This episode will be the last before the autumn, and also the last before the general election. Appropriately, therefore, the theme this time has been 'political'. My feeling is that in a time when people are turning away from traditional political parties and universalising grand narratives, political poetry as powerful and engaged as that of Blake, Shelley and Keats is being written, but that it is more social justice or single issue politics which are inspiring passionate poetic responses. It seems to me that some of the best and most innovative (rather than merely gimmicky) writing comes from environmental activism, the fight against racism and violence against women, and also from the exploration of a queer aesthetic.
In this episode you will find poems which address the horrors of our time, from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, to the displacement of people, the terror of sexual violence, and the relentless destruction of environment. Most of these poems arise out of strong feelings of shock and hurt; some are hortatory, some simply bear witness. Political poetry is of its nature occasional, a response to the moment. Some of the poems here reflect the urgency of our present moment, others are more reflective. There are a couple of lighter moments and we also have an interview with Rip Bulkeley, poet and editor of two powerful political anthologies,
The poets in this issue are Jenny Lewis, Rachael Clyne, Richard Price, Carl Tomlinson, Caroline Jackson-Houlton, Pat Winslow, Heather Moulson, Jacob Mckibbin, Claire Cox, Diana Bell and Sarah Watkinson.
Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University.. She has had eight plays and poetry cycles performed at major UK theatres, including the Royal Festival Hall, the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre in Russia, the Cockpit Theatre, London and Pegasus Theatre Oxford. Jenny's fourth book of poetry, Gilgamesh Retold, was a New Statesman Book of the Year and Carcanet's first audiobook. Her fifth collection, From Base Materials, has just been published by Carcanet and is on the London Review of Books Bookshop best seller list. |
Both poems by Jenny Lewis in this episode can be found in her new collection, From Base Materials, just out from Carcanet. Her first poem is accompanied by Malcolm Atkins and Lizzie Spight -see below.
The poem for Sarah Everard previously appeared in Poetry Ireland Review.
'Jenny Lewis says she has always had a fear of rape and violence which led to this tribute to the lfe of Sarah Everard who, when she was 33 and walking back from seeing a friend in March 2021, was accosted by Wayne Cousens, a serving Metropolitan Police officer, who arrested her for breaking lockdown rules (which she wasn't) then drove her to Dover where he raped and strangled her then burned her body and disposed of the remains in a nearby pond.'
Malcolm Atkins founded and runs the Confluence Collective. He says 'I am a lapsed Marxist European composer/performer perturbed by the corporatisation of learning and the privatisation of compassion instrumental in the decline of the small island I inhabit. My main interest is in bringing communities together through sharing the combinations of sounds and movements that define our cultural identities. I have all the expected paperwork - diploma, degree, MA , PhD etc and a very nice garden.' Lizzie Spight says 'have been born and brought up in Northern Germany, and live in the UK since 2005. I am professionally trained as a dancer, choreographer and dance movement psychotherapist. Also, following my passion for music for many years, I have been playing various kinds of flutes as well as performing, recording and writing as a singer. My special interest is in cross arts projects, working with visual artists, poets, dancers and musicians.' |
Rachael Clyne
Pretty Little Things
from google search
Spice up your wardrobe. Animal is an action lifestyle brand, organised alphabetically, from endangered antelope to vanished zebra. Bargain-hunt our clothing and accessories online, our skins are available in a range of colours or muted hues. Animal flipflops, swimwear, jumpsuits have designs to die for. Opt for our latest celebrity inspired range at must-have prices. Our hottest pieces will have you in a clothing frenzy. Fear not, this killer spree won't break the bank.
(Animal uses cookies to give you the best experience)
A Woman walked
A woman walked into a barman who convinced her she was fat
A woman walked into a metal bar she said it was an accident
A woman walked into a wall of silence and her case was dropped
A woman walked into a nude photo and her BF shared with his mates
A woman walked into a priest for help and he helped himself
A woman walked into a free meal and paid with her vagina
Ten women walked into ten bars and never came home
Growing Old is
when the gap between your century and this is the wake of a ship sailing away
when that which you thought beautiful no longer tastes sweet in today’s mouths
when your cherished hopes are so much plastic in the face of this generation’s future
when you realise your privilege was bought at the cost of everything
when freedoms you fought for are reversed, or irrelevant
when your body is a dictator tightening its screw
when your wisdom is so much blah blah
when your memory is critically endangered
when your favourite song is a care home activity
when your underarm sways like a hammock
when the soul you strove to cultivate dims at the edge, glows hot at the centre
Please Don’t Mention the…
I want to mention it, but
even though I think about it
all the time, I won’t,
because talk
only fires missiles, turns
into border-checks,
where the wrong opinion
leads to a firing squad.
