Publication day for an author is a joyous, exciting, and a nervous day; and more so than ever because of the lockdown, which has been the main reason for opening up the site again during this time. So I am delighted to be featuring Steve Pottinger on the actual publication day of his sixth collection, thirty-one small acts of love and resistance’. Please buy it if you can, as a small act of love and resistance. Here’s Steve.
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“When we rang in the New Year, I don’t expect any of us thought our 2020 would include supermarket queues, panic buying, empty motorways, or an invisible Prime Minister, but here we are. The world is a quieter place, where we keep our distance from each other, do our weekly shop, and – in my case at least – spend far too much time online, seeking some kind of social interaction. For better or worse, our worlds have shrunk to our immediate neighbourhood, the few streets round us, the distance we can walk or cycle in an hour.
The place I live is nowhere special. It’s one of the sprawl of once-industrial towns that make up the Black Country. Outsiders would be hard pressed to tell where it begins or ends, and – on learning that a lot of people here see Brexit as a good thing, and returned a Tory MP with an increased majority at the last election – might think they know everything they want to know about it.
Spend time here, though, and you’d learn there’s a real sense of pride among the people who live in this small town. That the response to lockdown has been, for a team of volunteers to co-ordinate support for vulnerable residents, deliver food parcels and prescriptions, and liaise with local supermarkets for supplies. That helping each other – because you can’t ever rely on the government – is as much part of life here as the roller-shutters and the petty thieves.
Many of the poems in my new book ‘thirty-one small acts of love and resistance’ explore the beauty of life here as well as the grit. The wonder and the limitations. The poem I’d like to share, Mothers’ Day, is a celebration of our town which was commended in the Prole poetry competition 2019, and has taken on an added poignancy since lockdown. When I close my eyes, I can picture the faces of the people in this poem, I can hear the laughter and the chat, I can feel trouble waiting just out of sight, around the corner. And I can’t wait to be in that pub again.
The place I live is nowhere special. But it is remarkable. Like thousands of other remarkable, unsung, communities up and down the land. Maybe, when all of this is done, we’ll remember that.”
Steve Pottinger is a poet, author, and workshop facilitator, and a founding member of Wolverhampton arts collective Poets, Prattlers, and Pandemonialists. He’s an engaging and accomplished performer whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, and he’s a regular contributor to online poetry platforms. He’s performed at Ledbury and StAnza poetry festivals, at the Edinburgh Free Fringe, and in venues the length and breadth of the country, from Penzance up to Orkney. His sixth volume of poems, ‘thirty-one small acts of love and resistance’ was published by Ignite Books this Spring.
‘thirty-one small acts of love and resistance’ is on sale here: https://ignitebooks.co.uk/products-page/steve-pottinger-books/
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Mothers’ Day
Let us sing a song of the tiny tattered town
of the pub at its locked-down, knocked-down heart
and of those who drink there.
Let us sing of Mothers’ Day and celebration
of the family night out
of a large glass of red and the make that a double
of burgers with all the trimmings
a side of onion rings and chips with everything
sing of curry and a pint and change from a tenner.
Let us sing of the bevy of traveller women
loud and drinking and drunk
and their don’t care a toss if you serve food
we’re bringing the pizzas in anyway
don’t think of stopping us nonchalance,
sing of their children
who climb barefoot over the tables
over and under and through
caring nothing for rules.
Let us sing of the bar-staff, budget-uniformed,
overworked and underpaid
who are suddenly busy at the other end of the bar
who have a finely tuned instinct for looking
the other way
who know there’s not a chance in the world
the money covers this, no chance at all.
Let us sing of it being someone else’s problem
quite definitely someone else’s problem.
Let us sing, then, of the young manager
his stooped shoulders, his muttering, his sighs
as he wanders over for the third time
counting the minutes, praying to get to
the end of the shift without it kicking off,
sing of the token gesture of negotiation
sing of putting to one side the memory
of what happened last time.
Sing of his hope he doesn’t have to draw the line.
Let us sing of everyone in there
knowing the cops will be late, useless
sing of keeping one eye on the exit
of knowing that if it all goes down
well, devil take the hindmost.
Let us sing of take a deep breath and bear it
of it not being your business, none of it
of swallowing this down, of letting it slide.
Let us sing of hours measured pint by pint
of old men slipping home
of the crackling tension of trouble ebbing
like a tide you hadn’t noticed turn.
Let us sing of lost nights, last buses,
of just one more before you go
of pizza crusts trodden in carpets
of traveller women, beyond drunk now,
queens of all they can keep in focus.
