A poet friend shared this Substack article on facebook and I think it is very good at analysing something which is going on at Poetry Review without taking sides and also from a female perspective.
Poetry Review has always been prone to appointing so-called ‘scene-changers’ but like a backdrop at the theatre it is mostly just that. There are some interesting notes on core business and I’d suggest that beyond PR subscribers I doubt there are 500 people who purchase it as suggested..
I know a little about the new scene changer editor. He had written a poem about his mother which won him PR prize but frankly was as good as any PR NPC winner i.e. not very good at all but he caught a mood in the PR board’s eyes.
Prior to this ‘discovery’ he was already being touted pretty heavily at Academic conferences where thoroughly middle-class people wrung their hands about the lack of working-class writers. They then rode that better than any surfer on a wave of changing of the guard sentiment.
What he is as usual is a gameplayer and roleplayer depending on wind shifting so right now he is ‘enabling’ and ’empowering’ you name it the Bad Betty/Broken Sleep generation in much the same way Peter Forbes enabled his mates then Stephen Smith soon after. Hence you get Amy Acre’s book reviewed as best thing since Sylvia Plath which of course utter bollocks (Co owner Bad Betty FYI) .
Bigging up your mates been going on since Pindar and Horace but what more worrying is the shift away from anything resembling poetry not just in PR but across the board as the Tik Tok generation with smarts realise prose sells more. Look at female poets who cross over to prose as fast as they can..Lowe, Tempest et al….
This is all a part of the Cult of Wellbeing the Arts Council has been bankrolling for years ironically as actual wellbeing has plummetted and the NHS collapsed. In terms of funding it has shrunken year on year and the mantra at ACE now is sustainable in long term unless too large (Bloodaxe/Carcanet/English Opera etc) to fail.
I was amazed to see that the grant circa £350K was equivalent to a one-off arts council grant to academic nonsense back in 2000 (TrAce NTu if interested was nonsense of course) showing how fast the cake has been eroded under successive governments.
A poet friend nailed this as a time of fake compassion and insular care as social institutions for real care collapse on all sides. No matter your grandmother has nowhere to go try writing a poem about it.
The point that ‘reviews’ no longer allowed to be reviews but are ‘enabling, empowering’ too is a good one……so one wonders how long it be called Poetry Review
New Policy no USA and Canada mags reduces overall numbers and frankly wasting time.
Here’s this month’s chicken head on the chopping block list…after vetting left with very few opportunities
London Grip – Three poems XXX (see below) Moon Turned Dark, Houses on the Horizon and Mallory’s Camera
Briefly Write – two 16 line poems Working on a building of love, London Calling
London Grip: XXX
Been asked to re-submit a poem here for June issue so will do my best to write or find two other poems to go with it. Then this within one hour of submitting and 4 hours BEFORE deadline and apparently forgetting asked me to resubmit a poem ..
I have been rejected in a frankly bizarre message which states that despite a ‘very good poem ‘ (only bit he got right) I am at fault for not being on message with a theme which only arises when said theme occurs to the editor in process of editing. This duly increases control of said editor many times and makes him look even more god-like ( Or Emiritrus Professor ) in his position than he already considers himself. Oh magazine badly designed looks 20 years out of date and basically a soap-box for his own agrandisement.
Sometimes I grow tired of poets…especially arrogant incompetent ones. This destination is permanently shelved in fucking useless box….oh and if want to complain about this content go ahead I will take piss even more ..
Still didn’t waste three very good poems on a shit magazine so every cloud has a silver lining.
Frogmore Papers : X Post only which is sweet and as I was accepted via post in 1990s by I believe the same person (nowt else them days) I suppose not so bad I missed the post date totally…. Oxford Poetry: XFEES Another blast from the past although it didn’t charge me £3.50 or more last time (1993). Therefore ignored this time if wish to see more about the magazine the Submittable portal shows this https://duotrope.com/magazine/oxford-poetry-10349
Amsterdam Quaterly : X Theme Vibrations……I hate theme bollocks and I do not vibrate…
Beaver Magazine X (USA) Unfortunate name…Seems to be USA based but could be Canada hard to tell. Good use of wordpress looks good. Briefly Write : UK -based clear guidelines looks OK. Look like care and not just doing what they told post CW MA as so many do. Also have some idea about design.
Consilience : X Now closed just as well mind-numbingly complicated process I know science related but need a degree? Issue 17 is now closed for submissions of both poetry and artwork.
Empty HousePress X (USA)
OK allow simultaneous hard to judge magazine natural world emphasis in photographs. USA based. Out as USA cannot be arsed.