Even families erect
walls overnight, sandbag
each other, shove dissenters
behind wire, collapse in ruins.
So I don’t mention it,
while its shrapnel ricochets
around my heart,
its fallout catches my breath.
Rachael Clyne’s prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014) concerns our broken connection with nature. She has long been a campaigner on eco issues. Her latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else, covers themes of identity and otherness, including her Jewish migrant heritage, sexual orientation and relationships. https://www.serenbooks.com/shop/Poetry https://rachaelclyne.blogspot.com/
|
Claire Cox
Their Weapons are Makeshift
A car’s burning carcass. Barricades.
Bricks that checkerboard the streets,
jammed under bus wheels. Petrol syphoned –
can to glass bottle – a pale umbilical cord.
They shuttle shopping trolleys for water,
food. A snatched embrace. A facemask kiss.
Camera on a selfie-stick. Smoke skying.
Downtown, office hands are raised,
five demands, fingers splay in the air.
Arrows of flame. Grey uniforms, tear
gas, live bullets. His body curls
fetal. A baton swings. The jerk
of sneaker-feet. Blood and handcuffs.
The island of my birth has besieged itself –
umbrellas its flimsy shield. Steel
masses at the border. No surrender.
Portrait of my House as a Mangrove Swamp
You’ve had to learn fast about change:
drought/drown salt/fresh ill/well.
Silt-gatherer, shark-nest, refuge for fish
and egret, you shelter me.
Frugal now in my feeding, I’ve adapted
to eat air. I emerge at low tide
wave one outsized red pincer
in terror/hope.
Vigil
i.m. Sarah Everard
a candle in red glass
a gesture of light
the city being barred to us
the streets to reclaim being barred to us
we stand up for the streets
from behind our living rooms’ closed doors
see the bandstand
the flowers
the torch-phones at dusk
her twisted arm her face on the pavement
same city long ago his grip the tip of his knife
my face pushed to the coping stone
his voice telling me to stop
screaming in my hands
tonight a candle in red glass
our gesture of light
Born in Hong Kong, Claire now lives and works in Oxfordshire. She is co-founder and Associate Editor at ignitionpress, winner of the 2021 Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, and has completed a practice-based PhD studying poetry and disaster. Her poems have been included in Primers: Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) and she was winner of the Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize, 2020. |
Pat Winslow
A Man May Sell His Boat
A man may sell his boat
for a small fortune.
Who knows
what his days are like
when he can’t meet the eyes
of his children.
He may turn from the sea
and become a digger of earth.
A man must do something
with his hands after all.
But a sower of men
is no better than a man
who hauls human remains
in a net of bluefin tuna.
The man who lands a baby
will turn over and over
in the night till his wife
screams for him to stop.
The man who digs
stuffs his eyes and ears with dirt
and makes a tomb
of his mouth.
A man may sell his boat
as most have done.
If he refuses, it is something,
but not enough.
Amongst Strangers
Not knowing the language
she feels that if she spoke
it would be like a cat’s cry sawing
through the early hours
her need to be stroked
and let into bed for the night
each word a head butt
against their legs.
A kick is all it takes.
They might laugh
like her grandmother did.
A cat rolling down the stairs
is nothing when war
is raining all year round
and the river is full of bodies.
After
The soldier who stripped naked
to wade in and wash the blood off
was not someone she knew or cared about
if he was one of them or one of her own
he was young and careful.
Who knows what they’d made him do or what he’d seen.
She watched him bend down and scoop the water.
His penis was like a mouse tucked inside a nest.
Give a boy a gun and he’ll do
almost anything.
There
We’ve been sleeping in corridors
dreaming of hyacinths and bread and coffee.
We’ve grown used to craters and upended carts.
Even so, the sight of a dead horse can shock.
There were apples as firm as fists in our orchards
and cherries and plums in the trees.
When did you last hear a frog sing at night?
Remember dancing, how we gathered in the square
by the schoolhouse, the squeaky bike
and the boy with his smart lapels and cap?
If we had a bicycle we could ride out of here,
you on the handlebars, me on the back
making wobble tracks in the snow.
We’d be long gone before they realised.
It’s soap I miss the most
and the view from my window.
I was writing a letter before this started.
I put a sheet of paper in the roller and the sirens began.
Someone else is there now, drinking my tea.
Tell me who’s more ghost, me or the soldier billeted there.
