK so this is news that stays news as they say… In 1963-4 Raymond Carver left the Iowa Writers Workshop..he drove to Sacramento. I have just metaphorically done the same only I don’t have a car and cannot drive (his was a battered Chevrolet not a Cadillac by the way). I hinted at this news in…