PorridgeXXX UK soley Post Creative Writing degree group so fairly young ALL female editors. There are NO men in art section which frankly pretty awful hence no I shall not bother is a club for females ( trans )only. Put it on your masthead then…
I found a male name on a poem BUT it Trans about becoming a butterfly..oh dear…
If it Porridge it full of pink and sparkly bits really….
The Shore: XXX (USA) USA based I think slightly older than fresh faced grads use of images worrying. Use of sea pictures always suggest Suffolk middle-class to me. OH USA based fresh-faced grads who probably like to live in Norfolk. Career building so give it a miss too…it incresingly easy to spot banged together magazines wiht poor graphics set up to publish people’s mates under ‘international’ signage. (USA)
SPELLBINDER XXX Oh dear more new grads shit…their submission guidelines hoorendous arrogant shit to be honest was put off before even finished reading ..
CAREERIST nowt else likes to boast about how well it doing bet actual poetry fucking awful. They wouldn’t know art or good design if it ran them over…
Spellbinder was founded in 2020 by a group of students based in England, who had first met at the Durham University Creative Writing Society. How nicey middle-class. File by Porridge I hate these kind of fake magazines.
HUMANA OBSCURA: XXX
So Obscura hard to tell if real or a scam..no names and an identity taken from free theme sources online…its first anthology focusses on BLUE
that it I out….
THE JOURNAL USA: X USA
Phew a proper magazine at last
Decent magazine varied content know what doing. easy to spot after a while…
Submitting poetry to magazines these days seems to be akin to buying a lottery ticket or as I remember as a child filling in the football coupon with Xs….
Here are March Xs on the coupon…
So far the score is not good
Magazines Submitted to Jan- February- 10
Rejections – 10
However the average success rate of submission windows that run into thousands literally is below 10%…..according to the magazines themselves nice to let me know..here examples from two replies.. We print less than 1% of the poems sent in each call,
We received a large number of submissions, only 10% of which will comprise the next edition.
So on that basis the best hit rate mathematically is 10 acceptances for every 100 mags submitted to…..at most in fact nearer 1% or 0ne in a hundred acceptances which says it all really..
I do only do online free submissions so at least there not the cost of stamps as in the old days.
Over a two year period 1992-4 I kept records of paper submissions.
The hit rate then was about 10 in a hundred so it looks like chances due to volume are bout one tenth of what they were in 1990s if I being optimistic my feelings is it now really about 1% of what it was ten there more poets out there now than potholes…
This because of pure numbers the increase in people self-identifying as poets has probably increased by a factor of a thousand plus.
MARCH SUBMISSIONS
So here we go
Current SCORE
Potential Magazines this month = 14
Actual number submitted = 7 Rejections so far = 7
Banshee X(Ireland) Instant hit as designed by someone who knows how to design a cover and it Irish..that enough to submit end of…
Firewords (Scotland) I like Scotland it produced better writers over last 100 years than England and that a self-evident truth…
London Magazine X (Poetry Prize submission £10 a poem ) No I do not pay to enter anything …too mean and too sensible. They rejected me politely last month for a free submission I do not need to pay to be rejected when I can get it for free…free market economics..
Magma X (Themed ‘Grassroots’ not a good theme ) Very worthy but I don’t write social work poems….or do therapy worksops…or save whales very often..I do what I can and like most sane people bemoan the mess the Tories have made of these islands…
Shearsman X By the time you read through the fairly arrogant tosh that the editor throws at you you pretty much feel like torching the whole thing. Oh and if they have to tell you they publish more women now it says it all really…
Also the editor handily tells you that nobody gets published until they have evidence of a period of being published thereby establishing a fan base to sell the fucking things ( although 99% of all poetry sells fuck all..) which happened with my Salt pamphlet which contained 20 years of published poems and sold 62 copies.
So cheers at present rejection rate I be six feet under long before I have the smattering of published poems required. Which why I self-publish and say bollocks to that system….submitting is a fun game nothing more and there some good stuff out there just have to dig deep.
OneArt (usa) XXXXX
Cool faux pop art look even cooler response times which makes me suspicious. Overall design lacking is basic at best suggests grad student building own profile job. Ha not even that actually quite an operator and CV builder on own. This mag is pretty fake and a prop to his ambitions basically…..not unlike a few similar people this side of the pond.
Response within 24 hours was a stone cold auto-respond so suspect he (not they) read bio do not read work . Ah checked all their recently accepted work and yup Bio derived acceptances or they just so good at picking every acceptance with a good bio..ha ha ha ..no wonder they turn around so fast . Not a single poet (80% female by the way but that could just be state of play right now as no overt feminist flags) on their acceptance list had less than a fully developed CV .
