It is wonderful being a literary gentleman. That is what, I call myself now that I an retired. I follow my natural inclinations, read, write and generally take any opportunities I can to show off my small stock of knowledge and understanding. It is a small stock, and it sometimes its diminutive size me into difficulties. I have now given my Dickens in Doncaster1 talk twice, and full of confidence and bravado at its success, I recently signed up to give a talk in Lincolnshire next month: Dickens Goes to Grantham. As with the Doncaster talk, I agreed to do it on the strength of a few mouse clicks which confirmed that the great man had indeed visited the town in question. But here’s the problem - Researching his visit to Doncaster revealed all manner of intrigue. He wrote about the people there, the St Leger horse racing, the theatre and the whole atmosphere of the place. He also had a tryst with a young actress, less than half his age, who he pursued as a lover and carried on a clandestine and adulterous affair with for the rest of his life. There was plenty to fill a talk with. Unfortunately his Grantham connection is not quite as sensational. He stayed for a night at a coaching inn, the George Hotel, on his way up the Great North Road to Yorkshire. Afterwards, he wrote a letter in which he told his wife that it was a very good inn indeed. He also mentioned its excellence in Nicholas Nickleby, the book that he was writing at the time. That is the full extent of the information which I have to work with. I spent several hours of my recent holiday in the South of France reading Nicholas Nickleby from cover to cover (it was too hot to do much else) but found no more about the place in it. Slim pickings indeed.

Am I worried? Not outrageously. I am sure that I can add plenty of colour about the young Dickens, (he was 26 at that time compared to 45 when he visited Doncaster) the Great North Road, his travelling companion Halbot Knight Browne (who was his illustrator, Phiz) and the state of the nation in the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Also, Nicholas Nickleby is in fact a cracking novel, so I hope to find an excuse to put in a couple of short readings. All in all, I’m really looking forward to it.

I’m actually becoming quite obsessed with Charles Dickens. He is more than just a literary gentleman, being comparable to a rock star, in that he was fêted everywhere he went, he toured the British Isles, Europe and America, not only writing and performing, but acting on the stage, he involved himself in political discussion, championing the poor and oppressed, mixed with the stars of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, Victor Hugo, and Edgar Allen Poe, promoted the work of others such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, and led a tumultuous private life.

I’m currently re-reading Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography (she also did one about Ellen Ternan his young lover) and wondering where to go next – back to the beginning with Sketches by Boz, a mid-point piece like Little Dorrit or something later like Bleak House. If you have any suggestions, or opinions, let me know.

Above all else, he was a working class boy made good, who had worked his way up from child labour, (putting tops and labels on pots of shoe polish in a factory), to becoming a wealthy and successful man, and he did it through determination and hard work. That the hard work was writing makes the story especially poignant to those of us who dabble in writing either online or elsewhere. I feel a real affinity as I try and discipline myself to write regularly and punctually for publication on here, and also strive to publish others both online and in a quarterly literary journal. The self imposed deadlines, whilst not as demanding as his, can be quite a tough at times. Yes, I know that I will never be Charles Dickens, just as when I was in a rock band, I knew that I would never be David Bowie, but it’s nice to aim high and emulate the ones you admire (in your own style, obviously)

Which brings me to the question of obsession. I go through sporadic periods of obsession. Currently, it is Charles Dickens, but at other times there are others, equally as strong The world of Star Trek takes me in its grasp every now and then, as does Hull City Football Club, bird watching, and characters as diverse as David Bowie, Philip Larkin and George Formby. Aren’t we all prone to these little crazes? Is obsession necessarily a bad thing? Is it a weakness or a disorder? Is it unhealthy? Don’t our obsessions just add a little colour to our lives, contribute to our characters, and go towards making the unique tapestry of the mental landscape of our minds? I think that it is all too easy for us to discourage ourselves and others from taking too much of an interest in specific subjects and people, for fear that it is somehow unnatural and weird. We almost medicalise it with fears that it is a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or Autism. I’m not claiming that these conditions don’t exist. Of course they do, and they can cause real difficulties to those who have them. But I believe that there is also something magnificent and human about wanting to go into great detail and find out all about a narrow speciality. Part of that magnificence is that it demands focus and concentration, and these are things that seem to be constantly under threat in modern times.2

The smartphone and the internet are wonderful things, but they do tend to chip away at our ability to focus and concentrate on anything for long enough to gain any depth of understanding. We are constantly tempted to move on to the next thing, the next small thrill or reward. Perhaps it is my age. I am just like my parents were, they used to complain that television – the idiot box in the corner – would rot my brain and give me square eyes. But then again I would concentrate on watching something with a sustained theme for over an hour and have something to think about afterwards. These days I can concentrate on Facebook or other social media for over an hour and when I finally tear myself away from it I can recall very little of what I saw.

How would Dickens have coped if he was writing on a laptop with internet access and a smartphone pinging by the side of him? Would he have started to write about the George Hotel in Grantham, and been tempted to look at its website and then been distracted by needing to review it on booking.com or by an advert for a smoking jacket (which popped up because he had clicked on some similar adverts before)? Would he have been urged to hurry up and buy that jacket or book another room, because the offer ended at midnight, and there were only a handful left? Would he have felt compelled to respond immediately to a couple of sketches that Phiz had sent over WhatsApp, or shared on Twitter? I hope that he would have had the self-discipline to resist but who knows? And who knows how many potential Dickenses and Dickinsons and Austens and Hardys and Larkins are at this very moment idly scrolling through memes and instagram shorts rather than getting down to the business of fulfilling their potential?

Anyway, I must go now. Someone has tagged me and a bunch of other people in a series of facebook posts and I am compelled to investigate. Obsessed!

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Sixty Odd Poets

All my recent talk about the rules of writing poetry and the role of the subconscious in it has been buzzing around my mind quite a lot over the last few weeks. I know that we are better at creativity than any artificial intelligence, but I really needed to get my thoughts clarified. Here’s my attempt.

Our subconscious is a knowledgeable, creative being who lives within each of us. A being who just needs some encouragement to come out. Well, perhaps not quite encouragement. In order to coax it out, you need to set up the right conditions. A shy creature, it doesn’t respond well to forcing. It is very much afraid of criticism and scorn. Freed of the threat of these, it can be very playful. It is like our inner child. All children enjoy play. All children are poets because they have no inner critic. They have not been taught too many rules and led to believe that their thoughts are childish and therefore worthless. They say what they think, making connections between objects, people and places that as adults we filter out and reject. These connections are where the feelings are, where the poetry can be found.

There are two ways of looking at the world. Two ways of explaining or communicating our experiences. The scientific way, and the artistic way. The scientific way depends on measurable facts and data. It points to objective truths, to a reality that exists separately to our human existence. Mathematical and scientific facts exist in a realm independent of us. We may have built the system, but with it we are pointing away from ourselves.

The artistic way points to experiences and uses representation, including simile and metaphor to tune into how things make us feel rather than how they can be measured.

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations - Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

The human writer creates images that have a personal relevance, The human reader may connect to that relevance or find new meanings and connections within it. One might suggest that it is equally possible that the human reader can find relevance and connection in artificially produced writing? Of course connections can be drawn, or memories triggered, However, the artificial material can never be original. At best it can only be random. The responses in the human mind will always outperform the randomly generated prompts.

An artificial, random connection is not quite the same as a human one. Time for another thought experiment. I’ll do this one, but feel free to do one of your own when you get the idea. I imagine two random objects. Let’s say a watering can and a T.V listings magazine. I can put them together and weave a story from my experience. first I imagine myself the garden, pausing to see what I might watch on the television afterwards. this is the sort of connection an that an artificial intelligence might make.

But it couldn’t bring the richness that you and I can. It couldn’t see the magazine. It would be unlikely to come up with a copy of the Radio Times from 1969, like I did. I remember looking at one, stretched out on the living room floor at home. I know the texture of its pages, it was still produced on newsprint in those days, apart from a slight gloss on the cover. I am imagining reading details of an episode of something called Tales From the Watering Can to be broadcast on the radio that Thursday afternoon. (I have made that up based on things that I experienced then) The AI couldn’t develop this theme in like we can. I can almost hear that programme - even though it never existed. It is a children’s story, read in an avuncular male voice, about creatures living in and around an old watering can, perhaps with a spider’s web stretching from the handle to the spout. The AI couldn’t feel the story in the same way as those of us who have experienced such fare, stretched out on carpets (not fitted carpets mind) in the glow of the wireless. Mixed in with these memories are memories are bits of the book Charlottes Web - I saw it as a play in the theatre when my kids were little. There are also echoes of Hammy Hamsters Adventures on the Riverbank, a strange sixties television show - with a male narrator and gentle music. Perhaps an artificial intelligence could mine Charlotte’s Web and hammy Hamsster scripts, but it couldn’t get close to the feelings conjured, and wouldn not easily arrive there from the prompt “Write something about a watering can and a TV listings magazine”.

I am going to snap out of that particular reverie memory now try something else. Perhaps the radio show isn’t like that at all. Perhaps it is about a café called the Watering can. One close lose to an allotment, where old men come to drink tea and share tales of disappointments both in gardening and in life. Their browned hairy arms bear faded, indistinct tattoos from foreign ports where the ships that they sailed on once docked, allowing them just three days leave. Perhaps one of the men comes from a different background, and his arms bear not tattoos, but the ritual scarring of a different culture.

Again I can see where these thoughts might have come from. I often walk past allotments and think of the type of men who use them. Not like me, more like the generation before mine. I was brought up in Hull, and many men went to sea. One such man was my uncle Bernard who had lots of tattoos, of ships, scantily clad women, and one of the statue of liberty, which he pretended to be drawing onto his arm with a ball point pen the first time that I saw it.

I also once saw a man studying in the Hull University library. He was black and the skin of his hands, arms and face, was marked in raised bumps arranged in regular lines. Someone told me that it was ritual scarring. Like my Uncle Bernards tattoos, I thought, but not. They were stranger, more exotic, more other.

Could Artificial intelligence come up with the allotment cafe with echos of my Uncle Bernard and the ritually scarred man? Perhaps, with intensive prompting it might start to get somewhere near, but the situations would be formulaic, based on existing tales of men from allotments. They couldn’t feature the knowing, yet desperate eyes, the broken dreams, the fear and acceptance of impending death. The threads in their clothing, the wind moving the longest of one man’s eyebrow hair. It would be unlikely to try and tackle the philosophy behind their conversation. Only you and I can begin to imagine that that. Machines have no idea.

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Sixty Odd Poets

I was enjoying an evening at an art group, when the conversation turned to poetry. The majority of the people there didn’t know that I have pretensions to be a poet. I quickly took the decision resist the temptation to give my own opinion. I remained a silent listener. I wanted the person leading the conversation to have the space to give their own opinion.

I can’t abide that stuff where someone just presses the return key every now and then and calls it a poem. That’s not poetry, it’s just bad grammar. They should write in full sentences and paragraphs if they aren’t going to rhyme. How does just pressing the return key every now and then make something into a poem?

They had a point. Of course they did. I tried to make the above paragraph into a poem by pressing the return key every now and then. It didn’t really work. I wanted to change the order of the words, I wanted to shorten sentences, I wanted to stylise it, maybe put in some lines outside of the dialogue to describe the speaker. In short, I could see how it might become a poem.Go on then… I’ll give it a shot

The Poetry Critic

“I can’t abide that stuff” he said
“Where pressing the return key 
passes for poetry. 
That’s just bad grammar” 

With all eyes on the room on him
He warmed to his theme
Jabbing the air 
or perhaps the chest of an imaginary poet
with a long, bony forefinger

“If you aren’t going to rhyme” he said
“write in sentences and paragraphs.
You can’t make a poem
By just pressing the return key”

Ok, not my best work. It won’t have the poetry editor at the New Yorker begging me for the rights. Perhaps I could present the gist of it in a metered and rhymed form. then it would definitely be recognisable as a poem. Even to my friend at the art class.

