Bouncers by Jonathan Edwards

I sometimes imagine Bouncers (aka doormen), your modern day St Peters, were born with their arms folded. Lifted, or forced out of the womb, with their body formed for action; it’s as though they are hiding their bulb-like knuckles under a bushel of bicep.

Having said that, I think Bouncers get a bad press which is borne out of misbehaviour but is rooted in a paradoxical image problem; on the one hand they need to project menace, or your average front loaded, done a few bench presses in my day, have-a-go-for-the-missus zero, is going to think above his station. But on the other, it all gets a bit tiring for them to do that all the time, and if you look close enough, they are often up for the laugh to brighten up what can be a really boring, low paid, unsociable hours, form of employment.

Jonathan Edwards sums up this image perfectly in his poem, Bouncers. You have their dark side, but they are out in the cold, “Undertakers’ coats buttoned to their throats,/they applaud their own performance to keep warm.” And they have to be all eyes, looking beyond what’s put in front of them in the queue, “They have the miraculous visions of a prophet/over the shoulder of whoever they’re talking to.” But then it’s the “drive home at three or four and wake at noon/with no hangover.” (more…)

Monopoly by Catherine Smith

I think we have all seen those World War Two prisoner of war movies, where the men connived their escape in secret, digging tunnels with makeshift, man-made tools, then releasing the soil from their trousers in the exercise yard. The men did however, receive assistance from their respective military services back home. One of the most ingenious of the strategies for escape came in the early 1940s from MI9, the British secret service unit responsible for escape and evasion; they hatched a plan with British Toy maker, John Waddington Ltd to develop the game of Monopoly for the imprisoned men. They set up bogus humanitarian organisations to get the games into the camps, but the aim was not to brighten the spirits of the men through this capitalist game, but to hide tools in small boxes within the package. The most important development however, and why Waddington were brought in, was their ability to produce silk maps; these were easy to hide (down boots) and quiet, unlike their paper counterpart. So the game was instrumental in the war effort.

Monopoly has been around for over a hundred years, although it was only licensed as such in 1935 and has been the joy, and frustration of many families across the world since then. It was originally intended to educate people in the iniquities of monopolistic capitalism; but as Catherine Smith’s poem beautifully shows, the competitive nature of capitalism, particularly between a parent and child can overcome any benevolent thoughts. “Almost bankrupt and only recently released from jail,/she owes her ten year old/four hundred quid in rent/….she pleads poverty.” But the boy is unrelenting, “He points out/she could give him Leicester Square,” showing no sign of compassion for his rival’s predicament. “She thinks how/this is what capitalism does to children,/-brutalises them.” So she fights back, “she’ll take her chances,/and hangs onto Leicester Square.” She does this not by rational economic thinking but through human experience; “She likes/the Japanese men with their cameras…/she likes the pigeon shit, the café/ with the gilt-framed photo of the Queen.” And I guess the moral of the story, whether it be to free prisoners or help educate our young, we need to be careful of the multi-headed hydra that capitalism can become, and how “no favours asked” is a rare and touching thing. (more…)

John Clare, Helpston c.1820 by John Mole

The final years of the last millennium feel like a febrile time now. Although the US and UK governments were far from being left wing, after 18 years of Conservative rule beggars couldn’t be choosers. Blair had come to power promising progressive policies (warmongering wasn’t in the ’97 manifesto), a Democrat was still in the White House, and 9/11 was beyond the horizon. I was working for the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which promoted a more social and environmentally responsible economy to the one that had emerged in the slash and burn free market of the 1980s. NEF’s philosophy was founded on the principle of ‘small is beautiful’, which grew out of the eponymous book by EF Schumacher. Here, the maxim was ‘act local, think global’; if small businesses, community organisations, individuals, acted together in consideration of the planet before profit, then we all could thrive. Such think tanks were flavour of the decade and we entered the corridors of Whitehall and the World Bank as well as big business with a collaborative, more pragmatic approach to change, which reflected the political zeitgeist.

Much of this commercialisation began in the late 18^th, early 19^th century, at the time of the agricultural and industrial revolutions and the birth of the modern era of capitalism. The poet John Clare (“The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”), grew up and lived in the epicentre of this quake. The common land from which his family had eked out a living became enclosed and privately owned as did much of the country. The historian EP Thompson described this time as the making of John Mole the English Working Class; Thompson said of Clare, “that he ‘conveys with extraordinary sensitivity the ways in which the psychic landscape of the villager was savagely transformed by the enclosure of the commons and open fields’.