Oh and he can help you be a better poet..indeed… For that to be the case we have to look at his work These three poems by ********** explore the subjective nature of reality… I not going to present here but what follows are three pretty awful poems which figures…..made me laugh out loud.
I will not be troubling OneArt again …good thing is can dismiss as crap quickly and re-purpose to somewhere half decent instead 🙂
Full House Literary X
Very nice personalised reply good people to do business with will certainly send again in future.
Trans Non Binary friendly young guns mag part of Bad Betty/Broken Sleep wokeism. Terribly twee but then a generation that never worked and spends time networking has never really got its hands dirty. Closer to modern music than poetry as I knew it but that not such a bad thing. Submitted but would never expect to be published as for them it like trying to comprehend their grandfather’s point of view but then some grandfathers are still cool like Patti Smith ..
Ditto.
Stone of Madness Press X is a physical [online] and conceptual space for queer, trans, and neurodiverse writers. I not in that tribe but a clear masthead and purpose again thank you for clarity and all the best.
Swim PressX is an independent publisher and magazine established in 2021 by a group of four Lancaster University friends. (clarity and honesty well done).
All women editors so probably slanted toward feminist perspective.
It reminded me of a Creative Writing course I walked away from where too many sublimated sexual desire stories being written by young women to be healthy ( Wolves tore my clothes etc)..whilst amusing I not going to send any such story to a theme of ‘Desire’ but all best…from small acorns mighty oaks grow could be new generation Virago in 10 years so don’t knock em..
Muleskinner Press X
Despite my kind words a kindly worded rejection which did not appear to auto-respond will try again.
Made me laugh which not a bad thing these days and so American it could be an Americana music journal even the name….submitted three ‘reckless’ i.e. unpublishable anywhere else pieces that maybe the Yanks get but probably not…the best editorial CVs I seen in a while and a fucking relief after wading through the usual BMCC stuff * (British Middle Class Cosy). What the hell they will make of me god knows but hell they got Trump to deal with..I should be easy 🙂
Thimble literary Online X
Same as above not much of a reply but not stupid or asking fro money which a bonuds these days woudl consider again.
Well designed know what doing another USA based magazine which mixes the music and art worlds into mix my kind of people…bit confused by submissions page and suspect already closed but sent them some poetry anyway. Likeably laid back submission page without the usual rigorous delineation of sending ..
Moss Puppy: XXXXX Young uns with no sense of design values chucked together at WIX which means pretty unprofessional..in time maybe improves but looks like thrown together by 12 year olds ..actually most 12 year olds could do better.
Really am I going to submit to something that looks like a teenager’s bedroom..no…even the name is Twee Crap as is the stoopid themes idea…oh and the fanart section well words fail me…they really do…makes Deviant Art look interesting.
Propel: X
Stated Ian MacMillan read submission even though submiittable says not which looks like bullshit but there you go my poems always been better then that professional northern clown anyway…who seems to be setting up a dynasty such is the power of celebrity poets they can breed themselves…can’t wait for GoggleBoxPoets
Serious stuff which a relief after last farago…(which I believe was the name of a Poetry Magazine once will have to check).
So serious I doubt I stand a chance until Faber come knocking but worth further reading and as have two days to do so will investigate further….looks very good.
Hell I even heard of some of guest editors and they are my age …its a start and maybe a small shaft of light at the end of the tunnel 🙂 Submitted all six of my father’s things poems.
I wanna be Rejected….
I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice, I wanna be rejected, I’m your yankee doodle dandy in a gold Rolls Royce, I wanna be rejected, Kids want a savior, don’t need a fake, I wanna be rejected, We’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make, I wanna be rejected,rejected,rejected.
This is how it feels to be back on the poetry pitch….
I creating a useful guide on How to Fail at Poetry as so many seem to effortlessly succeed these days going by the drivel being pumped out by little presses invented by poet’s mates so here how to avoid all that and really fail properly.
I will soon be creating a poocast where you can learn to fail and offering workshops in a whole range of How to Fail areas including How to Fail as A Working Class Writer, How to Fail as a dreadlocked eco warrior writer and last but not least How to Fail writing about being a mother although this is by far the hardest one to fail at right now.
