Fran Lock Ph.D. is a writer, activist, and the author of seven poetry collections and numerous chapbooks. She is an Associate Editor of Culture Matters.
no one else to share my slanted fate. god was routine unrelenting splendour; too fine and far a thing to help. nervous and compelled between the corridor, the alleyway, or any place a slack luck failed. pain like tearing paper; pain like biting through a glass. spasm, cramp. on days that paled to finite shine in ugly towns of bleak taboo beside the sea. terrible things. this secret snow inside the globe of me. learnt to defer to a four-letter word, to the force majeure of shame. girls conform to the lock- jaw logic of tetanus – dread for days. afraid to say, afraid to name, afraid of speech. girls untongue their stunting curse with silence, cannot pray. god was an unbodied brilliance loose in the room, too bright and wide a thing to help. and christ as pure as a blank page, the standard hush of libraries. no one else to share recession’s stink, insomnia, this bare and complex dark without design. unsteadied and expendable, where flesh is ghettoed, got, in bruising schools or trapped in airless rooms on truant afternoons. a twisted mess of pleats and seams our stammered lot. and god is good, but god’s too good, and god aghast is, faberge and satellite – beaming his gold nonplus in tempered waves. on days you need a human hand, a human heart. and what is prayer? in the ear or in the air? in between each doubt and grounded wish. the intelligent shape of noise. what is prayer? a hope you hold becalmed in the bowl of your own hearing? insensible shell, the ear that makes an ache of all my straining for sound. to be received, just once. it was rita and mary magdalene, lucia, agnes and Theresa who pulled me up from joyless aural dystrophy: lost in abject static – the directionless spite of words unheard, halfheard, unsaid. to be received. somewhere, by women like myself, but strong. saints, our better engines, our comrades, our sorority. they were my own sleek coping – there in my mildewed bedroom, coming and going, a tiered light in their hair, as fast as doves or monkeys, as tangible as cats.
Rita of the White Bees
by Fran Lock
To Saint Rita of Cascia, Patron Saint of Impossible Causes, and of abused women.
pray for us, for the girls like green splinters, their pierced reveal unfolding in small towns running on skeleton crews; for the pageant-hearted girls who burst like bright ideas into backseats, bikinis, the blessable dream of being human; for the too skinny stay-awake girls, living on rice wine and red light, whose home is the typical elsewhere of exiles; for the lip-glossed gonzo girls, those high femme fatalists, all cried out; for the lost girls, giddy and groped on, coked to their stoic ponytails, shiny and slick and swinging like whips; for the headlong girls, barefoot and bracing themselves in a bus lane, smiles like Saint Laurent scarves on fire, manic and vampire; for the girls who went waning in wraparound glasses to clinics and vigils; for the pub-crawled girls in packs, in parks and lanes, alive with the loitering joy of foxes; for the girls who fuck like stray cats come to sad anatomical terms in the spongy summer nights of cities; for the girls in ravenous warp speed, spinning, spun, till tears collect in their cartwheeled eyes like sparks; pray for us, for wasted girls with workshy serotonin, whose trestle cheekbones grind on air; for the peep-toed girls with broken heels and fake eyelashes, trafficking tears at a photo shoot; for the lookbook, look back angry girls, whose bad day is a black dress that goes with everything; for the bitch fight girls, their raw collided atmospheres on fire, all cellulite, venom, and celebrity perfume; for the girls whose hairdos are stairways to heaven, whose pigments shiver in vintage frocks, whose song is a storm in a borderline thought, who tend their fetishes like flowers; for the girls, most of all, who are their own witching hour, their jaundiced drama dragging them down in the bump and grind of a tightening gyre; for the girls whose vertigo is not the fear of falling, but the fear of jumping; who are so entirely sick of this mingy, yelping ethic men call love; for the girls who are no longer young, whose unmade faces are empty airports; whose bodies are the quarrels they are having with themselves; for these girls, their madness lasting them out like a sensible pair of leather boots. Patroness of Impossible Causes, pray for us, that we might flip a decade’s deadweight like a mattress; gather our Godspeed, walk away from ourselves.
you can make an inkblot of your nosebleed if you want to. talk and tsk and suck your teeth. conspiracy and crucible, and last of all is cliché: fighting irish. Tell me how my fist offends propriety, then name me one good thing on earth was ever given freely. i’m a joke to you, but i have known a place where mothers make a theme song of their grieving. i’ve seen men kneel, not pious but defeated; seen them keen, with doffed caps and tied tongues, and tugged forelocks, far too long. girls in gingham tabards, thin fingers rag-picked to an angry spasm; our young bucks buckled like broken ploughs after hard graft and heavy lifting. you don’t want to know. so i swing, at gin-sickness, pittance and piecework; flick-knives and switchblades, imperfect contrition. i swing at the pitchy stink of the barges, at the pinch-penny portions of leprous bread; at itchy armpits, scarlet fevers, at scavenging, navvying, flimsies and chits. because this is your world: bald men dragging their knuckles across the middle distance. men with tattooed dewlaps, goosebumped in bermuda shorts, flying their stomachs and half-mast, screaming a sieg heil! into my face. there is nothing to eat, offal and porridge and free school meals. there’s nothing to do, so brothers go obnoxious, unwashed, prodigal. or get themselves dead behind heritage. bygone pogrom, bad-debt, self-doubt and ethnic cleansing. they took it to heart when you said you was better than them. you took it too far when you said they belong to this doldrum squalor and tenement dread, amphetamine pestilence, out of their heads, forever amen. so i swing, i swing at the diesel and grease of an air we dare not breathe. i swing at the mean-featured foremen, cussing and cursing and nursing their two ton grudges; at all the self-made men, who expect us to pull ourselves up by our punchlines, a racist slur with cowshit on our boots. i swing because i’m sick of paedo priests and hanging judges; acid casualties, psycho-killers, crouching like gargoyles in unlit stairwells, all straight razors and skinny wrists. no one believes we are better than this. aspirant suicides, ceasefire babies. brave new world, pimping its pockmarked acres of flesh in the shit- witted gridlock of closing time, where patriots haggle for snatch in an alley, and mullet-cutted absolutists traffic in retaliation, tracksuits and black-market meat. deadbeat dads, slack-jawed and confecting endless fear against the sloping dark. oh, brave new world, of custodial no-hopers flogging stolen stereos in multi-storey car parks. jerusalem. i swing, for little girls slurring their homework. you called them sluts, you said they weren’t worth
the sweat off satan’s back, and now they believe. and now, those scallies sharpen their hand- me-down swagger to a cutting edge. they’ll cash your cheque then spit in your shadow, leave you for dead. and you act surprised, ask yourself why, while colicky longing fills the pigeon-chests of children. while widows with twisted faces amplify bereavement with burlesque. a black dress contriving tactical malady. i swing, for the gaunt blunt-force of a pain that breaks your back, for our remedial belief, the queasy bloated grief we march in step with through the rankled light, the racing rain. born by summer’s histamine psychosis; bearing our fierce, inflexible shame. i swing, with my seldom succoured brothers, sucker-punched, and always stuck somewhere between our conscience and our cunning. jerusalem, of dirges and of lurgies, sluggish nightmare, fumbling drudgework, men like you. justice, is a thin soup supped with a long spoon. small wonder we fight, it’s all we can do.
Fran Lock exposes the hypocrisy, classism and elitism in contemporary liberal attempts to edit, erode and police working-class participation in the arts, and she calls for the radical, systematic democratisation of culture.
Here she goes again!
