My hometown of Didcot, Oxon (formerly Berks) was identified as the most normal town in the U.K. according to the BBC and researchers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-39428314.amp?
Which makes me a Normal Town Poet….
More to follow…
Category: working class poetry (Page 1 of 4)
WICKERLAND? It’s like MOTHERLAND but without the humour..more AMANDA writes poetry…..god help us all. The above states
chance to talk about real things like connection, love ,loss, creativity, purpose….
thats so nice not fake things like Iran, Gaza, Ukraine…
at least it makes Class War seem so less futile..
IF THIS IS POETRY then POETRY IS OVER….dead, a Norwegian Blue, nailed to its Class based perch. I embarrassed to use the word any more in fact I hate POETRY and POETS as presently configured in the UK.
You know those so-called poetry geniuses clogging up the presses with their creative writing group white middle class drivel…..
There are hundreds if not thousands of people out there now calling themselves poets and entering endless stupid competitions and helping each other feel ‘better’. It is internet driven creating delusional poets and a lot of spurious nepotism disguised as networking. Poetry in the UK is a fraud.
In my honest opinion at best this is simply therapy not poetry ( typical career paths include ex hypnotherapists/ acupuncture/wellbeing/physiotherapy etc oh and made a pile in the City bankers and wives of bankers loom large) so they really have time on hands..none ever seem to have been in anything but comfortable white middle class environments.
This stuff makes me want to burn their publications if not actually the poets (don’t push me on that it negotiable) slowly in a bonfire of their own self-regarding writing..maybe a giant Wicker Poet..that would do nicely.
The present queen of this post millenium touchy-feely drivel is the recent winner of the National Poetry Competition which a flag-bearer for more of the same. Although what Nation’s flag she flys under dubious..Offshore banking maybe.
A poem about missing an affluent middle-class son who has a top job in Australia ( the author has a background in working at the Bank of England).
In a world where reality is increasingly bloody and desperate we get this genre-defining slice of interiority that avoids all aspects of reality apart from those impinging on the author’s sensitive soul. This is what poetry post millenium is all about. She is not the worst she can at least write but it not the work that the problem its the vested interests making this happen.
She represents the triumph of the establishment. The establishment Poetry Society doing its avowed job of rewarding somebody who so establishment it painful. Don’t expect comments on Gaza or the homeless it just isn’t fit for purpose darling in the poetry and book clubs across the shires they want world view views which shore up their sense of security not question it.
Her friends placed her BS book in front of Philip Larkin in Waterstones and shared on X that bastion of liberal views. A stunning example of posh lady Boadiceas ( there actually a luxury perfume called that seriously one cannot make it up) challenging the patriarchal norms as they trod carefully around the homeless on the way out of the bookshop….reverse the situation and imagine the shitstorm a male poet doing that to a female poet would engender. Sadly no male poet called Plath around to test the water maybe there a Moore, Dickinson or Shapcott though…it a sign of the arrogance and untouchability of a certain strata of post-feminist affluent women that they do this.
Larkin is not unusual at all in fact a certain level of financial stability is essential to their dominance. NO poor female or male poets make the grade these days as you need time (lots of it) and money (lots of that too).
A feted poet from Oxford lives in a million pound house travels to at least three Spa/Writing retreats a year and wins awards for ‘interviewing’ dementia patients whilst underpaid staff clear up the urine. Nice one must need the sea air after that tortuous supplement to your high end earners lifestyle.
Finally and not least Kit De Waal a warrior queen of new feminist poetry and a shining example of Working Class made good (genuine hard back story) but after marrying the barrister brother of Booker prize winner Edmund De Waal it all got a tad easier. That’s the reality of modern British Publishing it CLASS based and increasingly devoid of talent and genuine innovation.
Bookseller campaigns to increase visibility of Working Class writers are just that a tokenism to obscure the increasingly Class based control of publishing. Ironically Kit De Waal offering a Bridport Prize in Bookseller for older poets. etc more tokenism of course.
Bookseller tokenism classic is the Working Class Nature Writers award..