Two months have passed and here is the scoreline for my first batch of poetry submissions. Treated as a Football League Table where after Mag name 1 = received reply and number after my name = 0=rejected 1=accepted and P means postponed no reply yet. X = Too bad to bother submitting or demographics against me. i.e. wrong genre, sex, colour, attitude or not specifically writing about trees or animals or whatever stupid bloody theme they came up with this time….Waves, Dolphins or Feelings…
Butcher’s Dog 1 – Shaun Belcher 0 The London Magazine – 1- Shaun Belcher 0 ( I sent outwith their guidelines so not surprised but was turned down nicely) Strix – 1 Shaun Belcher 0 Nice sense of design and probably good as from Leeds. The North 1- Shaun Belcher-0 Allegro 10 ( so fast and rude it seemed personal) – Shaun Belcher-0 Amsterdam Quarterly 1 – Shaun Belcher 0 Bell Ombre – X (Goth Rubbish) London Grip 1-1 – Shaun Belcher Almost 1 but 0 (suggested re-sending) Mechanics Institute Review -X see Strix above this one a nest of academics who not overtly Goth so may be ok..missed deadline.
So January stats are Poetry Mags 7 – Shaun Belcher 0 although VAR checking for possible goal in March… that it for now…..a glorious Faber future awaits.
This month easy I only remembered to submit to one American magazine ‘Leon’ with both poetry and short story receiving the ultimate accolade of rejection in fairly prompt manner for both. Hats off to our former colonial chums for being as rejection orientated as us Brits. They took to the trees when the redcoats came…old habits die hard. So to date one submission as foillows
Leon 1- Shaun Belcher Poetry 0 Leon 1- Shaun Belcher Poetry 0
Nice to be rejected by same mag in two different genres makes one feel that one is offering a wider portfolio of failed material…
Rest as follows
Artemis X Wimmin Only Pennine Platform X Total luddite why waste time setting up a submittable account when one can use a failing postal service to send your damp with rain manuscript like in olden times….for fuck sakes just close yourselves down it no longer the 1990s… Carmen et Error XXX North east Goths hated the graphics dont have to really go past that do I…for people who think ‘Uncanny’ is a new thing..e.g. academics who bought Cure records. Ignore with venom. Only true word is Error. Couplet XX – only couplets an easy ignore X2 The Alchemy Spoon X Missed deadline as last in list. Uses a alternative system to Submittable which I had not heard of called Duosuma? May try again when next window opens. Website confusing but they do at least keep updated and on to AI. I also not a fan of ‘themed’ issues but give them the benefit of doubt. Do provide free online issues which positive.
Green Ink Poetry X – Looks like the kind of poetry magazine a hedge monkey would have invented after a bad acid trip. Too many druids not enough reality. Julian Cope would love it…..maybe it him in disguise.
Poetry Wales X – At last fundamentally a decent magazine but oh dear what a fucking awful theme..Wave..what like the Severn Bore……..pass to druids. I have a tendency when facing crap themes to try and twist the objective hence I was rejected once for a ‘generation’ theme by suggesting it could benefit by being about energy generation….rejected but always amuses me.
Gutter X – Gutters are useful for displacing showers of shit and this no exception looked quite good until i forgot closing date and now the website turned into a giant pink and green splodge so one for the future then ..
Stats for February
Magazines 1 – Shaun Belcher 0
Opening 1st March
Shearsman Banshee The Common Ink Sweat and Tears Propel The HIgh Window The Shore
The Sunday Times Colour Supplement heralds Poetwee..
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…
A pretend farm lies within these borders, hedges, fields and muddy tracks. One un-harvested by contract machinery, unbounded by electrified fencing.
As I stand on a grass verge a mile of tarmac bubbling behind me, the horizon buckling in the heat haze, I begin to build. Wood for concrete, timber joists for steel. In my head a new farm appears. The old farm rising in the skeleton of the new. Concrete cladding and corrugated tin roofing splits and flies off over the hills. The Thames Water sign on the barn end floats like a stamp soaked off an envelope.
I am rebuilding my past in the present when the daydream is shattered. A tractor lurches towards me cab dazzling like a sharp scythe lifted from a grinder.
The driver asks me what I’m doing. I mutter that I used to live here — What, he says, in that ol’ wreck. He doesn’t believe me but the wary mouth under the goggles and dirty John Deere baseball cap lets go a few more words
-Don’t ye go in there, dangerous see. I say yes, having already been in.
Standing on roots, brambles and branches I got to peer through a broken window at bare floorboards and a grate littered with flakes of asbestos, ash and plaster. By that grate my sister entered this world on a cold February evening during the cold snap of 1962.
A Jamaican nurse hovers over my mother as firelight dances on the ceiling. Black hands cradle the white bundle as it is passed over the sheets to my mother. I am three years old, drawing in the condensation and watching feathers of snow melt against the window.