John Mole’s poem ‘John Clare, Helpston c1820’, conveys this situation of landowner and worker superbly. ‘With their golden notebooks/they stop to watch him carting hay’. Clare was a worker and a poet, one who witnessed the end of common land first hand and what it would mean. ‘He watches the future drive off/in its shining hatch-backs/down Heritage Lane/then, seized by love and anger/takes up his pen to write.’ The hedgerows and fences that scar the countryside today began to be drawn at this time; John Clare was the poet who described the impact it had on the poor in many of his poems. John Mole’s poem shows why and is a great homage to the man. (more…)

Decline and Fall, and On Guillotines by Fran Lock

This is for those of us still licking our wounds in the fallout from the General Election; at the fact that Labour was seen to have lost because it was too Left wing (I know, don’t you love the media and those that lapdog them); and trying not to think too badly of those who ‘silently’ not only voted Conservative, but twisted the knife with an large overall majority.

Succour has been hard to come by. I migrated to Al Jazeera as I do when domestic news is too, well, domestic, and I felt guilty when perspective was given to me with migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean, and the continued war in Iraq and Syria, and the Yemen, and the secondary earthquake in Nepal.

But though certain things are relative, there has still been a need to seek solace from friends and networks. I tried to believe in the more nihilistic anarchistic view that it wouldn’t have mattered who got in, but that just made me angrier. Then there were blog posts from the poets Jo Bell, Clare Pollard, and Josephine Corcoran, who bound their anger and hurt in a constructive and humanist approach. And inevitably there have emerged poems in response, from the Stare’s Nest, Well Versed, and the new blog, New Boots and Plantocracies, which I highly recommend.

I have taken my own time to think about how to respond on the site, and I have to admit a defeatist lethargy was still getting the better of me, until I received an email from Fran Lock this morning. I met Fran after the launch of the latest issue of the Poetry Review, where she read some fantastic poems. I gave her my card (yes, got cards now for PP – getting almost corporate), and she contacted me offering some poems she has written in response to the election (poets really are the people that keep on giving). I could have chosen them all but I’m not greedy.

They made me angry, but this time in a positive way because of the language; they articulate my frustrations with Labour, my contained anger at the invisible voters, my uncontained anger at the media (I keep trying to believe we have a free press, but can only see it as free to keep feeding us its elitist bullshit). I decided on two poems, “Decline and Fall”, and “On Guillotines” because she captures all of the actors involved in the democratic farce and even manages to fit in some humour, “Ed’s head like a Pez dispenser, shot/from the neck up and wearing puzzlement/like loss of blood. Cameron, of course,/pinkly inevitable. He pokes through his suit/like a big toe.” (more…)

Andrew’s Corner by Kayo Chingonyi

I have just finished reading Selina Todd’s amazing “The People: the rise and fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010”, which wasn’t the best of reads in a run-up to what turned out to be a disastrous election result. Some of her detailed research of the first half of the 20^th century, was drawn from the Mass Observation project; this was set up by a group of volunteers who wanted to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ and so carried out interviews with people about their daily lives. It was stopped in the 1950s then revived in the 1980s and continues today. There is also a similar project in the US called Humans of New York.

It got me thinking about how we observe people in their daily lives. One aspect, which Kayo Chingonyi’s poem Andrew’s Corner revived in me, was observations by sociologists in the US of street corner life. One of the first that I know of is William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society, which mapped the lives of poor Italian Americans in a Boston slum in the 1940s. Then a more famous study, Eliot Liebow’s ‘Tally’s Corner’ which has sold over a million copies. Liebow sought to show another, more positive side to the way in which African American men responded to poverty during the 1960s. It showed them not to be feckless and non-caring parents; “Leroy bathed the children, braided the girls’ hair, washed their clothes at ‘the Bendix’ (laundromat), played with them, and on their birthdays went shoplifting to get them gifts.”