Advice to Wannabe Poets

Poems ought to scan and rhyme
If not, they’re just a waste of time

Just pushing down the return key
Mid-sentence, very frequently
Doesn’t create poetry

The idea that poetry must rhyme is not unusual. In fact views about what is and isn’t poetry abound not just amongst non-poets but amongst poets too. The poetry world has its fair share of people who will tell you that what you have written isn’t proper poetry, or if it does qualify, that it is somehow unworthy. Fans of formal structure may look down their noses at those who favour free verse. Those who write in blank verse have been known to sneer at rhyme enthusiasts, who are divided between those who see no harm in using a rhyming dictionary, and those who would never admit to stooping so low as to use one, even though they have rhymezone bookmarked on their browsers. People who write from prompts run the risk of being derided for lacking sufficient imagination to create ideas of their own. People who announce that they wrote a piece at a workshop are sniggered at in some quarters by poets who proclaim that nothing of quality can be produced without being closeted within the silent confines of a writing den. Others swear that you should never draft in anything other than pencil in a physical notebook, scowl at those who draft on a computer and have no time at all for those who use their phones, whilst many of those who swear by their computers and phones are prone to think of the notebook and pencil brigade as primitive poets stuck in the past.

Of course, sensible poets such as you and I know that a good poem is a good poem whatever form it takes and whatever the circumstances of its creation. It is what the piece says that counts, and if it says something that makes a connection with originality and style, then, at least in my book, it is a good poem.

It is my heartfelt belief that the vast majority of human beings on this planet are capable of writing good poetry, but unfortunately very few do1. I believe that the reason for this has a lot to do with what people perceive good poetry to be. Anyone who feels that good poetry has to follow a set of rules around rhyme, structure, form, syntax etc is denying themselves the possibility of stumbling upon different ways of working and expressing themselves.

I think that we are all capable of writing good poetry because we all have a unique perspective on the world. We all have a different ideas and experiences, different associations in our minds, different perspectives and different personalities. Maybe the fact that we all have different DNA plays a part too. Maybe all of these things add up to some sort of poetic DNA which can leave its fingerprint on the things that we write. By trying to stick to some perceived rules of poetry for no better reason than we believe that poetry has to be done in a certain way, we are distorting that fingerprint, and allowing less of our poetic DNA to shine through.

This is why AI produced poetry is ultimately unsatisfying. AI poetry is completely constructed of rules. By definition it can never present a unique human perspective as every perspective, methodology and idea within it has to come from databases and be sorted mathematically from a list of probabilities. Only a human can be surprising, original, and fabulous.

The key to being fabulous is to experiment, be playful, use rules if it helps, but don’t be constricted by them. If you want to write a rhyming sonnet, go for it. See how it feels, and if it says what you want it to say. But if you feel that it might be said better by cutting out each individual word and scattering them all over the table and typing up the result, David Bowie style then try that too.

I really believe that being playful and trying out a range of methods and approaches is the only way to bring your poetic DNA to the surface. Working from prompts, searching for rhymes or following structures, need not be totally constricting, and can turn up unexpected directions and ideas. You will immediately reject many of these directions and ideas but some will stick – because they will resonate with you. The reason for that resonance may well be beried deep in your subconscious2. Go with it – that’s where your poetic DNA is.

If you are choosing a word or an idea for no other reason than it is the sort of word or idea that you feel that a poet ought to choose, then the chances are that it won’t contain much of your DNA, you are working from the same principles as an AI poet. Go with your gut. Be human.

In the final analysis, I’m not qualified to tell anyone how to write a poem. I’m not sure that anyone is. But I can have a stab at telling you how not to write one…

How Not to Write a Poem

•	You could think a poem
•	And when you'd thunk the poem
•	You could learn that poem by rote
•	You could refuse to write your poem down
•	If that's what floats your boat
•	Or you could have an idea
•	An idea for a poem
•	And smother it at birth
•	Never to be written, recited or read
•	Anywhere on Earth
•	But if thou wanteth to produce
•	Bad poètic stock
•	Then be pretentious, my son
•	Consider the styles of poets other
•	And rehash them in haste
•	with little effort
•	little skill
•	little inappropriate similes
•	which perchance should fall, inky from your pen
•	like sour milk from a virgin's breast
•	Or let Metaphors mixèd prowl 
•	the confines of your cranial cage
•	their spanners stopping the engine of your art
•	Or, failing that
•	Present it in a PowerPoint
•	With graphics, like a chart

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Sixty Odd Poets

Many people are put off posting their poetry on social media because of the amount of publishers and journals that refuse to accept submissions that have been shared this way. I started posting on Substack because I had given up on submitting , and just wanted to get readers for my work in any way that I could. I had the sense that it was wasted, just tucked away and gathering dust in both the digital and physical realms.

It worked! I got readers. Not a phenomenal amount of readers, but an amount that renewed my enthusiasm for writing poetry. This new enthusiasm eventually had me submitting again - but only stuff that I had not shared on the socials.

More recently, I have started breaking this rule. I occasionally submit poetry which I have already posted elsewhere. I never do it with stuff that I have posted on Substack, which feels like I have really self-published it, but certainly with stuff that I have put out on Facebook and Bluesky1. Am I wicked? Am I an evil poet, who doesn’t deserve to ever be published by anyone else ever again?

I don’t think so.

I reckon that I would be lucky if even the most popular of my Facebook or Bluesky poetry posts are read by more than a couple of hundred people (this is a very generous, boastful estimate, — the vast majority will be read by a small fraction of that figure). Most people who do read them will almost immediately scrolled on to the next post in the feed. Some might remember the feel of the piece or a detail from it, and some of those might remember my name as well2. But honestly — does that really mean that the work is sullied and unworthy of ever being considered for publication elsewhere?

Some, more enlightened, editors don’t think so. They make a distinction between unpublished work and uncurated work. Uncurated work may well have been published on social media. Rattle, a well respected journal based in the United States accepts submissions of uncurated work. The editor, Timothy Green, explained his decision in an excellent 2023 article in Lit Mag News.

But there are still many editors who forbid me to submit stuff that may only have been read by my family, a few friends and maybe a handful of people who have stumbled across it whilst idly scrolling. This is where I get economical with the truth. As far as I am concerned such stuff is unpublished. I take the gamble that an editor will never know3. Of course, these days, I could be caught in the lie by the use of an A.I. assisted web search. But if anyone had to go to those lengths, it would just prove that the instance of social media use was pretty obscure.

Besides, if someone does accept a piece of work that has been aired on social media, I secretly do them the courtesy of kicking over the traces and deleting the offending post. The world keeps spinning, and my actions almost certainly have no impact on public interest in their journal.

Of course, on the few occasions that I submit work to some fabled organisation that I would give my right arm to be featured in, I play the game, even if I don’t agree with the rules. It would be awful the receive a letter from The Poetry Review or The New Yorker, informing me that they have had second thoughts about publishing something of mine having discovered that it has already garnered a dozen likes on Facebook. Such is the stuff of nightmares! If that makes me a hypocrite, then so be it. I am more pained by the fact that it makes me the sort of person who makes a value judgement about every publication that I send my stuff to. Then again, we all make such judgements don’t we? OK, maybe not as crude as - is this publication too prestigious to lie to?

If I was really hypocritical, I would insist on stuff that had never seen the light of day on social media when I take submissions for my own small journal, Odd, or indeed, for the Sixty Odd Poets page here on Substack.

I don’t do that. In fact I have taken things a stage further. I actually look at social media with a view to finding poetry which I might want to publish myself and contact the poets to ask them about it.

I see it as the way a football club uses scouting to find players who might be promising additions to the team. It would be ridiculous if a club insisted that a prospective player must never have had a game of football in public before, instead requesting that hopefuls send privately prepared videos of their abilities to the management. Imagine that!4 No, don’t it doesn’t bear imagining! Footballers should go out and play football as often as they can, and learn from the experience. Part of the experience is being seen to play football, with the chance of being applauded, criticised or ignored. As far is I can see, poets are no different, apart from the fact that many of them are older, less physically fit and unable to understand the nuances of the offside rule.

In the arts, we have a fantasy that somehow talent is enough to get you ‘discovered’. We imagine that some sort of impresario will stumble across the singer in the backstreet bar, the artist with paintings on the café wall, recognising them as a genius and propelling them into the stratosphere of success. Even when this story is a part of the publicity around someone who has made it, it is rarely the case. Most success takes a lot of grit and determination, knocking on doors, getting your work heard or seen, making yourself known, building contacts, in short, striving. For a musician, social media is a great showcase, and no-one insists that you should never have posted your music anywhere. Perhaps those who want to promote musicians stand to make so much money from a successful signing that they don’t mind about previous exposure. For the poet who mainly writes, the use of social media should be a great way to gain exposure, yet the gatekeepers of poetry success are largely refusing to entertain work that has been exposed that way. This works against poets, creating a real obstacle to sharing their work with a wider audience.

Much of the poetry that I read and post on social media comes in the form of responses to prompts. If you type poetry prompts and the name of your chosen social media into a search engine you will have plenty to choose from. If you are not careful, you will be in danger of becoming addicted, and it will have a terrible effect on all your other writing. More to the point, if you are not prepared to bend the rules a bit, a significant percentage of your writing time will be devoted to producing pieces that you will never be able to submit for publication.

I have long enjoyed the #PoemsAbout prompt that Broken Spine editor Alan Parry runs on Bluesky. He puts a weekly prompt up and suggests that people respond on a Friday. It starts the weekend well. Contributors are also encouraged to comment and support each other, which helps to build a community. If you get into the habit of it, you find that you are often delighted by the quality of the posts. In fact you will soon get to find your favourites amongst the regulars. I did, and have even featured some of them in Sixty Odd Poets.

This month I decided to do something similar myself. I put an #OddChallenge challenge up on Bluesky, Facebook and Substack. It wasn’t a prompt as such. The challenge was to write a poem in the future tense. I got plenty of participants, and will be contacting some of the ones that I particularly like about the possibility of featuring their responses in a Sixty Odd Poets page. This to me seems like a decent use of social media to promote poetry. It also allows poetry to be discovered without the need for a formal submission system. In fact I am considering giving up the formal submission system altogether or at least taking the majority of what I publish from people who I have been able to ask personally, either in real life or online.

I would be very interested to know what other poets and editors think of this approach. I can see that it wouldn’t suit everyone. I can’t imagine The New Yorker following my lead anytime soon. But I think for a hobbyist publisher such as myself it might be a good strategy. Go on - put some response in the comments and give me some food for thought.

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Sixty Odd Poets

4

Imagine if simultaneous submissions were not allowed either, and you had to wait months before Hull City came to a decision before you could send your submission to Grimsby Town.

The last time that I wrote, I was anticipating my talk at Bawtry Library as part of the Bawtry Festival. I promised to tell you how I got on. What I hadn’t anticipated was doing the writing from a chair at the side of my hospital bed. Ohh cruel fate. One minute you are a successful poet, dropping pearls of wisdom, regaling audiences with tales of your brilliance and experiences in the literary world, the next you are staring death in the face. Well, not exactly. I don’t think that kidney stones come with a high mortality rate, and with a bit of luck I shall be discharged in a day or two1. But they bloody well hurt when they are doing their thing in the dark domain of your kidneys. And when the agony is upon you, thoughts of the sweet release offered by the grim reaper are of some comfort. Then again, the release offered by hospital strength pain relief is even sweeter.

Anyway, if I do perish through this current affiliation, at least I will have gone out on a high. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too loudly, but my Bawtry appearance was a resounding success. Actually, I don’t think that the trumpet sounds outrageously loudly when the resounding success happens to be speaking to an audience of just over twenty in a small branch library in the outskirts of Doncaster. Particularly when a proportion of them were from my own family. But what the hell? I can be anything that I want to be and the majority of the audience were not family, and I had not even met many of them previously. Nobody walked out in disgust, nobody fell asleep, and the response was very favourable. I am a literary giant of the local library scene… In Bawtry.

I never plan anything in depth until the day it happens. I might be chewing it over in my mind in the days or even weeks before, but I’m almost compulsive about avoiding any detailed preparation until the last minute. So I spent much of the afternoon before the performance sifting through my complete works, and trying to hone it down to a suitable selection.

The event was scheduled to run for a couple of hours, with a break in the middle. I reckon that 40 minutes is about the maximum that anyone can comfortably sit still and listen to one person. So I opted for two 40 minute sets. There’s no way anyone could tolerate listening to a solid wall of poetry for any longer than that. I certainly couldn’t imagine doing it without my mind wandering off. I also reckoned that my approach would have to be relaxed and conversational. Two forty minutes sets, allowing four minutes per poem including chatter and conversation surrounding it would mean 20 poems. That seemed like a lot. I also had to self edit. I couldn’t perform my rudest and sweariest poems. I couldn’t go for anything which might be regarded as heavy or which demanded any specialist knowledge. Twenty light hearted poems. I printed them out, and put them in a folder and added a few notes about what I might say to introduce them.

