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Last year I did a reading for Nottingham Poetry Festival in which I produced a small ‘polemical’ pamphlet called ‘Burning Books’.<\/p>\n
The pamphlet was a one off and most of the poems after ‘outing’ in paper form were then hidden away as ‘too political’ for my readers by myself!<\/p>\n
I censored myself which crazy but shows the agonies of being in any way ‘political’ or writing from a stridently working-class viewpoint in the contemporary middle-class ring-fenced world of ‘proper poetry’.<\/p>\n
It only now and post Kit de Waal’s article in the Guardian that I realise that in doing so I hiding from my true self.<\/p>\n
So here again is the ‘real’ ‘Burning Books’ pre-edit and I stand by these poems…..a lot of pretentious middle-class ‘poets’ will hate it but frankly as I don’t spend much time listening to their whinging I don’t care. I will be ‘re-categorised’ as a ‘performance poet’ I expect and described as having\u00a0 a ‘chip on my shoulder’ which a frequent method of negating anything which threatens the middle class.<\/p>\n
Here a taste of what I talking about…<\/p>\n
Proper Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n I used to write proper poetry<\/p>\n Not the really proper stuff<\/p>\n You know packed full of classical allusions<\/p>\n Or invented lives based on obscure photographs<\/p>\n No I gave up on proper poetry<\/p>\n Because it is so fucking boring<\/p>\n So I write an occasional diatribe<\/p>\n And raise two fingers to the academy<\/p>\n These are the times for less poets, less experts<\/p>\n Less academics and more UKIP candidates<\/p>\n When a military chaplain’s daughter from Wheatley<\/p>\n Is playing Joan of Arc in the Wars of Brexit<\/p>\n With only God and King Billy to save us.<\/p>\n Download as a pdf here<\/p>\n