I am more than happy to be featuring Chip Hamer today. Chip has been a stalwart of the political poetry scene for more than a decade now. A proper selfless person he has led Poetry on the Picket Line raising thousands of pounds for striking workers. ‘A Class Act’ is Chip’s debut collection published by Flipped Eye, the incubator for many of our most highly regarded poets such as Warsan Shire and Malika Booker. Oh, and you’ve got to love the BJ pic from Chip’s day job back in 2012 (if you like, you can put a caption to it in the comments section below). So why not buy Chip’s book. You can get a copy here:
**********************
“It’s good to have the book published. Though the timing has been strange. Just a bit off from the start. First spoke to Paul, from Lunar Poetry magazine, about the collection, in 2012. In 2013, I asked Niall O’Sullivan to do the editing and got stuck into pulling the poems together. Did a good job there, I think (though we left out one particularly dystopian poem ‘Planet of the Apes’, that doesn’t seem quite so unlikely in current circumstances. It might get an airing again, one day. We’ll see). Some quite political poems in there, some quite personal ones.
Then a few things happened, and few things didn’t happen. I had a living to earn, the Poetry on the Picket Line thing kicked off (worked hard on the anthology, published by Culture Matters) and this book wasn’t a priority. Nevertheless, we finished the editing, chose the title poem ‘A Class Act’, and gave Paul a nudge.
He did a few edits and then… it all went a bit quiet. Niall suggested Flipped Eye and I was keen (a pretty good fit, I reckon) but didn’t want to let anybody down. Anyway, it drifted a bit. Waited too long, to be fair. In the end, to cut a long story short, a big thank you to all at Flipped Eye for getting it out and doing such a good job with it. Published on May Day too! By then, though, we were all on lockdown. So, no big do at a pub. No little do, either. There will be one, though, trust me.
I’m very pleased with the way it has turned out. None of the poems in there are from later than 2013, and I’m proud of the way they stand up. Looking forward to gigging them again, too. Particularly to doing them with some of the newer material. I really hope this book shifts a few copies, as I’m keen to get the next one out in much shorter order (the poems are written, and the early edit work is underway). How to sell it, though? Proper gigs are out of the question for the time being. The only way right now is with a soft launch and a bit of an online push. Any positive reviews most welcome!
Considering doing some short films of the poems, reading them and talking a little about them. Maybe answering some questions I’ve had about particular poems. Then putting those clips online and seeing what sort of response they get. I’ve always said that my poems need to work both on the page and on the stage, so I can’t complain, but I do miss the live work. That little bit of crackle and nervous energy. Never quite know how it’s going to turn out, now do we?
I’m going to leave you with the last verse of ‘Hippy Chicks’. Just to capture that tension between hope and experience. It’s still happening, even now. Especially now.”
‘The fierce young patriots go out and put the fear of someone’s god
Into some women who have chosen an identity behind the veil.
The politicians argue about matrimony, man to man,
The trickle down they spoke of now revealed as faecal gravity.
It’s a hard rain, watch it fall.
They keep calm and carry on regardless,
We carry the can,
Suppress the rising tide of panic in our hearts
And hope the hippy chicks are proved right, after all’.
**************
BJ: Hello, who are you? Chip: Your worst f**king nightmare!
On the other side of the conversation, hearing phrases like “it’ll get better over time” and “everything will be okay at the right time” felt like blanket statements disregarding the shame and heartache flooding through my body. A simple overreaction, they call it. The fact that these emotions have been pent up for years, some taught from a young age, can fly so easily over people’s heads.
The poem I chose for this post is called “War Dove”, the title poem of my debut pamphlet. In dismantling the concept of forgiveness, the poem studies the separated pieces through weary eyes, working to prove its own cynicism wrong.”
“Think back to 2017, another time, another crisis. 
Like many poets, I write to try and make sense of what cannot be made sense of by logic or argument alone. Aside from the unintended foreshadowing in the poem’s title of the current unfolding horror story, there are connections of powerlessness. Holding a pen in your hand, or having computer keys do their bidding under your fingers, is an outlet for some processing of inadequacy in the face of something you would like to solve but basically can’t. Form is one way of marshalling what you want to say, to help shape chaos into a creative act.
The stamp of 
Some of the sonnets are more indirect explorations of moods – others have a more sustained and obvious focus. 
“Engaging with the general lockdown reaction on social media has shown me how different groups of people have taken it – there are those that are, rightfully panicking, tearing their hair out, thrashing, screaming at the sky, denouncing their gods; and those, like myself, who climatized well due to having experienced some form of lockdown in their life.
had.
Did you ever think that there were a lot of invisible people living in lockdown before this pandemic? There are people everywhere living sad lives, and then they die quietly. I’m left with the lingering frustration that things only become an issue when they affect people en masse, or affect those with a voice.
“The anthology ‘Onward/ Ymlaen!’ published by Culture Matters comprises left-wing poems from Cymru rather than ‘Wales’. Why do I stress this? As the 
As co-editor of ‘
Jones’s own journey from Labour supporter to embracing the emerging Indy movement is one which truly reflects our politically fluid times.
I try to watch the news once a day; more than that and it is really depressing. Alternatively it is infuriating, why do we need to see Royalty clapping in an obviously posed way with their children outside their front door which does not appear to be in a street where anyone else lives. When have they ever used the NHS?
Yesterday I made marmalade, from one of those tins of prepared Seville oranges; I knew they were good because my mother used them, rather secretly as she saw it as cheating. When I was quite small I remember going, in our fathers cab, to pick blackberries in 
My partner and I are both of an age where a store cupboard is normal. Our parents lived through the war so there were always a few tins and packets kept for emergencies. We order our shopping delivery fortnightly and have a kind of general store. We are trying not hoard and so far have managed to get roughly what we need. When our delivery arrives it gets washed, dried and put away. Sometimes the way we talk about what is happening reminds me of my childhood when food was still rationed and my parents were not very well off. My mother was a genius at making things stretch not just food but clothes too.
“For much of my life, I struggled with a range of symptoms which seemed to bare no correlation to one another. Chronic fatigue, an increasingly constant nausea level, violent aching without reason.
My poem, ‘young man,’ was really one of my first explorations of this tension between distance and closeness. It felt like an act of empowerment, as I initially struggled to find work, to admit defeat. To acknowledge flaws, and to ironise them. As it turns out, to be vulnerable in life makes it far easier to be vulnerable on the page, and soon a body of work began to form around the experience of living within my own body.