When I told Judy, my wife, that I had chosen twenty, her first reaction was not encouraging. Twenty??? I stuck to my guns, figuring that I could always drop some if it wasn’t going well. In fact in the hours between selecting the twenty and the start of the gig, I flitted between panicking that twenty was far too many and panicking that I would run out of material inside the first half hour.

In the end, I delivered two 40 minute sets almost to the second. And all was well. I was a little bit technical, explaining the joys of writing in iambic pentameter, but that seemed well enough received. I even read a few stanzas of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, so that my version The Budgie could be delivered in context. Again, well received. I ranted about Meadowhall, Ikea and Tescos in a section on shopping, I talked about what my dad has been up to since he died in a section on my dad, which I intersected with a section on death. People listened, laughed where appropriate, and applauded. I even managed to sell a few books at the end. There is honestly no other way to describe the evening than as a resounding success.

So now I have the bug. I dream of performing similar feats in front of bigger audiences, containing different people. Maybe at community arts centres, independent bookshops, and errm… slightly larger libraries. The sky’s the limit. Maybe this time next year I will be boasting about the Filey Literature Festival! If only my health holds out. Lord! Give me a few more years that I may indulge my literary pretensions just a little more.

And, dear reader. If you have any opportunities for me to come and entertain you, please getting touch. I’m not proud. Knit and Natter Groups, Church Fêtes, Sportsman’s dinners, Women’s institutes, I’ll have a go at anything. It’s all adventure as far as I’m concerned. Seriously, get in touch.

Sorry if this is a little briefer and less well thought out than usual. Blame those pain killers!

See you in a couple of weeks.

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Sixty Odd Poets

You can be anything that you want to be. A quick web search of the phrase brings up in all manner of annoying motivational memes and posters, with sunrises, horizons and stuff. There are even ones featuring Freddie Mercury and Barbie. It makes me think of the song from Bugsy Malone with we could have been anything that we wanted to be in the lyrics, mainly because it has a good tune. A similar philosophy came to me at the age of 16 through Do Anything You Wanna Do, the 1977 top ten single from Eddie and the Hot Rods. Like a lot of the songs that came out in the golden age of punk music, it spoke to me.

It was the philosophy that got me into a band with my mates. I wanted to be Johnny Rotten, so I became a version of him. I even transformed my Hull accent into a London snarl. I still cringe when I think about that. I hadn’t yet come across Be yourself; everyone else is already taken which is another popular motivational quote. (It is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he actually ever said or wrote it.)

After ditching the accent and an adventure in another largely ignored band, I gave up on my dream of success in the music business in the mid 1980s. Until I hit 50, at which point I remembered that I could be anything that I wanted to be. This resulted in my career as a self-proclaimed pop star which you can read all about in my book Sixty Odd Songs – the title that started my whole obsession with sticking Sixty Odd in front of everything.

I’m in my mid 60s now, but I could still be a pop star if I wanted to be, there are plenty of them about, from Bob Dylan to that bloke in the open necked silk shirt who sings in front of backing tapes down at the pub on Saturday nights. I just stopped wanting to. The pubs and venues were too much effort. Never mind about the flesh being weak, the spirit wasn’t even willing any more.

I had gradually decided that what I really wanted to be was a poet.

Here’s another annoying motivational quote It’s never too late to start

Nonsense! I can clearly remember sitting at the side of my dad’s death bed and thinking “it’s a bit late for him to start piano lessons now”

Still, there has to be some truth in it. I did another web search. In amongst all the sunrises and silhouettes of people holding their arms aloft, I found a chart listing all the people who had achieved great things at different ages. Obviously, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at the youthful end, but the other end petered out with Charles Flint who founded IBM in 1911 at the age of 61. It wasn’t even IBM at the time. What’s the moral of that? Its never too late to start but 61 is about the limit, and it’s well over a century since anyone achieved much at that age?1

Despite all this, I still believe that I can be anything that I want to be. Perhaps it’s a boomer thing or a middle class thing that makes me believe that everyone can follow their dreams. I would rather see it is a progress of civilization thing, and hope that such progress isn’t going to be thrown away by people who would quash ambition and imagination in the name of money.

Here’s another quote – Money is the root of all evil. This one has spawned plenty of memes, but none that can be described as motivational. Apparently, Mark Twain said the lack of money is the root of all evil, and the original bible quote said the love of money is the root of all evil.2 I think that my proclamation is that thinking too much about money is just another obstacle to being anything that you want to be.

Who wants to be a millionaire? Nobody really. What we really want is not to have to worry about money. If you can achieve that, either by raising your income or lowering your expectations, or some combination of the two, then you really can be anything that you want to be.

If you can separate your desires from the ideas of wealth or celebrity, you are free.

OK. Hit me with all the things you want to be but can’t; Professional Footballer? (Professional just means paid – no one is stopping you playing football in a team), Brain Surgeon (OK, you could get into trouble with that one, but you can help people sort their brains out with a bit of friendly advice), Astronaut (Now you are just being awkward. Buy yourself a telescope or take some drugs)

Look… I know what I am talking about. I was a pop star for over a decade. I might have been a shit pop star that nobody had ever heard of – but I lived the dream.

And now I am a poet.

At the beginning of my pop star career, I wrote a small manifesto of the things that I would achieve: Go on a tour. Release a CD. Get on the radio, stuff like that. About the only thing that I didn’t achieve was to throw a television out of a hotel window. I could have done, but now that cathode ray tubes are a thing of the past, it wouldn’t have been quite as much fun anyway, and besides, I didn’t want any trouble. In the end I decided that I didn’t want to be a telly throwing kind of a pop star anyway.

Perhaps I should have written a manifesto of what I wanted to achieve as a poet. Maybe it would be the same: Go on a tour. Release a CD. Get on the radio, stuff like that. I’m not doing badly at all, and it’s not only writing, I am also getting the odd poem published in literary magazines, publishing, myself and others, and organising events. What more do I want? Not a lot really. Maybe a couple of more prestigious journals and a full collection published by someone else, but I can wait for these goals, and if they remain unachieved, I’ll still be a poet.

And to prove it I am appearing as a poet at the Bawtry Festival on Tuesday 16^th June 2026. The doors at the Bawtry Community Library (DN10 6NE) open at 6.30 for a 7.00 start, and its free to get in. They do suggest that you call (01302 734510) to book a place, but I think that is because they are offering free wine and they want to know how many bottles to get in.

If you can’t make it, come back here in a couple of weeks and I’ll tell you how I got on.

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Sixty Odd Poets

1

Actually, I eventually found an updated version of the never too late graphic that featured a 65 year old achiever - Colonel Sanders. He’s finger lickin’ good!

If you write poetry, do you ever ask yourself why? Isn’t life for living rather than for writing poems about? Aren’t poets just like those people at rock concerts taking videos with their phone rather than just enjoying the experience?

If you never ask yourself that question, then surely other people have asked you. The parent who thinks that you are throwing your life away, wasting your time on fancy nonsense. The friends and family, mainly the partner, who see time spent at the writing desk as time not spent with them. Why bother? they ask, there is no money in it.

We have been brought up to see money as the primary measure of value. Even though the Beatles were correct to point out that money can’t buy you love, it is arguable that it can attract a more desirable lover, and it can certainly buy physical intimacy.

Unless you are either extremely good or extremely fortunate, there is no money in poetry, and there is no sex in it either. Even if there was a suggestion of sex in it, that partner would have even more reason to complain about you devoting so much time to it.

So if its not for money, and not for love or sex, what are you in it for? Some sort of intangible comfort? Like the phone video person at the gig, you want to be able to say, I was there, to create something that sees the event from your unique perspective? This is who I am. I go to gigs, I like music, I notice things, I write poetry, I create!

Perhaps that is why the poet writes - In the name of creativity. Flexing the creative muscle - like any artist, painter, sculptor, musician, photographer. Only with poetry you need nothing more than a pencil and paper. Not even a pencil and paper. A poet could do the whole thing in their head. It may require more concentration, practice and determination to write poetry that way, but a lot less than it would to play a game of chess by just imagining the moves and speaking them to the opponent with no reference to an actual board. There are chess players who do that, and the probability is that they don’t do it for money, love or sex. Do you think that they are weird? Well -thats exactly what non poets think of you.

Still, It feels good to develop your creative muscle and create some sort of art or poetry, just as it feels good to develop physical muscles and engage in sport.

But now I have another question for myself. Because it is not just the writing. It is the reading too - unearthing poetry in lit-mags, collections and anthologies, as well as on websites and social media. It is also the listening, on the radio, Soundcloud and YouTube, attending readings, recitals, and open mics, hearing the words delivered by human voices.

Reading and listening: Exposing your mind to the words of others. Searching for the pieces that resonate. Sifting through oceans of stuff that does nothing for you. Willing it to make a connection and when it doesn’t wondering if it is down to you, or down to the poet? To some extent all of us who read poetry are playing the Simon Cowell in our minds, deciding who has got talent and who you can dismiss (although you would never tell them that you were dismissing them). More than that, we are honing our own craft by emulating the strengths of the best, and avoiding the pitfalls of the worst.

Do you enjoy all that? Or is it an unhealthy compulsion?

And all those poems/poets that you dismiss - are they really as worthless as you perceive them to be? Is their poetry of less value than yours? What makes you think that? Their poetry must serve a purpose for them in much the same way that yours does. Maybe it doesn’t trigger any dopamine in you, but it might well do the trick for others.

To achieve that, poetry has to have something to communicate. Good poetry communicates something well and that good poets hit the target more frequently than poor ones.

This idea lies behind a further development in the tale of how poetry is taking over my life like a virus, like a tumour, a malignant creature that causes me to use too many similes and metaphors. I find myself wanting to run poetry workshops.

Why should I want to do that? There’s no money in it (although admittedly it would probably be a bit easier to make money out of that than to make anything out of actually writing poetry). Sex - Don’t even go there - There’s apps for all that - why go to all the bother of running poetry workshops?

Maybe it is some sort of evangelistic motive. perhaps I am saying I enjoy this . You should too - it will change your life! Or maybe it is born of a desire to help people who want to get to know poetry, or are concerned that their poetry isn’t hitting the target? I have (a limited amount of) experience with this sort of thing. I can share what I have learned, you might find it useful.

Or perhaps it is just another excuse to talk about poetry with people who are interested in talking about poetry.

And this brings me back to the library, to the week in which no one turned up for my fun and informal poetry workshop, leaving me to spend two hours alone with my thoughts, hatching plans to make sure that it never happened again.

Well. It didn’t happen again. But no thanks to any plans that I had hatched.

The following week, I went into the session armed with one of those bells that are used on shop counters, hotel receptions, and old fashioned quiz shows. I hand wrote a sign which said Ring the Bell to Summon a Poet, reasoning that this would enable me to leave my designated corner unattended, and wander around the rest of the library in search of people, conversation, and ideas for poetry.

Only, before I set off on my travels someone walked into my area and sat down. It was partly my fault for removing all the Reserved - Sorry for any Inconvenience signs. This woman had just put her car into a nearby MOT centre and wanted somewhere comfortable to sit and pass the time for the hour or so before she could go back and pick it up. (How the knit and natter women laughed later when I told them about that.) Still, she was happy to chat and tell me how she was spending her retirement and enjoying U3A (which is now a name in itself and no longer an abbreviation of University of the Third Age) where she did conversational Italian and photography. She was sure that, if I was interested, there would be poetry opportunities, as culture and the arts are well represented in U3A.

Then something amazing happened. Whilst we were conversing on such matters, the librarian came over with an actual real, live, poetry curious customer. She didn’t even have to ring the bell as I was still sitting in front of it. We all had a lovely chat about poetry and the arts until the MOT woman got her call, after which that actual customer and I got down to working on some poetry. She had brought in a couple of pieces in the hope that they could be discussed and tweaked. I was happy to assist in that process and we had an enjoyable time. Sadly she told me that she would be unable to come the following week due to other commitments, but I didn’t let that small matter dampen my enthusiasm.

The following week, things got even better. I had three customers. This equalled the total number that I had had over the entirety of the previous three sessions. The bell remained unrung, and I was able to get out the poems that I had prepared for the week that no-one came - Simon Armitage, Joyce Kilmer and additionally, one by Charles Bukowski on the subject of his cats. We read, discussed, and wrote together on the topics of encounters with nature, and everyone seemed to get something from the experience, including myself.