Lets not unpack that for what it is..oh ok then it is total bullshit simply take two boxes combine and tick. PR department inventions to boost sales of fairly mediocre talents and get kudos for defending the poor and disadvantaged.
The Bookseller is a driver of all that face-on shit you see in Waterstones you know the umpteenth copy of the plot and sleeve art of The Essex Serpent – they marketeers of dross. They know how to shift shit printed in China like nobody else…Rowling is their Queen. Nobody can invent new income streams quite like her.
LEGACY: death of innovation and a lost generation
There are now few new kids from working class backgrounds in the media, theatre, music world because it ring-fenced by the ability (TIME IS MONEY)
to do it.
Mercury Prize Nominees – ALL public school last year.
Two of our finest female new poets
Hollie McNish – feigns humble ordinary gal did Classics at Cambridge father owns a Reading IT company is director.
Kae Tempest – father one of world’s top music lawyers…must have made the transformation from mediocre poet to music artist that much harder..
PR POET-EDITORS: Editing others poetry has become a money-spinner if not the only young poets income stream and has spread exponentially via social media.
This list isn’t gender specific nor sexist it is CLASS specific. I sure there are male equivalents it just hard to find them although a few spring to mind. It is predominantly female because they have the lions share of success recently. This is because of the glass ceiling being not just shattered but then turned round and armour-plated. If you can add some diversity points or a tragic back story you in the money.
It harder to track male stories maybe because they not so keen to share their privileged upbringings whilst female poets appear to feel protected by their gender and generally share more.
This is the end of poetry as I knew it which in the late 1970s was predominantly male almost overwhelmingly so. The pendulum has swung very hard the other way now.and the birth of poetry as lifestyle choice is connected to this it is as simple as that.
A nice award bauble to add to Chanel perfume on dresser and a Tesla in the drive. Oh darling you won a competition most poets cannot afford to enter how marvellous. Lets have a dinner party soon.
As Nick Moss writes..
Their poetry is rooted in an attempt to maintain as essential to poetry that sensibility of interiority which is the core of the novel in its original form. Croft describes this as “the commodification of poetry, the privatisation of feeling.” Not every poem needs to be about a fucking geranium. Not when some people don’t have patios to decorate, because they don’t have homes at all…
None of it addresses the personal through oblique and politicised analysis but always through personalised tear-stained-contact lenses..
The latest fad write it and read it off your phone after all it is throw-away…social media led drivel..it doesn’t matter.
Have an issue lets talk about it, workshop it, send it to a press/ magazine that likes it and bingo..on we go…a carousel of poetry that makes Sylvia Plath look hard-edged rational…bring back the Confessional Poets at least they had some other things to say.
Here my guide to getting published today:
Write about YOURSELF.
Write about yourself in relation to an issue you may not have been directly affected by say suicide or alcoholism and write about it in relation to yourself.
Write about NATURE not ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Not actual nature as in commercial factory farming more how you like walking around a lake and looking at trees.This category sells well especially if decorated with pretty illustrations. Rabbits and cats best.
SUBMIT TO MAGAZINES RUN BY FRIENDS
Never ever stray away from your support networks it takes time to build up a web of equally vapid boosters who attend your monthly meetings and swoon over every syllable. They quickly become publishers as they move up the greasy pole of Brit Lit. Pay for high end agents they worth their weight in promotional uptick.
PAY TO PLAY
Go top end in Creative Writing Course choice that way you connect higher up the ladder. PAY out money in subscriptions and competition entries. NEVER express a unsuitable opinion especially about politics unless gender related and vague to show you on right side of history. Spend big on small presses and magazines and competitions INVEST in your future.
SELF-PUBLISHING
Never self-publish that s for commoners and such-like. Self-Publishing is akin to total failure. Poetry only really exists through approved channels. Get a Faber abd Faber or Cape badge and you in the green room of poetry and your every missive will be poored over in The Guardian and Times. Eat my shorts darlinks..or drink them in hospitality.
