Growing up in the Big Bad Brum, as I did, and being a child of the Nineteen Fifties, I was disposed to reading and escapism, I took to poetry as if I had been born in the first onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth and dreamy-eyed Coleridge entranced me, as Keats and Shelley and outspoken Blake. As did first the late Shakespeare, the verse command of the Tempest and the Winter's Tale, and then the overwhelming language of the middle - ie King Lear and Hamlet. Etc. I went on and on, devouring poet after poet: I forgave Ezra Pound for sometimes writing well, I learnt to love the accents of mediaeval and Anglo-Saxon verse. although I wasn't entirely convinced by contemporaries I certainly saw something in the Geoffrey Hill of Mercian Hymns, I liked the power of Ted Hughes, I appreciated the knitting of Larkin. I remain, for instance, deeply impressed by the technical mastery of George Macbeth's late poems. I loved the WS Graham of Malcolm Mooney's Land and the David Jones of The Sleeping Lord. None of which, however and how sadly, prepared me for the absorption of poetry into the language and ethos of managerial culture. whatever poetry deserved surely it was not to be engulfed by the undead. No-one needs a print run, a defined spine, a hard or a soft cover, to write, and to ever to needed to be read, you have to step outside of whatever surety you have: we are all equal in the blasts of oblivion. There is no avant-garde anymore, there is no mainstream, just the illusions of either. For sure, there are hierarchies, gang-culture tends to produce those.
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David Joseph Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
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The Animal Subsides
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