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…
Poundland Sonnet 2: A Wreckless Scheme
A WRECKLESS SCHEME Paradise is a gold throw on a white leather sofa Under the buttocks of a call-girl blowing a footballer Indiscretion is a national pastime after cup-cake baking Facebook ramming lives with other people’s misfortune Clear-eyed dreams of making it with the boys in the band Dissolve in bleary orgies in the…
Poundland Sonnets 1: A Poundland Sonnet
A POUNDLAND SONNET In the vacuous naughties the affluent thrum Their chubby fingers on the card-less tills As the slippery accountants of PWC and RBS swill Their caviar down with Vive Cliqout at the parliamentary bash The air is full of Quangos and insider trading slang As the parade of yesterday’s entertainers head for…
Writer’s Block…..smash the piano!
IGGY POP IN A SIDEBOARD Too much thinking fucks you up Too much time slips through the cracks Worrying about the rain, the funerals The way the poplar trees creak in the wind And all along the drip of ice melting off The corrugated asbestos roof a metronome The beat of a disillusioned parade…
The Armitage Stomp
I have delved a little into the Armitage biography and it quite worrying. He has received just about every award and opportunity it possible to get including four Phds (Honourary of course no laborious referencing required). So when Martin Stannard in his review of Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 raised the possibility that this was…
Simon Armitage: Who’s he kidding?
‘The Martian Owl’ Photo Credit: Paul Wolfgang Webster This post brings together some thoughts I posted online today in response to the attention being given a negative review posted on the Stride website by poet and critic Martin Stannard of the newly published ‘Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014. Review available here: Martin Stannard Review Me…
Let’s go to Sacramento…Diesel on Gravel again
OK so this is news that stays news as they say… In 1963-4 Raymond Carver left the Iowa Writers Workshop..he drove to Sacramento. I have just metaphorically done the same only I don’t have a car and cannot drive (his was a battered Chevrolet not a Cadillac by the way). I hinted at this news in…
The true story of the Devil’s House
To celebrate tonight’s news here the background to the track…here the original slip of paper I wrote it on….plus a note on reverse mentioning the song ‘Satisfied Mind’ maybe for ‘feel’. I never recorded it as far as I can tell. Sunday 21st October 2001 A blank week in diary…aged 42 Â and still working at…
Guitar Man – Will Hodgkinson
As I have taken a break from ‘analysing’ myself in the modern educational manner I have turned to reading for some pleasure and first up this slight yet fairly amusing tome from a journo who hung around the sort of people I knew in London in early 2000s… From living under Liam Watson (Toe-rag) to…
My First Short Story: The Leash
My first ever short story. The Leash We cannot start from what we do not know we can only start from what we know The leash to the greyhound tightened around her red raw hand. Across the river the lights of the car factory flickered and bounced in the water and she finally let go….