Observation is a key quality of a poet, and Kayo does this so well in Andrew’s Corner that maps the generational experiences of a particular corner of London, “Where an old man comes, to practise/standing still, tutting that the street he fought to keep is gone.” And we are given all of the senses of change, “the world of bass,” “the smell of weed and too much CK One” and the detritus of objects that tell their own stories, “condom wrappers, kebab meat, a ballet pump”. Then finally the crossover of night to day, where “joggers dodge a dead pigeon, offer wordless/greeting to the night bus’s army of sanguine-/eyed ravers, nursing bad skin and tinnitus.” Top notch. (more…)

Hungary 1956: from a Woman in Exile by Anne Cooper

On a train at the Romanian border, two Iraqi Kurds jumped into our carriage and sat facing each other as though they had been there for the whole journey. Two Romanian border guards entered soon after. They were not interested in what four British men were doing visiting their country a year and a half after the fall of Ceausescu. They thought they would have fun with the Kurds; but these boys had crossed a number of borders already and were no match for the guards who had little history of dealing with foreign visitors. After what seemed like a heated exchange to us, ended in almost friendly banter, as the four of them laughed at each other’s dictators.

After a few days in Bucharest losing count of the pepper of bullet holes from the revolution, news came through that there was a coup in Moscow by hard-line communists against President Gorbachev. We sat in our rooms listening to events unfold on the World Service; the mood of local people was complete fear bordering on panic. They thought the Soviet tanks would roll in as they had done after the Second World War staying for over forty years, and that their revolution was over.

We saw the aftermath and fear that remained during those years after 1989 when we went through Bulgaria, Romania, The Czech Republic (as it still was) and Hungary. And it was in the latter country that one of the few uprisings took place against Soviet rule, and is told in Anne Cooper’s poem Hungary 1956: from a woman in exile. Here Anne explains the story behind the poem:

“I wrote this poem in 2006, 50 years after the uprising in Hungary that was mercilessly crushed by the Russians, a turning point for many on the left in Europe who had refused to believe news that seeped out about Stalin’s massacres of the Russian people. The spectre of tanks crossing borders and crushing a people literally and metaphorically raised the question – could this be socialism and led to the disillusionment of a generation of people who had been inspired by Russia and hoped for a better world. I wrote it following a conversation with a woman I ran into on the way back from the supermarket in Clapham. She was struggling with her bags, I offered to help. When she told me where she was from, when she arrived, I asked, “Did you come here after the uprising?” Her story tumbled out, here it is. She wishes to remain anonymous. I have written it as a poem of witness. A story of the incredible heroism shown by ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances; people fighting for democracy and the right to run their own lives, paying such a high price, yet lighting a flame of inspiration for the struggles that followed across the Eastern Bloc and beyond.” (more…)

Morning Prayers by Laila Sumpton

Ibrahim lived in Idlib province in Syria. He is a graduate of English Literature from Aleppo University. But he joined the Free Syrian Army. Why? Because in 2012 the regime of President Assad burnt his library of English books during the early stages of the war; he had five hundred in all including Shakespeare and Tolstoy, as well American poetry. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was his favourite – he saw hope in Godot. But the war as we know became complicated and many factions entered the war. Ibrahim left and is now teaching school children in Turkey.

I have followed his story via the reporting of BBC journalist Ian Pannell. I wrote a play about him called Waiting for Summer, which was shown in Brighton and have written a poem. What drew me to his story, and to Laila Sumpton’s poem ‘Morning Prayers’, is the way in which the more personal story is told. It is not the helpless uneducated victim that is often portrayed by the western media; it is someone who had hopes and aspirations like anyone living in peace.

In Morning Prayers, the hopes of a mother are set out, “You long for monotonous streets/unremarkably intact/adapting only to the seasons.” These longings for the mundane are ones that many of us take for granted, “You hope for the rush to school/to be fuelled by no more/than a stern bell ringing teacher.” Of course if you are trapped in a war, then “You pray for your son only to fear/spiders, heights and getting lost/that he will grow bored of birthdays,/only ever hold toy guns.” But we know that even the most simplest of wishes can be very difficult to fulfil. Whether it is Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Egypt, mothers, father, sisters and brothers hope and pray only for peace, for to read books, play, get married and live safely. Laila’s poem shows this both starkly and beautifully. (more…)

Poetry Books and Pamphlets

Books and Pamphlets I Have Bought and Nearly Read

I have been feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of poetry books and pamphlets out there and the pressure to keep up with them both for the site and for my own learning as a poet. At the moment I don’t really have a sense of how they fit together or what I have learned from them. So I thought the first thing to do was to make a basic list of the publications I have (although there may be others scattered around the house). This isn’t a review, it is a simple list from which I hope to get a sense of how they relate to each other in terms of style and themes. I would love to hear of books/pamphlets you might think I will be interested in reading.

