PICASSO’S PEACE TRAIN The black clouds had been building up all week Thunder rolling down from the Peaks on Nottingham, Grey drizzle trickling from the glass roof at Marylebone Station Dripped on to Pablo Picasso’s neck as he boarded the train to Sheffield Monday 13th November 1950 early morning the train’s steam billowed Through…
poetry
Lost Nottingham: Charlie and the Lace Factory
CHARLIE AND THE LACE FACTORY Monday 4th May 1904, Grand Theatre Radford Road, Hyson Green Evening performance of Sherlock Holmes over, Charles Chaplin aged 15 Collar askew from a swift costume change leaves Billie the page boy behind And cheekily slaps the final drop curtain just below King Charles head The sun-light overhead…
Burning Books – hiding in plain view?
Last year I did a reading for Nottingham Poetry Festival in which I produced a small ‘polemical’ pamphlet called ‘Burning Books’. The pamphlet was a one off and most of the poems after ‘outing’ in paper form were then hidden away as ‘too political’ for my readers by myself! I censored myself which crazy but…
Man With No Name – poetry V song
An authentic?( Adrian Slatcher)song that is a poem in disguise written in mid 1980s when I harboured ambitions to be the English Nick Cave 🙂 The song ok the ambition a little over ambitious:-) The war in question is the Falklands and the story true my step-grandad died of a heart attack in his pantry…
Songs as Poems – Poems as Songs – Substitute already written?
Poem or Song or poetry by other means….???? ‘Un-American Way’ 1999… UN-AMERICAN WAY Did you hear the guns a rattling out on the Kentucky hills As mud spattered up from your prison truck’s wheels Did you smile every day as you washed the days away Imprisoned for having nothing to say?* Did you dream in…
Substitute : New volume of poems 2018
Sometimes all it needs is a trigger and Kit de Waal’s excellent piece in the Guardian yesterday brought together a lot of things for me that been bubbling under the surface. Her article ‘Make room for working-class writers‘ touched a nerve….. read it here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/10/kit-de-waal-where-are-all-the-working-class-writers- Also she made a comment about how the Proper v Performance…
Sexism, Elitism or old fashioned Class War? : How poetry builds barriers to protect middle class dominance.
Sisters are doing it for themselves? A recent piece of ‘criticism’ in PN Review by Rebecca Watts has caused a storm of controversy apparently. PNR is an adjunct to the long established and firmly modernist Carcanet Press which has long been one of the jewels in Arts Council funded poetry publishing in the UK alongside…
Edwin Smith revisited – Catching Light
Back in October 2014 (now three years ago) I was on the first term of a Creative Writing M.A. at NTU. I was also with uncanny timing commissioned (the first and so far the only time I been commissioned) by R.I.B.A. through Apple and Snakes to write in response to a lovely collection of Edwin…
Blurred Fences : Thames Valley Texas
A Christmas Poem in November? I wrote this poem in 1995 and had omitted the key line about poets for fear of offending my father. Now he has been gone 13 years so probably safe to reveal what the poem about. After my father died in 2004 my mother confided to me that he had…
Contemporary American Poetry – 55 years on
Picked this up in a second hand shop recently. Was first edition (1962) of a book I had encountered in a travelling shelf of ‘American Poetry’ in my local Didcot library in 1981 when I had returned home after art college. It (in the flag cover version below) and a book of William Carlos Williams…