Inua Ellams

November Review – From Nana’s Luck to The Last Gang in Town?

It’s been a great second month for Proletarian Poetry (I would give you the stats but that’s a bit too geeky. I am however, warming my hands over them now).

I have got to know some great poets who have kindly agreed to have their poems featured on the site. As I’ve said before, in terms of working class lives, this is about the poems not the poets; I secretly believe that all poets have written a working class poem, they just don’t know it yet – it’s a class consciousness problem 🙂 Also as I write this, I am reminded how many of the poets I have seen read this month; all are great performers in their own right and way – you really can’t beat live poetry. For example, on Saturday I was at The Shuffle where two featured poets on PP, Inua Ellams and Karen McCarthy Woolf read alongside, Tom Chivers, Holly Corfield Carr, Gale Burns, and Harry Mann. The theme was the environment and there were a great range of poems on the subject.

This month’s poems have covered a number of themes to do with: family, gender, identity, racism, urban life, work and industry, food, and music (got to have the music). There are mothers, fathers, grandparents, butchers, assembly line workers, brass bands, activists, priests, loan sharks, and (to use the title of Inua Ellams’ poem) Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves. (more…)

Directions (after Billy Collins) by Inua Ellams

Inua Ellams

The two poems featured here by the multi-talented Inua Ellams take us through London streets at night. Directions (after Billy Collins’ poem. Please read this before you read Inua’s) is a hand-on-our-shoulder poem, talking to us as a friend familiar with the poet’s home (‘you know the wild bush at the back of the flat/the one that scrapes the kitchen window’).

The poem was written in response to Billy Collins’, closely following his structure, tone, line breaks and mirroring his epiphany. Where Collins’ Directions takes us into the beauty of nature: high up ‘you will eventually come to a long stone/ridge with a border of pine trees/which is as high as you can go’, Inua’s is rooted in a deep urban setting where your journey takes you ‘to a rough rise/of stairs that reach without railings/the run-down roof’. Nature is there but it ‘struggles for soil and water/and fails where the train tracks scar the ground?’ (more…)

The Out of Town Shuffle at the Poetry Cafe

Andrew Smardon, Hilda Sheehan, Brad Schmauss, Jo Bell, Kim Moore, Liz Dorfman, Joey Connolly

Poets really are a welcoming bunch. Standing at the bar of the Poetry Café last night, I introduced myself to Kim Moore, who like Jo Bell at the Forward Prize, invited me to join her and friends before the readings (I didn’t quite get to the bottom of why Hilda Sheehan ended up in a freezer in Lidl, or was it Aldi?).

I was there for The Shuffle to hear seven poets from ‘out of town’ organised and hosted by Jill Abram. I liked the way Jill introduced the poets by reading a poem for each of them (she meets a lot of people, mainly on residential writing courses as far as I can gather). (more…)