(For Borno,Nigeria)

Another miscarriage has
betided her woes in the
womb of the oracles

Earth grandiose dusk
has swallowed light
And inundated our hamlet
with spoils of gory throes

We are now the bisected navel
of a dying chronicle; a testament hurled
to the whistling wind

For our progenitors sack of semen
has dried like arid deserts-
geriatric barrenness

And our virgins
Are now concubines
of turban tieing carnivores

(for elephants in central Africa)

They, Poachers,
slaughter us — the large ones.
They put us in a basket
and herald nomenclatures of zest.

We are a generation
sold to the partial god of greed;

Wirra!
A sacrifice to appease
his famished progeny,extinction.

For blisters of woes
have been tattooed
on the nucleus of our dynasty.

And the foetus of our grace
has kicked the bucket
in the infirmary of salvation.

Help us. Please.

The Educational Psychologist puts it in context
to a room full of teachers. He defines the complex
problem of children, disordered and unruly.
I raise my hand, ‘Please Sir –
would you have judged me so shrewdly?’

What would you have seen in that kooky, choosy,
screwy, fruity, moody, loony teen?
What would I have been if you put me in a box
and tried to unlock the paradox
of this disruptive chatterbox?

A genius with Aspergers, or ADHD,
oppositional defiant, with a conduct disability.
A strong willed drama diva,
with ‘how to behave’ amnesia?

Each day I went home with
a general adaptation syndrome
and a touch of hyper-mania.
It gets even more insania ….
Little impulse control.
Malingering manic episodes.
Post traumatic embitterment.
Rationally belligerent.
Seasonal adjustment.
Rebellion deliberate.

And transient global amnesia to boot.
When I was fifteen I wasn’t that cute.

Would you have had the…

Poop-Poop!
(written when Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education; after Kenneth Grahame)

The world has seen great villains,
And villainous schemes they have wove,
But never a bloke on whose name we choke
Compared with that of Gove!

The clever coves at Oxford
To logic and facts have clove,
Yet they none of them think that they’re half as bright
As talentless Mr Gove!

The MPs sat in the House and lied,
And a palace of lies they wove;
But who’s as dishonest as he is dim?
Egregious Michael Gove!

The teachers sat in their schools and wept
As to finish their marking they strove.
Who was it changed the syllabus?
Guess! It was Mr Gove.

The Goddess of Education
Sits in her library grove .
She cries, ‘Look! who’s that hideous chap?’
We answer: ‘Michael Gove!’

The schools are all dreadfully injured,
For an idiot over them…

Hi Jane. Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on the success of Nine Arches Press. You’ve managed to publish a steady stream of poetry collections as well as Under The Radar magazine, and Nine Arches also contributes to the poetry scene in the midlands and beyond with excellent events such as the regular Shindig! readings.  You’ve also been the first publisher in residence at a poetry festival, and Nine Arches is receiving some well deserved attention, winning a Sabotage award for most innovative publisher last year and recent high profile reviews in the Guardian and elsewhere.

 When did you first have the idea to set up an independent press and did you model Nine Arches on any other publishers? Did you seek advice from established presses when setting out?

I was working for another small publisher at the time. As that post finished, it just seemed like there was a lot of great, unpublished…

It’s hard to write about a garden. From a Western standpoint, there’s no escaping the long shadow of Eden and original sin. Even outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, the major world religions all have the trope of the garden as paradise: a place of escape and revelation. This persists in a post-Industrial Revolution culture which fetishes the pastoral.

If the garden bears the weight of our expectations, the writer has to negotiate this burden. Poetry of place needs to be about more than description, however accomplished; it is also about people in relation to the place. When I arrived at Riverhill, I read Abegail’s poem, ‘How to Walk in the Garden’. Her approach is to adopt a beguilingly didactic tone, assuming the role of guide. The first line of the poem pulls us in: “Here’s the key to the garden”, and the imperatives continue, both inviting and commanding us to “Squander…

The final years of the last millennium feel like a febrile time now. Although the US and UK governments were far from being left wing, after 18 years of Conservative rule beggars couldn’t be choosers. Blair had come to power promising progressive policies (warmongering wasn’t in the ’97 manifesto), a Democrat was still in the White House, and 9/11 was beyond the horizon. I was working for the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which promoted a more social and environmentally responsible economy to the one that had emerged in the slash and burn free market of the 1980s. NEF’s philosophy was founded on the principle of ‘small is beautiful’, which grew out of the eponymous book by EF Schumacher. Here, the maxim was ‘act local, think global’; if small businesses, community organisations, individuals, acted together in consideration of the planet before profit, then we all could thrive. Such think tanks…

The Family Matters tour has been travelling around the country, bringing these highly personal stories from four of London’s best-loved poet/writers (Agnes Meadows, Patricia Foster, Janett Plummer and Linda Shanovitch) to life.

Here are some pics from the Winchester performance:

Patricia Foster performs
‘A Caribbean Pied Piper’

Janett Plummer performs ‘The Unhappy Mother’

Agnes Meadows performs ‘Love on the Eastern Front’

Agnes Meadows

These astonishing stories are drawn from the writers’ own families, illuminating the ways in which we are all connected. Join them for a revelatory ride, as the cast spill family secrets, and they examine the ties that both connect and bind us.

There’s still a chance to catch them here:

Thursday 21 May – Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, New End Square, Hampstead NW3 1LT, 7.30pm – 9.30pm. £8. To book, call 020 7431 0144 or buy online @ www.burghhouse.org.uk

Wednesday 27 May – The Library @ Deptford Lounge

Roger Dennis has recently won the National Poetry competition and his poem, Corkscrew Hill,  is on my Featured Writer’s page. Until now I thought of him as an artist and I’ve heard from several people that he is a great art tutor: he lives in Ashburton which is my main shopping town. I love his paintings which seem very diverse in style and tone.  I really didn’t know he wrote and it seems this was the first poem he sent out into the world.  It’s the kind of miracle everyone would dream of!

I took advantage of knowing him to ask him a few questions about the enigmatic poem and his writing ….

Q1.  What is the relationship between your writing and your art?

 
I can see that this is naturally one of the first questions people have when they realise I both paint and write, but…