If he’s not dead by now. If there even exists.
The Gift
303 acres of land on the western bank Allegheny River was given to Cornplanter, chief of the Seneca on March 6th 1791 by Thomas Mifflin, the first governor of Pennsylvania.
A bark canoe paddling the broad flow,
a span of tumbling sunlight between
stands of cottonwood and pin oak,
years of thaw and melt, sounding
the white waste in winter, a spike
and a saw slicing through ice, a long
grey fish slimming into view, a spear
and a knife, deer hide stretched tight,
drying by day; by night, a fire,
pale smoke in the mornings, the creak
of saddle leather; silver dollars in spring,
thick pelt of beaver, otter, bear; a hawk
circling a planter’s moon, ears of corn,
beans, squash and melons, tobacco,
small quantities of oil for medicine.
A gift that’s not put to good use
is just asking to be taken back
say Stockburger, Kinnear and Noyes.
A blast furnace is built, a foundry,
a mill race, a warehouse, a landing stage.
The gift passes to the Graff Hasson Company.
Drake’s well is sunk, churches rise, a dam,
a bridge, a railway, roads, realtors, banks.
Quaker State and Penzoil move in.
In 2006 the city celebrates with fireworks
and a rock concert on the shore line.
But the economy’s shot and folks
are closing down and selling up.
For those who stay, there’s little left
apart from rust, food stamps and hope.
Pat Winslow has published seven collections, most recently, Kissing Bones with Templar Poetry. A winner of several notable competitions over the years, she enjoys collaborations with film-makers, composers and artists as well as developing her own writing.
|
Jacob Mckibbin
LIFESTYLE CHOICES
Making a choice doesn’t always mean that you have a choice. Someone
might choose graffiti as a pillow when their other choice is the pavement.
Suella writes on X that living on the streets is a lifestyle choice. That many
of those who sleep rough are from foreign countries. The parts of this town
that I write about are a foreign country to you Suella. Are a foreign country
to many of the people who live in this town. Someone who doesn’t even
choose the colour of their sleepingbag isn’t making a choice about where
they sleep. Making a choice doesn’t always mean that you have a choice
especially when your sense of control has been taken away. Suella I don’t
know if you will ever understand this. Suella I hope the next room that you
walk into makes you feel homeless.
CATALOGUE OF HOMELESS NICKNAMES
Sticks
Beatbox
Crash
Shaman
Fly
Snowy
Coffee
Bodybag
Yogi
Jacob Mckibbin is a poet from Oxford. Previous work has been published in Propel Magazine, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto and elsewhere. |
Rip Bulkeley was born in Devon in 1941. He is a maritime historian with degrees from Adelaide, Bradford, London, and Oxford Universities. He founded Oxford’s Back Room Poets in 1999; the group still thrives today under different management. His collection War Times was published by Ripostes in 2003, when BRP also held a splendid poetry festival in Oxford. He is a libertarian socialist and lifelong peace campaigner, and has edited several anthologies of political poetry: Poems for Grenfell Tower (Onslaught Press, 2018), Rebel Talk (Extinction Rebellion Oxford, 2021), and Dungheap Cockerel (Culture Matters, 2023). He has published several poems in sci-fi magazines, and is currently writing poems set in a future hybrid, human-AI society. |
Carl Tomlinson
Hairline
Facebook wants me to shave my balls.
Or at any rate
purchase a razor
specifically for this task
as, apparently,
no-one wants bits of pube on their chin.
Perhaps because I wet shave
my first thought
is ‘Wouldn’t you just change the blade?’
instead of ‘Don’t you dare to tell me
that bits of my body won’t do.’
In a slight sad way
I’m grudgingly glad
to glimpse for a second and no more -
a few weeks before I hit fifty-four
what it might be like
to have to find ways of ignoring this shite
for most of your life.
Carl Tomlinson lives on a smallholding in Oxfordshire. He works as a business coach and virtual finance director. His work is widely published online, in print magazines and anthologies. His debut pamphlet, Changing Places, was published by Fair Acre Press in 2022. |
Heather Moulson
Impolitic
Early one morning, before porridge,
Mum told me we had a new prime minister.
But she couldn’t have forecast the bitterness
of a three day week
Power rations
candle-wax burnt fingers
Coming home to a cold tea
When Mr Heath went to the country,
I imagined a cosy cottage in Norfolk.
On the TV, someone threw red paint
on his suit. I fretted that it wouldn’t come off.
But not for long.
I was having fun with Slade records
and yearning for a Trevira coat.
