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Showing posts with label British Working Class Poets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Working Class Poets. Show all posts
Contents, November 2022
Contents, October 2022
Guest Editorial: British Working Class Writers (Paul Brookes)
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/,
Both poets have work included here. I will let their work speak for
itself.
Paul Brookes
Guest Editor, SETU, October 2022, Special Edition on British Working Class Poets
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
Featured Authors
Joe Williams (British Working Class Poets)
Joe Williams
Joe Williams is a writer and performing poet
from Leeds, UK. His latest book is The Taking Part’, a short collection of
poems on the theme of sport and games, published by Maytree Press. His other
work includes the pamphlet “This is Virus’, a sequence of erasure poems made
from Boris Johnson’s letter to the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the
verse novella ‘An Otley Run’, which was shortlisted in the Best Novella
category at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Despite all of that, he is probably most
widely read thanks to his contributions to Viz. Joewilliams.co.uk
Portugal 3, Spain 3
Knowing I’d be with you,
I’ve been practising your language,
So when he scores the penalty,
Instead of XXXX off, cheating shit,
I have something more poetic:
Que te folle un pez!
You equalise, but he scores again,
So I stand, shout at the screen,
Hijo de las mil putas!
In revenge for 2006.
When you take the lead,
I realise that I’m unprepared,
Educated only in insults, curses,
Have nothing for this, beyond
Arriba, arriba, si si si!
In the end, his hat trick
Allows me to unleash
Me cago en tu madre!
And I no longer worry, for now,
About not knowing what to say,
Or how to say it.
A Reliable History of the Marathon
Philippides invented it, in 490 BC,
Was so excited by his own idea
He immediately dropped down dead.
Never even filed a patent.
He could’ve made a fortune in royalties.
The earliest surviving account
Is by Plutarch, six hundred years later.
By then, everyone was doing it for charity,
Dressed as rhinos or tins of beans,
Recording it all on Strava.
It wasn’t till the 1896 Olympics
That people started taking it seriously.
The BBC weren’t interested,
Thought three hours was much too long.
There was only one channel then,
And no red button.
They showed the beach volleyball instead.
Later they added wheelchairs,
And eventually even women,
But the biggest change was in 1990,
When the marathon was renamed the snickers.
A lot of people are still quite upset about
that.
52% of them voted to leave the IOC.
The official length of the snickers is
26 miles and 385 yards.
They say it was Edward VII
Who added the extra yards,
To get a better view of the finish line,
But that isn’t true.
You shouldn’t believe everything you’re told.
At the Bottom of Kielder Water
There
are villages, they said.
Houses, and a
school, a church,
And if you swam
down far enough
You’d find them,
could poke your head
Inside, like a
goldfish in a shell.
But someone else
said Bollocks,
They knocked it
all down long before
They let the water
in.
As if that makes a
difference.
As if the ghosts
of Plashetts don’t
Still float
between their sodden rooms,
Backstroke to the
village shop
For milk, bread,
the Chronicle,
News from yet
unsmothered towns
Where trout don’t
pass through walls,
And not everybody
knows what it’s like
To feel the water
rising
Over their heads.
Sarah Wimbush (British Working Class Poets)
Sarah Wimbush
Sarah Wimbush’s
poetry is rooted in Yorkshire, England, with tales of childhood, colliery
villages and Gypsies and Travellers. She is
the recipient of a Northern Writers' Award and has published two prize-winning
pamphlets: Bloodlines (Seren, 2020) and The Last Dinosaur
in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop, 2021). Her first collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published with Bloodaxe in 2022. bloodaxebooks.com
Bloodlines
In the Bloodlines
there's a
hooped earring.
In
the Bloodlines there’s an open vardo
door,
ramsons on the other side. Songs and seasons
wave at you
from the Bloodlines, atchin tans watch you
fly. In the
Bloodlines there’s an acorn of swagger that
inflates into a
barrel wearing a vest. In the Bloodlines
there is nothing to
offer up to the Old World except
a pair of shammy
bootees -
your past, their past.
Bloodlines stare,
bemused by the
chant of Tables,
a company car;
lunch. Bloodlines
hoick slingshots at
woodcock and snipe.
