“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.”
The Other Side of The Desk (The Ugly Librarian) In my middle years (not young not old) I spent many hours in serviceOn the shiny oak desks of municipal and academic librariesNot once did a sexual thought enter my head despite the staffBeing not only erudite but in some cases classically proportioned The hours for…
Shaun Belcher gives some excellent advice on how not to start a poetry career. July 1991I 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…
THE GREENWASH RECYCLE Starts in a marketing agency hand-out around the milleniumSocial demarcation and quantifying statistics showed newer markets More social class segmentation and new science of social media metricsIdentified new opportunities to market directly to the A B and C groups Especially those spending more time at home, the newly affluent mothersWork from homers…
Poems written in London and Oxfordshire. Published in early 1990s in Last Gasp pamphlets. Last Gasp was a poetry open mic I helped run with poets Giles Goodland and Bridget Kursheed in Oxford. From 1986 I was heavily influenced by Raymond Carver and especially his book FIRES. Indeed I attended his memorial readings event in…
POETRY FLIES I came from Oxford I didn’t go to OxfordI visited Cambridge once I didn’t go to CambridgeI do not have a nice tidy clique to accept my poetryEven when I write nothing for thirty years I didn’t keep writing when I should haveI didn’t stack chairs for the powers that beOr fawn over…
wrote this many moons ago nothing changedthe description of Les Murray reading at the end is true POETRY IN ENGLAND There is something about poetry in EnglandThat is awfully nay terribly Middle ClassSomething not quite right in the hands of a workerSibilants dribbling like snot from the poor man’s nose Wiping its sleeve on the…
Like a bad penny this story never dies and after I had this photograph taken yesterday I thought similar and did some more digging and found two new articles on ‘Flynn’ and for those less squeamish that comes from the saying ‘in like Flynn’ about Errol Flynn’s legendary bedding of women. the full story in…
Looking back at those difficult years now, do you feel that the silentstretches were detrimental to your work? If I hadn’t been fighting battles on other fronts, I might have been scribbling boring middle-aged verse – like MacNeice who twittered on for a decade until the miraculous final poems. It seems that the Muse favours…
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…