I’d barely noticed Mr Wilson creep back in,
and by Crisis, what crisis?!,
I was living it up in the Mediterranean.
What winter of discontent?!
When I heard a whisper
of a woman prime minister,
I was dancing abroad.
My only worry being what dress
to buy.
I eventually returned home,
broke and unemployed
in a turbulent political climate.
I swung from extreme Don’t Know
to the far Don’t Care,
as I queued up at the Labour Exchange,
still wearing my false eyelashes.
Heather Moulson has been writing poetry since 2017. She has performed extensively in London, particularly Celine’s Salon and Soho Poets, and Guildford and Woking. Her debut pamphlet Bunty, I Miss You was published in 2019. Heather won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Award in 2020. Heather is part of the Booming Lovelies who performed at the Guildford Fringe last year. |
Richard Price's most recent collection, Late Gifts, was published by Carcanet in 2022. You can hear Richard talking about and reading from his work in PWH, Episode 20. Information about his publications can be found here, in the post for episode 20. |
Diana Bell
Bird Wisdom
The birds are talking to me.
The robin sings about working together –
‘You dig the earth and I will eat your slugs.
This is how the world works’.
The great tits are chattering in a crowd.
They sing about families –
‘We must all look after our own.
This is how the world works’.
The blackbird is more cautious
and keeps her distance high in a tree –
‘Take care who you are involved with.
This is how the world works’.
The pigeons talk quietly
waiting for their opportunity
to swoop, to take, to steal -
This is how the world works.
And the kite soars high above,
silently watching, seeing all
and saying nothing.
This is how the world works.
Diana Bell is a multi-media visual artist including sculpture, installation and painting. She has won awards for her sculpture and for her work in hospitals. She has always written poetry and worked with poets, but has only recently begun publishing. |
Caroline Jackson Houlston
BALANCING ACT
What the moth wanted was modest:
less than .0001% of sweater to fret into
the small drab silks of its new family.
For the few—white-haired, war-bred—
the shirt too shameful for Oxfam
is washed and quartered
and buried in the triangular crypt under the stairs,
with a sleeve for the Windolene, and, for the brass,
half an underpant.
Some of it is sheer wanton tidiness.
Some of it is gourmets cutting corners off sharks
or swapping river dolphins for a hydrodam
that checks the floods of red silt bleeding from
the scarified bald hills.
Greed is a god worshipped in pretexts.
Every year, to be comfortable,
I need to eat a forest the size of Wales.
Let us cut the pie in half,
half for me and half for the world.
That leaves half a pie.
Let us cut the half in half.
That leaves a good slice of pie.
Let us cut the slice in half,
half for me and half for the world.
This is called ‘balance’.
Caroline Jackson Houlston is a retired English lecturer who has been a member of Oxford Stanza 2 for seven years. She likes to think of herself as an eco-poet, or even by that unfashionable label a nature poet. She has just completed a short pamphlet of her poems about Otmoor and is finishing off her accompanying illustrations. |
Sarah Watkinson
Habitat Loss
Was it lost, or never found,
the thousand-flowered tapestry
the public good, the common ground?
The bay where herring queens were crowned
the quiet sky, the fruitful sea
was it lost, or never found?
Small city squares to stroll around,
accidental, open, free
a public good, a common ground.
Translucence of a glass-dark pond
amphibian diversity
was it lost, or just not found?
A wood where chanterelles abound
that’s not some shooter’s property,
a public good, a common ground?
A stranger welcomed to the round
untallied generosity
was it lost, or never found
the public good, the common ground?
Sarah Watkinson is a poet, Oxford University plant scientist and emeritus fellow of St Hilda’s College. With Jenny Lewis, she ran SciPo 2016-2020 and led O.U. TORCH SciPo New Network, 2018-2020. She was inaugural writer in residence at Wytham Woods 2019-20. She has published two pamphlets: The Woods of Hazel, 2020, with Romola Parish; Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight, Cinnamon, 2016. Her first full collection, Photovoltaic, originally published by Graft, has just been reissued by Valley Press. I am very grateful to be allowed to republish this poem, which first appeared in Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight and Photovoltaic.
|
You can hear this episode at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy/episodes/Poetry-Worth-Hearing-Episode-25-e2lcgj3
It is also available on Audible and Apple podcasts.
Please listen and share. Comments and suggestions welcome and should be sent to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com.
Poetry Worth Hearing will be back in September when the theme will be 'inside/outside' to be interpreted as widely as you choose. More information later, here and on the Facebook page.
Comments