I am not sure how many of you will have heard of Mike Quille. For the past ten years he has been behind the publication of numerous poetry collections and anthologies of working class poetry. No other publisher supports working class left wing poetry more than Mike who is ably supported in his editorship by a network of poets such as Mike Jenkins of the Red Poets, Alan Morrison, Alan McGuire, and the inimitable Fran Lock.
However, as with many institutions and publishers, Culture Matters is finding it difficult to carry on adding to its great catalogue – costs of printing and posting have gone up as well as the general cost of living. With the recent retirement of Smokestack Books, opportunities for working class poets has been diminished further.
Culture Matters is marking its tenth anniversary this year. I was an associate editor in those early days and in 2018 Mike published my book, The Combination: a poetic couple of the Communist Manifesto. I don’t think anyone else would have published it.
So we need your help. It isn’t much but if you could buy one or more books, it will greatly advance Culture Matters ability to publish working class poetry in an arena where very few publishers are taking on such issues as poverty, politics, and social history.
If you are new to Culture Matters you may want to buy the ‘Building Jerusalem’ anthology which has extracts from all the books and pamphlets published over the last ten years.
THANK YOU FOR READING AND SUPPORRT
In solidarity, Peter Raynard – editor of Proletarian Poetry.
When did you last read poetry with grit, with blood, violence and drugs and all the glorious ways the working class have to live to survive. I don’t know whether things are getting better or worse for working class poets. On the one hand, Culture Matters is doing well, providing a political and social home for working class culture and ideas. But then, Smokestack Books is no more, though the back catalogue Andy Croft amassed is still available and immense, in what it achieved in its twenty plus years. Andy Croft gave me that chance back in 2016 when he told me he would publish my debut collection ‘Precarious’ in 2018.
But not all hope is lost. Publishers like Broken Sleep Books, Bad Betty Press, are giving opportunities to working class writers. Though they have both recently lost continued Arts Council funding, and have relied on crowd funding. Other mainstream poetry publishers, like Carcanet, Bloodaxe, are National Portfolio Organisation (NPOs) so are more stable and within their catalogue there are some working class voices.
In grit you know in the first lines of the poem that the poet has/ does live that life. Standout poets such as this include Caleb Femi, Bobby Parker, Anna Robinson, Casey Bailey, Martin Hayes, Melissa Lee Houghton, or Helen Mort.
I was introduced to today’s poet, Steven Bruce by my friend Martin Hayes. Like Martin, Bruce tells of the everyday life of people who struggle with the written and unwritten rules they have to navigate.
His collection, Brute (out with 1987 books) will have you spitting out the grit within each line and poem. Dedicated to the ‘bruised, the burning, and the ones still trying’. It is not an easy read, and nor should it be. In a time of late capitalism that is reducing us all to individual public limited companies. What’s your product? What’s its worth?
Steven Bruce is an award-winning author whose poetry and short stories have appeared in international anthologies and magazines. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Teesside University and explores themes of trauma, survival, and the human condition. Born in England, he now writes full-time in Poland.
You can buy a copy of ‘Brute’ from 1987 Books, here.
Martin Hayes says, ‘I haven’t read anyone who has ever made sadness and the shit we have to go through, feel this good.’
A Cockroach Walks into a Bar by Steven Bruce
A cockroach walks into a bar lit by a chandelier of dog teeth. The bartender, a fat roach with one eye, pulls him a pint.
On the television, a man in a suit signs a paper that means bombs for children.
The roach watches in silence.
Jesus, one mutters, How do they always find new ways to destroy themselves?
The roach sips his beer from a rusted thimble, thinking of the time he saw a man kick a dog for begging.
Call us vermin, the bartender says, but we don’t poison the rivers. We don’t bury children in rubble.
The bartender changes channels wipes his mandibles, and says, Soon, they’ll wipe themselves out.
And when the last man dies with a flag in his mouth and a banknote in each fist, we’ll crawl out into the silence and have our day.