The List

Patience Agbabi, Blood Monochrome (Canongate, 2008)
Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014)
Raymond Antrobus, Shapes and Disfigurements (Burning Eye, 2012)
Simon Armitage, Paper Aeroplanes (Faber, 2014)
Jo Bell, Kith (Nine Arches Press, 2015)
Jo Bell, Navigation (Moormaid Press, 2014)
Emily Berry, Dear Boy (Faber, 2013) (more…)

On Ellington Road by Mona Arshi

Our garden backed on to my Primary school playground. When I was six or seven, a few friends and I would lean against the school fence of a break, and shout: “MUM, biscuits!” and she would come and hand out the custard creams for us to eat on the grass, each in our own individual way. A couple of years later she went to work full-time and I would go over the road to a family of eight children before school. The breakfast production line would have made Henry Ford proud.

We lived in the middle of our street (my parents still do) and it’s book-ended by a pub and a church. And like many of the streets people grew up on, it had its array of different characters; a number of Irish Catholic families as well as those who had grown up in the city (although they were in the minority); a British heavyweight boxing champion, who’d let you knock his door and hold his Lonsdale belt. Then there was the spooky overgrown house on the corner where two brothers lived, although you only ever saw one of them – rumour was they were identical twins and never went out together, and that one had a wife who he drowned in the little pond in the garden.

Forgive these reminiscences, but I wonder how much you think back to your childhood street and all the people who lived there and where they might be now? I have to thank Mona Arshi for her wonderful poem, On Ellington Road, for jogging me back in time. But Mona has a much better memory than I do, for the detail she gives of the many characters on her street is remarkable. ”Old man Harvey, with his thick specs and polished shoes/shouting ‘trespassers’, yet offering us a penny for collecting/his waspy pears.” Each line or couplet has a life story that you want to explore more, “Aunty Kamel, knocking on our door, with her black plait undone,/begging us to keep her for the night.” (more…)

Birmingham to London by Coach, by Steve Pottinger

In 1925, the newly installed Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, linked the pound the gold standard in a vain attempt to boost a dying empire. This led to an economic catastrophe and the now famous General Strike of 1926. Always one for war war as opposed to jaw jaw, Churchill advocated troops firing on strikers. So to stop him from inflicting such harm, he was assigned the editorship of the British Gazette, the government’s propaganda machine during the strike. The paper ridiculed the strikers and claimed they were a direct threat to the country’s democracy.

The media has continued with this tradition of ridiculing and demonising the working classes. During the Miner’s Strike of the 1980s, Thatcher wanted to take a very similar approach to Churchill, with a secret plot to use 4,500 troops to crush the miners and she had the backing of the right wing tabloids of the day. The Sun tried to run a front page of a straight-armed Arthur Scargill (he was mid-wave) under the heading, “Mine Furher”, but the print union (who knew if the miners lost they’d be next) refused to run it so the paper had to back down and run the alternative (see right).

However, the focus of today’s media demonization is the out-of-workers; those on benefits, who we are told have too many children, are promiscuous, criminal, and feckless. These types are paraded on the screens from Jerry Springer to Jeremy Kyle, with characters like Vicky Pollard and Frank Gallagher, and are regularly on the front pages of the tabloids. It feeds into politicians’ minds and speeches; in the UK election the focus is very much on hard working families, who can only be helped through cuts – cuts which implicitly will affect those on benefits. So if you are unemployed, disabled or unwell, elderly, you are seen as a drain on the state. All this, despite the fact that many “hard working people” are in poverty and rely on benefits and food banks. It is a classic divide and rule strategy.

How does one deal with this? One obvious way is with frustration, anger, protest, and voting against those propagating a perception that disadvantaged people are the problem. The other way, which Steve Pottinger has done with great wit in his poem Birmingham to London by Coach, is to write about it in a satirical way; turn our perceptions around, make us think differently about the current demonization of a class of people, who somehow hold little power and little money, and yet seem to dictate the policy of the main political parties. I know, it’s fucking bizarre! (more…)

Proletarian Poetry

Poetry of Working Class Lives