Having done the groundwork, I really ought to have promised to return the following week and build on it. But i was only booked in for four weeks and I have so many other things to do, that I sadly had to finish it there. (Don’t worry, I ensured that my three companions knew about future events in the ares

I never did get to write a poem about the knit and natterers (who were actually cake decorators - or rather practitioners of sugarcraft - which is a fabulous word and would have mede a great title.) I may go back and do that sometime. On a day when I won’t be disturbed by people wanting to talk about poetry.

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Sixty Odd Poets

It’s not that poetry is inherently lonely. Yes it demands periods of solitude and concentration. But concentration is a good thing, right? And if concentration thrives on solitude and concentration is a good thing, then solitude is a good thing too, as long as one doesn’t make too large a habit of it and become a hermit, stopping off the interaction and stifling opportunities to gain the insight and inspiration that enables decent writing to occur.

Yet here I am unexpectedly, and not exactly comfortably alone in a library. My third library of the week. Totally alone but for the knit and natter group behind the bookshelf next to me, the librarians manning the desk at the other side of the room and a handful of customers browsing at either screens or shelves.

I was expecting to be holding a fun and informal workshop on writing poetry: the second of a series of four - one a week throughout the month of May. I had two punters at the first one. A bloke who had taken it up since his retirement and woman who had never done any poetry before but had a friend who dabbled and who she suggested that she might bring along next week. She didn’t. Nobody returned for a second go. Was it something I said? Did I fail to make it fun and informal enough? Who knows? All I know is that I now have a corner of the library to myself with three round tables all marked “Reserved - Sorry for any Inconvenience” and every chair around them unoccupied but for mine.

I can’t leave because the minute that I am gone, someone is bound to come in expecting some fun, informality and poetry.

I am prepared for that eventuality, ready to talk about encounters with nature, in parks, gardens, woodland, hills, dales, or beaches. I brought copies of poems too. I kicked a Mushroom by Simon Armitage and Trees by Joyce Kilmer - one recent, one older - one rhymed, one not. Lots to think about, to discuss, dissect, and emulate, all in a fun and informal manner.

I even had some backup pieces about cats and dogs in case the first two fell flat. But my preparation was all in vain.

After skimming through a library’s copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s selected poems, I opened my laptop. And now I am writing this.

I actually love libraries. As I said, this one is the third that I have been in this week. I helped to run a successful poetry workshop in the first of them, the Balby Community Library near Doncaster. Although this was a with a long established group of keen poets – Read To Write, who were already working on a collection of poems based loosely on the concept of the Chelsea Hotel, and hotels in general.

In the other one I have been working at creating a small museum style display for the Mexborough and District Heritage Society. The local council’s department of culture actually provided some swish new display cabinets, which in the current climate is something to celebrate. I have also led shared reading groups there, which have been rather more successful than the one which I am currently not delivering.

Never mind. Maybe I am a little to blame. When I was approached to run the sessions, I was under the impression that the purpose of them was to attract people from the local community to come and use their library. Therefore, I didn’t publicise it amongst people who I already knew, none of whom were local. I imagined that If I came with a group of people who were already familiar with both me and each other, then I would be creating a sort of barrier to the local punters getting involved. This was more than likely a mistake. Firstly my immense ego had probably overestimated the amount of friends and family I could attract to a suburban library on a midweek morning in spring. And secondly, I suppose that it is easier to join a group that is already gathered, than to join an odd looking bloke sitting on his own in the corner of a library surrounded by notices apologising for any inconvenience.

There are two weeks left to run. The library had posters printed, so I am committed to turning up for them. Not that I think that they are displayed in many places outside of the library itself.

So how should I spend those two remaining sessions? I suppose that I could read some more Carol Anne Duffy and type out a few more articles. But that seems almost like giving up.

I could also make the attempt to attract people who I already know to the session. Of course, this runs the risk of finding out exactly how unpopular I am, but I have a thick skin. And at least I could say I tried. I don’t want to give the name of the library in question in this article, just in case the librarians or punters might consider that I have broken some confidence, but if you live within striking distance of a mid-point between Doncaster and Rotherham and are not particularly busy on Tuesday morning – drop me a line and I’ll send you details. I would be grateful for the company.

A third possibility occurs to me. I could actually be more proactive within the library. I could move away from my designated corner and start to openly write poetry about the place and the people using it. I could engage with the librarians, the browsers, and the knit and natter group. Even if no one wanted to join in and write with me, I would still have something to show at the end of the session.

This actually sounds like a plan. Of course I might lose my nerve before I get properly started, but if I steel myself. It can’t be any more difficult than standing up at an open mic night when all the other poets are only interested in reading their own stuff, and I have done that before. If I am honest I have actually been one of those other poets.

Dear reader. I shall return in a couple of weeks and tell you how it went. I may even include some of the resultant poetry. There! I have said it now, so I am jolly well going to have to do it, or suffer the indignity of silently returning to Substack, deleting this article and never mentioning it again.

Right, before I go, I think that I shall have a natter with the knitters1.

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Sixty Odd Poets

Work on all my other projects ground to a halt in the middle of this month, and I name Charles Dickens as the principal culprit.

Last year, some dear soul had put it about that I can give a lively and entertaining talk, and The Doncaster Family History Society contacted me on the strength of their recommendation, kindly asking me to pick a topic that would be relevant to their town and prepare a lecture on it. I had been reading something about Dickens and his reading tours of the country. With a few clicks of the mouse, I confirmed that he visited Doncaster in 1857. I suggested Dickens in Doncaster as my title.

It wasn’t until I started preparing in earnest that I discovered that he hadn’t visited merely to read a few chapters of the Pickwick papers, and a bit of Nicholas Nickleby and be on his way the next morning. He had come for a very different reason. He had come because he was lusting after an eighteen year old actress who he had recently met in Manchester. Scandalous! He was a married man of 45 years old, and two of his nine children were older than she was!

The woman in question was Ellen Ternan, or Nelly, as everyone called her. And although the week he spent in Doncaster that September (During the week of the St Leger horse racing) was something of a letdown for him (he referred to it subsequently as the Doncaster disappointment) he continued his pursuit of her in the following months, supporting her mother and sisters, taking her on holidays to Europe, and generally making himself irresistible (at least financially). He was soon living separately to his wife with Nelly as his secret lover and companion until his death in 1870.

The trip to Doncaster came about after Dickens discovered that Nelly, along with her theatre family were to appear at the Royal Theatre there. he quickly persuaded his friend and fellow writer, Wilkie Collins, that a trip up North would be a great source of inspiration for them both. They were engaged in producing a magazine, Household Words, together and had to produce new material for each weekly edition. They badly needed inspiration.

The exercise provided a portmanteau of stories and anecdotes which were collected under the title The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, in which the two writers, thinly disguised as Mr Goodchild and Mr Idle, take some time off their work and enjoy the delights of Northern England, including the Doncaster Races and an evening at the Royal.

As I researched the story for my talk, it occurred to me that I might as well put out a slim book on it, another attempt to enhance my pension from the world of literature. Therefore, as well as producing a lecture with lantern slides - (or PowerPoint as they are known these days) I compiled a short monograph as well.

Of course, you can find The Lazy Tour in its entirety elsewhere on the net, including original editions on the excellent Internet Archive, but if you would like to read just the Doncaster bits, with accompanying notes on Dickens’ marriage and his affair with Nelly, details of where he stayed and the places he visited in Yorkshire, along with information on the play that he and Collins had put on at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, which had first brought them into contact with the Ternan Family, all accompanied by contemporary photographs and illustrations, then you could do worse than purchase my volume Dickens in Doncaster which is available worldwide under the auspices of Mr Amazon and Sons of Seattle, Washington, USA.

I sold one or two at the lecture, which was held at a very swish venue, the Earl of Doncaster, a stunning and authentic 1938 hotel which has been maintained in all its glory and splendour and is well worth a visit just for the experience of having a drink in the bar.

I hope to arrange opportunities for people to see me deliver it again, in Mexborough - home of the sixty Odd Poets, and perhaps in Doncaster once more during the celebrations for this years’ 250th anniversary of the St Leger race. Of course, if you would like a similar lecture delivered somewhere near you, I am always open to offers.

Sadly, as a result of my Dickensian dalliance (and my week enjoying poetry and music at the Leeds Song Festival) I have failed to hit the target on my 2026 Sixty Odd Schedule for the first time. I had intended to have the Eddie Smith book finished, at least in draft form, but alas, whilst it is looking good, it is still not there quite yet. In mitigation, I have sent out what I have prepared so far to some interested parties. It is getting very close now.

But not this month. This month, I need to work on the second volume of the Odd Journal, which will be launched at 3pm on May 31^st at the Fox Gallery in Mexborough, with readings from a number of contributors and an open mic.

I have a couple of further engagements coming up. On Saturday May 23rd, I shall be one of the guest poets at the launch of David Harmer’s new publication Before It’s Too Late from the Fig Tree Press. It’s at 2pm at the Brewery Tap in Doncaster, not too far from the railway station if you fancy it.

And on Tuesday 23rd of June ay 7pm, as apart of the Bawtry Arts Festival I shall be reading and talking about my poetry and stuff at Bawtry Library (nowhere near a railway, but apparently there will be free wine – so if you can be transported there by a designated driver, your indulgence will only be limited by the amount on offer and your shamelessness in taking as much as you can get your hands on)

Clearly, it is not an Arena tour yet. But if you could possibly make it to any of these events, I would, as ever, be delighted to see you.

All the very best

Mike

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Sixty Odd Poets

I have always enjoyed music. When I was a kid, my mam and dad both enjoyed playing LP records on the radiogram in the front room. It was as essential a piece of furniture as the television, certainly more impressive in its design and taking up more space. A long, low chest on legs, you opened the lid to reveal a glass plated radio tuner and a record player that offered speeds of 78, 33 (and a third), 45, and 16. Then, at the other side, room to store the records. Ours were mostly budget price recordings from the supermarket. My mam liked Jim Reeves, my dad light classics such as those recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. They also had a boxed set from the Reader’s Digest: The Magical Wold of Melody. Back in those days television was only available in the evenings. When they weren’t playing records, they were listening to the radio, mainly the light programme, (which became Radio 2 in 1967). I can remember the hearing The Dave Clark Five’s Bits and pieces when I was three years old, and feeling even then, that it was something daring and different.

Punk music arrived in 1977 at the crucial time of my adolescence and saw me turn my back on Reeves and Fiedler. This was my sound. My music, with an attitude and philosophy all of its own. In the following years I expanded my tastes to include David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk and Sparks, enjoying the fact that my parents didn’t really get any of them.

As I grew into adulthood, I mellowed a bit. From my mid-twenties onwards I allowed the light classics to edge its way back into my listening back in along with vintage and then slightly more modern jazz, occasionally wandering into radio three territory, but only to seek the sort of music that fitted into the magical world of melody.

As a man in his sixties now, I spend much more time with Radio Three than any other station, lured there because Classic FM has too many adverts. (Hurrah for the BBC).

A few years ago, my friend Ian Parks was involved in the Leeds Lieder (which became Leeds Song) and had his words set to music and performed by a young, classically trained singer, and accompanied on grand piano. I was fascinated and if I am honest, quite jealous. Then Susan Darlington, anther poet who I know and admire, who has also been involved in Leeds Song mentioned that the project was open to applications from poets to join the 2026 cohort. I applied that day. How glad I am that I was one of the ten chosen poets! The project finished last week with a fantastic concert at The Opera North Centre in Leeds. We all got to read our poems and hear them transformed into marvellous songs by fantastic young composers and musicians.

I learned a lot from the whole experience, and afterwards felt that I was beginning to develop an appreciation for music beyond the magical world of melody.

Whist some of the pieces were very melodic – others had elements which took me back to listening to stuff that I had heard on long ago radio three broadcasts by avant garde composers. Dissonant, difficult and, to me, incomprehensible.

“Ohh crikey” I thought “what have I got myself involved in?”

I have always prided myself on being able to appreciate all music. This was put to the test in the when my own kids began to listen to music performed by bands such as Rammstein, System of a Down and even Slipknot. I listened, and persevered, and eventually began to appreciate at least the intention and joy of it.

So I listened and persevered with all the music on offer in the poets and composers project.