Let us sing, my friends.
Sing a song of the tiny, tattered town
of the pub at its locked-down, knocked-down heart
and of those who drink there.
Let us sing of Mothers’ Day and celebration
of the family night out
of empty glasses and a last one for the road.
Let us raise our cracked and tuneless voices
and let us sing.
“The title poem for my debut collection, Her Lost Language, feels a bit like a ‘cuckoo’ in that I usually write about the legacies of British transatlantic enslavement, with direct reference to Jamaica. This seems to be where I find my voice, and can cover subjects from the maternal, food, past, present and future.
It feels clear on re-reading the poem that the environment I describe is not just ‘hostile’ for the character but for everyone who has to live in it. The phrase, ‘A lift shaped by urine is’, to me, about real suffering – for those that have to endure it and those that cause the offence in the first place. How alienated do you have to be, to literally piss where you live?
“Cardiff has one of the oldest BAME populations in the UK. However, it wasn’t a slave town like Bristol. The majority of the Black population were merchant seamen – who settled in Cardiff’s docks area, or Tiger Bay as it was known back then. My grandfather came to Cardiff via a familiar route in the 1890’s. 
Gradually people migrated to other parts of Cardiff, My grandparents moved out in the 1940’s. Unfortunately my grandfather was on a ship which was torpedoed during World War 2 – so we never met. I grew up in what I jokingly referred to later as a Black & White family with a ‘coloured’ telly…. It’s funny when you’re a child, you don’t think of yourself as a colour…. I discovered I was black accidentally. We would always watch the news at teatime. It was sometime around 1972, and the newsreader barked “and the Blacks are rioting in…”. It was somewhere in London. I said, ‘Dad – who are the blacks?’. My dad looked at me quizzically and said ‘We are son…’. It was a light-bulb moment. “Aaaah – that’s why people call me funny names at school”, I thought. They were strange times – ‘
The poem I have chosen from my collection, has to be ‘On the death of Muhammad Ali’. A) Originally, it was one of my poems that Eric Ngalle Charles chose for his ‘
“It seems to me, that this global pandemic leaves me unable to write a thing except maybe clichés; tired phrases. I can’t write about it but writing about anything else seems unthinkable. I’m aware that for some poets I know, the opposite is true and poems are pouring out of them. One way or another we are all affected and not just in regards writing; some people find themselves unable to do anything productive whilst others throw themselves into activity – we find our own ways of dealing with the anxiety. There is a definition of trauma that makes a correlation between the perceived level of threat and the perceived level of helplessness we feel in response to it; essentially when an event overwhelms our ability to cope. The reverberations of this collective trauma will be around long after the lockdown ends.
I remember the helplessness I felt then too and how painting led me to writing this poem, ‘Drowning’. I wanted to send something cheerful and uplifting for this guest post but of the few more cheerful poems I’ve written nothing seemed right. I read a Facebook post a friend shared recently by someone who said the last time they were in lockdown was during the 
internationally touring DJs and members of an all-female band of adults with learning difficulties. My aim wasn’t to get famous names but to talk to women who lived and breathed music in their everyday life, either professionally or at an amateur level.
But for all of this, this little area houses many people, or perhaps a better word, it homes them. Above the shopping centre are two residential complexes, Paige Heights and Sky City – architecturally unique when they were built – like neighbourhoods in the sky. You wouldn’t know they were there, looking up from the street. And on one side of the high street lies the vast Noel Park estate, street and after street of Victorian cottage style houses, originally built to home artisan labourers.
“I am very grateful to Peter for inviting me to submit a blog post and poem for this great website. It’s always nice when someone you respect shows an interest in your work and places you amongst a growing collection of talented artists… especially since I’ve been a little down on my debut ‘poetry’ book, Contained recently. It’s like staring at your own face in the mirror for too long – my features have lost all relevance and no longer make up what I remember. Perhaps, worse still, they make up exactly what I remember.
I don’t know anything about film theory – except a short (but excellent) YouTube series narrated by a feature film producer, preoccupied by the ‘oner’ – but I’m sure every character in these dramas is supposed to have an ‘arc’. But all I see is JT standing there barrel-chested, mush-faced, wide-lapelled and NOT BEING JOHN TRAVOLTA. The whole thing is very distracting. And, of course, maybe he just looks like that now.
“Three years ago, 
First up is my 
For those, like our poet today, 
Kathy shows this ‘gentrification’ of both housing and business in a number of other poems in her wonderful new pamphlet, ‘
Proletarian Poetry 