Doff your cap, Toe the line,Do a good job,Know your place,Speak when spoken to,Don’t talk back, keep mum, Be reliableHold your knife properly,Don’t leave the table until told to,Watch your step, March in time, Defer to your betters, Salute the flag,Be punctual, Do a good job, Never argue, Be polite, Bow,Scrape,Be invisible. If you do…
politics
Diving for Change: Thames Valley Texas
DIVING FOR CHANGE Below and to my right from this window a Volvo lorry crunches gearshredded leaf, dust and gravel trickles from bumper and wheel-arch. The digging of the new pool has been going on now for two weeks. Yellow digger-buckets mouth the park’s soil and turf into lorries that rumble off, indicators flashing, down…
The last great White Elephant
In 1986 or thereabout I bought the Carver stories above from a shop in Plymouth whilst visiting my sister. It was the start of my obsession with all things ‘Americana’. I moved on via Granta’s Dirty Realism collection to a whole series of American authors including Lorrie Moore, Bobbie Anne Mason and then backwards towards…
My Back Pages: The Empty Stair
For my sins I have been watching ‘The Crown’ and it reminded me of a poem I wrote back in the 1990s before the death of Diana….. As you can see I was always a staunch Royalist… The Empty Stair A fleur-de-lys fissured by sulphuric rain crumblesbut still hangs, paint-peeling, above an entrancethat is being…
Edwin Smith – Catching Light – Recordings
EDWIN SMITH POEMS Back in October 2014 (now six 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…
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…
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…
Burning Books – Horseshoe Press Pamphlet #2
I have added two poems from the mini-pamphlet to a new revised edition of ‘Buying Time – Poems 2016’. It now entitled ‘Burning Books’ Poems 2016-17 and is available via ScribD below and via the Horseshoe Press website http://www.horseshoepress.co.uk/ As the blurb said in 2016…and I have no reason to change in fact things seem…