I was still assimilating some of it when I attended another show at the Festival. A premiere of Dunwich described as “a song cycle without a singer” by Martin Iddon1, who (along with poet Hannah Stone) led the composers and poets project and workshops. There was no dissonance in Dunwich, the piano music was actually quite melodic. However, the piece wouldn’t find a place in a Magical World of Melody compilation. To my untrained ear it seemed repetitive and meandering. It never seemed to go anywhere. The same might have been said of the accompanying video, which featured grainy images of figures on Dunwich beach and occasionally at surrounding structures. The narrator told a history of the port of Dunwich along with some legends and ghostly stories, in a quiet low key voice. The whole experience felt strange and unnerving.

Then, as I listened and watched, I started to experience it differently. Gradually something started to make sense. Perhaps my expectations of what I might get from music was too influenced by The Magical World of Melody along with Jim Reeves, pop and rock. Perhaps, I had only been looking for music which made me happy, or relaxed, or Jubilant. Dunwich did something else. It made me feel reflective, and brought a sense of geography and history, triggering the sorts of emotions that I might experience on a visit to a remote place, where perhaps I might read up on the history and feel the sensations of being present there.

This led me to realise that I don’t go to an art gallery only to see pretty art which makes me feel happy or relaxed, nor do I necessarily go to the cinema or the theatre for those purposes. The penny was dropping. It occurred to me that a major part of what I enjoy about poetry is that it triggers all kinds of emotions, not always happy or pleasant ones.

Thanks for providing that insight Martin!

That isn’t to say that the magical world of melody or any art designed to trigger feel good emotions is in some way inferior. I had just become more consciously aware of other purposes.

Armed with that awareness, I seemed to appreciate the composers and poets programme even more. I could now see more clearly how the music was working in a similar way to the poetry to subtly trigger different sorts of emotion.

Perhaps this is obvious to many, but to me it was a real revelation. And I have Leeds Song to thank for it.

I must also specifically thank Joanna Ward, the composer who created the music to my words, Kelsey Thomas, the soprano who sang them and Edward Lloyd the pianist who delivered the music.

All ten poets felt equally in awe of what the musicians they had worked with had managed to do.

You can find all of the poems, along with the details of the composers and musicians in the PDF of the programme, which also contains a piece of created by a different artist for each piece. Hannah Guy made the art to accompany mine. A photographic response, which aims to translate the structure and feeling of the poem, rather than illustrate specific lines. Armed with my realisation regarding the emotional dimension of creativity, I understood this, and loved how she wrote about her thoughts in creating it.

I am conscious that I haven’t spoken too much about the poem, and my good friend Len, the man of Leeds who inspired it. That will have to await another occasion, once Sixty Odd Poems returns to a more traditional poem and essay a week format.

Meanwhile, perhaps you would like to see the video of the concert. My poem and song come just after the 50 minute mark, but if you have time to watch the whole thing, and read the programme too, I think that you would find it very rewarding. (yes, the title picture for the video is rather uninspiring - but have a click - it will instantly disappear)

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Sixty Odd Poets

When someone writes a poem, or a collection of poetry, with whatever level of success, they are leaving a mark, a record of their thoughts, to be shared with anyone who comes across it. This is as true as for the person whose poem is is read in the letters page of the local newspaper the following Friday evening, as it is for the person whose poem is read in a bound volume of their complete works hundreds of years after they have died. It is also true of those who keep their poetry in a locked drawer, even if, after they have died, the contents of the drawer are unceremoniously tipped into a black plastic bag and put straight into the dustbin. The potential was there even if it was surpressed and ultimately never realised.

I suppose that it is true of all art. The people who made paintings of their hunting experiences on the wall of the cave that they sheltered in were giving something of themselves in the same way as Picasso was.

Since we have had the ability to record music, by notation or by mechanical means, musicians have also been able to share something across considerable measures of time and space.

I digress. I am taking specifically about writing poetry, and thinking about it because of the two books that I have been working on publishing in recent weeks.

Me and Roger Waldron launched his Notes from Various Settees the other week in Mexborough. We hope to have an online launch for anyone who can zoom in in a week or so and you are cordially invited to attend.

At the launch, Roger recalled what I had said to him the first time that I met him in person. You don’t look like your poetry. It had amused him. It had also amused me. Roger writes short poems in the first person. Rich in humour, they collectively create a portrait of a sort of Northern English Bukowski like figure, just about surviving the trials of modern life and embroiled in complicated relationships with a collection of women. Take this poem as an example…

A Day in the Life of a Quiet Pint - Roger Waldron

I’m leaving the cut throat business
of being a love rat there’s too many ex lovers
want to take a swing at my chin it’s mid summer
there’s a cool breeze and I’m pinching myself
there’s a pint in front of me that deserves
my undivided attention and I think about the silence
behind cigarette smoke when I ask a woman
if I could grab a light she tells me smoking is bad
for me she gives me a wink and smiles and I think please
don’t encourage me I’m a complete and utter arsehole

When I met Roger, he was not a Bukowski like figure at all. And I quickly realised that the majority of his poems are works of fiction. Perhaps a brighter chap than me would have realised that before they had ever met him. There is such a variety of situations and attitudes in there, all that stuff couldn’t possibly be the experience of one man, But I hadn’t examined the poetry, or my ideas about the poetry critically enough to make that entirely clear to myself. I had got wrapped up in the magic of them. I wanted him to be a good humoured Northern English Bukowski like figure so that’s what I expected him to be. To be honest, I would have probably had a similar reaction if I had actually met Bukowski at a poetry reading in New York. Perhaps he would have been sober, chatty, polite, maybe shy even, at least different enough from the figure that emerges from reading his stuff to cause me to say something along the lines of You don’t look like your poetry.

The fact is, that appearances aside, Roger’s Poetry came from the mind of Roger, just as Bukowski’s poetry came from the mind of Bukowski. Neither of them might have lived quite the life that they present through their words, but the characters and situations that they create reside in them somewhere, and are a part of what makes them.

The cave dweller who drew the spears piercing the hide of a huge buffalo, might have never even joined the hunt, but there is something about his observation, his interest, his presentation, that says something about him, something that resonates Maybe he admired the hunters, maybe he was amused by them, maybe he just thought it made a great picture, but in choosing the subject for his art, he was communicating something about himself, as well as his subject.

I like Roger’s poetry because it resonates with me. I’m nothing like his creations either, but there is something in me that responds to the pictures he creates, and as a consequence, I enjoy reading his stuff.

On to my posthumous pal Eddie Smith, another person who didn’t exactly look like his poetry. I am now deeply into producing the long promised book of poetry and art culled from the stuff that he left in the proverbial locked drawers, only no-one placed them unread into black plastic bags and disposed of them. They were digitised and eventually found their way to me. With Eddie, I knew the man before the writing. I know that he enjoyed the ridiculous. I know that when he wrote about Hitler having a kitchen extension fitted, describing him as a nice fella, he was not expressing Nazi sympathies, any more than a fondness for kitchen extensions. He was writing about the ridiculousness of blokes and the conversations they have with one another, in a way that Roger Waldron would be familiar with.

Hitler’s Kitchen Extension - Edward Smith

My dad and his mate
Built Adolf Hitler’s kitchen extension
This was in 1933
They didn’t know what he would turn out to be
They said he was a nice fella
Always giving them biscuits and tea

Some of Hitler’s mates admired their handiwork
Himmler and Joseph Goebbels offered them work
In fact, most of the leaders of the Third Riech
Had their kitchens and bathrooms 
Fitted by my dad
And his mate
Who was called Mike

What with Eddie no longer being here, the collective effect of immersing myself in his musings on Hitler and other creations such as cheeky Jack the Lad corpses, walled in electricians, and suicidal painter and decorators, have brought him back so strongly that, corny as it seems, I feel his presence in the room as I struggle with setting it all out.

It’s the illustrations that cause most of the struggle – he created them in pens that bled through to the thin, lined notepaper he always used, and then he would create more on the other side. Actually, he did the same with his poetry. I don’t think he ever used a computer to create anything. All of his poetry has had to be copy typed, and lightly edited for presentation alongside the much edited and cleaned up illustrations.

When I say cleaned up, I mean tidied up, the lines of the notepaper removed, the stuff from the other side of the page edited away. What I don’t mean is cleaned up as in made less shocking. Eddie liked to produce shocking, crudely dawn images: The deep sea diver bravely patrolling the ocean with his cock out. The vicar pissing in an old fashioned potty. The machine that enables men to instantly create babies without the intervention of womankind. Images, which are as disturbing as they are delightful. For me they produce belly laughs equivalent to the ones I shared with him before he was promoted to glory.

I don’t know whether Amazon will publish it. If they do, I shall certainly have to list it in an adults only section. If they don’t, I will be sure to find another way. As another friend of mine said recently. The world needs a bit more Eddie in it.

I’ll keep you posted with developments.

Mike

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Sixty Odd Poets

It is now over eleven years since my old friend Eddie Smith died, at the age of 51, just missing out on reaching the age of Ernie, Benny Hill’s Fastest Milkman in the West, which was a shame, because he always liked that lyric…

Ernie was only 52
He didn’t want to die  

For those who have never heard of Eddie, back in the day he was the Born to Act Daft lead singer of Hull band, the Gargoyles. Watching him on stage was a wonder to behold, and the lyrics that he wrote were both amazing and hilarious. Heres a link to their first album, the critically acclaimed 1986 independent release Mrs Two Dinners, featuring Eddie’s mam on the cover.

I don’t eat eggs at easter
And I don’t get pissed at Christmas
I still think my cock’s for stirring tea
Cos I’m a Jehova’s witness

His ad-libbing between the songs and improvisation was also hilarious, he had an amazing, surreal, stupid sense of humour, which he used in other events too, with me in the Mike and Eddie disco, and the regular Sunday night Quiz he held at the Adelphi Club, which was much better much dafter, and sadly much less profitable than Shooting Stars.

Everyone who knew Eddie loved him. Well you have to say that about the dead. Perhaps not everybody. There was a bloke involved in the meat trade who once threatened to remove his balls with a bolt cutter, because of his animal rights hi-jinks, but almost everybody else loved him. And that threat never even came close to being carried out.

Eddie also applied the creativity which he brought to his lyric writing and stage appearances by writing and performing poetry, which he illustrated in his inimitable, chaotic style.

After his death, his wife Ann found a vast collection of poems and illustrations all over the house, tucked away in drawers and plastic bags, and probably stuffed beneath the mattress and under the floorboards too. A vast collection.

It was always her intention to have a selection of this published at some point, but the years started to accumulate, and the project was abandoned on several occasions.

Around two years ago – maybe a bit more, she contacted me to ask if I would do it, as she had heard that I was starting to do a little publishing. I was really enthusiastic to be involved, and she soon sent me a digital file containing loads of bits and pieces, some of which had me literally crying with laughter.

I set to work almost at once, editing illustrations and typing out poetry from which had been culled from many, many scraps of paper, exercise books, and note pads, and trying to get it into some sort of shape.

But there is something daunting about working on the opus of a beloved friend who is no longer around. I wanted to do my best for him, but in aiming to do so I became a bit of a perfectionist. It is hard enough editing your own work to present to the world, but someone dead who you think of both as a good friend and a comic genius? I became racked with indecision, by impostor syndrome, by feeling that whatever I produced would not quite suffice.

And I was involved with other projects. The development of Sixty Odd Poems, and Sixty Odd Poets and the publishing ventures that these involved. I was also working as a teacher in Special Education, and wanted to publish my own poetry and essays. There was a ton of other stuff to distract me. I kept putting Eddie off for another day… another week… another month.

When I retired from teaching last year I had a little more time and yet despite taking advantage of this new freedom, I found that I was still putting Eddie off in favour of other projects.

Then, a month or so back I decided that I would have to curtail this Substack and not pick it up properly again until I had finished a number of projects. I also realised that by publicly announcing my intentions it would become a lot harder to duck out of them. This was when I set up the Odd Schedule.

I have now completed the first two items on the list. In February I produced issue one of the Odd literary journal, and last week I finished work on Roger Waldron’s Notes from Various Settees.

Eddie is next.

I aim to have completed work on it by the end of April, whatever the quality looks like. It will be good, It will be Eddie. Clearly, after I have done it I shall have to run it by Ann, and also by Hull music expert, Nick Clay, who has also sent me a slew of stuff. But I will definitely have handed it over for their perusal by the end of April and hopefully it can be put out by the time of his birthday in May. When I told Nick of this plan, he immediately commented that although I had specified a month, I hadn’t actually specified a year. Point taken, Nick. We shall see. But I will have something for you to review by the end of April 2026. Because after that I will be staring work on Odd: Volume 1 Number 2.

Meanwhile, Roger Waldron’s book will be officially launched on March 29^th at 3pm at The Fox Gallery in Mexborough, and somehow I have to fit in reading at a performance of music, poetry and art in Leeds (including a musical setting of one of my poems delivered by a soprano accompanied by a grand piano) on April 15^th and a lecture on Charles Dickens in Doncaster on April 29^th.

I have never been busier than since I retired. It’s panning out to be the best time of my life though. Leave youth for the young – it was overrated!

I shall finish with one of Eddie’s poems

Caravan Sex - Edward Smith

Caravan Sex
My wife and I
Don’t normally enjoy sex
So, I hired a caravan
To improve it in.

It’s done nowt for our sex lives
But it has nice fittings
Like beds that appear
From hidden flaps
And tiny clicking cupboards 
Where I stash my slacks

The caravan is only small
Room for two, but not for three 
My wife’s not bothered about leg room
Because my wife’s an amputee

You can find more of Eddie’s stuff on his posthumous Sixty Odd Poets page.

You can also read an article about his funeral, written by Nick Clay.

And here’s the speech that I gave at that very funeral.

See you in a couple of weeks

Mike

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Sixty Odd Poets

I am happy to say that I am on track with the literary targets I set myself earlier in the year, and Roger Waldron’s forthcoming book, Notes from Various Settees is well underway. I have been working on the cover with Roger this week, which has involved various draft images being sent back and forth with suggestions about changing the colours and images within it. Basically, it depicts a settee, on a carpet in front of a wall. But the style of carpet and wallpaper is a delicate choice. Not to mention the colour and font for the title and author name. It might be a bit fiddly getting something that feels just right, but I quite enjoy that sort of thing as it gives me a chance to play around with graphics and provides a change from writing.

Apart from the occasional face to face over a coffee somewhere half way between our two houses, most of the communication between me and Roger is done through email or Facebook Messenger. Whilst this is very convenient, and most business can be transacted pretty well by these means, having such lines of communication open on the computer can be an immense distraction. Opening one email usually involves reading at least half a dozen more, and there will always be one or two of these which demand a fairly immediate response. It is really hard to close them down and leave it all until later, especially when doing so often means that I will forget all about them for a considerable length of time, despite what flags and reminders I set up. Opening Facebook is even worse. I always open up my messages on my desktop – so that I can drop files and images into it but as soon as the feed is opened, the distractions are so invidious that often I forget what my original purpose was.

Brave is my web browser of choice, with adblock plus running in the background. This keeps adverts to a minimum (even on YouTube) but it doesn’t stop me getting distracted by all manner of things that people have posted. I have to turn all notifications off and refuse to open anything up other than the word processor or graphics program that I am working on, and until I have done as much work as I can before I absolutely have to communicate with someone.

When I am researching a piece, I often have to consult Wikipedia or the Internet Archive. I have to try and do this without going anywhere else. But even if I do, distractions abound. One article or publication leads to another, and eventually I find myself down a rabbit hole, far away from where I needed to be. Sometimes I feel that the things that I find there actually enhance my writing, but often they are either fascinating but of no use or lead to me adding a set of unrelated footnotes to the writing which considerably add to its length and the time that I have spent on it.

Back to social media. Does it actually achieve anything positive for a writer? I have read many articles on Substack and in other places pondering this very question. I would say that it definitely provides me with an opportunity to put what I produce in front of a wider audience, and also a place to link up with other poets, writers and publishers. But I do struggle with how much time I should devote to this and how regularly I should do it.

Substack has developed a lot in the two and a half years that I have been using it. The Notes feature has made it into more of a social media space in its own right. And whilst it is nice to follow and engage with followers, it can take over, in the same way as the other sites that I use, mainly Bluesky1 and Facebook2, can.

Until recently I had a schedule telling me what to post on each of these three sites each day. A review here, a repost there, a bit of publicity or a link at other times. But it all seemed a bit much and I started to feel bad if I missed something one day. There is also the terrible suspicion that when you post too regularly, a significant amount of those who see your output will think, ohh crikey, doesn’t he ever shut up? and reach for the unfollow, unfriend or unsubscribe button. These days I am trying to have a more relaxed approach. I have a significant amount of other projects taking up my time and worry that obsessing about social media and numbers can easily impinge on life in the real world including relationships with friends and family, if not remembering to eat, shower and go to the toilet regularly. (Only kidding, I haven’t quite got that bad yet.)

Yet still here I am. A month or so back I solemnly declared that I would ignore the Sixty Odd Poems Substack for a few months. I almost immediately decided that rather than giving it up completely I should just replace the researched and considered piece of writing that I had been putting out each week with something more informal every fortnight. I was worried that the page would fade away if not regularly tended to, and then I would have to build it up from nothing again when I return in earnest.

Another worry is the idea that it is easy to begin to use Social Media entirely to promote one’s self without any consideration of what other people are creating and achieving3. Posts are all me, me, me! and the poster comes across as boorish and self-centred. On the other hand I feel that It isn’t too hard to spot those who engage with others solely as a means of getting engagement for one’s own creativity. Please Lord, don’t let me come across like that, and if I am a bit like that, please Lord, let me not be found out by being too obvious about it.

As Immanuel Kant said: Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Well, dear reader, it has been nice chatting with you. Rest assured that I regard you as end in yourself, much as I do myself and the product of my writing habit. In fact I don’t really know what either of us, or this article might be regarded as a means to.

See you in a fortnight.

Mike

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Sixty Odd Poets

Poetry Starter Pack
Poetry Starter Pack 2
Poetry Starter Pack 3

I am proud of Odd - the Journal of the Fellowship of the Sixty Odd Poets. There’s some great poetry in there from a fine collection of poets, along with a couple of articles of my own, a few reviews and a great cover by Sally Anne Wickenden. If I didn’t believe in the quality of the contributors, I would never have done it.

The Amazon delivery came on Thursday. Thirty five copies, which should be enough for the launch. Online, I see that I have already sold six.

I’m not proud of using Amazon. It feels very much a part of the dangerous broligarchy of American tech billionaires. In many ways it makes me feel less of a publisher. But it’s the lowest risk way of producing stuff and ensuring that it is always available - internationally too.

Those six sales have raised me £6.49 in royalties. I will get more from selling the thirty five which came on Wednesday. I need to sell fourteen of those to break even. Thirteen if I add in that £6.49. The venue for the launch (which is a gallery within the historic 1904 school building in which Ted Hughes developed his appreciation of poetry) will cost me a further £60, so I need twenty people to pay the £3.00 entry fee to cover that.

I’m not complaining. I will break even or miss doing so by an amount that I can afford. I’m not in it for the money. I’m just stating fact. The Longbarrow Press, a publisher of quality poetry books, reported on Bluesky the other day that they had sold just four books in the first half of February. (Eat the dust of my six, suckers!) They have some acclaimed works by great writers in their catalogue. Steve Ely’s Eely is, like the rest of his work, a rewarding and thought provoking read. I attended an online launch for it last year, but I haven’t bought a copy. I just can’t buy everything that I want. It’s not only that I can’t afford to do so, it’s also that I have a wall of books, of which a large proportion are still unread. Does my reluctance to buy books from other presses make me a hypocrite? Perhaps, but we all do what we can manage.

There really isn’t a market for poetry books. This is well documented elsewhere. The main ways of making money out of poetry seem to be through vanity publishing, running workshops and residential retreats, or offering awards and competitions where the prize money is significantly less than the total entrance fees. Ohh, and grants from the Arts Council or similar bodies. If you, like me, have very limited appetite to get involved in any of this, then you have to resign yourself to the fact that you are never going to find your fortune in the literary world.

And yet… The existence of poetry in books and online brings a great deal of joy into the lives of lovers of literature. Poetry is a succinct form of communication, sending messages and emotions through time and space. Perhaps other art forms do the job more efficiently or with more chance of commercial success. Despite the existence of the internet, music and film still offer lucrative employment to many fortunate creatives, at a level which poets and publishers of poetry can only dream of, but there is something wonderful in the power of using well-chosen words, which express thoughts, ideas and emotions in a way that is idiosyncratic to the poet and have the potential inspire similar thoughts, ideas and emotions in others. And it doesn’t cost much in the way of initial outlay to become a poet. A notebook and pencil will do for a start. Maybe an internet connection to share your work to a wider audience, or failing that, the will to turn up at a few open mic nights.

Nor does it cost much to become a publisher. Online it costs nothing. On Amazon, still nothing until you want printed copies, and then as little as you want to risk.

For me, calling myself a poet and a publisher is reward in itself, even if the titles don’t really feel deserved. Who cares? I spent years calling myself a pop star, knowing full well that I was stretching the concept as thinly as possible to make it descriptive of my contribution to the world of music. My philosophy then, was as it still is now, fake it ‘till you make it. Or rather, fake it, and enjoy faking it - You might actually convince yourself and a handful of others that there is a grain of truth in your claim - and in the final analysis, what does it mean anyway?

The launch of Odd will be all over just over seven hours after this article hits Substack. I will probably be in Wetherspoons, spending all the profits on a couple of pints of alcohol free Guinness. And then my thoughts will, as promised, turn to publishing a collection of the wonderful poetry of Roger Waldron as economically as I can manage whilst still producing something resembling the quality product which the undeniable quality of his work deserves.

I hope that when it is available, you will be tempted to purchase one. It would make both me and Roger very happy, and might finance a couple of visits to Wetherspoons, or more likely to the coffee shop in Wentworth Arts, Crafts and Antiques for both of us.

I’ll be back in a fortnight with another progress report.

Mike

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Sixty Odd Poets

Last week was the first week in well over two years that I didn’t put out an online edition of Sixty Odd Poems. It felt strange. Even though I continued with Sixty Odd Poets (with an excellent collection from Andrew Stott), I felt as if I had missed the opportunity to make contact with an old friend. You! And everyone else who reads this substack - including those who have subscribed since my last post.

Needs must though. I shall not be putting post next week either. And this post will be a quickly prepared, un-researched and largely unedited piece. I did promise to keep subscribers in the loop about how things are going with what I am working on, what is keeping me away.

I have a plan and a schedule. I am the sort of writer who needs a schedule. That’s why I love writing on substack so much. It gives me a deadline, and a sense of an audience, who I am in some way beholden to. It is not just me who I am letting down if I staying bed for a few hours extra every morning and spend the rest of the day away from the keyboard.

The plan mainly concerns a number of publications which I aim to put out through the Sixty Odd Press this year, Some of which have dragged on far too long, and were in danger of never coming to fruition unless I changed my habits.

This month I am working on the first edition of Odd - The Journal of the Fellowship of the Sixty Odd Poets. A quarterly literary journal to replace the sixty Odd Poets collections of six poets that I have been putting out at a rate of approximately one every two months for the past couple of years. I couldn’t keep up that pace, and was developing a backlog of poets who I had featured online and not in print. Now I have a long term plan which will should see the substack page and the journal running in full tandem by May 2027 (yes I am that obsessive). Its a journey, But I am well into the next step and am on target to have Volume One Number One out by the end of this month. If you have had a page on sixty Odd Poets and have not had any of the poetry in it physically published in a Sixty Odd Collection, your time will come. I will be in touch at some point over the next six months.

The project is an exciting one as it allows me to include other features such as reviews, catch ups with old friends, information on events and some art. The forthcoming first edition will feature art by the excellent Sally Anne Wickenden on the cover, and I hope to feature more amazing artists in future editions. Illustration inside the book is a little more difficult as costs restrict me to black and white, and my personal taste restricts me to line drawings, but if anyone wishes to submit under those restrictions, I would be delighted to see their work.

By the end of March… I am to publish a collection from the excellent throwaway poet Roger Waldron “Tales from Various Settees” I am really proud to be able to do this, as Roger’s work is fascinating, full of humour, and wry observation on often little explored avenues of modern living. Also Roger is a fine fellow who deserves a wider readership.

By the end of April… I aim to complete a project that I have been working on sporadically for almost two years now. (Or is it three) A posthumous collection of the poetry and Illustration of my old friend Edward Smith. (Provisionally Titled Being Dead is Shit.) Eddie was an amazing, spontaneous, funny man, the lead singer of the fabulous Hull Band the Gargoyles, and prodigious producer of usually hilarious but often also thought provoking poetry and illustration. He can be compared to Vic Reeves, Spike Milligan and David Shrigley, but comparisons like those only put you in the rough area. Eddie had a style of his own. He produced so much that I have been quite overwhlelmed, and his wife, Ann tells me she has only sent a faction of what she found squirrelled away after his untimely death in 2014. I have been sitting on it for far too long. This year it will happen.

