Like a bad penny this story never dies and after I had this photograph taken yesterday I thought similar and did some more digging and found two new articles on ‘Flynn’ and for those less squeamish that comes from the saying ‘in like Flynn’ about Errol Flynn’s legendary bedding of women.
the full story in Coppard link above but here two new takes on the story..
I came from nothing, and it may be I was never anything more than a contrivance for recording emotions I would fain have taken for my own, but could not– life passed me by
. From AE Coppard’s semi-autobiographical My Hundredth Tale written c1930
Graham Thomas an English author living in Tokyo has written a very accurate short life of Flynn available here.
Five years ago we slid across this bridge at dawn after a long hot drive from Barcelona. I kept waking up on the back seat to see factories flaring orange against the black hills. As we entered Zaragoza I saw the basilica lit up by floodlights that caught the dust swirling in from the desert.
I woke with that dust in my teeth, sweating whilst you lay there perfectly cool and calm. We carry our countries in our blood, habits, instincts that carry us back to the same places in our dreams. Now I catch you sleeping again; winter, the Ebro rising, I’m not sweating but still the air here tastes different.
Every winter for five years we have swung back across the bridge circling your past through the sparkle of christmas lights. Words have crept into my vocabulary as I struggle with Spanish but I still get caught like an uprooted tree on the double r’s, tongue snagged against the bridge supports whilst you sail away floating on the native rhythm of your language as I submerge.
I stare at the back of another car doused with torrents of rain as tail-lights burn in the wet roads and palm trees swirl. I stare at the roads as they flood easily, a summer’s dust and dirt clogging the drains. When we met I was washed away on a torrent of affection. Now we stand on the bridge five years on wind catching dust, staring into a flood that moves beneath us.
Now it here…..version numero 3 based on an Englishman’s attempt to deal with the Monegros desert….
It is said that this territory was once covered by dense forests through which squirrels could cross the country from one end to the other.
Now it is desert dust mostly….no squirrels
THE SPANISH SQUIRREL
Tributaries of Ebro splash through pines, sand-filled water tumbling by roots as winter sunlight, bright as an English spring, dazzles through the Parque Grande fountains.
Re-treading your past like a pond-skater, spinning around your city, dizzy with language, I skitter past a bronze statue of an open-mouthed singer I’ve never heard of.
Grass recovering from the last scorching summer it is still the greenest space in your parched birthplace. Spawned amidst a tangle of Thames Valley woods where even in summer drenched fern steams
I find it hard to take in this dryness. A dust-blown treelessness that surrounds us. But amidst the burning sands and buckling rails the white tracks of the possible extend links
that spread below our circling plane like cow-spittle dripping away from the water-trough. Below us sheep and goats cloud remote paths and baking lorries glint on the auto-pista.
From up here the green of the river-plain is as snicked and trim as any suburban privet. Beyond the treeless desert and mountains I think of that squirrel, caught mid-air forever, never landing.
(Fable has it that Spain was once so densely wooded that a squirrel could cross the country jumping from tree to tree.)
Album cover and here first track based on the Crystal Palace fire as seen above.
The original poem was written in 1982 one of my earliest.
The collection will provide spoken word soundscapes for 26 poems related directly to eco-green political themes I written over the last 40 years.
The tracks are being uploaded to Soundcloud as they completed .
Here first recording..
the great exhibition
two jays in tic-tac spinning cresting waves of lace curtain and linoleum two-stepping tarmacadam’s invention a century’s first mast the barge of the crystal palace this gaping hole where the machinery ploughed into the past the smell of smoke of ashes
The playgrounds were strewn with ash Smoke still billowed from the underpass Further out in the estuary steam rose From the tanker now beached and rusting
Lights now only flickered around the estate On every other day to conserve energy Milk floats converted to run on steam Carried bodies of those who froze
Up the icy streets to the crematorium The one place left they still used gas The old cylinder gas tanks long since Deflated like punctured balloons
Horses and cattle roamed the empty fields Looking for their owners and a bale of hay But the engines that brought them Had long since died and started to rust away
No-one now could remember how it started One day there were fires everywhere The pylons buzzed in the rain Then it stopped, silent roads, empty skies
Hands scratching for fuel kept finding Impressions of leaves and insects in the coal For a while the neighbours chopped down trees Built holes in their eco-house roofs
To let the newly built fire-places let out smoke then the hard winter stopped that By spring there was no firewood to be had All the oil and gas had burnt out long ago
Slowly the bones started to appear Bodies lying in the fields slowly fading back into the chalky soil Row upon row of chalky fossils.
A selection of published and self-published volumes 1992-2022…30 years! I will be reading poems from these various collections tonight at The Organ Grinder with Neil Fulwood.
Here my CV 🙂
A NEW YEAR GREETING
**** (poem here)
Addenda: What I am not.
Shaun Belcher is the author of one out of print slim volume that disappeared into the virtual ether before it was printed via lightning strikes/amazon so qualifies as a work of fiction. He did not edit any anthology of obscure, unacknowledged legislators nor did he win any prizes, nor should we be specific did he enter any competitions. He has held no official tenures as a creative writer at any top end nor third rate provincial university and has never reviewed other poets he dislikes for the simple reason of building a profile to get published. He has never been recommended by friends in the poetry world as he has none and has studiously avoided anything to do with poets or poetry for over two decades. He is member of no group who look after his publishing and reading interests when his work over time slides into fabulous irrelevancy or simply becomes so bad it an embarrassment. He has no agenda nor minority axe to grind and has never played on his working class beginnings for pity or favour. He regards his lifelong devotion to obscurity and keeping some semblance of sanity in a world over-run with poets like a corpse covered in flies that he should not add to other’s suffering by maintaining a steady output of academic poetry which simply done to fulfil research departmental targets. His earnings from poetry over 40 years accrues to £70 he once got paid for being given a slot at Ledbury Festival by a friend and a commission again via a friend for £500 which works out to roughly £14.25 per annum which a living wage in the poetry world these days.
He is however still a poet if being a poet is none of the above.
He is still alive at time of writing and doesn’t expect things to change radically.
It all depends on a red wheelbarrow apparently and he does not have one.
I will be offering this as a free download from this evening as it Bastille day. GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth
Contains 80 poems and some illustrations. I will be reading from it on Tuesday August 2nd at the Organ Grinder Canning Circus with Neil Fulwood who celebrating his new Smokestack Press publication.
Includes the following pamphlets and projects:
Drifting Village Poems 2001-2011
Edwin Smith Commission 2014
Burning Books and Buying time 2017 – 2018
My Father’s Things (illustrated) 2019
At the Organ Grinder I shall also be reading from the new volume ‘Substitute’ which due in Fall 2023.
Is mine and always will be it is my birth-right I am born to this and never shall let it slip I am the world king and God’s chosen one To let go of power is to betray you all
I will make the problems disappear All it takes is character as my masters told me Drilled with a sense of purpose and entitlement From a young age to handle the reins of power
The ethos at Eton and Oxford is always to be right even if found out never let the mask slip For that is a sign of weakness and I am not weak I am the firm hand, the strong voice, the liar
Who can not ever be found out to lie The philanderer who can buy secrecy The fool who cannot be judged wrong For there is no other King
This morning the cloak of privilege Is torn and stained but still wraps me round With banker friends and people of high birth who will take me in and bathe my wounds
I will return to the battle with my Excalibur Smite my enemies and ride again into battle This county needs me in its darkest hour I watch re-runs of Churchill in a darkened room
This is my right my destiny I am alone A King of no country
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.
Visit OPEN BOOK WEBSITE the monthly readings have now ended but the archive remains.
