I wanted to return to Pomes Flixus and considered ways of opening the book (again). This is one response to the question, which I realise I haven’t yet proposed… From 1970 or thereabouts, Maurice Lemaître’s Toujours à l’avant garde de l’avant garde jusqu’au paradis et au delà.
Tag: poetry
I am not here
When we first moved to Wivenhoe, Essex, over six years ago now, my compass still pointed towards London. The railway was a thin chain, a line of landscape that linked our new home with our old home in the city. A combination of changing jobs, Network Rail’s interminable bus replacement services, and a general digging in to our new environment, has seen a shift made.
I wrote no poetry when I left London. I was touting a vaguely experimental novel, playing guitar and singing. Then, after a couple of years here, I started attending Poetry Wivenhoe‘s monthly evening of readings, at which a guest poet, local poet and open mic poets get up on stage for a couple of hours. After a few sessions, I started writing, and reading.
Last year, Scarecrow, a first collection of poetry, was published through me and Ella Johnston‘s own ‘small publishing concern’, Dunlin Press. I had some poems published in journals, too, and I read at poetry events across East Anglia, in London, and in Liverpool.
Wherever I thought I was when I arrived in Wivenhoe, I was not. Some of these thoughts made it into Scarecrow.
So where am I? I appear to have arrived amid a loose, but connected, sometimes neighbourly, sometimes geographically distanced, collective of supportive and curious minds – people who seek out, listen to, read, and most of all write poetry. Some of that poetry rhymes. Some of it doesn’t. Some of its meaning is straightforward and transparent. Some of it is oblique or opaque – a conundrum that doesn’t care whether it’s ever solved.
But what most of the poets I meet these days share, is the knowledge that what they do is outside of direct commercial concerns. It’s not usually seeking large audiences, or existing as some kind of a priori exercise in soliciting funding. That doesn’t mean it’s not good poetry. In fact I often feel the opposite. What it means is that it has other reasons for being. It is created because those who create it feel compelled to do so, compelled to describe – to interrogate, make ambiguous, reinterpret, reimagine – the world in which they live, perhaps for no other reason than they can.
Does poetry make you money? It’s a fair question. But why do you ask? It might help me if it did. But would it help you, too? There’s something about doing something that doesn’t offer financial return that really offends people.
In December, I headed back from Cumbria/The Lake District to Essex via Liverpool, to give a reading at the launch of issue two of Coast to Coast to Coast, a handstitched journal of poetry edited and produced by Maria Isakova Bennett and Michael Brown, in which I had a poem, Ways.
December is a busy time in the day-job for me, and I almost said no to going. In a week of travelling, Liverpool was an extra diversion. But there, at the Open Eye Gallery, were these people again. These poets, and an audience that had come to hear the poetry, reading and listening to the world being subtly reinvented, our understanding of the world being polished, muddied, sharpened, blunted.
It’s strange now, thinking of that high tension line I had drawn between Essex and London six-and-a-bit years ago. So direct, so certain. And now what? Well, it’s January and I’m back in Wivenhoe again. And this is good. Except I am also not here. It’s like everything is starting to be everywhere. And this is good too.
Elliptical Movements – Billy Mills review of Scarecrow
I’ve been rewarded this year by being introduced to the poetry of Billy Mills, whose recent The City Itself is one of those occasional collections that can make you question why you write the way you write. It simplifies the complex, and finds huge space for exploration in what is seemingly simple. It’s about place, and about the elemental and the supposedly insignificant, the particular and the universal, and the relations between them. It’s words, but it creates a soundscape – a rising and falling of the whispering air around us. It’s great, basically, and is part of a continuity of work Mills has been working on since the late 70s – a series of books that form one long book, or one long conversation/interrogation, at least.
Poet Michael Begnal notes here of The City Itself, its “compact and intricate soundplay, occasional lyric flashes, documentary historical material, and even personal narrative in order to make an argument about the interplay between urban and natural spaces and human beings’ place in the network of things.”
Nicely put, and one of the reasons why I’m delighted that Mills has reviewed my recent debut collection of poems, Scarecrow, on his Elliptical Movements blog, alongside work from Peter Philpott, Sonja Benskin Mesher, John Phillips, Daragh Breen, and Anna Cathenka.
You can read the reviews here. It’s a blog worth subscribing to.
Preview: Scarecrow is coming

Into the woods
Something hidden in the woods.
An early January edit
In January the ferry marsh is spare. Nearby there are godwits, little egrets, cormorants and, present in their sorrowful call, redshanks.
It is dark at mid-afternoon, especially on the days when the sky starts charcoal and lightens to battleship grey – but no more.
At the writing desk the blinds are up and the silver birch is peeling; blue tits flit through it on their way to the woods. The train horns are reminder of the city; the concrete; the glass.
I have an old notebook with new writing – words, at least, nothing solid, though it is condensing, slowly. And I have a new diary pocked with ink-marks and scribbles.
Before the noise of new writing, though, there is something else. Something coming. Something that has been here for a while. A book.
MWB
100-Word Fiction: ‘Ends’
How we think about life when it ends.
The morning streetlight amber, off in an instant.
The geese that fly in and then loop back without warning.
The frosted cars idling by the pavements.
The early fog that lifts slowly above the church tower.
The shock of violas trembling in their pots.
The blackbird that hops off into the thorns.
The branches that fade from green to black.
The accretions of mud at the edge of the path.
The hold that autumn has, though winter must come.
The leaf that will not be shaken.
But it will be shaken, now.
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Slow News Week’
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
Rent a smaller home.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
Wear a warmer jumper.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
Turn off the fuel.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
A slow news week.
Think about living worse.
Try and die sooner.
100-Wird Fiction: ‘No Mountain High’
That a life builds, grows
Is what she had heard.
But it sometimes felt
The opposite.
It was as if a life
Started with a mountain
A mass of granite
Immovable, vast
And then things happened:
Events, thoughts. The mountain
Was chipped away at
Incrementally.
Tiny etchings, furrows –
Surfaces scuffed, worn –
From the corrasions
Of many histories.
All that stuff that happens –
Happens to – as if
A man had no part
In events, that they
Were inflicted –
That he was a victim
When no, no.
That man is no mountain.
He built his own downfall.
He deserves what he gets.
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Dowry’
Their little hands reaching out into the sunlight and clear
Clutching scrunches of silver and white, like crumpled tenners, scores –
Unfolding the mottos of fortune cookies, notes of remembrance, promises
Made one to another, they to us, winter to summer.
The first gesture of the year is an embrace changing
Studded green to garlands of cream; an offering, deal, dowry
Of the newly prosperous, a show of intent, soft pride
That slow months will leave unrequited as the yellowings come.
Petals strewn on the breeze, again. The earth cracking beneath.
Hollow human laughs and the blossom long gone, branches bare.