Over the last few months I have been asked to contribute to or participate in four separate projects exploring working-class creativity and voice. Being the Millwall FC of the London poetry circuit (no one likes me, no one likes me, no one likes me, I don’t care) it’s a rare pleasure to be taking part in anything, but these projects are exciting in very particular and important ways, in that they are conceived and driven by working-class people, and that they extend the possibility of an expanded and polyvocal concept of community. This is timely. And it matters to me enormously on a personal as well as a political level. It should matter to you too.
It’s timely, and it matters because the old rhetorics of representation and cultural inclusivity have often led to a selectively edited picture of working-class identity in literature and the arts; a situation in which one or two – usually white, usually old, usually male – voices become icons and ambassadors for a complex network of cultures and experiences. To give a recent example close to my heart: it didn’t matter shit one to me that Simon Armitage became Oxford Chair of Poetry. Nothing against Simon Armitage, as a poet or a person; he’d more than earned his right to be there as far as I’m concerned. What is troubling about his appointment is the way in which it has been uncritically trumpeted as a triumph of working-class representation. And it’s not, it’s really not. A post-war northern male version of working-classness is one of the few acceptable faces of working-class identity permitted to proliferate across mainstream media platforms. This is deliberate: the poetry’s distance from the material realities it describes presupposes and encodes a nostalgia, a looking back that defuses potential threat (social or poetic), softens the language of experience, and makes safe what might otherwise be challenging to the cultural status-quo.
Don't mention the word class!
This creates a dangerous situation, and here I think about something that the trade union leader and activist Bob Crow once said in response to a shitty tabloid heckle about how his taking a holiday in France was somehow antithetical to his left-wing politics and his working-class “credentials”. What do you want? Crow asked, for me to spend my holidays crouched under a bridge reading Das Kapital? This makes us laugh, but it’s also telling about the bind in which working-class cultural creators continually find ourselves: expected to conform to and to constantly perform a very narrow, very specific version of working-class identity. Power elites pick their icons and ambassadors with care, using them as standards against which to weigh, measure and validate our authenticity. We are expected to relentlessly enact somebody else’s idea of what we should be. And if we’re not being and doing that, then we are found to be “inauthentic”, we are dismissed, and our exclusion from any meaningful cultural conversation about class is effectively engineered.
This matters, because the people traditionally holding the purse strings, controlling the presses; the people responsible for funding us and publishing us, are the same power elites who decide what constitutes a valid working-class voice, and an acceptable working-class identity. Arts Council England, for example, has nothing to gain from supporting people and projects who challenge or threaten their traditional business model, and most major publishers are wary of a working-class poetics that openly and explicitly acknowledges the politics of its own oppression. To have your work “out there” in any meaningful sense, to secure the invaluable financial assistance by which a creative project lives or dies, is to accept that your work, and that you, as a person, will be mediated, filtered and enmeshed, by and in the machinery of a grossly unequal hierarchy. By this method we are compromised. We tailor and shape our voices and ourselves to fit their image of us, and our working-classness is depoliticised and de-fanged through an act of caricature. By this mechanism is the triumph of working-class representation transformed into the tool by which working-class participation in the arts is edited, eroded and policed.
When I hear arts and poetry organisations talking about the importance of “accessibility”, and of writing in “the language of the people” it drives me absolutely bat-shit. Firstly, because who says “the people” shouldn’t find poetic difficulty stimulating and inspiring? And secondly because my poetry is perfectly fucking accessible; it’s the way in which education circumscribes and abbreviates working-class imagination that’s at fault, the way poetry is taught in schools, hand in hand with a hidden curriculum that tells kids like me this is not for you.
The onus shouldn’t be on the poet to limit their field of expression to cater to the imagined ignorance of people who were never given the opportunity to understand or enjoy poetry in the first place, particularly not when the poet herself is from those same social margins. The pressure should be on governments, funding bodies, and on the same organisations making these asinine pronouncements, to implement real, radical systemic change to the way resources are allocated, to the way poetry is taught, to the provision of not merely equal but fair access to creative cultural participation.
Co-opt their language before they win the argument!
When I hear organisations and publications bigging up the “accessibility” of a particular artist, text or movement like that’s the be-all and end-all of existence, what I hear is the desperate attempt of an out-dated and culpable power elite to absolve itself of responsibility for the grinding inequality and misrepresentation that faces working-class people as a class within the arts and literature. What leaves a truly special cat-shit taste in the mouth is when the language of radicalism is used to prop up the status-quo, usually at the expense of the communities and movements whose fearless campaigning and artistic activism generated this language. What is worse is when they use the deployment of socially conscious buzzwords as a way of silencing criticism.
For a prime-rib example of the former we need look no further that ACE’s recent publication of the mildly nauseating “Cultural Democracy in Practice”, which appropriates and misapplies the language and concepts of the Movement for Cultural Democracy without ever once acknowledging the relationship of cultural value to the exercise of power and authority.
ACE's vision of Cultural Democracy in Practice
Despite Cultural Democracy’s absolute embeddedness in ideas of class struggle, ACE’s document ignores class altogether and minimises the relevance of race, gender or age to cultural participation. It has been suggested that ACE’s paper is more about shoring itself up against probing questions surrounding equity, distribution of power, and the redistribution of funds, than it is about challenging or changing these things. In other words, ACE has co-opted community engagement in order to perpetuate the economic and cultural status quo.
There’s a wonderfully perverse bit of manoeuvring here, and it’s typical of the systems inside of which art and literature are expected to operate. An organisation – in this case ACE – pays vocal and public lip-service to the idea of “cultural democracy” or “social inclusivity”, or any the hell else other thing, without ever acknowledging or altering the inherent inequality at the heart of its deep structures. Rather, the language of radicalism and social justice is cynically exploited to legitimate that organisation’s attitudes and behaviours, and any criticism of the way they interpret or deploy this language becomes a de facto criticism of the things for which those words and phrases stand. An organisation that wants to present itself as progressive, equal and inclusive, can then wheel out one of its safe icon-ambassadors as a kind of human-shield: look, we can’t be institutionally racist, sexist, or classist because here is a black, female working-class spokesperson, and if you criticise us, you criticise that person, and if you criticise that person it is you who is racist, sexist, and classist.
Pretty sneaky. Sticking with poetry and class it’s easy to see how figures like Armitage function like the One Black Friend of the idiot who just made that unspeakably racist joke: his mere presence categorically proves there is no problem with systemic classism in the arts, and that absolutely no one has to take any responsibility for the shit they say or the things they do.
But there are so many difficulties inherent in bringing any kind of systemic critique to bear upon either the arts in general or the “Poetry Community” in particular. It’s a small community, after all. Insular, pretty incestuous even, and the exercise of applying analysis has a way of making waves few at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder can afford. Dissent is neutralised by creating dependence (the elites run everything from major presses, to courses, to competitions) and ensuring complicity (we need to play nice to get our work out there, to keep our heads above water), which ultimately compromises our credibility as critics.
Either that, or the act of criticism in invalidated via the expedient route of dismissing the individual critic. There’s an awful Catch-22 here which goes something like this: if you are un- or under-published, if you have little by way of formal education, then you forfeit your right to be taken seriously and your criticism amounts to nothing. However, if you are published, and you are educated, then you have no right to complain, your criticism is so much empty histrionics – worse, you are biting the hand that has so consistently fed you.
We need more acceptable faces of feminism!
We see evidence of this tactic in the media’s treatment of “instapoet” Rupi Kaur, and the serial twitterstorms and social media fallout that followed her publication by Simon & Schuster late last year. Because Kaur was continuously touted and positioned as the “voice” of young women of colour, her work single-handedly credited with making poetry “accessible” and exciting again, removing it from the “ivory towers of academia” and giving it back to a hungry general populace, to criticise Kaur’s poetry was to be racist, misogynist, or some kind of grotesque elitist snob. But it requires only the bare minimum of analytical effort to unpick this tangled tapestry of bullshit. Who, after all, was doing all this touting and positioning? Kaur’s agent, maybe? An elitist mainstream media? Her publisher? Look closer and Kaur’s publication and subsequent rise to stratospheric poetry-stardom emerges as a manipulative marketing exercise.
