Learning Finity and the persistence of stories

I'm very pleased to be able to post that my publishers, Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams, are going to publish my fifth collection of poems next year. It's called Learning Finity, and it's about mythic time and how a place might change beyond recognition but still retain an imprint of the past. It's also about getting old and the mutability of everything, except, maybe, stories.

I like to think that something of the past and its people, their lives, loves and disasters, remains in a landscape. That the trees that colonnade the nave of St Mary Le Port Church, now a bombed ruin tucked behind a curtain wall of 1960s brutalist office blocks, themselves empty, are engaged in rebuilding it. And that the valerian that bursts through cracks in walls on the hillside above where the ice rink and the Locarno used to be remembers when it was patch of woodland called Fockynggrove, and was a very well frequented spot indeed.

If you've read other posts here, you'll probably guess I'm talking about Bristol, the city I was born in and which I've never managed to leave. Here I am, hanging out with local poet and bad boy, Thomas Chatterton, quite a few years ago now. 

I mostly love my native city, though there are times I've been deeply ashamed of it, such as when Points West asks whether it should apologise for its slaving past and then does a vox pop stuffed with belligerent locals, who haven't fully grasped the implications of how our forefathers made its wealth. And the fact that if it weren't for Black Lives Matters protestors tearing down his statue, this city would still be commemorating Edward Colston right in its heart is excruciating. 

I often wonder what my great-great grandparents, who lived and worked on Christmas Steps, right in the centre of the city, would make of it all, if they had the chance to wander around their city now, which is so different from how they remember it and which will be unrecognisable to future citizens. Everything is mutable, but stories persist. 

'Fockynggrove' was first published in Atrium, May 2020

Poets vs Covid-19

In the battle between poetry events and coronavirus, coronavirus appears to be winning. At the last count, I've had thirteen readings and a book launch postponed and/or cancelled, with one tentative rearrangement so far.  Hopefully most of them will be rescheduled, but when is anyone's guess. 

One of the cancellations was the Clevedon Literature Festival, which was especially poignant as it was the inaugural one. However, the poets involved - veritable titans of the local scene, including Clive Birnie of Burning Eye books, Melanie Branton, Ben Banyard, Dominic Fisher and me -  have produced recordings of our poems instead, and they can be heard here. 

Meanwhile, in the continuing absence of a launch for my new collection, The Shadow Factory, another review has been published, with a couple pending, and if you care to, you can read them by following the links below:

Review for London Grip by Rachael Clyne

Review for The Blue Nib by Emma Lee

Review for Write Out Loud by Janice Dempsey

Review for The High Window by Lucy English

Oh and here's the latest issue of the wonderful Long Poem Magazine, with my long poem, 'A brief life of the poet in seventeen contradictions', about Bristol bad boy and free spirit, the poet Thomas Chatterton, in it. Huzzah!

The John Brooks Award

Starving - or otherwise dying - in a garret is overrated and seldom looks this good.

Henry Wallis: 'The Death of Chatterton'

But austerity has hit writers hard. There's less money available in the form of grants for the arts, and schools and other institutions have had their budgets squeezed so hard, paying visiting authors or poets is out of the question. 

Carl Spitzberg: The Poor Poet

This is why the Society of Authors is so important. Part of its work is to administer a number of grants for writers, to help fund works in progress and support those in financial difficulty.

William Hogarth: The Distrest Poet

As well as being a practical help, these grants also provide the writer with validation, encouragement and recognition.

Gustav Metzger: Homage to the Starving Poet 

I recently received the inaugural John Brooks Award for writers living in the West of England and Wales. 

Pubd 8th August 1826  by Wm Cole: an impoverished poet sitting in a garret surrounded by sheets of paper

It will help me continue
 to work part time and care for my disabled adult children, while I complete my current work-in-progress, Learning Finity.

John Joseph Barker: The Poet Chatterton 

To the Society of Authors, I'd like to say a heartfelt thank you. To you - if you are a writer - I say Join. And Apply. You Never Know.

Joseph Mallord William Turner: The Garreteer's Petition

Looking for Thomas

I spent the last R*yal W*dding in the Forest of Dean with my mate, Jill. She gave me a commemorative plate to mark the occasion.

Jill's Way Up North these days, and I don't get days off very often anymore, so I contented myself with a strategic hour in a favourite place I hadn't visited in ages. 

I had a secondary motive. Thomas Chatterton's been hanging about in my head lately. I've been meaning to write something about him for years. Maybe it's time. 

You can see his house from the north side of the Church, though it's been moved since he was born there, to accommodate the horribly close dual carriageway. And there's only one wall of it left. 

Not long afterwards, the family moved even closer to the Church - just about where the traffic roundabout is. 

This grave belongs to a different, later Tom. 

There's a commemorative plaque to Chatterton in the South Transept. It's somewhat understated, unlike Thomas. 

Yes, he WAS one of ours, I'm afraid ... AND a poet ... 

Actually, the South Transept is one of my favourite parts of St Mary Redcliffe. Poor Joan Canynge is there, for a start. Having predeceased her husband, William, in 1467, she was popped into their prepared joint tomb, only for him to become a priest. 

He was buried nearby in 1474, in ecclesiastical garb.

Stood up in the afterlife. And far more embarrassingly than the unused blank half of a headstone you often see. 

Thomas Chatterton would have known all this, of course. He wrote a poem called The Storie of William Canynge in the guise of his invented mediaeval poet-priest, Thomas Rowley.

I was after visiting some old favourites of my own. I love a Memento Mori, I do. 

Also in the South Transept, having been moved since I last visited, are the mediaeval stone corbels which, having been replaced during restoration works on the North Porch in the 19th century, now reside indoors in retirement. 

No apologies to posting photos of the lot of them. They are fascinating to me, as it's so easy to see the real people who modelled for them, centuries ago. It's almost as if they're emerging from the stone. 

They now join this poor chap who, in typical Bristol fashion, has been press-ganged into continuing service. 


I had some other favourites to visit. The stained glass windows in St John's Chapel, for a start.

The destruction of the mediaeval windows is always blamed locally on Cromwell's men during the Civil Wars, though chances are they incurred some damage earlier, during the Reformation. 

This window contains some fairly complete figures. 

I love this one the best, though. It looks like a jumble of fractured images, but was skilfully reassembled in horizontal bands by Joseph Bell in the 1890s. 

Look, here's another Thomas, I'd wager - Thomas Becket, who seems - well, really quite sanguine about beng murdered. 

This is far more recent, designed by Harry Stammers from 1960 - 1965. There's a Lady Chapel-full of it, though my favourite section, Eve and the Serpent, also seems to have incurred a bit of damage since I saw it last. I hope it gets repaired soon. 

Of course, you can't walk through the Church without marvelling at the vast spaces. 

It was built by Merchant Venturers to outdo all the other churches in the area in scale, and this is does, with the exception of the then St Augustine's Abbey (now Bristol Cathedral). 

I wish it was possible to get up among all those roof bosses for a closer look.

What purports to be Queen Elizabeth I as a ship's figurehead and a whalebone brought back from Newfoundland by John Cabot in 1497.

The rest of the Church - and there's a lot more - was going to have to wait for another visit. I had my mother's shopping to do, not to mention getting home in time to not watch The Magic Of the FA C*p Final. 

There was one thing left to revisit, however - an easy-to-miss bit of graffiti carved into the tomb of Philip Mede, a former Mayor of Bristol in the mid-fifteenth century, with an illegible date beneath it.  

Now who has initials like this? 

The Romantic Poets and Bristol: A New 'Lyrical Ballads'

Since I broke my leg, I've only got out of bed - or at least off the settee - for poetry.  A marathon 12 hours yesterday at Bath Poetry Cafe's annual event, Voices In The City, was preceded the night before by a remarkable gathering of poets at @Bristol, under the auspices of the Festival of Ideas.  

Both Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth had links with Bristol, and so to celebrate Bristol's year as European Green Capital, 23 of the UK's most prominent poets were invited to respond to poems from Lyrical Ballads, for this reading and a two-part Radio 4 documentary.  

The evening began with a series of introductions including one from Mayor George Ferguson, who spoke about how the evening would celebrate Bristol and the richness of its urban wildlife.  He also mentioned the city's commitment to promoting and developing poetry, especially for children.   Then it was the turn of the poets, the great majority of whom had been able to travel in person, to read their particular poem, each introduced by honey-tongued Ian McMillan, who also read a poem of his own.  

Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, remarked that it had been a long time since she had taken an entire reading from her pocket, and indeed it was odd to see such luminaries as Makar Liz Lochead, Sir Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, Alice Oswald, John Burnside, Paul Farley, Fleur Adcock, Jean Sprackland, Ruth Padel and Sean O'Brien shuffle on and off the stage as if they were at school assembly.  As much as I was delighted by the opportunity to hear so many of our best contemporary poets, I wished the event had been divided into several throughout the year, so that the poets had a chance to introduce us to some of their other work, to give these new poems some context.  My guess is that it was done like this partly to create a one-night extravaganza and partly to facilitate recording, but after a while I began to feel slightly sick, as if I'd opened a big tin of Quality Street and eaten all the orange and strawberry creams, one after the other.

My favourite poem was Alice Oswald's elegiac description of a dead swan, which she'd passed on her daily walk for a month earlier this winter, as a counterpart to the rotting albatross strung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner.  It was a beautiful, startling piece and I am in awe of her fearless nose.

Other quibbles - no, actually, these are complaints - include the description of the evening as a celebration of Bristol and its urban wildlife.  In fact, the city was largely overlooked, and when it was mentioned, it was in reference to the natives' 'somnolence' or as being a place where its inhabitants 'slur their words like drunks'.  Of all the poets present, none were born in the city and only one lives locally.  As for Thomas Chatterton, our own Romantic poet, Wordsworth's 'marvellous boy', he was completely ignored.

Finally, that far from promoting poetry, as the Mayor claimed in his introduction, the city council has this year ceased its funding for Poetry Can, the lone poetry development agency for Bristol and the south-west, thus jeopardising not only its programmes of work with school children and resident, council tax-paying poets, but also the biannual poetry festivals and the agency's very existence.  I saw quite a few seething local poets exit the reading, their faces almost as red as Mr Ferguson's infamous trousers.  

  Bristol urban wildlife

Photo montage © Dru Marland