If we think about the classes according to their mobility, we see the working class far more ‘on the move’ to find work and a place to live. Whereas with the middle classes, mobility is more one of professional development. Essentially, one driver of mobility is necessity/ survival, whilst the other is much more positive, with higher status, wages, etc..
We have addressed this issue before on Proletarian Poetry, for example most poignantly with Micheal Gallagher’s ‘Paraic and Jack and Johnfrom 2016,
Goodbyes to the mothers, always the mothers, the father-mother-farmer mothers, the savers of hay, the spreaders of turf; brought into heat once, maybe twice, a year, migrant’s return, marital duties, children’s allowances, God’s word – stuff like that.
In Cathy Galvin’s brilliant debut collection Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara published by Bloodaxe Books, she portrays the impact of migrancy, both inward and outward. From Coventry like myself, her Irish roots are in the far west of Ireland in Connemara. In my own area of Coventry, a large Irish community settled in Coundon from the 1950s – so many that it became dubbed County Coundon; though there are a number of other areas where Irish families settled in the city. I have friends whose parents came from Donegal, Cork, Mayo, Galway. They came to rebuild Coventry from the Blitz but also to work in the car factories.
But things have changed a lot in the last twenty six years. Helped by its own success then boosted by the UK leaving the EU, Ireland is now a place people migrate to, or return to. More people have returned to Ireland now than left, with the population rising from 4 million in 2000 to 5.4 million in 2025
Cathy has written a beautiful paean to her Irish roots in Connemara and Coventry. She notes this change of inward migration in the featured poem ‘An Ghaeltacht’ which refers to recognised regions of Ireland where Irish is the predominant language. Cathy is a poet, journalist and literary entrepreneur being Founder and Director of The Word Factory,
Paul – Pól – bought himself a boat and a house. Took land on the island, drove through mountains on a motorbike. But these people with the same name as him, the same DNA, drinking in the same bar, kept themselves to themselves. Gave him no work. And in Galway – Well you might as well be back in Croydon, he said All those East Europeans, no one speaking English. He keeps his curtains drawn, gate padlocked. I’m told he’s packing his bags. Taking his estuary English over to Durham where houses are also cheap. In time, it’s possible they tell me, he might even pick up the language.
Today marks the first anniversary of the death of Fred Voss (you can read my obituary here). I am very grateful to Professor A.E. Stallings for giving permission to publish her poem, ‘The Machines Mourn the Passing of People, to honour Fred.’ When I read this poem just a few weeks ago, I couldn’t quite believe how pertinent and poignant the poem is. It addresses the end of work, but instead of the redundancy of the worker, Stallings speaks of the machines. The poem is taken from her Selected Poems: This Afterlife, published by Carcanet.
The poem is dedicated to Fred’s partner, the poet Joan Jobe Smith.
The Machines Mourn the Passing of People
We miss the warmth of their clumsy hands, The oil of their fingers, the cleansing of use That warded off dust, and the warm abuse Lavished upon us as reprimands.
We were kicked like dogs when we were broken, But we did not whimper. We gritted our cogs– An honor it was to be treated like dogs To incur such warm words roughly spoken,
The way that they pleaded with us if we balked – ‘Come on, Come on,’ in a hoarse whisper As they would urge a reluctant lover– The feel of their warm breath when they talked!
How could we guess they would ever be gone? We are shorn now of tasks, and the lovely work – Not toiling, not spinning – like lilies that shirk– Like the brash dandelions that savage the lawn.
The now is silent of curses or praise Jilted, abandoned to hells of what weather Left to our own devices forever. We watch the sun rust at the end of its days.
Culture Matters invites poems for a special poetry anthology marking the 100th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike. The collection, 100 Years of Solidarity, will celebrate and memorialise the voices and experiences of working class people, past and present, through poems that remember, and uphold the labour movement’s enduring values of solidarity and collective action.
