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…
poetry
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…
Edwin Smith Poem – now online at RIBA website
RIBA have finally put up the poem…so you can read it now I provided a ‘referenced’ version and a ‘clean’ none annotated version they went with referenced…strangely but there you go ‘Catching Light’….I have also provided a recording of myself reading (no footnotes;-) which will be uploaded later I presume.
First Assignment – Influence?
My poetry bookshelves..about half the collection built up over 25 years…. I am really struggling with the simplest thing. The first assignment for Creative Writing M.A. is straightforward enough : Identify one writer whose work has been in some way influential to the development of your own creative writing practice. Discuss one or…
Barns and Stars…..aiming at the stars?
Finally got five minutes to sit down and catch up with myself and all the threads I have started off… I have not had a chance this week to read and critique a short story as I have been doing because of so much else going on. Busy is good but not when it gets this…
Farm-Hand’s Radio – Complete available as pdf
I found that the auto-print facility in google chrome means I can create a full pfd of the collection to share. Not formatted to avoid page breaks but all of it is there . It is also available online at this URL: https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=117 Farm-Hand’s Radio Complete PDF also available at Scribd: