NORMAL TOWN POET
The Other Side of The Desk (The Ugly Librarian) In my middle years (not young not old) I spent many hours in serviceOn the shiny oak desks of municipal and academic librariesNot once did a sexual thought enter my head despite the staffBeing not only erudite but in some cases classically proportioned The hours for…
Click on image below to load the online flipbook
I was tipped off about this great free flipbook software by Anthony Howell. So here is my very first Poetry Pamphlet which I made on the Poetry Library London’s photocopier as that was mostly my job there. I made 25 and sold them for £1.50 (big money in 1990) and sold out although Ivor Cutler…
So finally here it is the all new revised second edition of Thames Valley Texas published to coincide with the reading I giving at Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot on Friday 7th November. I will be supporting the acclaimed new country singer Hannah White and The Dreaming Spires whose new LP ‘Normal Town’ is a suite…
My hometown of Didcot, Oxon (formerly Berks) was identified as the most normal town in the U.K. according to the BBC and researchers. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-39428314.amp? Which makes me a Normal Town Poet…. More to follow…
Cold Spell A pretend farm lies within these borders,hedges, fields and muddy tracks.One un-harvested by contract machinery,unbounded by electrified fencing. As I stand on a grass vergea mile of tarmac bubbling behind me,the horizon buckling in the heat haze,I begin to build.Wood for concrete, timber joists for steel.In my head a new farm appears.The old…
Shaun Belcher gives some excellent advice on how not to start a poetry career. July 1991I had just completed an interesting but fruitless temporary post at The Poetry Library on the South Bank through 1990 and had my poems and songs illustrated by my sadly deceased friend Laura Stenhouse at St. Martin’s College of Art…
This pamphlet collects together all the poems written since my ‘re-birth’ in the font of poetry at Open Book. I have to thank Neil Fulwood for splashing the Eu de Blue Monkey on my face and waking me up to the possibility that poetry was not dead in Nottingham…well not yet. I have come to…
This PHOTOBOOK WITH POEMS will be about my hometown of Didcot, Oxfordshire. I am a Working-Class boy from a council estate in Didcot, Oxfordshire which is the wrong side of the tracks from Oxford and all it stands for. This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived…
This is an ongoing project I just started and will take time to complete. I began writing poetry in my hometown of Didcot in 1981-2 after a few perfunctory ‘poetry’ lectures at Hornsey College of Art introduced me to Larkin, Heaney and Hughes. Then a slightly tipsy Adrian Mitchell joined us under a tree in…