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…
working class poetry
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…
Blurred Fences : Thames Valley Texas
A Christmas Poem in November? I wrote this poem in 1995 and had omitted the key line about poets for fear of offending my father. Now he has been gone 13 years so probably safe to reveal what the poem about. After my father died in 2004 my mother confided to me that he had…
Buying Time – In or Out it’s the same old story…
Buying Time I’ve been buying time since I was born It is what the working class were made for No trust funds, no foreign holidays No gap year, no kindly Aunt’s dowry My father taught me to buy time Any chance you get son take what you can Don’t be dishonest, keep your pride, do…
The Enemy Within – How Thatcherism destroyed the White Working Class
Map of former Rover Car Plant at Oxford Interesting and ground-breaking article from Paul Mason in The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/the-problem-for-poor-white-kids-is-that-a-part-of-their-culture-has-been-destroyed Excellent article by Paul Mason but calling for a ‘white kids community’ again in towns like my hometown of Didcot near Oxford where the ‘aspirant wide-boy migrant’ psychology rampant is harder to realise. These commuter towns…
Substitute: My problem with poetry
Now I have always had a problem with being a ‘poet’. I come from a straightforward working class council estate background and the only thing worse than being a poet there was becoming a ‘fine artist’ so I killed two birds in one bush there then with my double non-career. I remember digging up a…