To acknowledge that doesn’t make a person a snob, or a racist, or a fucking misogynist. It makes a person somebody who cares deeply that marginalised women and girls have better representatives and poetic role-models than Kaur and her pallid, directionless pap. True, her subjects are vital, necessary and engaging, but that doesn’t make her poetry good. If we don’t demand rigour and richness of ourselves or our so-called “representatives”, we impoverish ourselves as cultural creators, we promote a dangerous underestimation of ourselves as artists. We have to ask ourselves why Kaur is picked up and promoted at the expense of other, better young women writers of colour, of which there are so, so, so many. Go to Rap Party, or to one of Out-Spoken Press’ live nights; take a casual scroll through the archives of Peter Raynard’s Proletarian Poetry, read Arshi, Mahfouz, Shire, Osman, Minamore, Lola, Allen-Miller, Miguel, Sur. And understand that what Kaur represents is the co-opted and compromised “acceptable face” of feminism, a commodified, consumer-friendly feminism with the edges rounded off, a feminism that nods vaguely in the general direction of all that besets us without ever offering a meaningful challenge to or analysis of those forces.
Typing the above has made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I understand the importance of sisterhood and solidarity, and I don’t particularly enjoy trashing other people’s work. But I’ve been wondering lately if a desire to be “nice” or “supportive” isn’t killing the necessary work of criticism. Should the fact that there are so few working-class women poets, and even fewer working-class women poets of colour mean that I’m bound to support even those writers whose poetry is hackneyed, misguided or unhelpful? This isn’t a rhetorical question, it’s a genuine and pressing one. And I understand that art is subjective, and that Kaur’s poetry isn’t for me. It has a right to exist, and I’m glad, I guess, if there are young women out there who get something from it. But – and this is a big but – isn’t it possible that young women would get more from any of the other artists I just mentioned? What would happen if they were given the opportunity to meaningfully choose? If media coverage and publishing trends did true justice to the sheer depth of diversity that exists in contemporary poetry, rather than fastening on to one or two commercially viable cash-cows and milking them dry? It’s the disproportionate emphasis on a couple of big safe names that bothers me. It’s tokenistic and it’s patronising, and it’s limiting to our collective voice, and it’s diluting to our collective dissent.
Let Coke democratise culture! Let them eat McDonalds!
Discomfort abounds for me in poetry. Discomfort abounds for me in other areas too, but poetry has the upmost sweetness and meaning to me, it’s the sea I swim in, and so those anxieties are the most vivid and acute. Poetry fulfils this role for me largely because – and this is another of my oft trotted hobby-horses, so bear with me – poetry, as an artistic medium is so sublimely suited to the material conditions of working-class existence. Growing up, to do literally anything else: paint, act, sing, learn an instrument, play a sport, required time and resources neither myself nor my family could afford to commit. To write a poem all you need is an eye, a voice, and something to scratch your rage out on.
Unlovable labour, by Steev Burgess
Its method of production suits a population mired in the wretched life-consuming hell of poverty and unlovable labour. It can be practiced alone, anywhere; you don’t need pricey tuition, you get better by doing it, and who, after all, is more attuned to the music of your own experience than you? Growing up, I also felt a tremendous need for poetry, its immediacy and urgency spoke to me in ways prose could not reach; it bypassed the banality and circumlocution of everyday speech and made me feel emotionally connected to people and places far beyond the narrow confines of my life. It was both a way of expressing and understanding my daily experiences, and of escaping them to somewhere different, somewhere better. And so I feel powerfully that poetry is ours, by right and by necessity both.
Which is why this sense of discomfort pervades. In the past year I have seen poetry used to advertise everything from building societies to mobile phones, from Coke, to McDonalds. Fucking McDonalds. And I’ve followed the online debates about how this is actually a good thing: poetry is the language of the people, it’s not some precious, rarefied medium that needs to be kept, protected and unsullied from the grubby hustle of commerce. It’s democratic, I’ve been told, and anyway, who died and made me moral arbiter of “the scene”? What right do I have to judge the decisions of others? People have got to eat, and you can’t claim to support working-class poetry then shit on working-class people who are selling their art to survive. Right?
Yeah, okay, up to a point, but I don’t know whether reducing art to a shitty little cash-nexus is really such a staggering victory for cultural democracy. And look, I guess it’s fine if you want to contribute a poem to an institution or a product that manages to avoid abject moral bankruptcy, but, and I feel this is true in the case of the Nationwide ads especially, what you’re selling isn’t just the poetry, it’s yourself, the poet, it’s your working-classness; you’re allowing this building society to co-opt your “credentials” as a signifier of their authenticity and integrity. You’re using your heritage, your history, your bloody accent, on someone else’s behalf. Nationwide isn’t us. It isn’t grossly exploitative, and it’s owned by its shareholders, but it still isn’t us. It’s £2.3m in chief executive pay’s worth of not us in fact, and this in a time of mass unemployment, stagnating wage growth and in insanely hyper-inflated housing market that’s making it difficult for most of us to eke out an existence.
The employed poor, by Martin Hayes
I think what bothers me most, though, is the way in which the ghosts of working-class history are summoned up in the service of this financial product. Unfairness is acknowledged, but in the most cursory way possible, as if poverty and suffering were a force of nature, something that just happened to people in the bad old days, not something done to people systemically and systematically, deliberately, continuously, still.
But shit, Nationwide are not actually terrible, so who am I to pick holes in other people’s choices? You’ll grant me I’m on safer ground with my other examples, right? McDonalds, I mean, catch yourselves on, what a crock. If I read one more article about how “populism is good” or “it’s bringing poetry to a wider audience” I swear I’ll blow a gasket. Firstly, because this isn’t poetry, it’s something cooked up by an ad agency pretending to be poetry, and secondly because this isn’t populism, its cod-populism, it’s a corporation riding poetry’s coat-tails to position itself as your mate, in order that it might more effectively peddle its deep-fried patties of eyelids and arseholes, sawdust and spit.
Poetry, the way its rhythms encode and invite intimacy, its direct address, its person-to-person quality, these things are hijacked by the God-awful “just passing by” ad. The rhymes are reminiscent of McGough or Mitchell without being written by either, delivered by Neil Morrissey in a suitably blokey brogue. These signifiers of working-class identity, working-class poetics are tactically exploited to legitimate this shitvert, and position McDonalds as essentially inseparable from everyday working-class experience. As a working-class person I call bull-crap. We deserve better. Even if you can bypass the animal cruelty, and their stellar contribution to world-wide deforestation (I can’t, but that’s just me), McDonalds are still incredibly exploitative of their working-class employees, and historically one of the most aggressively anti-union chains in the fast food industry. Their food is also linked to malnutrition and obesity among the poorest communities worldwide.
And yeah, I will eventually stop flogging McDonalds, but as a corporation it’s just so beautifully illustrative of the way not only working-class culture, but working-class identity is appropriated, distorted and exploited by corporate capitalism.
I think what grinds me most about that crappy advert is its chummy tagline: “There’s a McDonalds for everyone”. Everyone. Like there’s not a version of my existence that isn’t bound up with and tied to their substandard fast-food. As if they’re somehow emblematic of, or synonymous with my culture. I don’t know, you can over-think these things, but that “everyone” still grates. I fear it’s probably the same “everyone” that thrilled to the Olympics and its community-disrupting corporate-sponsored descent upon London, and the same “everyone” that lined the streets to wave flags with feckless abandon at the spectacle of another Royal spawning. “Everyone”. Because if they can’t co-opt you and manufacture your consent, they edit you out of the picture, out of the dominant narrative. I am so entirely sick of being edited out.
