NORMAL TOWN POET
I was tipped off about this great free flipbook software by Anthony Howell. So here is my very first Poetry Pamphlet which I made on the Poetry Library London’s photocopier as that was mostly my job there. I made 25 and sold them for £1.50 (big money in 1990) and sold out although Ivor Cutler…
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 Salt Modern Voices Pamphlet No. 6 which was issued as part of a Salt print on demand experiment in 2010 is no longer available and all references to book and author have been removed from the Salt website in a recent upgrade. Chris Hamilton-Emery has moved Salt steadily towards a more fiction based list…
I produced an illustrated sequence of poems for my father in 2019. This April 13th he would have been 92 had he lived but he has been gone 20 years now. As a tribute I have created a pdf of the sequence that was shown as a series of artworks at the King Billy. Below…
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…
One of the fabulous things about the modern poetry scene is the hatred of ‘self-publishing’ as somehow amateur or not professional…a opinion reinforced by those with most to lose i.e. the publishers. GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth Contains 80…
The planned new poems in a volume called substitute was held back as I had another year’s teaching contract to complete. I am now officially retired from Nottingham College so can concentrate a tad more on the written word. To date I have written a baker’s dozen of new poems since last year’s reading and…
I will be offering this as a free download from this evening as it Bastille day.GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth Contains 80 poems and some illustrations. I will be reading from it on Tuesday August 2nd at the Organ…
A selected volume – The Cloud Factory Poems 1996- 2011 can be read here.
This rather nice vintage French leather bag came my way yesterday and I am going to use it to carry my poetry around in and hence the name ‘the Rattle Bag’ which I copped from the Heaney and Hughes anthology title… As Heaney said :Ted suggested we call it by the name of a strange…