MAGAZINES THE REALITY
Most magazines are almost certainly dominated by the white middle class and may even be edited from a chateaux in France..most are post Oxbridge white middle class really affluent. Keeping control of the message all important not quality. The occaisional brown face helps tick boxes and helps establish a veneer of faux diversity.
BRIT LIT SICK NO CURE?
IF BRITISH POETRY has become a therapy circle for the white middle class is it virtually redundant now? Male female or trans no matter the lack of substantial content outside the domestic is in my honest opinion a total failure of modern poetry.
Whilst the hogweed of self chokes the landscape things like Smokestack folding show how bleak the future really is ….the ‘terroir’ of poetry is increasingly ring-fenced by the poetry of self..they want to erect barriers to reality.
I am against this stuff…give me a match we need new growth.
In the olden days my grandfather would set a match to a straw field after harvest…
The personal is political – poetry used to be political
before politics became dangerous ask Kneecap
Burn Baby Burn
Radiohead – met at Radley Public School….there you go…
This pamphlet collects together all the poems written since my ‘re-birth’ in the font of poetry at Open Book. I have to thank Neil Fulwood for splashing the Eu de Blue Monkey on my face and waking me up to the possibility that poetry was not dead in Nottingham…well not yet. I have come to bury Ceasar etc etc..
Whilst enjoying seeing so many diverse and talented people offer their wares the biggest effect was to make me firstly engage with poetry world and once engaged become enraged with how shit most of it appears to be.
I will rant about that elsewhere but for now look out because by the time that Guy Fawkes is burning yet again this pamphlet will exist.
Here a taster of its contents much of it shared here at some point and some of it too acerbic yet to come.
As Raymond Friel said in a review many moons ago…
“Belcher cannot be accused of nostalgia or pastoral myth-making but is as vituperative in tone as Larkin“
Nothing changed there then…
here a promotional video too using fake footage fake voice and real words….
I accepted a challenge from Neil Fulwood on facebook to post ten books that I love, one book per day, no explanations, no reviews, just the covers.
The idea is to promote good books, encourage reading and create a wonderful reading list.
Here my 10 as posted and explanations of why chosen.
This book is the only volume I have kept from a bookcase full of victorian books which given to my country grandparents of whom my step-grandfather could not read. It was my introduction to books from being a small child but strangely never saw read. I wrote about them in poem The Hare Lip. Read that here:
Bought in 1985 when it came out from a bookshop in Plymouth (sticker on back) whilst visiting my sister. I heard a lot about Carver from muisc reviews at time referring to the ‘Carveresque’. Loved his writing and background fitted my notions of writing working class stories in poetry and song. Years later met his widow at Poetry Library also a great poet. Still a significant writer for me 30 years later.
Simply the greatest poet I have been in the same room as ( Norman MacCaig’s birthday party in Edinburgh) although I did stand next to him outside the Edinburgh Central Library as he lit a cigarette but was too shy to speak to him. Bought this in Scotland probably at James Thins. Edinburgh made me a poet Oxford made me give up being a poet simple as that.
Again a chance meeting meant I handed a signed copy of the original Goldmark publication of Whitechapel Scarlet Tracings one of his best and earliest books when I at a Goldmark exhibition private view Sinclair attended. Instead of that book I chosen this as John Clare was a fundamental inspiration that got me through A Level English thanks to my mad teacher Miss Millington a bonkers mid 50s spinster who regaled us with tales of dope smoking camel races from her previous lives…..years later Clare inspired a song that ended up the title of a Norwegian Country Lp..go figure..
I love this book more than anything else he written (hence three copies) and he written a lot ( I know I have all of them).No never met him so cannot name drop this time but this book defined my concept of americana long before it became fashionable. Without this book there no Flyinshoes and probably no Alt Country..this was the text book.
Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh a reading to promote this book and probably the best poet of my generation by a mile. Looked like the computer programmer he was still at this point. Opened his mouth and surreal suburban odes the like of which I not heard before or since. Favourite single poem is the Asylum Dance…….superb writer and sadly will write no more but what there is awesome.