The middle class is just better at acting!
This brings me back – somewhat less than neatly – to the arts and literature in general, and to poetry in particular. There’s a vision of working-class culture at work in these spheres that I can only describe as blinkered, monolithic and homogenous. Sorry, I’ll rephrase that: blinkered, monolithic, homogenous, and ubiquitous. This shit is everywhere. And once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it, it’s in every advert, every book or television show. It follows you around out the corner of your eye, a very bad case of Baader-Meinhof complex.
I noticed it first in the vox-pops, those little segments of the news where some poor beleaguered reporter has to go out and canvass the general public, get their take on the burning issues of the day. Why were the working-class people they picked to interview invariably inarticulate? Or ignorant? Or prejudiced? Maybe because most populations are inarticulate, ignorant and prejudiced in ways and for reasons entirely unconnected to class? At first I was able to tell myself I was being paranoid. But then came that slew of shit social-safari television: Benefits Street, Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away! and my own personal bête–noire, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. Here we come, the undeserving poor, an eternal cast of either criminals or victims, an undifferentiated mass of scrounging, skiving profligates. I’d see this and I’d think about my childhood, about the lives of my family and my friends, and I’d think: okay, but where’s the rest of it? Where are we?
Programmes like Benefits Street and Big Fat Gypsy Weddings are problematic in so many ways, but chiefly, I think, for the way in which they present carefully – and highly selectively – edited footage as documentary fact. Because how do they choose which families, which “characters”, and what stories to film? And how is the way in which these stories are framed, and cut, and scored contributing to a skewed and generally inaccurate representation of working-class people? Further, and more germane to this discussion, what kinds of narrative are these portrayals propping up? Whose interests do they serve?
Let’s face it, when we appear in the mainstream media at all it’s generally in the form of cynical copy-paste poverty porn, and this is absolutely strategic. It’s a way for our cultural elites to have their cake and eat it: they’ve included working-class characters and working-class voices, they’ve included working-class lives, and working-class experiences, and for this they earn a nice big box-ticking pat on the back. But they’ve included them within very narrow, tightly circumscribed parameters: striver or scrounger; the bluff northern male or the brassy cockney blonde; the swaggering black yout’ in a gang, or the fist-fighting congenitally sexist pikey.
This kind of phoney representation extends to fiction too, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve sat through some middle-to-upper-class actor doing us pikey in different voices until I wanted to punch holes in concrete. They put us on like working-class drag in order to to flex their hip credentials, to win awards and plaudits for being socially aware, and worse, they do this at the expense of real working-class actors with just as much talent, who don’t have the recourses to compete in the incestuous, nepotistic snake-pits of film and television. Further, cultural expectations of the working-classes have been so successfully engineered, that we are no longer trusted to be the authors, spokespeople or archivists of our own experiences. Instead I’ve got Brad Pitt in Snatch, Michael Fassbender in Trespass Against Us, and the always heartwarming news that everybody’s favourite posh twit Benedict Cumberbatch is going to play Mikey Walsh’s father in a forthcoming screen adaptation of Gypsy Boy.
And poetry’s the same. And I spent such a long time hearing that my voice and my background were unacceptable, that they were things I’d have to minimise in order to “get on”, only to catch people doing me back at me, ventriloquizing me and my life, rocking up to my stages squatting in my postcode, forcing the rent up, garnering right-on points from my edgy poverty but bearing absolutely no responsibility towards the communities and cohorts they’d come crashing into. It pissed me off so much, in fact, I wrote a poem about it.
And you know, there’s what you’re allowed to say, and then there’s the way in which you’re allowed to say it. It isn’t that poetry has a problem with the working class, but it only wants us in certain venues, in particular enclaves whose borders it can effectively police, keeping us away from the business of “serious” cultural labour. “Slam”, for example, is increasingly hyped as “the poetry of the people”, imposing a false dichotomy between page and stage, and drawing an ugly, somewhat arbitrary dividing line between “elite” and “street”. This is patronising, disingenuous and gross. For all the paraded “right on” status of slam and spoken-word, it too has its regular staple of middle-class practitioners. And to assert that it accurately or completely represents working-class poetry is to pretend that there is one singular definitive voice of working-class experience. This is arrant nonsense.
Nothing wrong with slam, of course, and there’s so much about its ethos of community engagement that’s laudable, vital and exciting, but its over-emphasis as somehow exemplary of working-class poetics risks irreparable damage to the complexity, diversity and nuance of working-class poetics and working-class voice. A great deal of the slam I have encountered is – and I’ll admit, my experience might not be typical – samey, in terms of its thematic concerns, syntactic structure, delivery, and in the rhythmic formulation of the work. This only bothers me because the “poetry of the people” label is often used to sententiously confer moral status on personal, stylistic choices. Further, I think there’s an argument to be made that a strong moral agenda is sometimes used to legitimate or excuse lazy-arsed writing.
SLAMbassadors
Again, I’m not lumping all slam poetry together, or saying it’s lazy and bad. SLAMbassadors, for one, is a mad-exciting project, full of promising, talented young poets from every walk of life writing and performing hair-raisingly good material. What I am saying is we have to be so wary of any attempt to homogenise working-class poetics, or any other aspect of our cultural production under this or that banner, particularly when it risks dividing us from wider cultural participation and contribution, and especially when it means uncritically feting work just because it ticks the right boxes. What I am saying is we need to be on our guard against attempts to regiment and codify working-class poetry under the guise of challenging the dominant culture – page is x, so stage is y – it weakens working-class imagination and sets proscriptive limits on the way we are allowed to access poetry.
The working class mustn't become class-conscious!
But what even is “working-class culture”? As a phrase I find it condescending, dismissive and descriptive of nothing. At best it lacks nuance, at worst it becomes a way of corralling together a disparate collection of traits and customs, reducing them to a few tired tropes, and kicking them to the kerb, out of sight, out of mind. This is one of my most recursive and enduring rants, so bear with me while I hammer this sentence out again: there is no single “working-class culture”, and the idea that there is is a deliberate and insidious lie.
Working-class experience is, rather, characterised by its hybridity, its intersectionality. It is a melting and merging of cultures and customs under the impetus of overwhelming economic and social pressure. It’s what drives our creativity and resilience, our flair, our beautiful shoe-string inventiveness with language, with fashion, with music, with food. And it’s this that’s under threat: our image of ourselves as capable of embodying all of these things, and our right to know them and claim them as ours.
During my teenage years one of the hardest things for me was understanding where I fitted in, feeling mongrel, partial, neither one thing nor the other. At school my image of myself oscillated wildly between the belief that I was some kind of sub-genius, and the paralysing certainty that I was fraud, a fuck-up, and a failure. This is because the adults I encountered in the institutions I passed through either wrote me off as soon as I opened my mouth, or were so astonished that I could so much as string a coherent sentence together they immediately began weaving my fairly mediocre abilities into a narrative of individual exceptionalism. Reason being, neither side could accept someone like me had exactly the same capacities and potentials as the assimilated middle-class kids. Nothing they had seen or read or allowed themselves to experience had prepared them for the surprising possibility that I was a normal adolescent with a fairly decent brain. It just did not compute. So, when I bollixed something up it confirmed the worst suspicions I had about myself, and when I did something right I felt like a freak. Two years into a Ph.D. and I still struggle with this. What helps is understanding how this situation was engineered. How cultural elites operate to exclude, omit or erase the stories and voices of people like me, to wipe out our sense of ourselves as active participants in the cultural sphere. How these elites create self-loathing, how these elites create shame.
