This is an ongoing project I just started and will take time to complete.
I began writing poetry in my hometown of Didcot in 1981-2 after a few perfunctory ‘poetry’ lectures at Hornsey College of Art introduced me to Larkin, Heaney and Hughes. Then a slightly tipsy Adrian Mitchell joined us under a tree in front of Alexander Palace.
My early poems were slightly surreal, landscape orientated and drew on the American Poets travelling selection I came across by chance in my local library. W.C.Williams especially affected me. From early on I was influenced by American and Scottish landscape and eco poets especially Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, Al Purdy and Canadian Prairie poets.
By 1991 having failed to make a living as the new Francis Bacon in London I ended up back home in Didcot and working part-time at the Poetry Library on the South Bank. Here I really started to write seriously as I saw that poetry not a dead end and my first publication was in John Harvey’s Slowdancer magazine which Chainlink tips a hat to. I quit the library to become famous elsewhere (Scotland ) which of course didn’t happen or if it did nobody told me.
I loved my time in Edinburgh and wrote some pretty mad or bad or great poems about that time that will appear for the first time in the proposed book above. Whilst in Edinburgh 1994-6 I joined the Shore Poets and was again influenced by people I met and read with.
The Back Catalogue:
Being ignored by the English poetry establishment on return from Scotland and feeling pretty tired of tiresome poetry types I put my career on hold. Oxford does that to one if you not from the establishment and not waited on…
The problem is that of the roughly 2500 poems written in the last 40 years about half are still typewritten in folders and never seen the light of day.
This is where I take on the task of producing a respectable collection as above. It will take time. Arsenal may well have become European Champions by the time I finish. Everybody has to have a hobby when retired now you know mine.
At the risk of appearing a bit deluded (most poets are some made careers from it) I’d say I am probably the best unpublished (currently) poet in Nottingham if not the whole East Midlands..time will tell.
Meanwhile I will stick my various irons in the fire and moan about lesser poets being funded and/or published (with no evidence of brain or talent) which to be fair I been doing for close on 40 years.
As for the various people who helped me survive and keep prodding the muse you will get your credits in due course.
There aren’t many of you.
To keep up to date with progress visit the writing blog here.
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing