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I shall be reading from new Horseshoe Press pamphlet ‘Thames Valley Texas’ next Tuesday at the Organ Grinder on Open Books second birthday. Without the hard work of the T S Eliot of Bus Drivers there would be no Open Book so thank you Neil Fulwood here’s to the next two years…
Date for your diary: Tuesday 3rd October 2023, from 8pm. Open mic, headline sets from Shaun Belcher and Tony Challis; plus special appearances from some mystery guests. So head to the Overlook Hotel, er, I mean The Organ Grinder, Nottingham and join in the fun. Anyone missing out will be “corrected”.
One of the fabulous things about the modern poetry scene is the hatred of ‘self-publishing’ as somehow amateur or not professional…a opinion reinforced by those with most to lose i.e. the publishers.
GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth
Contains 80 poems and some illustrations.
Includes the following pamphlets and projects:
Drifting Village Poems 2001-2011
Edwin Smith Commission 2014
Burning Books and Buying time 2017 – 2018
My Father’s Things (illustrated) 2019
At the Organ Grinder I shall be reading from the new volume ‘Substitute’ which I am working on now.
TONY CHALLIS
Tony Challis has been writing poetry since the 1980s, as well as short stories and memoir. He has had poems published in magazines local to Nottingham, has had a poem commended in a national poetry competition, and is Chair of Nottingham Poetry Society. Tony is also keen on performing his poetry at spoken word events and at poetry gatherings. He is a member of a number of poetry writing groups within which he hones his skills. He now has a substantial body of poetry written which he is keen to share with the world.
A Quick Queerbashing
It was only a five minute walk
across the main road to his ex.
Well-coiffed, in leather jacket,
fresh, smart and bouncing.
It was on the way back that it happened.
Times come when the search for words is dry,
when it is hard to maintain a dribble of chat.
He could not reply, only smile with his eyes.
The frame firmly placed over his face prevented
replies; bolted in place to help his jaw heal.
I had to keep a conversation going, talk
about my doings, mutual friends, shows….
He could write brief notes on paper, just.
If I had had a companion there might’ve been banter,
cross talk, jokes shared to liven his time.
I had read reports, how he had walked
in amongst a group of five, innocent,
blind to their baseball bats, uncomprehending
of their anger, of how they had failed to find
a victim at the hill-top water tower.
He would do; he was clearly queer.
They gifted him a metal plate in his leg,
a problem kneeling to unhelpful gods.
Did their own hearts scare them as they struck?
I recall the gratitude in his warm gaze.
SHAUN BELCHER
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/
Shaun Belcher is a multimedia artist and poet, originally from Oxford, now a retired teacher in Nottingham.
He has written poetry since his mid 20’s, influenced by his rural upbringing as well as wider themes of dislocation and global technologies.
He will be reading from new volume SUBSTITUTE
The planned new poems in a volume called substitute was held back as I had another year’s teaching contract to complete. I am now officially retired from Nottingham College so can concentrate a tad more on the written word.
To date I have written a baker’s dozen of new poems since last year’s reading and will be reading from the new collection at the Open Book Reading on the 3rd October.
No Substitute update….
In an ironical twist having selected the title because of The Who song I found out that Pete Townsend actually got married in my hometown and at the council offices I and my sister helped clean back in late seventies. My mother and nan were cleaners there in evening.
There no sustitute for a tie-in bit of PR in this case there were even photos taken. No I was not there but probably at home kicking a football against the wall as a nine year old.
Accept no substitute…
Like a bad penny this story never dies and after I had this photograph taken yesterday I thought similar and did some more digging and found two new articles on ‘Flynn’ and for those less squeamish that comes from the saying ‘in like Flynn’ about Errol Flynn’s legendary bedding of women.
the full story in Coppard link above but here two new takes on the story..
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-marvellous-forgotten-stories-of-a-e-coppard
I came from nothing, and it may be I was never anything more than a contrivance for recording emotions I would fain have taken for my own, but could not– life passed me by
.
From AE Coppard’s semi-autobiographical My Hundredth Tale written c1930
Graham Thomas an English author living in Tokyo has written a very accurate short life of Flynn available here.
Recommended.
Desert Dust started out as a poem about Spain as part of a sequence originally published in Fire Magazine read here:
http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record6911-2.html?id=9510
4. BRIDGE OF STONE
Five years ago we slid across this bridge at dawn
after a long hot drive from Barcelona.
I kept waking up on the back seat to see factories
flaring orange against the black hills.
As we entered Zaragoza I saw the basilica lit up
by floodlights that caught the dust swirling in from the desert.
I woke with that dust in my teeth, sweating
whilst you lay there perfectly cool and calm.
We carry our countries in our blood, habits, instincts
that carry us back to the same places in our dreams.
Now I catch you sleeping again; winter, the Ebro rising,
I’m not sweating but still the air here tastes different.
Every winter for five years we have swung back across the bridge
circling your past through the sparkle of christmas lights.
Words have crept into my vocabulary as I struggle with Spanish
but I still get caught like an uprooted tree on the double r’s,
tongue snagged against the bridge supports whilst you sail away
floating on the native rhythm of your language as I submerge.
I stare at the back of another car doused with torrents of rain
as tail-lights burn in the wet roads and palm trees swirl.
I stare at the roads as they flood easily,
a summer’s dust and dirt clogging the drains.
When we met I was washed away on a torrent of affection.
Now we stand on the bridge five years on
wind catching dust, staring into a flood that moves beneath us.
https://trailerstar.bandcamp.com/album/moon-over-the-downs
Then it shapeshifted into a lovely track by Diana Derby on the Trailer Star tribute
https://trailerstar.bandcamp.com/track/desert-dust
Now it here…..version numero 3 based on an Englishman’s attempt to deal with the Monegros desert….
It is said that this territory was once covered by dense forests through which squirrels could cross the country from one end to the other.
Now it is desert dust mostly….no squirrels
THE SPANISH SQUIRREL
Tributaries of Ebro splash through pines,
sand-filled water tumbling by roots
as winter sunlight, bright as an English spring,
dazzles through the Parque Grande fountains.
Re-treading your past like a pond-skater,
spinning around your city, dizzy with language,
I skitter past a bronze statue
of an open-mouthed singer I’ve never heard of.
Grass recovering from the last scorching summer
it is still the greenest space in your parched birthplace.
Spawned amidst a tangle of Thames Valley woods
where even in summer drenched fern steams
I find it hard to take in this dryness.
A dust-blown treelessness that surrounds us.
But amidst the burning sands and buckling rails
the white tracks of the possible extend links
that spread below our circling plane
like cow-spittle dripping away from the water-trough.
Below us sheep and goats cloud remote paths
and baking lorries glint on the auto-pista.
From up here the green of the river-plain
is as snicked and trim as any suburban privet.
Beyond the treeless desert and mountains
I think of that squirrel, caught mid-air forever,
never landing.
(Fable has it that Spain was once so densely wooded that
a squirrel could cross the country jumping from tree to tree.)
From
FARM HAND’S RADIO
Poems 1996 – 2000 OXFORD
dedicated to Ivo Charles Belcher (1932-2004)
Original poem written in 1985 from ‘The New Country’
Experimenting with poetry and sound….
26 poems related to a damaged ecology 1981-2022
set to some ambient electronic soundscapes.
neither fish nor fowl….
Album cover and here first track based on the Crystal Palace fire as seen above.
The original poem was written in 1982 one of my earliest.
The collection will provide spoken word soundscapes for 26 poems related directly to eco-green political themes I written over the last 40 years.
The tracks are being uploaded to Soundcloud as they completed .
Here first recording..
the great exhibition
two jays in tic-tac spinning
cresting waves of lace curtain and linoleum
two-stepping tarmacadam’s invention
a century’s first mast
the barge of the crystal palace
this gaping hole
where the machinery ploughed into the past
the smell of smoke
of ashes
from ‘The Tithe Machine’ Poems 1981 -84