Damp earth is a must
as you lie with the
Bloodlines,
some scratch the name of
the wind into elm with a crotchet hook,
others chor lollipops
from children. Bloodlines can’t hear you but
they follow you in a handful of photographs
and crumpled vowels:
the shortening clay
pipe; gorgio fowki. In the Bloodlines you make
yourself make
steamed pudding, then eat salad. In the Bloodlines
there’s a long
blue thread. In the lea and the lanes there must be
someone who can tell you about the Bloodlines; about
the rhythm of your tongue, your flying fox glare,
the need to
set curtains ajar at night.
What are you
searching for
in the darkness? Why
are you?
And yet, it’s the Bloodlines
that murmur on the barval,
Bloodlines that understand
the spell of a campfire,
your attraction to gold,
how if I shuck my paleface
from gullet to hairline,
the
world would turn
scarlet and all that pours
out will be road.
atchin tans stopping places; chor take/steal; gorgio fowki non-Gypsy/Traveller
folk; barval wind
Won 2nd
prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2019
The Pencil
Sharpener
Fridays were pencil sharpening.
Like a bus conductor’s ticket machine
clamped on the teacher’s desk –
that squeeze to uncurtain the cavity,
insert a stub, then turn the lever with a whirr
until out came a skin-fresh pencil,
pastry skirt, the point a tack;
all the pencils in the pot
uniform-striped red and black.
Our pencils were oddments drawn
from Argos and Mum’s work. Spelling nights
Dad would shear the carving knife
with a steel: once, twice, a third
to set the edge, then slicing forwards
peel a pencil like a pear. He’d blow
the ice-pick tip and jab his thumb
to test for firmness, then
above the whiteness he’d excite the air
with tiny circles. I imagined words
like: daughter, sharpen, write.
First
published in The North
Our Language
This is the voice. This
is the sound of the broad and gubbed, the Undermen; the too-young, the
faced-up, the midnight-blue tattooed. These are mouths fit to bust with
faultlines and deputy sticks, the crackling of airlocks, motties, cages and
tubs; throats riddled with methane and headstocks, gob-stink and dog-ends, of
nights and days and afters, and the short walk home as dawn spills over the tip
at the end of the houses. This is the language of the pony riders and jumped-up
checkweighmen, of Davy lamps and Dudleys, the oncostlads and gaffers, of
black-nails and snap-tins, and names like Arthur passed down through time until
it’s more than a name, it has new meaning like the word GIANT or STONE. It is
not dole-wallahs, nor the never-never, nor the light-fingered, nor more to be
pitied than talked about, although talked about all the same, it is making your
mark with a cross and having faith in what’s beneath. It’s friendship. It’s
xxxx the bastards. This is the tune of haulage boys and shot-firers and
Elvis impersonators, their legs smashed to bits at the bottom of shafts and the
women who feed everyone’s children. Sometimes the words speak for themselves at
galas or picket lines, or not at all, on those rare rest days, by a
well-stocked lake, where men of rock are silenced by a distant horizon. I could catch this language and write
it out for those who want to know, I could place it in their palms to hold like
a squab and watch it swell with all its ‘boot rooms’ and ‘slack’, because our
language still exists. It roars by gas fires, and at the far table in the Club,
and in the living museum beside the image of a man digging forever through a
coal seam two foot thick. It is black
lung and unwritten songs. It is soup kitchens, work vests, hewers. Picks.
First
published in The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop, 2021)
Julia Webb (British Working Class Poets)
Julia Webb
Julia Webb is a
writer and poetry tutor/mentor from a working-class background, based in
Norwich, UK. She is a poetry editor for ‘Lighthouse’ a journal for new writing.
In 2018 she won the Battered Moons poetry competition. She has three
collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird
Sisters (2016), Threat (2019) and The Telling (2022). She believes that poetry is for everyone
regardless of class and that writing has the power to change lives.