By the end of May… I aim to bring out Volume 1 Number 2 of Odd. With a second selection of twelve poets (I already have their names on a secret spreadsheet), and hopefully more features developed during the lessons of preparing volume one, (which I am learning now)

By The end of June… I aim to have my own publication, based on the first set of (Sixty Odd Poems) published. Like all the other publications I have mentioned so far. The lion’s share of the work is already done. It is just a case of tidying up the rough edges and editing to satisfaction.

By the end of July… I aim to have the second set of sixty Odd Poems ready for publication - but probably not published. I wouldn’t want to release it too quickly after the first set. I would just like to have it in a position where it is just about ready to go - maybe in time for the fabled Christmas Market, although I always have pipe dreams of creating a Christmas Miscellany - maybe that should wait for another year.

By the end of August… Odd Volume 1 Number 2 will be out. Featuring work from the poets that you may have read since last November on the sixty odd Poets page.

By the end of September I shall be Sixty Five years old! Also, The Substack of Sixty Odd Poems should be a regular Sunday morning feature again. I haven’t settled on the theme yet. My own poetry as in the first series? Analysis of classic poetry as in the second series? Or something different? Involving poetry, other classic writing, history, speculation? Who knows. Maybe you might like to make a suggestion to get me thinking.

There.

I feel better now. I always find that sharing something make it more likely to happen. Most of this stuff just needs a final push to get it over the finishing line. Its not as if I am starting each project from scratch. So I think that I should succeed with the bulk of it. The Eddie Smith is the one I fear the most, but I am determined to have at least something out, even if it is not the towering tribute that seems to be always just out of reach. The world needs more Eddie in it.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a progress report.

Mike

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Sixty Odd Poets

…

Before I close this section of Sixty Odd Poems, I must take one more visit to the poetry that I both suffered and enjoyed in the late 1970s as a pupil at Sir Henry Cooper Senior High School in Hull. Mostly with the good Mr Shearing.

Whatever was on the syllabus, we all delighted in sniggering at the faintest suggestion of smutty bits, whether intended by the poet or otherwise.

Narrative poetry was definitely on the syllabus. I have recalled St Agnes Eve by John Keats, elsewhere, and touched upon Elegy in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Grey in my story about his friend’s unfortunate cat. I am pretty sure that we did Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur too, but I shall have to write about that on another occasion. There was not a lot in the way of smut or double entendre in any of those poems. But Robert Burns’ Tam O’Shanter was another thing entirely. The one about the fellow who, on his way home from the pub, stumbles upon a coven of witches who strip off to their underwear whilst dancing with the devil.

Even though this poem was written in a Scots dialect of English (as most of Burns’ work is). It was still unco (uncommonly) difficult for us to get to grips with, but even at a space of fifty odd years a few phrases stick in my mind, mainly because they entered it through the channel devoted to smuttiness.

For instance, the devil screwed the pipes and gart them skirl. We loved that one because it had the word screwed in it, but I also liked it as a description of someone playing the bagpipes. For me screwing the pipes became a sort of physical twisting of the instrument and the devil’s body around it, and even though gart them skirl means “made them squeal” I just loved the phrase because it seems to have more musicality to it than the English alternative.

We also had a bit of a titter at the witches duddies. Perhaps I was still getting my ‘d’s and ‘b’s confused. Because I was convinced this was a synonym for bubbies. I am disappointed to learn that it only means clothing – as in the quaint old word duds which is related to dude (one with nice clothing) Burns has each of his witches beginning to sweat and reek – swat and reekit, and coost her duddies to the wark (cast the clothes to the floor). I can’t remember what we thought they might be doing with their bubbies, swinging them to the rhythm of the skirling pipes or something, but it didn’t matter. Duddies was hilarious.

On the other hand, we didn’t find anything funny about open pussies; the rude connotations of that word were unknown to us at that time. I still think of Fanny as the go to comedy word for a vagina. Burns uses the pussy in his description of how the witches chase after him, like startled mice running as fast as open pussie’s mortal foes when, pop! she starts before their nose.

Burns lived from 1759 to 1796, a short life, but a very productive one. To put him in a historical perspective, he was a contemporary of Mozart (1756 to 1791). He was 11 years older than Wordsworth, 13 years older than Coleridge, and a generation ahead of Byron, Shelley and Keats. When he was a boy, Thomas Grey was still alive. There is something about Burns’s use of the Scottish language that makes him stand apart from all those other poets though. He is like a northern punk, who turns his back on the established way of doing things, and therefore his poetry has a streak of rebellion hard wired into it. Like Chaucer, who insisted on writing in English rather than the French which had been the language of the ruling classes since 1066, he was saying, take me as I am, I am using this voice, and it is more than equal to your fancy language.

Not that Burns was incapable of writing sensitive romantic poetry such as that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Beano comic’s Walter the softy would have loved his poem A Red, Red Rose. He would have sniffed an actual Rose whilst reciting it.

A Red, Red Rose

O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.

Unlike Walter the softie, whilst Burns was reading it, he was internally calculating what favours it will get him from the woman (or women) he was reading it to. He enjoyed sexual conquest and had twelve children from four women who he had professed eternal love to. Who knows how many other ‘unofficial offspring were wandering the glens of Bonnie Scotland?

Knowing Burns as a bit of a lad as modern parlance has it, one wonders how many of the pussies and duddies and screwings in his poetry were intentional?1 Was he aware of the delight he would bring to generations of smut lovers when he wrote Cock up Your Beaver2? Or was it just an innocent call to arms against the English? Cock your military beaver-skin hat and go teach them a lesson!

Cock Up Your Beaver

When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,
He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown;
But now he has gotten a hat and a feather,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver.

Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu' sprush;
We'll over the border and gie them a brush;
There's somebody there we'll teach better behaviour,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver.

The only reason that I even consider Burns knowingly using these words, is that I have a treasured book in my possession. The Merry Muses of Caledonia, which contains Burns’ collection of extremely rude folk songs, which he copied out, enhanced, and kept in a special notebook only to be shown to close friends. Amazingly it was published in 1800, As it is out of copyright you can easily obtain a copy today. Mine is a 1965 edition with a preface by one J DeLancey Ferguson (1888 – 1966, one of the foremost scholars of the life and work of Robert Burns) along with introductory notes from the editors, Sydney Goodsir Smith (New Zealand Born Scottish poet) and James Barke, who wrote five novels on the life of Burns, and takes the opportunity of his space in the volume to deliver such gems of erudite thinking as…

… “Fuck” I take to be an onomatopoeic word equivalent of the sound made by the penis in the vagina.

I can almost remember my jaw dropping and my eyes popping out of my head when I read that line.

I first came across The Merry Muses of Caledonia as a teenager, after voraciously devouring another book, The Bawdy Beautiful (the sphere Book of Improper Verse) written by another Scottish poet and Burns fan Alan Bold. This came out in 1979 and is now is out of print but not yet out of copyright. However, you can pick one up on amazon for about £12 or read it for free on the internet archive. It mentions the Merry Muses amongst other filth ridden classics in the preface. Even in those pre internet days, I couldn’t rest until I had a copy in my possession.

Strangely enough my very favourite poem from The Merry Muses isn’t actually about sex acts or sex organs, it just concerns two women, possibly farmer’s wives, one of whom has a mishap

There Was Twa Wives

There was twa wives, and twa witty wives
As e’er played houghmagandie
And they coost out upon a time 
Out o’er a drink o’ brandy
Up Maggy rose, and off she goes 
And she leaves auld Mary flytin
And she farted by the byre-en
For she was gaun a shiten

She farted by the byre-en
She farted by the stable
And thick and nimble were her steps
As fast as she was able
Till at yon dyke back, the hurly brak
But raxing for some dockins
The beans and pease cam down her thighs
And she’d cackit a her stockins. 

Just for the sake of clarity here’s a rough translation (mostly done by consulting the index of the book) - Its nowhere near as good in English, but it does help a reading of the original if you understand what some of the words mean.

There Were Two Wives

There were two wives, two of the wittiest wives
Who ever fornicated
And once, they got into a quarrel
Over a drink of brandy
Up got Maggy, and off she went 
Leaving old Mary scolding her
And she farted by the end of the barn
As she was going for a shit

She farted by the end of the barn
She farted by the stable
And thick and nimble were her steps
She was running as fast as she was able
When she got around to the back of the wall, the storm broke
And whilst she was reaching for some dock leaves 
The beans and peas came down her thighs
And she’d shit all over her stockings. 

And that’s it for the second set of Sixty Odd Poems. As promised, I am suspending all payments from those who have subscribed financially until I resume regular posts - hopefully in the mid to late summer. In the meantime shall be posting a little just to keep those who are interested up to date with how I am getting on with the projects that I am doing whilst not writing these essays. (at least five publications and a few live events), but not every week. However, Sixty Odd Poets will continue for the foreseeable future, with plenty of opportunities for you or other poets you know to get involved.

Bye for now

Mike

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The Irish poet William Butler Yeats is regularly referred to W.B. Yeats, which is odd, because Butler was part of a double barrelled name, rather than a fancy middle name. It had been the family name since His great-great grandfather, Benjamin Yeats had married Mary Butler back in 1773. Nowadays he would more than likely be called William Butler-Yeats, but they did things differently back then. At least they did in the Butler Yeats family, who were rather posh.

Although William was only two years old when the family moved to England in 1867, he grew up really interested in all things Irish, including the myths and legends of that country. And this was reflected in much of his poetry. He returned to Ireland in 1881

Despite being from a protestant background, he was also a supporter of Irish Independence. He believed in a united Ireland with both Protestants and Catholics governing together.

When The Irish Free State was formed in 1922, Yeats became a senator. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Clearly, Yeats was a fine and accomplished poet, but this particular Nobel Prize possibly owed a little more to the politics of supporting a newly independent nation than celebrating his work. Or am I being mean? Surely the awarding of any Nobel Prize could never be taken without due consideration of the talents of the person to whom it was awarded in their field, otherwise you would end up in a situation where divisive warmongers who do such things as turning guns on their own civilian populations would be considered for the peace prize.

Suffice to say that Yeats is a considerable figure in Ireland’s cultural and political history.

He died in early 1939 at the age of 72. These days whenever I read the death dates of famous people, (those who died older that I am at any rate) I can’t help but do a grim mental calculation in my head. If I die at the same age as Yeats did, I’ve got eight years left1. Of course I am thankful that I have already lived longer than Philip Larkin (who turned his toes up at 63), William Shakespeare (52), and (obviously) Byron (36), Shelley (29) & Keats (25), not to mention Sid Vicious (21). But I can’t help envying the greater mark that each of them left on the world than I have managed.

And here is where the W.B. Yeats poem that I have chosen for this week comes in. What Then? was posthumously published in Last Poems (1940). Apparently he had sent it to the headmaster of his old Dublin school, when asked to provide something suitable for young lads. It is the work of an old man who has achieved many worldly successes, but wonders what it has all meant. The subject of the poem (who seems very like Yeats) has led an enviable life with success in writing, had many good friends and has a good family around him, but at every stage, the ghost of Plato asks him what then?

It could be that he is asking something more like what next? Focusing the mind on what the next chapter will be. In this reading, the old man in the final stanza is contemplating what will become of him, or his legacy, after death. But I like to imagine that each what then? Is asking about the significance of what he has achieved. In the final analysis, what has it all been worth? Perhaps It is asking both questions. As ever, I would be interested to read the thoughts or opinions of anyone who has them in the comments.

For me the poem is a comfort2. I have expended a fair amount of time in writing, with significantly less acclaim than Yeats enjoyed. Admittedly I have written with significantly less ability too, but I am proud of what I have done, and enjoyed creating my little opus, possibly as much as he did his. Although I don’t compare to him as a writer, I like to feel that I have achieved as much as he did in the field of friendships and family. And at the risk of sounding clichéd, friendships and family are perhaps the greatest treasures of life.

Next week will mark the last of these weekly essays for a few months at least… What then?

What Then? - William Butler Yeats

His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. ' What then?'

