Farewell and all that…

that's all folks Just over five years ago, I began my journey into the poetry world. Blighted by a preoccupation/ obsession with class and the arts, I brought them along for the ride. I started Proletarian Poetry for two reasons: to put more working class poetry ‘out there’, and by doing so, learning from and engaging with what became 150 poets. I have written around 150k words of commentary, which some day might become a book, and there has been 65k visitors to the site.

However, not in small part due to my continued ill-health, but also because I need to move on a little with my own writing, I have decided to bring down the bright red curtain on the site. I will continue to keep it accessible and will tweet missives relevant to class and poetry.

My next venture is two-fold: first, completing the manuscript for my next collection to be published by Nine Arches Press in 2021. Second, I have just been awarded an Arts Council grant to write a novel in verse (gulp).

I want to thank every poet, publisher, and reader who has been involved with PP, including those who read at the events I organised. Fear not, there is still plenty of working class poetry out there, but I hope in some small way, that PP has added to the barbed wire poetry of resistance.

Adios amigos. Venceremos!

In solidarity, Peter Raynard.

Another Life by Jill Abram

In these times of uncertainty and lack of hope – I speak only for myself here 😉 – the following from the archives is a poem by the lovely Jill Abram, imagining Martin Luther King as a postman.

Proletarian Poetry

Many years ago my friend went for an interview at the Royal Mail; when asked why he wanted to be a postman, he said, “Because my uncle runs the pub across the road.” He didn’t get the job, which wasn’t fair really because the pub was always full of posties at lunchtime.

Charles Bukowski was probably the most famous literary drinking postman. When deciding whether to continue at the post or become a full-time writer he said, “I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”

Imagine however, that instead of delivering other peoples’ letters or junk mail, the postman delivered a message of his or her own. What would the folks of downtown L.A. have thought about missives from Bukowski or Burroughs? Or…

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They count on you getting tired, giving up by Kathy Pimlott

When I first moved to London in 1992, a friend said to me ‘get your name down on the council, else you’ll never be able to afford to live here’. I didn’t and he was right. After ten years, and with a partner and young child, we upped sticks and moved outside the M25, where we still couldn’t afford to buy anywhere but could just afford to rent a house. This is the hollowing out of London, leaving only those clinging to their council/social housing and the upper rich and their extorted money.

Whether you’re a bearded Marxist, or a bearded hipster, you would have to agree that it is much more expensive to live in London than it was thirty years ago. Extremes of wealth are seeping into every pore starting from the boil’s epicentre, The Square Mile, reverberating across the country from the 1980s’ deregulation earthquake.

kathy_pimlott For those, like our poet today, Kathy Pimlott, who have lived in the centre of London in ‘protected’ housing (whether council or social housing) for many years, it has felt like only a matter of time until the long claws of late capitalism, tear into peoples’ homes for profit. In her poem, ‘They count on you getting tired, giving up’ she shows us how ‘Money wants no-one/ to belong here, just pass through, hold no memories /worth fighting for to temper plans to squeeze the streets’. Maggie Snatcher’s Housing Act in 1980, saw the stock of social housing in London fall from being the most popular form of habitat, to the lowest – now at only 20%. For Covent Garden in particular Kathy says: ‘The specifically galling thing about the monetisation of the picturesque and ‘villagey’ Covent Garden/Seven Dials is that the area would have been flattened and replaced with a raised central ‘island’ of hotels and offices surrounded by a three-lane ring road if the community hadn’t fought these plans for demolition and redevelopment in the 70s.’ And cover Kathy shows this ‘gentrification’ of both housing and business in a number of other poems in her wonderful new pamphlet, ‘Elastic Glue’ published by prodigious The Emma Press.

There are a number of crises facing Londoners today, most prominent recently being knife crime. But there are others, such as pollution, jobs, and our subject of today, housing. Too much I feel is expected of the likes of London’s Mayor Sadiq Kahn; who doesn’t have the powers that many people perceive him to possess. A (con)tradiction began when New Labour attempted to decentralise power with greater local council autonomy, the setting up of city mayors, then the Con/Dem pact’s Police and Crime Commissioners, because all were done without the economic coffers to endorse these new powers. It’s like giving a toilet cleaner the keys to the public bogs, but nothing to clean them with, or someone a pop-up tent with no land to pop it on. Time for them to do one.