She
was a biscuit barrel or barrel shaped at least
as he kept reminding her
the bucket he kicked splashed lemony water
up the wall
her face a crumpled tissue on the floor
the dog was whining outside the locked
back door
the TV was querulous and mundane
the shopping was waiting to be packed away
the kettle was whistling on the stove
a child was shuffling on their bottom down
the stairs
She was a biscuit barrel though whether
empty or full was unclear
he was a barrel full of vinegary homemade
beer
his contents leaking out across the floor
a child had shuffled down the stairs and
let the dog in
in the other room the TV blared
the shopping was defrosting in the
pushchair’s tray
the kettle was still whistling on the
stove
She was a biscuit barrel mopping the
kitchen floor
he was cursing the kettle and the dog
shouting through to turn the TV off or
else
his mood was vinegary and cold
the shopping was scattered across the
floor
the dog was whining in the hall
a child was crying in the downstairs loo
the house was quarrelsome and sly
From Threat (Nine Arches Press,
2019)
All that Water
The house a flood plain
though we didn’t know it,
beds washing around their rooms at night
like boats broken from their moorings.
The only light a soft orange bleed
through too thin curtains.
As we drifted off
we could hear our parents downstairs
(neither of them swimmers)
struggling to keep their heads above
water,
the garbled voices of underwater TV.
When Nanny H arrived
suddenly everything felt calm and safe –
she brought life buoys and flares,
she tucked us into bed at night
wearing orange life jackets.
And yet beneath her calm surface
was a deeper water –
a vortex that led to the underworld
and when she thought we were ready
she would casually toss us down.
from The Telling (Nine Arches
Press, 2022)
Crash Site
We remember only
vaguely now the wreckage of our mother –
her damaged fuselage suspended
precariously
between two broken pine trees;
how carefully one had to tread
so as not to bring the whole thing down,
and everywhere the stink of spilled
aviation fuel –
at least in the beginning.
We never did find that black box
so it was always unclear exactly what had
happened,
and each survivor told a different story.
But the wreckage was there for all to see
–
seats and belongings scattered far and
wide,
things broken open,
life jackets snagged on jagged branches.
Though our mother’s windows
had popped out with the pressure,
she sometimes talked affectionately about
the plummet,
but swore she could remember nothing
of our other life, before take-off.
Our first memory was the screaming of
metal
and the silence which came after.
from Threat (Nine Arches Press, 2022)
Paul Tanner (British Working Class Poets)
Paul
Tanner
Paul
Tanner has been earning minimum wage, and writing about it, for too long. He’s
had 10 collections in as many years, but they must be xxxx, otherwise he
wouldn’t still be stacking shelves, would he, eh? Check out @vote_tanner on
Instagram for more. Or don’t. Uh huh.
her
stuff
she
watches you scan and pack
her
stuff.
well?
she says.
well
what? you ask.
aren’t
you going to apologise? she wants to know.
for
what? you ask.
for
keeping me waiting in this queue all this time! she says.
why
doesn’t she demand apologies
from
all the complaining customers
she
was stuck behind?
in
fact
why
doesn’t SHE apologise to YOU
for
making the queue you serve longer?
then
again, you are sorry to be serving her,
you
really are
so
you tell her in all sincerity:
I’m
sorry
but
she won’t believe you:
can
I speak to your superior, please? she smiles ominously
and
you ring your help bell
and
the rest of the queue groans
as
you carry on
scanning
and packing
her
stuff.
death
bed story time
boomers:
literally try to get
every shop worker
that’s ever served them
fired
also
boomers: blame what understaffed staff
are left
for being lazy millennials
and
then boomers: blame the rise
of self-service
machines
on technology-dependant Gen Z
and
then: pay anyone younger than them
for online sex
and
finally: blame anyone and everyone
who came after them
for the death of
the high street
society
and morals
before:
living, evidently, forever.
or maybe it just feels like it.
a
more vicious person than I
would
pray that that lot snuff it
before
they have a chance to mess up Generation Alpha,
but
we needn’t worry:
no
one I know can afford or want kids
for
some reason.
enforced
poetry
we
were standing around
the
back of the shop
having
a smoke.
he
asked me:
were
you here when that guy called me a fat bearded prick?
no,
I said.
this
guy called me a fat bearded prick, he said.
oh?
yeah.
threatened to punch me, and all.
sez
to me: you wanna punch, do you,
you
fat bearded prick?
why?
couldn’t
give him a refund.
oh,
I shrugged. of course
and
if the sun was out
we
would have been standing
in
the shadow of the shop.
the
sun wasn’t out,
but
we were still standing
in
the shop’s shadow,
you
know?
if
you’ll allow me to force poetics upon this scene, like.
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