A railway labourer from Swindon who learnt several languages and wrote a series of books about his region including this amazing collection done on a bycycle tour of the Upper Thames. The achievement alone is astonishing the writer almost totally obscure like a good few of what I call the English South Downs Spiritualists.Nature writing before the current faddists and big publisher bullshitters got in on the act. He, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas….ECO before the word invented…..my holy trinity.
I lived on a council estate where half the houses were better built in brick and known as ‘Atomic Houses’. They were built to house the workers at Harwell Atomic Research Laboratory. It about a mile and a half across fields from my town of Didcot. I knew neighbours that worked there. My mother helped place rods into reactors when a teenager and I worked there. It was where the UK atomic bomb was built it created the plutonium. I signed official secrets act just to do a shit job there. It was an airfield used to launch Arnhem and D-Day gliders it is the reality nobody knows…..gorillas dosed with radiation early experiments with a little understood thing called radioactivity one day I will tell my stories..
Full circle the only book my father ever owned. A school prize before he sent to fields as labourer at 14. He was denied further education left that to me….never wrote but thought and spoke a lot.
In a fire this the book I save…
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 with just the occasional poetry book now. The cover painting was not my painting it part of a rights free set of a Finnish artist available to use and save costs across the series so there you go….
I asked him about all this and he told me that I had sold the glorious number of 62 copies over the last decade so it unsurprising it no longer on list and I now reside in bin 13 with quite a few others.
Whilst it was available I would only shared promotional edited versions of the book out of respect for the copious and long contract but now it officially ceased to exist I can offer to all as an Easter Egg free download.
The volume pretty much hoovered up everything I had published in small magazines up until 2010. To this day my published works ceased in 2007 with three poems in Staple magazine. So until the new stuff I sending out now gets somewhere this is all there is….the last of the Last Farmer:-)
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 London and saw Edmund White, Richard Ford and Salman Rushdie read in his honour.
I think this volume is the ‘lost volume’ as I was living at home in Didcot and totally cut off from literary world from 1988 until 1990.
I did do some readings through the Last Gasp group until I moved to Edinburgh in 1993.
None of these poems have been seen apart from in these hand made pamphlets.
Style note all hand written then typed on my mother’s old typewriter.
The last few pages of the document as pdf have originals and some uncollected poems.
The blue pen and line through a poem are from Giles Goodland when selecting for a pamphlet…I did not have second copies as everything had to be typed by hand …so here it is..
Diesel on Gravel…..1990
I shall be reading from new Horseshoe Press pamphlet ‘Thames Valley Texas’ next Tuesday at the Organ Grinder on Open Books second birthday. Without the hard work of the T S Eliot of Bus Drivers there would be no Open Book so thank you Neil Fulwood here’s to the next two years…
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 will be reading from the new collection at the Open Book Reading on the 3rd October.
No Substitute update….
In an ironical twist having selected the title because of The Who song I found out that Pete Townsend actually got married in my hometown and at the council offices I and my sister helped clean back in late seventies. My mother and nan were cleaners there in evening.
There no sustitute for a tie-in bit of PR in this case there were even photos taken. No I was not there but probably at home kicking a football against the wall as a nine year old.
Accept no substitute…
A link to this article was shared onine by by Martin Malone former editor of Interpreter’s House which pre Martin I helped survive as a paper edition by creating a basic website.
The price of progress is that the magazine now now exists only online.
https://theinterpretershouse.org/
The article by Wendy Pratt of SPELT magazine
https://speltmagazine.com/
available to read here:
https://wendypratt.substack.com/p/notes-from-spelt-magazine-the-impossibility
My response in comments as follows:
I agree totally with your comments above although I have seen a lot of poor quality work riding on the coat-tails of the ‘so-called’ working class writing revolution which more a Bookseller PR stunt than actuality. The print medium died the day Oxford University Press tipped its lead type into the Thames or is that urban myth based on link below? (there is an eco-poem if ever there was one perhaps I should write it).
https://hyperallergic.com/181625/a-century-after-being-cast-into-the-river-thames-a-celebrated-typeface-reemerges/
It ended in early 1990s when a press I represented by actually hand set a poem of mine (I will find and share on my blog) in lead type. They had one of the last machines for creating type and a man came to mend it He was the last of the generation that had knowledge to mend them. The knowledge died with them.