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
poets and Wits about him drew;
'What then.?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

The work is done,' grown old he thought,
'According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'

A Note on the Illustration

The illustration at the top of the article was not generated by artificial Intelligence. Honestly! I made it by digitally manipulating a photograph and an old illustration which are both out of copyright and available online. It took me ages and I really enjoyed doing it. (I often enjoy making or finding an illustration as much as I do the writing.) I coloured it, tweaked it, edited it, and made lots of tiny almost unnoticeable modifications. Then, when I had finished, it looked as if it had been created by AI. That is the curse of AI and creativity. Also, I hadn’t intended to make a green rabbit, clasping its paws together behind Yeats’ shoulder. But when I noticed it, it seemed to be saying What Then? even more loudly than Plato.

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Ahh, the tumbleweed blowing over open plains and prairie, the ranchers drinking coffee from cans, the frontier, the sheriffs toting six shooters and Oscar Wilde.

Perhaps I am indulging in too much of a flight of fancy, but I have only just found out that Oscar went on a lecture tour of North America and Canada in 1882, and that is still in the period of the Wild West, isn’t it?

I love the nineteenth century with its Dickens, Brontes, Tennyson and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and all the other literary goings on in this sceptred isle to the East of the Atlantic Ocean. I love the way that people came to terms with the rise of science and religious doubt, and how Oscar Wilde chipped in with his championing of the aesthetic movement, emphasising that morality need not be the purpose of poetry or indeed any art. (At one point I thought that Art for Art’s Sake was just a song by 10cc)

I love all that, but I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that over in America the Wild West was in full flight. Yes, there was Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain over there, but there was also Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Wild Bill Hickock, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It blows my mind.

And then Oscar Wilde, the wisecracking wit and dandy of London society went over there on a lecture tour where he spoke about Aestheticism, probably in Saloon bars with swinging half doors, where the anxious steward would put his bottles and glasses under the bar at the first sign of trouble and the piano player would continue to play a ragtime melody even as the chairs and bullets started to fly. Well, something like that.

The tour had been organised by none other than Richard D’Oyly Carte, the man whose name is now forever associated with Gilbert & Sullivan. He had recently built the Savoy Theatre to stage their operas. At the time Wilde was not regarded as the literary giant he was to become. He had graduated from Oxford University in 1878 ditching his Irish accent and moving to London where he had gained a reputation as someone who dressed extravagantly and talked eloquently and endlessly. Many people asked, what real talent does he actually have? He had edited a few magazines and written a play and a book of poetry (imaginatively named Poems) both of which had failed to make any real impact. But he was a society celebrity, people wanted to know about him. They either ridiculed him or were fascinated, and D’Oyly Carte decided that he could make a bit of money by promoting him over in the United States. So off he went, and as he was such a charming and fascinating figure, the tour was a success.

Of course, he was still lampooned and criticised in the popular press, but many of his lectures were sellouts. Imagine that! Sellout lectures on Aesthetics by an effeminate man in the Wild West! He also got to meet one of his literary heroes, Walt Whitman. Some commentators suggest that he did more with him than just sip wine and chat about poetry1. He also met with a group of miners in the small town of Leadville, and ended up drinking whisky with them at the bottom of their pit, despite having been warned that warned that they were more likely to shoot him than enjoy his company. What a card, what a character.

On his return to England, he became a successful novelist and playwright, enjoying over a decade of success before it all went wrong in 1895 when his lover’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury accused him of being a sodomite (or more accurately a posing somdomite). Sodomy (or somdomy) had been a capital crime until 1861 and people had actually been executed for it as recently as the 1830s. Despite trying to sue Queensbury for libel, he was eventually charged with gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labour.

This involved six hour stints on a treadmill grinding flour, and when he became too weak to complete such tasks, picking oakum (separating the tiny strands of fibre from lengths of coarse rope, which scarred his hands for the rest of his days). When he was eventually released in 1897, he was a broken man. He died in 1900.

During those last years he wrote what was to become his most famous poem, The ballad of reading Gaol. It is quite a long piece which portrays the harshness of prison life through the story of his and his fellow prisoners’ reactions to the hanging of Charles Wooldridge, (a soldier of the Royal Horse Guards for the murder of his wife).

Plenty has been written about this piece elsewhere online, I would like to look at another of Oscar’s poems, from that ill fated first collection. Resquiescat is a piece written in memory of his younger sister Isolda Wilde, who had died suddenly after a bout of fever just a couple of months before her tenth birthday. Oscar would have been 12 years old at the time. He kept a lock of her hair throughout his life, in an envelope marked My Isola’s Hair (she is not dead, but sleepeth).

Reqiescat by Oscar Wilde

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

It is a lovely, if to modern tastes, morbid poem, but to my twisted mind it forges another link between Oscar and the Wild West in that it makes me think of a song released in 1940 by Gene Autrey, the Singing Cowboy - That Little Kid Sister of Mine.

I am not a big fan of Country and Western music, but it seemed to be really popular in Hull when I was growing up during the 1970s and 80s. Perhaps it was popular everywhere at that time, but there was an awful lot of it about in Hull2. When I became old enough to go out of an evening in the late 70s, it seemed as though every other pub used to have a large selection of Country music on the jukebox, along with the average 70s fodder which we remember as representing the decade today, such as Abba, Slade, and the Bay City Rollers. They also often had live acts performing country music standards.

Long before I was old enough to go out of an evening, I was aware of the popularity of the genre through my mother’s taste for Jim Reeves, and through the local radio Station, BBC Radio Humberside, which ran a country music show presented by a bloke called Tex Milne every Sunday. Despite the name Tex had a lovely Hull accent, I understand that he was really called Terry, but his friends and listeners called him Tex. (He might have been related to Disco Tex and the Sex- O-Lettes: then again, he might not).

I remember teasing my little kid sister with the lyrics of that Gene Autrey song, which just goes to show that I was probably less fond of my sister than Oscar Wilde was of his. It was written by a country music artist named Eddy Arnold. Oscar Wilde died at the age of 46, if he had lived into his late eighties, he might feasibly have heard Gene or Eddy sing That Little Kid sister of Mine. I like to think that he would have enjoyed it.

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A happy new year to one and all!

In a break with my normal routine – I shall start with the poem this week. It is a puzzle poem and as it mentions a New Year, and New Year newspapers are usually full of puzzles and quizzes, it seems appropriate.

It is a sonnet, by none other than the potato eating, baccy smoking, puddle cloaking, El-Dorado seeking and death defying Sir Walter Raleigh.

Sometimes, it is given a title which gives away what it is actually about, but I’m not going to tell you that title. Where would the fun be in that? Have a read first, and we can discuss things afterwards.

A Puzzle Sonnet - Sir Walter Raleigh

Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.

At first reading the poem is quite frightening. It would be easy to believe that it had been written by Nostradamus, Mother Shipton, Russell Grant, or some other character who made bold predictions which might just become true one day. And these days many rational people do quake with fear at the dreadful sound of tump, worrying that it might herald the tumbling up and down of dead bones in our cities and towns. Have you guessed what it’s actually all about yet? I’ll stick it in a footnote - you know how much I like footnotes.

Walter Raleigh was a real colossus of British history. He is one of those figures of whom it is possible to say love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him, and it is actually true, unlike other people of whom that is said – Jeremy Clarkson or Simon Cowell for instance, both of whom it is quite easy to ignore. The more I think about him, the more I like Walter Raleigh. He reminds me of the kind of bloke that inhabited my home town of Hull in the 1970s. Blokes who weren’t afraid to speak their minds who enjoyed smoking and playing with cards and dice. Many of them worked on the docks or on trawlers so had a knowledge of ships, a taste for adventure, and delighted in bringing home interesting things from overseas.

I first heard of Raleigh when I was presented with a bicycle bearing his name – the Raleigh Wayfarer, when I was about 13 years of age, although I had possibly met him before that, in the picture card shown at the beginning of the article1.

Raleigh was born in the 1550s, about 10 years before William Shakespeare. Some people actually believe that Raleigh actually wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, but this is nonsense. Although Raleigh was a bit of a poet – as evidenced in the sonnet above, he was far too much of a man of action to have had time to be writing 38 plays on top of all of his other output. He only really wrote poetry when he was in prison, which he quite often was, because although he was very useful to the powers that be, (Queen Elizabeth I and later King James I) he also had a habit of doing or saying things that annoyed them. In fact, he got into so much trouble with James the first, that he was eventually beheaded.

It is claimed that he was writing poetry in his condemned cell right up to the last hours before his execution. The poem The Farewell (also known as The Lie) being cited as evidence, (it fits the bill, although it was published quite a few years earlier)

Extract from The Farewell - Sir Walter Raleigh

Go, Soul, the Body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.

He had been executed to appease his old enemies the Spanish, after an officer under his command had unilaterally decided to ransack a Spanish held town in South America. There was a bit of a national outcry after the execution, with King James being accused of kowtowing to Spain and doing away with a real hero. Raleigh faced his death bravely though, with tales of his execution showing him as fearless and philosophical as Socrates. Apparently, his last words were to boldly tell the executioner to get on with it. Strike, man, strike!

Coming from a generation when everyone smoked and romantically thought of cigarettes as friends who would never let them down (and yes, I was as daft as everyone else on this matter for a number of years.)2. I like to think of his last words as being the ones that they found written on the tobacco pouch that they found in his cell. Comes meus fuit in illo miserrimo tempore. (he was my companion during that unhappy time)

Back to the sonnet. Have you guessed the riddle yet? Would you like to go back to the top and read it again? Ohh very well then. As promised, I have put the information in a footnote3

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Maybe it is something to do with the internet frying my brains, but I find long narrative poetry very difficult to digest. Tennyson wrote stacks of it. Earlier in the year I struggled to come to terms with his poem Maud. I only attempted it because the song Come into the Garden Maud is so well known and I wanted to know what the story was behind it. To be honest I still wasn’t entirely sure after a number of readings, although I did find it fascinating. I remember thinking that Robert Browning could have told the story just as effectively in a couple of pages, whilst Tennyson took over ten thousand words, with multiple sections and stanzas.

Of course he could be brief when he wanted to be, The Charge of the Light Brigade has only fifty odd lines, and could be read through in a few minutes. Much more suitable for modern audiences. However, much of his stuff goes on, and on and on, much like his American contemporary, Walt Whitman who only wrote one poem in his entire life - Leaves of Grass, which he enhanced, extended and edited over the nest 40 odd years.

Similarly, Tennyson began work on his huge poem In Memoriam, in 1833, published the first edition in 1850 and continued to add new bits until 1871.

Clearly both Leaves of Grass and In Memoriam are best regarded more as collections of poetry rather than single, long poems1. The best course of action when confronted with such humongous works is to pick out the most interesting bits and serve them up as more easily digestible lumps of poetry. That is what most anthologists have done over the years, and this is how I came across Ring out Wild Bells.

The whole of In Memoriam is a tribute to Tennyson’s university friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died in 1833 at the age of 22.2 Hallam was regarded by all who knew him as a genius, not only did he write poetry, but he wrote and debated on other matters too, including philosophy, metaphysics and politics. he was one of the first to recognise Tennyson’s worth as a poet and bring him to the attention of others who might be able to further his career3.

The poem is filled with grief, and was a favourite of Queen Victoria’s. She said that she found great comfort in it after the death of Prince Albert, and this probably led to her delight in offering him the role of Poet Laureate in 1850.

Amongst all the grief is a lot of discussion of the way the world was changing with science starting to seriously challenge religious beliefs. It was much harder to grieve in a world in which it was becoming increasingly uncertain that you would meet the departed at some future time in heaven4.

Ring Out Wild Bells is a fabulous New Years Eve poem. You could do worse than to memorise it and regale your friends and relatives with it before the inevitable Auld Lang Syne.

Much of it has great relevance today. This stanza ought to be dedicated to Nigel Farage and his chums…

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

In an earlier couplet, Tennyson even seems to be having a laugh at his own expense

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

In fact there is so much good stuff in it, that I could carry on quoting for some time, finding verses for many of our world leaders and other folk besides. But there are still turkey sandwiches and Quality Street chocolates to be eaten, so I shall leave you to read and enjoy the piece for yourself.

Ring Out Wild Bells - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

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3

Some people have suggested that there was a homosexual relationship between the two, but this is unlikely, despite the fact that in the poem Tennyson speaks of Hallam’s death as making him a widow. That was the sort of overblown language that Tennyson liked to use. In truth Hallam was engaged to Tennyson’s younger sister Emilia, That’s not even the tiniest bit weird, they didn’t look very much alike at all, and Arthur would have put Alfred far from his mind in his intimate moments with his sister.