“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.”
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…
Back in 1996 at the height of my poetry career (in Scotland not here!) I reviewed for the great Lines Review I not seen this in years but here a John Glenday and Richard Price review. I posting as I starting to get my pencils sharpened for some more reviewing after a break of 30…
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…
Yesterday evening I submitted to all these with varying degrees of success with the exception of Belle Ombre (which I had never heard of and which seemed a contender for the new Agenda up its own (hare’s) arse award). I got something off to all the rest even the one that I was not supposed…
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…
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…
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…
My first poems from 1981-1985 after art college. Some were published in the first volume of a’The New Magazine’ then just started by Gerard Woodward who  went on to be a well known poet and novelist. Unsure of my writing I used the  ‘David Bell’ alter ego. 32 poems including the sequence ‘The New Country’…