This Thing Moves by Anthony Anaxogorou

Today is World Theatre Day. Here is Anthony Anaxogorou from 2016 writing about the Bush Theatre.

I was in the room when he kicked her in the stomach. She was pregnant. Her scream was piercing. I was in the room when he drew blood back into the syringe before injecting himself with heroin. I was in the room as others left, unable to cope with what was unfolding in front of them, only a few feet away. I was in the room, at the first showing in London of the play Trainspotting at the Bush Theatre, back in 1995 before it was made into a film. As the eponymous blog says, it was ‘in-yer-face-theatre’.

bush theatre Theatre is often tarred with the same brush as poetry; that it is elitist, not for the masses, etc.. Some of which may be true, but outside of the honeypot of the West End, in fringe and regional theatre, much of what goes on is done with an inclusive…

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Like Mother by Nadia Drews

For mothers everywhere, this by Nadia Drews from 2016. Read it out loud to yourself.

Proletarian Poetry

16659957706_01284e0b15_z Image by G Travels

We are coming to the end of the school year; a year full of turmoil instilled by a Government who feels it needs to do more than tinker with the education of our children, treating them more like guinea pigs in an ideological battle to send us back to Victorian times. Both education Secretaries (Gove and now Morgan), seem to want a war with teachers with the proposed imposition of academy status for all schools (thankfully withdrawn), new SATs for Year 6 students, and the madness of testing those under the grand old age of seven.

Governments still struggle with mass education; with classes of upwards of thirty children, herded together like cattle despite their different needs and abilities and family circumstance, all with the sole intention of getting them to pass a minimum of five GCSEs. I know from personal experience…

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Love Letter to the NHS by Emma Ireland

For these times.

Proletarian Poetry

nhs_march_logo When I was born in the early ‘60s, I put my mother through a two day ordeal of labour, then was extracted via C-section; this was in the days when the scar of such a section was twice as long as it is today. So, it is little wonder that when leaving the hospital with my dad, my parents forgot to take me with them. Thank God for the NHS and all its efficiency, for an eagle-eyed nurse came running out of reception saying: ‘Haven’t you forgot something?’ Just over two years later, and my parents were playing cricket with friends in the stretch of scrubland outside our flat; when I was in need of something, I ran up to my mother who was in bat. The ball arrived at her stump the same time I did, she missed the ball and broke my nose. Thank God for…

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Diagnosis: ‘Londonism’ by Rishi Dastidar

Given the crisis were are currently experiencing, and the fact that in the UK, much of the attention in terms of cases is London, I thought it apt to share this again from Rishi Dastidar. His new book Saffron Jack, which I highly recommend is available here (free P&P): https://www.ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/saffron-jack.html

Proletarian Poetry

“Capitalism has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.”

marxwalks.com

Karl Marx was 195 on May 5th last year, and wrote these words albeit using the word ‘bourgeoisie’ instead of capitalism. John Lanchester used this trick when quoting Marx to show how prescient he was in describing the structure of capitalism and the way in which it changes the landscape (I sometimes think that capitalists understand Marx better than Marxists).

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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.