When I listen to a lot of the conversations about the “theft of working-class culture”, I feel this is an element that’s missing. It isn’t that the middle-classes or any group of power elites want to monopolise a particular uniform territory or set of traditions, it’s that they appropriate and cherry-pick arbitrary elements across a broad set of cultures and practices, exploit those elements for kudos and cache while telling us that we, our cultures, our lives, are the shit that’s left. Scrap. Offal. They sneer at us for not speaking well, but selectively adopt our linguistic ticks and flourishes to enrich their own verbal excursions. They steal our music and our clothes, they gentrify our dancehalls and our mosh-pits and our open mics, then they sell the resultant mess back to us at inflated prices, forcing us off of our stages, out of our mouths, out of our own skin.
Long live mainstream capitalist culture!
To take a non-poetry example that’s still very near to my heart, look at what happened to punk, to ska and to two-tone; look at the way in which the music was stripped of its radical political message, how the low-budget nuttiness and fevered invention of working-class kids was hoovered up, homogenised and returned to us as white male junkies in studded leather jackets. Same with hip-hop, how intense, socially conscious lyric flyting of kids with jack shit was sucked in and spat back out as slick misogynist crap, underscoring the same acquisitive, competitive, toxically masculine values as main-stream capitalist culture.
The Betrayal of Christ, by Caravaggio, c. 1602
And here, on this weird cultural margin, as a working-class, culturally “other” poet, you’re told there’s a part of you that’s defective or offensive, and if you want to get anywhere, you need to scrub that part out. I tried, I really tried, to my eternal shame. When I first come to London, because my image of myself and any pride or joy I might have taken in my heritage – ancestral or familial – had been so effectively destroyed, I negated myself: I wrote these terrible, monumental Fruit & Fabre-y poems, and I poshed my voice when I went on stage and read aloud. When this became too great a schizoid betrayal of everyone and everything I ever loved, and I started to write and speak as me, I was told I was “fetishizing” and exploiting my past. In time I realised that there is no version of my work that would be acceptable, that wouldn’t be used as a stick to beat me with. If I write my culture then I’m “playing the race / class card”. If I choose to write about anything else then I’m inauthentic, failing in my duty as ambassador apologist for “my people”, a sell-out and a fraud.
This is how elites and their cultural structures and institutions contrive to obliterate working-class voices, and tactically remove working-class people from the arena of literary and artistic participation. If they can’t control or co-opt you they make the effort of expressing yourself so exhausting, confusing and dispiriting, you just want to give up. And I have really wanted to give up this last year. Academia is horrible, exclusionary, alienating and fatiguing. My life is hard in material and emotional ways ninety-nine percent of my peers have absolutely zero hope of understanding, and the loneliness of that, of being a statistical freak inside a system designed to exclude me is really starting to take its toll. Nevertheless –
Oh no, they're waking up!
I will keep going, because working-class people are waking up to the urgency of this situation, because for the first time in a long time it feels as if we are galvanised and primed to become the authors and the archivists of our own experiences and stories. I am excited to be a part of this. I am excited to show people the sheer breadth and depth of what we can do. I’m excited that this could mark a genuinely significant turning point: no longer obsessed with defining or defending some invented and illusory idea of “the culture”, singular, we’re expanding, extending, exposing and evolving the notion of what that might be.
my mother’s face exists in the space between kaijū and sphinx. she’s wearing clothes that hold her body in contempt. her breath, imperfect peppermint. she has to go to work. her earrings are obols, shorn of their funerary usage. palest flirtation of dubious gold. unclaimed merest flick of skin, the seldom-surfaced self. our mother holds down several jobs, like righteous men might trample serpents underfoot. she works in the kitchens of holiday parks, spiting her wrists with the ambergris of hot fat; salt in the cut to her thumb. she works, waitressing tables, while little kids scream with tactless joy, engineering ice-cream headache, on and on. our mother’s scanned your hummocks of steroidal meat for hours, her hands making a dumb-show of séance. she cried like a tangled cassette in the night when she thought we couldn’t hear. our mother worked lates with the cold coiled inside like a sharpened spring at the twenty-four seven garage to tight to pay for heat. she gritted her teeth through gregarious sleaze in the small town slur of the local bar. and she came home and kneaded the bread like she was thumping breath back into a stopped heart. she held me through all my recalcitrant havoc, the voices we heard in our heads between god and the vomit, our gremlins and lurgies and rages. my mother studied. in those hotbed-of-non-event towns, she dug in her heels, and she bit back her anger. not a shoulder to cry on, a human shield, her backbone a needle of lightning. she studied, defended, and cleaned on her knees till she bruised. my mother, our mother, unfolding the joke from a book that the world had kept from her. my mother, coming sudden on the mind’s reckless hieroglyphs: i finally understand. my mother’s face exists between the strange and the wise. and we catch her sometime, when she’s only herself, dreaming her private tumult. my mother works, tilling the stony earth until a word strikes water and everything wickedly greens for a moment. this is the grace that shit is grist to. it’s thanks to her we are free.
Fran Lock has curated this year’s compilation of poetry for Culture Matters, to mark International Women’s Day. There are poems by Jane Burn, Sogol Sur, Joanne Key, Julia Bell, Anne Pelleschi, Beri Allen-Miller, and Fran herself, ending with a prose piece, On Fighting the Disconnect.
Introduction
When you put out a call for poetry submissions, you never know what you’ll get back. It’s a dangerous game, like asking questions of the Ouija Board, inviting a strangeness into your life, something maverick, haunting and twisted. This time was a little different, though; the women I reached out to being writers I’d admired for long time, and people I knew would have something to say on a subject that’s extremely close to my heart.
In the approach to International Women’s Day I started thinking about poetry’s potential as a kind of counter narrative, a way of exposing the hidden histories of women, stories and experiences that are erased or ignored by the general discourses of everyday life. When I asked these poets to contribute to Culture Matters, I suggested they send something that speaks to the material reality of being a working-class woman, of the struggles and joys that are uniquely ours, of the headspace those struggles create, of the ways we find to navigate the world and understand ourselves.
Which is easier said than done. What does it even mean to be “working-class” and a woman, here and now, when “work” itself is a vexed notion? How does gender interact with labour? How does labour interact with sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and with the hundred-billion other ways the world has of defining us?
These poems don’t answer all those questions. What emerges instead is a polyphony of voices across a wide range of cultures, experiences and generations. These poems, I think, exist as a proof that imagination takes root here, in us, in however inauspicious or infertile seeming the ground of our daily grind. Creativity unites us, and creativity is our best form of resistance and resilience.
Jane Burn
Jane Burn has had poems in The Rialto, Under the Radar, Butcher's Dog, Iota Poetry as well as anthologies from The Emma Press, Beautiful Dragons, Emergency Poet & Seren. She is the author of three books: Fat Around the Middle (Talking Pen), Tongues of Fire (BLERoom), and nothing more to it than bubbles (Indigo Dreams).
Jane writes: The seed of this poem, Let me tell you about, was sown late last year when I attended a local poetry night. One of the open mic poets was a young, very well-spoken man in his early twenties. His poem was about a sexual encounter he had had (for real or imaginary, I do not know) with a woman he considered less than himself. They did what he imagined were the usual 'roughing-it' things like going to Lidl. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas in his poem and when he spoke the line, 'chav girls need love too' which was meant to justify his 'slumming it', I walked out. I have been so angry about it ever since - the very idea that someone is to be treated thus because of where they were born is abhorrent. That they are just a 'girl'. As if there is a better class of person that can dabble with those who are lesser human beings. Oh yes, you can screw the common women for a laugh but you sure wouldn't take them home to meet the folks.
There is still a divide - there are still children growing up with less opportunity than others and judging by people like the man I mentioned above, there are still people growing up with the attitude that they are a better class of person. Perhaps he thought his poem was a witty little joke - perhaps he would be suprised to discover how offensive I found it to be.