Consider submitting one or two original, unpublished poems that speak to themes such as:
Trade union life, strikes, picket lines, and industrial action
Acts of solidarity and working-class resilience
Historical reflections from the last century
Inspiration drawn from labour movement history or contemporary struggles
The hopes, anger, humour, and humanity of people organising for justice
The poet Fred Voss, who has died at the age of 72, was one of the great American writers of manual labour. He went beyond the poet as witness in a journalistic sense, for he lived what he wrote and he wrote more than three thousand poems.
Fred was born in Los Angeles in 1952. Initially he thought he would go into academia. On passing a Bachelor of Arts degree in English he was offered a place on a Ph.D. program at the prestigious University of California, Los Angeles. But he turned it down to begin work as a machinist, which he carried on doing for the rest of his life.
He turned to poetry as a way of documenting the lives of his fellow workers who work for the ‘man’, the ‘machine’, the ‘system’; machinists who may be making engine parts for fighter planes that drop bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. His workmates came from across the Americas and his poetry exhibits that microcosm of working class life, which you rarely find in other peoples’ poetry, besides Martin Hayes and his portrayals of London couriers and controllers.
Fred published numerous collections. His first, Goodstone was published here in the UK by the ever astute Neil Astley’s Bloodaxe Books in 1991, in which Voss did a reading tour of the UK. His poetry had arisen out of the South Californian poetry of Charles Bukowski. But it was Professor John Osborne from Hull in the UK, who first published a hundred poems of Voss in the influential Bête Noire magazine which ran for ten years between 1985-1995. Goodstone was the touchstone of the more than three thousand poems Voss wrote over the next 35 years. Goodstone was the name Voss derived from the companies he had worked as a machinist. The poems, like the many that followed, told of the day-to-day struggles of men and women working in machine shops and factories of Southern California from the late 80s onwards.
In the introduction to Robots Have No Bones (two years into the first Trump presidency I wrote:
“Fred Voss’s poems situate us in the workplace, and by doing so, show us the humanity and diversity of those who work there – ones who both support or hate Trump, but as one want, at a minimum to support their family, not have to struggle and work long hours to do just that.” Sadly, nothing has changed, and we are now at the beginning of another Trump presidency.
Fred was very generous with his poetry, offering me two poems in the early days of Proletarian Poetry back in 2015. Then more recently in an academic paper I wrote about his work, and that of his good friend Martin Hayes, on the Poetics of Precarious Work for the journal English (forthcoming in 2025). He was over the moon about his poetry being analysed for the precarity of the job, given his initial interest in the academic life, and it is so sad he didn’t get to see the published copy.
Two poems illustrate the lives of his fellow workers and Fred’s deep empathy and love for them. In ‘Los Angeles’ (see below), many of the workers wear crosses, believe in God, go to church on Sundays, but because of the environment in which they live, through poverty, violence, and low wages, are close to breakdown, close to ending their life. This is also seen in the poem ‘Grease Spots’, as a worker hopes the US Air Force will make a ‘grease spot’ of the Iraqis in response to the Twin Towers crashes. Voss wonders conversely, if their own government has made a grease spot of them, because the workers are barely able to feed their children and may never be able to retire.
I have a feeling that Fred wasn’t given deserved recognition by the mainstream poetry community in the US; there is no record of him on either the Poetry Foundation’s website nor the American Academy of Poets, and yet there is a Wikipedia page of his life.
Fred is a great loss both as a beautiful human being and a poet who exposed the daily struggle facing workers in the precarious waters of late stage capitalism. Our thoughts and love go to his dear partner Joan Jobe Smith.
Los Angeles’ by Fred Voss
In Los Angeles I have seen men in factories with big crucifixes on their chests crucifixes exchanged for guns needles leaps out of 10th story windows crucifixes big and heavy swinging on the massive hairy chests of these men crucifixes exchanged for bottles that had these men face down on floors or in alleys bottles or needles that took their women their families their souls I have seen men in factories without one trace of shame wearing big shiny crucifixes on their chests men this close to picking up a knife and ruining their lives this close to blood they could never wash off their hands men from gangs from prisons from tiny rooms where the devil pulled up a chair next to them men who’ve earned their crucifixes.[i]
[i] Fred Voss, Hammers and Hearts of the Gods (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2009), p. 37.