Kathy Pimlott’s two pamphlets, ‘Elastic Glue’ (2019) and ‘Goose Fair Night’ (2016), were both published by The Emma Press. Born in Nottingham, in the shadow of Player’s cigarette factory, she has spent her adult life in Covent Garden. She has been, among other things, a social worker and community activist and currently works on community-led public realm projects. www.kathypimlott.co.uk @kathy_pimlott

They count on you getting tired, giving up

No-one lives here, you’d think, in the city’s glitzy heart
except the agile young wanting to shimmy and shine
before taking a van out to somewhere more… private.

Yet here we are, in infill blocks we made them build
all those years ago, knowing your mum, your kids
since before they had their own, so close we hear

each other’s sneezes, dying. Upstairs, temporary men
keep Spanish hours that clatter on their wooden floor,
my bedroom ceiling. They’ll go. I know who plays away,

who cooks mackerel, who’s been inside, uses Economy 7,
tunes in to Magic Radio. I know we’re on borrowed time.
Where are the old girls of the market, theatres, print?

Gone to Guinnesses in the sky. Money wants no-one
to belong here, just pass through, hold no memories
worth fighting for to temper plans to squeeze the streets,

trick them out in shoddy to look like style, smell like profit.
Silly us. All that time we thought it ours, rallied, witnessed,
held the line, all that grief, just making it nice for Money.

Telling the Lads by Toby Campion

homophobia The Sultan of Brunei, not known for being a man of contemporary enlightenment, has decreed that gay sex and adultery will be punished by stoning to death. A number of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, and Indonesia still employ stoning as a method of capital punishment. Of the 53 Commonwealth countries, 37 have laws that criminalise homosexuality. Such discrimination harks back to colonial rule. And yet, every four years, athletes compete in the Commonwealth games, where gay people face the danger of being imprisoned, when all they should be concentrating on the competition – one which is meant to bring people together. (more…)

Eighty Four: Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope (edited by Helen Calcutt)

dav Last Wednesday, I hosted a very special event at Foyles’ Bookshop in London; the launch of the poetry anthology ‘E ghty* Four’ published by Verve Poetry Press in support of the charity the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). Why E ghty Four? (* the ‘i’ signifies a life lost)

E ghty Four is the number of men in the UK who take their own lives every week; twelve a day, one every two hours, 4,368 a year. More women experience depression, more women take anti-depressants, but men are four times more likely to end their life. It is a national epidemic, which is not confined to this country – the US for example has 129 suicides a day, half of which are carried out with a firearm.

(more…)

London Undercurrents – two poems by Hilaire and Joolz Sparkes

I am so happy that this coming Thursday 28th March, Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire will launching their book London Undercurrents. Published by Holland Park Press, the launch is at Gradidge Room of the Artworkers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square London WC1N 3AT Further detail can be found here: https://www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/books/london-undercurrents/

Proletarian Poetry

It is said of Truman Capote that his book, In Cold Blood was the first non-fiction novel. Based on in-depth research, the book tells of a family murdered by two young men in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. It was part of what became known as the New Journalism by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, who used literary devices to tell factual stories. Today, this type of writing has become known as creative non-fiction. Their approach was a form of social archaeology, where the writer is led by the subject, often taking them into strange situations (read Hunter S Thompson for more of that).

Poetry being the most (ahem) truthful of writing forms, I think could be described as creative non-fiction. It often tells true stories either of the poet or others’ lives, and relevant to PP giving voice to to people who are rarely heard or depicted…

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Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2019

For the past year or so, I have been helping out with editing collections at Culture Matters; and I’m very proud to say that one of these is by the great US poet, Fred Voss, which will be out soon (with an introduction from myself). Below are details of Culture Matters’ Bread and Roses Poetry Award. Get yourself entered, it’s free!

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Culture Matters is pleased to announce that the third Bread and Roses Poetry Award, sponsored by Unite, is now open for entries.

Our mission is to promote a socialist approach to all cultural activities, including arts such as poetry. So we run the Bread and Roses Poetry Award to create new opportunities for working people to write poetry, and to encourage poets to focus on themes which are meaningful to working-class communities.

As in previous years, there will be 5 prizes of £100 for the best poems, and an anthology of the poems of around a further 20 entrants will be published later in the year. In addition, we are offering a mentoring and support package for writers who have not yet published a collection. Up to 3 of these entrants – who may or may not have won one of the 5 prizes – will be linked to an experienced, published poet, and they will be helped to produce their first published collection. (more…)