Let me tell you about
potatoes bought by the sack leaving school still not being sure what a noun is trying to fill the gaps left by a crap education hand-me-downs from them up the street Jan’s, where you asked for a bob and came out looking like your nan licking the back of Co-op stamps paddling in the slipway at Thorne, avoiding a floating shit dipping in Kayli’s rainbow and puckering at the taste auntie’s handbags full of copper-filth tuppence smell contemplating the scrapyard’s matted dog my mother selling her rings the cliché of three inches of bathwater each knowing absolutely nothing about wine the uncertainty of pasta the raw song of the siren’s end of shift being made to wait on doorsteps while other people went in a boy with fists the oompah band and how I loved The Floral Dance the horse with strangles on the dealer’s yard how my parents were never sure if they should take off their coats curdles of Artex on every ceiling and wall Skegness the fear that I might end up in the sewing factory how a lathe is softened by a fascination of swarf how I felt when I discovered that anyone can be an archaeologist the first time I ate a courgette calling lunch, dinner and dinner, tea how it feels when someone mimics the way you speak being good enough to fuck but not good enough to date ending up working a supermarket till feeling the smoothness of others snag upon your scuff being haunted by your rough-built self watching people hide what they really think knowing there is nothing more ahead than there is behind.
* Jane writes: Horses have been the most important thing to me for as long as I can remember. At four years old I used to balance on a precarious stack of buckets and try to scramble upon the fat roan back of a pony who lived on a nearby farm. I walked for three miles to where the local show was held throughout the summer and stood until the last horse had gone. From the age of twelve I worked evening and weekends in a dealers yard - I was not paid for the huge amount of work I did but I got to ride and be with the creatures that were the most important things to me. One of our 'treats' was to sometimes be taken to Pannal Sales, Yorkshire. I had such fantastical ideals when it came to these beloved animals. The reality of the sales was something I have never fogotten.
A Day at Pannal Sales
These are not the horses of your dreams. These are pens of steaming piebald hides, tangles of splaying legs, shit-spattered hocks. Ears back, too afraid to come to you over the gates – throats raw with heaved wind, bellies fat with worms,
ridge tile spines, a din of screams. These are not the horses you usually see. These are hunters, jumpers too long in the tooth – foundered ponies, sadly outgrown mother’s dreams, cuckoo bolters, biters, buckers, lame ducks
doped on bute. Stallions, cresty, frothed and raked about the lorry park to flash a high-kneed step. You will sit at the ring and wish you were rich. Guineas are bid over whipped-up hides and the gibberish hubbada hubbada dubbada
auctioneer’s talk litters the day with hope or hopelessness, depending on whose hand is raised. You will not forget the gated ramp of the meat man’s truck, nor the weanling Shetlands, small as dogs, furzy as teddies, eyes like
portions of God walking mildly up it. You will not forget the sound of a mare’s grief, udder bagged for a foal’s milky crave. The hat-rack shire with a Father Christmas beard. These are not the horses of your dreams.
* The witch who lives on the hill
Maybe there is something of the wanderer in me – I have this problem with rooting. Not tree but tumbleweed, rolled into corners, bumping its fragile netted head. Dust settles on me, weighs me down. I wish I knew my history – I wish I knew who I was. I don’t fit –
my dogs are cut from patchwork cloth, bite slow fingers. My ponies is feathered and splotched with white. He only needs a wagon, Tommy-The-Tooth-Man said – he ran racehorses in Ireland, is bones like a bird, fears nothing. I’m always after seeing their souls – horses will show
them to you, given time. You ought not to be on their backs until you are in their hearts. I see those neighbours, clocking my trousers, muddy-wet bum from sitting low, learning their unicorn talk. I hope their curtain twitching brings them what they wish for. Her garden. Looks like
a rubbish dump. Why would you want rusty things? I got to keep my eye out for the scrap-man, sneaky bastard – he’s got a right lust for my stuff. Bucket rotted to its scaffold form, horseshoes, iron rabbit, old pot-belly stove. This clutter, in its corrosion was a shiny something once. The beauty is in how
it changes. Shells everywhere, bleachy bones, pebbles. Badger skull in a plant pot – I’m a-gonna use ‘em for casting spells, come round yer ‘ouses, sell you pegs. My gay abandon of lavender bothers them. Her with that camper van parked on the street. Like a gyppo.
I lost count of the times folk have tried to insult me with this. I’ll wish on clover for them – fuckers. I know they peep through my windows, mutter at my Dead Man’s Swag. I crave cabinets, the kind that you filled with china birds. I have to scrub the stink of ciggs from, smelling like memories
of failed lungs and death. Roam the car-boots for bits to fill them – then they are bright as bowtops, spangle of chintz, porcelain birds. I look at a plate on a stall. Bloke says hurry up and buy it – if you won’t, the Syrians will. They pause to tut outside my house. Pretty soon
they’ll be genuflecting, spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch, calling to the Saints to preserve them. Why don’t you park down your own end? The phone-wire box on the street corner is opened, wires spilled – this man in his fluoro tabard, crouches in front, confused at the spew of guts. At the tip
of every one, a voice – if you could press your ear to the mass you need never be lonely again. There’s Betty, face like a wasp, pressed to the glass, wishing me ill and I am meant to be the witch. Her mouth is a poisoned bud. This used to be a nice street. Starlings roost on her ridge tiles. Kids kick balls in her hedge.
Sogol Sur
Sogol Sur is the author of the poetry collection, Sorrows of the Sun (Skyscraper, 2017). She is currently undertaking a PhD in creative writing at Birkbeck, and working on her debut short story collection.
Inheritance
One presumes one has everything to lose One enters the office, the bureau for bureaucracy, an embassy, a ministry, a roomful
You have to prove to them why you exist; why you need your inheritance although the term and the concept soil your mouth newly-shed blood in a lucid lake spreading, an indestructible virus this money, two-thirds of a professor’s salary is the only thing you have inherited from your mother - apart from her lust for the impossible, unacceptable ambitions, and sudden-death genes.
You need the money, you tell them, your mouth churning, turning, withering, a diseased flower in garbage. Your father has sent you. He is pulling invisible strings. What strings? What country? What inheritance? Why do you think you exist? What mother? What father? They don’t utter this, but you can hear it for by now you know a motherless woman is not a woman but a rootless tree, carved and scarred by a myriad of artless passersby, its branches cut and thrown in a deep swamp.
They shout at you without uttering a sound: Your country does not exist. It died with your mother. We don’t owe you any money. You don’t have any power How would you pull strings? Which strings? Why do you think you’re special? All the strings were buried with your mother in that grave. In that crowded cemetery where your body bent without your involvement and you heard a man - a far relative - say, ‘she’s okay, it’s probably just stomach ache,’ and you were surprised by your lack of desire to beat him to death.
But you did wish god or something like that existed and could resurrect your mother instead of ordering you to look chaste and you glanced at your mother’s sister in her black chador, praying at her sister’s tomb. And for the first time in your life you envied her you needed something, anything to hold on to but there was nothing.
When they collected you from your mother’s grave, you couldn’t hold on to them because you knew they were nothing. And there was nothing again to hold on to.
And every time you go to a sweaty office to claim her money you wish you were buried with her in that grey cemetery for you know there is nothing to claim, nothing to hold on to when you’re a motherless woman in your twenties with a painful passport and you hear voices in your head that logically you are aware don’t exist, yet they are as deafening as the rain knocking on your window during Tehran winter showers. And the vociferation: Take off your fake hijab Who do you think you’re fooling? We know you You’re not meant to exist.
