My choice is uneven. There are more men
than women. More Northern, than Southern. More able than differently abled.
More White than other colours.
When I feature writers I do not include
photos of them because I would rather their work speak for itself.
As the clich├й of a lower middle class author promoting working class writers I have asked another permission to use her incisive words on working class writers. Her name is Fran Lock. What follows are her words:
"A
post-war northern male version of working-classness is one of the few
acceptable faces of working-class identity permitted to proliferate across
mainstream media platforms. This is deliberate: the poetry's distance from the
material realities it describes presupposes and encodes a nostalgia, a looking
back that defuses potential threat (social or poetic), softens the language of
experience, and makes safe what might otherwise be challenging to the cultural status-quo…”
“Working-class
experience is, rather, characterised by its hybridity, its intersectionality.
It is a melting and merging of cultures and customs under the impetus. of
overwhelming economic and social pressure. It's what drives our creativity and
resilience, our flair, our beautiful shoe-string inventiveness with language,
with fashion, with music, with food. And it's this that's under threat; our
image of ourselves as capable of embodying all of these things, and our right
to know them and claim them as ours...”
“I will keep
going, because working-class people are waking up to the urgency of this
situation, because for the first time in a long time it feels as if we are
galvanised and primed to become the authors and the archivists of our own
experiences and stories. I am excited to be a part of this. I am excited to
show people the sheer breadth and depth of what we can do. I'm excited that
this could mark a genuinely significant turning point: no longer obsessed with
defining or defending some invented and illusory idea of "the culture",
singular, we're expanding, extending, exposing and evolving the notion of what
that might be. A gorgeous, shameless, hybrid beast...”
All quotes from
(from “Don't mention the word class!
The theft of working-class culture” Culture Matters, https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/poetry/item/2901-don-t-mention-the-word-class-the-theft-of-working-class-culture )
Another important site is Peter Raynard’s https://proletarianpoetry.com/,
Paul Brookes
Paul Brookes is a shop asst. Lives in a cat house full of teddy bears. First play performed at The Gulbenkian Theatre, Hull. His chapbooks include The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley, (Dearne Community Arts, 1993). A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press, 2017, 2018) The Spermbot Blues (OpPRESS, 2017), Please Take Change (Cyberwit.net, 2018), As Folk Over Yonder ( Afterworld Books, 2019). He is Editor of Wombwell Rainbow Interviews, book reviews and challenges. Had work broadcast on BBC Radio 3 The Verb and, videos of his Self Isolation sonnet sequence featured by Barnsley Museums and Hear My Voice Barnsley. He also does photography commissions. Most recent is a poetry collaboration with artworker Jane Cornwell: "Wonderland in Alice, plus other ways of seeing", (JCStudio Press, 2021) , sonnet collections: "As Folktaleteller" (ImpSpired, 2022), forthcoming "These Random Acts of Wildness, (Glass Head Press, 2022)
Special Edition: British Working Class Poets
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