When I am asked what I shall hand on I shall say this.
My dowry of words. Fire, water, glass, ice, darkness.
Shaun Belcher gives some excellent advice on how not to start a poetry career.
July 1991 I 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 in the old building on Charing Cross Road.
My brief tenure as a photocopying assistant and customer service adviser (weekends only) didn’t do much for me financially as I travelled up from Didcot for several months but it did introduce me to poetry and poets which I had dabbled with in a thoroughly modernist way since discovering William Carlos Williams in my early twenties.
In six short months in 1990 I met( and served) a whole gaggle of new generation poets ( Dooley, Shapcott, Greenlaw, Donaghy all great and one Maxwell who was a rude prick) and also met some greats like Ivor Cutler, Bob Cobbing ( who equalled Maxwell for rudeness showing that manners and avant-garde no guarantor) as well as seeing a whole host of great readings.. C.K. Williams, William Trevor and best of all Raymond Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher.
Thus inspired I self-produced a small poetry pamphlet ‘Towns on Shallow Hills’ which I remember Ivor Cutler reading but not buying on account as he said he had read it…said pamphlet I sold to various friends and poets ( I still have a list) and I am pleased to say still in the National Poetry Library collection which is apt as printed on their photocopy paper between shifts.
It didn’t launch me into contention as a new generation poet that honour had been carved out almost exclusively for acolytes of the Poetry Review editor Peter Forbes who I had the misfortune to hear read one of his dull longer form poems out once and who was an arrogant SOB who virtually controlled poetry in those days. He loved Maxwell which figures ..birds of a feather etc.
Remember in those days Oxbridge white middle class was a defining factor and only Simon Armitage broke through that and that led to some tokenism in the New Gen list but overall the power base remained intact which not good for a politically orientated writer like myself. That Oxbridge dominance is still true to a high degree. If you want a current assessment of political make up of the poetry audience go see David Coates research here https://davepoems.wordpress.com which overly academic but is telling.
I myself come into the category of his category of cishet white men which ironic considering he neatly leaves out the ‘middle class’ bit of that definition which handy as if, as he is , you are from Northern Ireland studying a PhD on Louis Macneice you pretty much tick all the boxes of those you attacking…..but at least he trying to flag up the inequalities for which I have to say well done.
The poems published in the pamphlet were pretty hastily written but I left the Library confident that I as good as the above mentioned careerist poets (not knowing a thing about careerism) and wrote some much better stuff which through 1991-92 I started submitting to journals and lo and behold started to be published. I was pretty much unemployed and broke all the time so it led nowhere. I did some unpaid reviewing for the Arts Council met a lot of people who supportive but too busy providing themselves with opportunities and funding and ended up meeting a lovely Spanish woman and buggering off to Edinburgh where I continued and flourished as a poet.
Today is pretty much 30 years to the day since I received my first publication letter from John Harvey at Slowdancer Magazine ironically based then in Nottingham. I still have a copy. This in retrospect was the high point of my poetry career until the retrospective ‘greatest hits’ pamphlet Last Farmer from Salt in 2010.
So 30 years on I starting to look at the poetry world again. A lot of the magazines and editors who published me have disappeared or simply died. Some I happy to see like The Frogmore Papers still going and poets who supported me in Edinburgh like Stewart Conn still alive which amazing. I do not know what kind of poetry I will write or if there even a poetry world that cares in an era of selfie PR and diversity tick boxing. Even the working class ticket has been abused and moulded to generate support and funding. It is a more visual, less middle class landscape but the powerful still lead at Faber and Faber , Cape etc. It reminds me of a late Larkin poem about a mind folding under snow .. it feels a chilly climate to walk out into poetry land…..
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….
Shaun Belcher was born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before moving to a council estate in the small town of Didcot in 1966 just as England won the world cup..
He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81 where he sat under a tree with Adrian Mitchell.
Began writing poetry in the mid 1980s and subsequently has been published in a number of small magazines and a poem 'The Ice Horses' was used as the title of the Second Shore Poets Anthology in 1996.(Scottish Cultural Press).
He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams working as a minion at the University of Oxford.
He is currently enjoying retirement from 20 years of teaching and hopes to write something on a regular basis again. He has been involved in various literary projects including delivering creative writing workshops in Nottingham prison for the ‘Inside Out’ project.
He supports Arsenal football club.
Favourite colours therefore red and green like his politics.
We have not won the world cup again since 1966 and Shaun Belcher is not as famous as Simon Armitage although his songs are better.