Joanne Key
Joanne Key lives in Cheshire where she writes poetry and short fiction. She recently returned to university as a mature student to complete an MA in Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire. She has previously been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, Mslexia Poetry Competition and The Plough Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in magazines including The Interpreter’s House; Ink, Sweat and Tears; and Nutshells and Nuggets. She won second prize in The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2014.
Sleepers
At fifteen, my wires trailed behind me like loose shoelaces. Despite the cable, snaking under my ribs, the feathers started to poke through the cuffs of my school jumper. A danger to myself, the men said I could take off anytime and should be sent to the factory where my mind would be occupied with minding the machines, tending them, mending my ways. The factory and its banner: Set Aside All Thoughts of Flight. My father gave it the green light as he sat on his rusty throne, flexing the hinges of his fists, smoke and booze flowing through his steel tubes.
And so they squeezed me into line with the other women, side by side, forced in as tight as batteries. The siren howled. A door clanged shut. That was that. The machines ate everything: days, words, music, news. I watched them swallow some women whole. We called them Sleepers. I saw my mother slip away until all that was left was her voice humming in the drum of its stomach. The factory took the sun, the doves cooing on the roof, the chatter and laughter and pitter-patter of rain, leaving us only with the sound of crying on fire escapes and the moaning of Sleepers trapped deep inside the machines.
Nothing lasts forever. Many years have passed, but on lonely nights like this my mother often flits back into my life. Owl-eyed and full of light, she sits on the windowsill, preening her feathers, before disappearing again, her shape fading from view as she circles the ruins of the factory, picking over the bones of those old worn-out systems. So many times I have tried to call her back, my face at the window – pale and plain as a blank clock. Mouth clicking. Open. Shut.
Julia Bell
Julia Hephzibah Bell is a writer and Course Director of the MA Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She is the author of three novels and the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook. Currently she is working on lyric essays and poetry. Hymnal is a verse memoir about growing up in a religious family in Wales. And she is currently working on a sequence of essays about Berlin. Two of these essays will feature in forthcoming editions of Wasafiri and The White Review. She currently divides her time between London and Berlin.
The Visiting Speaker
But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? - Luke 10:40
Typical. The minute there’s a man about the house she’s off, leaving me to get on with the gutting of fish, the buttering of bread. Sitting there, simpering, playing with her beads in that idle, flirty way that makes her look cheap.
Five loaves and fishes and then some piled on the table, there’s at least fifty people coming, it will take a miracle to get this done in time. And all she cares about is boys, boys, boys, turned into a simpleton the minute they arrived.
Our hands butterflied across the table, slicing, dicing, picking bones, tossing salads, while we debated the various defences of Kierkegaard, and the finer points of the theories of mind, and then when he arrived she emptied like a drain
quite the coquette, while I sit here steaming Pollack, getting grease stains on my blouse. So many exceptions: Peter who’s vegetarian, Matthew the wheat intolerant, Mark who can’t stand fish. Wet drips together dripping. Especially him.
When I went out to complain all he could say was there were more important things than cooking in that kind of hippie, dreamy way that she believes is a substitute for thinking. See here, he said, picking a flower, consider the lilies of the field.
And she lay next to him, giggling, rococo, as if posing for a Titian. God, that made me mad. Here I am up to my eyeballs in dishes, and all she can think about is sex. What good are flowers when the clock is ticking on the Sunday roast?
He’s no idea what it’s like pulled every which way, clean this, cook that, where’s my clean shirt? He might have time for stargazing, but me, I have to keep the carrots from boiling over. A martyr? Don’t be soft. I’m losing my mind in here.
Anne Pelleschi
Anne hails from Swansea, South Wales, and her life and work have evolved from her Welsh origins. She is the organiser of international literary events and an international creative writing competition. Closer to home she established Dylan Thomas's birthplace as a successful centre celebrating his early life, and for holding workshops and events, including poetry readings. She is a regular speaker on Thomas' life nationally and internationally. Anne has organised arts festivals in local parks and created 'Welsh Mams' Day. Her work is drawn from her lifetime experiences in which people and place provide centrality to her sense of iterative historical and emotional consciousness.
1832, for a mother
They call me a Murder Stone, though I have killed no-one. My role was not to take a life but to record one that was brutally shortened.
I am so tired, worn out, worn down, my once loud voice has disappeared, gone. I am a pock marked slab of misery where pointing fingers chiselled into me.
They call me a Murder Stone, though I have killed no-one.
I was chosen, hand-picked and quarried in Mawr, there is no-one alive to remember why now, so I must tell you before I fade, before the earth re-claims me and becomes my grave.
My role was not to take a life but to record one.
I am weak and leaning on an old chapel wall. As your feet pass by or your car engines thrum, you do not notice me yet I am the one who remembers the truth.
They call me a Murder Stone, though I have killed no-one.
Look for me in Felindre, look for me. Find me and discover about an unborn child, about Eleanor, its mother
Circles
On that sultry, weeping-cloud day, I watched her sitting room's furniture be moved and switched, re-switched, re-moved. I saw pain take control of a face that was drawn, a soul that was torn between despair and survival.
A blank worn canvas outlines of deep silences tears left un-spilled
Gasping breaths were her voice as she paced and twitched, stood still, sat down, opened cupboards, slammed their doors, apologised, searched, spinning round and around.
Those old training shoes trying to make sense of it a tongue sticking out
Into a quiet, whimpering stillness, words emerged from their swallowing, smothering cocoon and filled the room. Whispering into her neckline, she spoke about that morning, the hat mis-shaped, the ugly morning and the note that was left by her door.
Now only shadows quick silvered running footsteps a broken marriage
Beri Allen-Miller
Beri Allen-Miller is a poet and photographer currently living in Hertfordshire.
Commuter's Flu
hammering nails into my head to let the pain out i’m tired of being ice picked chipping holes into cold cold cold melting little drips into the eyes of wiser guys
“peanut butter mix it up mess with me ill kick your butt” i’m never going to let my heart shed ive got a brain i hide use it selfishly they say i was born in soft focus a little vaseline on the lens a little tinsel around the eyes.
i put my hood up relax my accent hiss into a blunt little minute 70 70 70 tangled up in my hair i was rocked by smoke finding with my fingers my core centralising light she a peony prototype power i sit with it let it alight get off of the brim of my hat covering my eyes with your tiny palms i am pushing out noises in breathy punches scaling through vowels.
Palpate
There is only so much a voice can do the girl piercing the old men whispering about her brain I dart into myself - a bee a bug with an eye for contagion and keeping my teeth aligned is harder than holding a drill into skin - a bee direct but fatally scared - a bug with a dark glint and quietly amber in temper and colour amber in coffin
I can hear the flesh of all of the sewn together men they don’t fit me well I can’t speak or talk Take me in your car park us near the seaside - the sea is our bedroom It’s a chore to roll over if I don’t have two small pulses to encourage one eye or both you see in me, a bracing for potency
You strain to make me larger this splinter is no good it has ruined to such impossible depths tweezers will not do they become too foreign at the side of my skin
I draw my family tree on my stomach, it’s all images written in flexing marks and I am told I am lost, love is recycled into threads
Fran Lock
our mother’s day will come
my mother’s face exists in the space between kaijū and sphinx. she’s wearing clothes that hold her body in contempt. her breath, imperfect peppermint. she has to go to work. her earrings are obols, shorn of their funerary usage. palest flirtation of dubious gold. unclaimed merest flick of skin, the seldom-surfaced self. our mother holds down several jobs, like righteous men might trample serpents underfoot. she works in the kitchens of holiday parks, spiting her wrists with the ambergris of hot fat; salt in the cut to her thumb. she works, waitressing tables, while little kids scream with tactless joy, engineering ice-cream headache, on and on. our mother’s scanned your hummocks of steroidal meat for hours, her hands making a dumb-show of séance. she cried like a tangled cassette in the night when she thought we couldn’t hear. our mother worked lates with the cold coiled inside like a sharpened spring at the twenty-four seven garage to tight to pay for heat. she gritted her teeth through gregarious sleaze in the small town slur of the local bar. and she came home and kneaded the bread like she was thumping breath back into a stopped heart. she held me through all my recalcitrant havoc, the voices we heard in our heads between god and the vomit, our gremlins and lurgies and rages. my mother studied. in those hotbed-of-non-event towns, she dug in her heels, and she bit back her anger. not a shoulder to cry on, a human shield, her backbone a needle of lightning. she studied, defended, and cleaned on her knees till she bruised. my mother, our mother, unfolding the joke from a book that the world had kept from her. my mother, coming sudden on the mind’s reckless hieroglyphs: i finally understand. my mother’s face exists between the strange and the wise. and we catch her sometime, when she’s only herself, dreaming her private tumult. my mother works, tilling the stony earth until a word strikes water and everything wickedly greens for a moment. this is the grace that shit is grist to. it’s thanks to her we are free.