I’m delighted that my pamphlet, an heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s prints, is published today by Culture Matters. It comes with a wonderful introduction by Fran Lock, and cover art by the Guardian’s Martin Rowson.
You can purchase a copy for £7.50 (plus £1.50 P&P, UK) at
Peter Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) of A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733) run the same gamut of moral and social concerns but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout. Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy.
The Heir
A rich Father dies, so a son’s life as heir begins. Vanity’s the sling which Tom will throw family chains from: his Father, a staid suit of a man battened down by the clamp of God’s utility
mother weeping, wife with child warming inside her. He will leave enough to oil their grief, but says there is no need to pray. With old money, time does shun less miserly ways ending troughs of emotion
such wealth held: when men lay idle no-one need read King James’ bible. New clothes fit both size and stead with enough silver to sail a ship. London ho! with its trade winds blown by slave labour. God well knows
the streets men of off-note graze on. All benighted in the Capital’s treasures of sin but not be sinned
“What Hogarth etched and engraved, Raynard successfully recreates in verse. The comparisons of life in Britain today are there to be made.” (Owen Gallagher)
“The tone Raynard manages to hit with his quite ravishing language and the use of the 3rd person voice as witness carries you along like you’re on some kind of walking tour of the grubby streets of the human mind/body leaving you eager to turn the next page, the next corner, to see what has next befallen Moll or Rake.” (Martin Hayes)
Described as a a “bold, brilliant and outspoken new collection of poems that scrutinise men and manhood, mental health, working class lives and disability. Aloud and alive with music, wit, anger and rebellion, this is an accomplished, politically-aware and vital book.”
I am grateful to Fran Lock, Jacqueline Saphra, and Richard Skinner for the following endorsements:
“Part manifesto, part hymn, part raging lament, this collection takes apart the dirty engine of so-called masculinity, strips it down to its component parts, reconsiders and rearranges them using a dazzling array of poetic forms. It is only through acknowledging the strength of their vulnerability, these poems suggest, that men will be able to manifest change in our broken system where the violence of patriarchy is the enemy of us all.” – Jacqueline Saphra
“In Manland Peter Raynard traverses the unstable terrain of working-class masculinity. His poems meet manhood in all of its banter and swagger; its persistent myths and dangerous silences. With his characteristic lyric verve, Raynard explores what it means to be a man, a father, a husband, and a son. The result is moving, candid, wise and tender, full of humour and hard-won insight. A convincing and beautiful book.” – Fran Lock
“One of the things I love most about Peter Raynard’s work is his voice. His voice is necessary, vital, passionate. It is the voice of anger at social injustice, a voice that deconstructs toxic masculinity, a chronicler of illness. Above all, it is the voice of truth. He tells us how the world is, not how we would like it to be. In this way, Peter Raynard is nothing short of a truth-teller.” – Richard Skinner
If you are able to buy it, I’d be very grateful and I hope you enjoy it.
A Fish Rots From The Head: A Poetic and Political Wake (published by Culture Matters) is a flash anthology of poetry and artwork, by around 100 poets and artists from England, Scotland and Wales. It expresses the fury and betrayal felt by working people about the leadership of this country – the mendacity, selfishness, corruption, smears on opponents and disregard for the general public shown by leading figures in the Johnson government.
This collection of images, parodies, rants, squibs, and full-on poems, put together in less than three weeks, is just part of a tide of satire now sweeping across Britain. It challenges, satirises, despairs, and even dares to laugh at the venal moral hypocrisy of our leaders, whose malignant mixture of callousness and ineptitude has never made life so hard, in so many ways, for so many working people in this country. Through its demonstration of compassion for the suffering of others, and its protest against wrongdoing by those in high office, this collection of poems and artworks provides a very necessary space and inspiration for solidarity and resistance. Let’s hope the removal vans come soon!
The book is available below. Feel free to download it and share with your friends and networks. You are also free to make a donation towards Culture Matter’s costs, as much as you like, using this button and download the anthology here. In solidarity!