A decade later I helped Oxford University convert ALL paper based Science publishing acquisition to computers and then a whole College’s library. Digital hit hard around the Millennium and since then a younger generation have developed entirely new habits of consumption, dissemination and interaction. Paper unless sold as anachronistic fetish object ( works for Vinyl records) is to all intents and purpose dead as a piece of type in muddy water. So forgetting the argument that internet is green (it is not the servers and electric generation to fuel it alone cost a few rain forests). Where do we go now?
Substack a good choice. I suggest you read the Jazz critic Ted Gioia (brother of poet Dana Gioia) he very cutting edge on where we are now and it isn’t good news.
https://www.honest-broker.com/
Your magazine looks great but it also looks like something I would have shelved at Poetry Library in 1990 (I been around that long). As for getting your messages across I returned to ‘the poetry world’ or rather the blizzard of new ‘worlds’ each tightly regimented and screened online (or paper) come to that. This is not because all magazines now are nepotistic (though a good few are or class interest based) but simply because the numbers now are frightening. Like music anybody with a phone and half a brain can be a poet if they want to (before AI made it even easier to simulate poetry) .
I grew up in an era of clearly defined gatekeepers ( Faber, Cape, Bloodaxe etc) which on the whole male dominated yes but because numbers far lower and generally standards higher it was easier to at least work out one’s place in the (singular) poetry world. Post world-wide web that no longer possible one has to find a nest that suits and defend your interests whatever your politics from that lonely tower as global capitalism basically runs riot below.
As a white (working class whatever that means these days and frankly in some cases not much) male aged 65 trying to re-enter the worlds (plural) I on a hiding to nothing and add fact that I been writing about the environment for nigh on 40 years it appears I am now almost unpublishable going by feedback I had so far. The reasons for that are generational (ageism) political (sexism) and demographic as I do not read or wish to engage with certain class ridden circles or even some younger circles of interest any more than they do me.
So Substack is a potential rabbit hole to another wonderland. It does work but if you enter this domain be prepared to post daily to make it work and engage followers and also to engage directly with thorny issues of political activism if talking Green we are no longer in village fete friends of earth stage we are in defined as eco-terrorism (pace Edward Abbey) territory now. Truly engage and it may be that Spelt finds a new niche.. paper is not dead its just not printed on any more..
Out of frustration I took a new tack towards ECO and Poetry on my substack is a long job but it seems to engage people far more than straight poetry offering. You may find of interest.
We are in for stormy weather
https://darkweather.substack.com/
My old style words on a screen and very occasionally a page although less so in the last 20 years than before here.
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=141
A lot self-published because I an early adopter and specialist in multimedia. I find the fetishism apparent in the ‘self-publishing’ wrong attitude symptomatic of those who should know better slamming the stable door shut after the horse not only bolted but also shot dead…..
It generally white middle class that promulgate that attitude of ‘I don’t want my poems online’ because they dream of standing in a bookshop with that object in their hand feeling pleased with themselves along with the other 5000 recently cheaply published (thanks to digitisation of the production line) authors feeling the same ..
It is complete nonsense.
I look forward to the podcast…..they are hard work….I ran a music one for a year.
After twenty years chez Nottingham I finally been invited to share my thoughts at a reading.
So if you wish to listen to a couple of bolshy poets tearing down the walls of heartache now’s your chance…
Neil Fulwood been around a bit has some books and generally a good egg….
He will be promoting his new Smokestack Press publication and generally taking the piss out of the Tories which in current climes no bad thing.
I will be ranting as usual……at everything.
I will be reading from this book available until August 2nd as a free pdf download below.
Visit CHAINLINK
https://www.openbook.org.uk/chainlink/
the new cultural matters journal that black and white and red all over...
Visit OPEN BOOK the monthly readings have now ended but the archive remains.