On Fighting the Disconnect
The teenage girl on the bus is wearing a white T-shirt with the words I AM A FEMINST printed on the front in stark inch-high black letters. It’s dark outside and she’s travelling alone, so, when a group of boys get on at the next stop and bundle upstairs into the seats behind her, making the usual lewd and nonsensical comments, I swap seats to sit with her. I don’t want to come off like a dick, or imply that she needs protecting, but I want her to know she’s got help if she needs it, so I ask her if I can sit down, and to make conversation I tell her I like her T-shirt. “Thanks”, she says, and drops the name of a thoroughly ubiquitous online retailer whose ethical policies might want a bit of rethink, their supply chain having been linked in recent years to the labour of refugee children; with their British-based warehouses the subject of widely reported exposés into exploitative and dangerous working conditions. I don’t say anything, but it does give me private pause. The workers in sweatshops and warehouses are typically women and girls, and it’s hard for me to imagine anything more cynical than the way consumer culture regurgitates this cosmetic and morally-compromised feminism to idealistic young women.
Somewhere there’s a disconnect. But maybe it was ever thus. Take Rosie the Riveter, that oft-copied icon of female “empowerment”. Rosie was designed by J Howard Miller, and her purpose wasn’t liberation, it was propaganda. Rosie was supposed to mobilise a workforce, and she did: between 1942 and 1945 over six million women in America alone took up new jobs to further the allied war effort, many of whom started work in the factories before their employers had issued standard uniforms and safety equipment. Before 1943, for example, steel-toed boots weren’t made in women’s sizes, and women welders regularly sustained injury working in their everyday clothes without proper protective gear. Agencies that could have stepped in and stepped up to outfit women with safe and appropriate clothing didn’t consider it worth their while. They were only temporary, after all, an expendable substitute for male workers drafted overseas.
In the U.K, the women working in munitions factories turned yellow from exposure to TNT, earning them the euphemistic nickname: the canary girls. Although this discolouration was temporary, other side-effects were far more ominous. Women developed bone disintegration, throat and lung problems, and a fatal liver disease known as toxic jaundice. All this to earn a scant half the amount of their male counterparts, and while being expected to conform to an idealised and unobtainable standard of beauty that was considered as much a part of their “duty” to the war effort as the factory work in which they were employed.
Rosie’s a suspect symbol, the acceptable face of female labour; she isn’t jaundiced or exhausted or malnourished or maimed. She’s a fetish, a wet-dream, she’d working-class drag with the edges sanded off. She obscures not exposed the complex reality of what it means to be a working woman.
Somewhere there’s a disconnect. As IWWD rolls round again this year I find myself dwelling on this disconnect more and more. As a buzzword feminism is everywhere, and I want to take comfort from that, but I’ve seen a lot and I’m naturally wary. When companies and celebrities position themselves as “feminist” in order to encourage consumption or legitimate their views, I am wary. When conversations about equality are reduced to a grubby little cash nexus, I am wary. When the idea of real and necessary systemic change is diverted into the celebration of spurious cultural “gains”, I am wary.
Fundamentally, I don’t give a shit if L'Oreal or any one of its feckless spokespeople think I’m worth it, because “beauty” as an arbiter of personal worth is meaningless to me, especially when “beauty” means relentlessly performing some grotesque notion of exploded femininity twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, something that isn’t remotely practicable for most working-class women with dirty and difficult jobs.
Fundamentally, I think there are more urgent and important issues at work right now than whether a boardroom Tory earns the same amount as her male equivalent. Yes, of course, we should work towards parity of pay in business, but this can’t be the only measure of whether feminism is succeeding. The question of economic equality needs first to consider the working conditions of the poorest in our society; needs to start with the fruit-pickers and warehouse factory packers, needs to understand the connection between the convenience of your next-day delivery and the woman in Grimethorpe breaking her back on minimum wage to make that happen.
Fundamentally, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference if Jodie Whittaker is Doctor Who, or if we have a gender-flipped Ghost Busters, when women in Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre are still on hunger strike for being detained unfairly and indefinitely in demeaning and dangerous conditions; when cuts to Child Benefit coupled with restrictions to access of Legal Aid trap threaten to women in poverty and domestic abuse.
My point, I suppose, is that wearing the T-shirt is fine, idealism is fine, but feminism isn’t a slogan, it isn’t an aspirational brand, and wearing the T-shirt isn’t fighting the patriarchy. Feminism requires something of us, requires joined up thinking and a sense of our responsibility to each other. Feminism requires class-consciousness, an attentive listening to the varied voices of working-class experience.
Culture Matters has published a brilliant new collection of poetry called Muses and Bruises by Fran Lock, an activist, writer and illustrator, and one of the finest political poets writing in Britain today. Her feminist and socialist poetry weaves psychological insight and social awareness into themes of poverty, mental health problems, sexual abuse, domestic violence and political struggle. Vivid, lavish and punchy, her writing combines a smouldering sense of anger and injustice with a deeply humane and vulnerable empathy and compassion. The poems are complemented by the collages of Steev Burgess, whose images dance with the poems, deepening their meaning.
The book will be launched at The Duke Pub, 7 Roger Street, London WC1N 2PB on Saturday 14th October at 7.30pm. Have a look at these two fabulous videos made by Fran and Steev to accompany the book.
And here is Fran's Introduction to the collection.
'Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.' - Adrian Mitchell
I've got a lot of love for the late Adrian Mitchell, but I think he was wrong about this. I didn't have much access to poetry growing up, but that wasn't because poetry was ignoring me, that was because poetry had been deliberately engineered out of my life. I had never been told that poetry was for me, that I was allowed poetry, entitled to poetry, deserving of poetry. And no one ever told me how much I needed it, and I did need it, we do need it, all of us.
I came to poetry alone, late, and by chance. My first feeling at having found this beautiful, radiant thing was a mixture of exhilaration and relief, rapidly followed by a massive sense of blind and burning rage that something so essential, so sustaining, something so rich in sweetness and in meaning had been kept from me. I carry that rage with me still.
Poetry does not ignore people, but there is a system at work designed to exclude people from poetry. People like me. People like you. It starts at school, with a hidden curriculum that attempts to circumscribe and to manipulate the cultural expectations and experiences of working-class kids by telling them what is and isn’t for them; what constitutes an appropriate and realistic interest, what counts as a legitimate achievement.
You can't be a poet, people said to me. No, because heaven forfend I should aim so high, heaven forfend I should have such an unrealistic ambition as to acquire language, to articulate and to express myself. No, because if I, as a marginalised or oppressed person, acquire that language, develop that skill, then I am arming myself.
If I am articulate then I cannot be discounted and I will not be ignored. If I have access to the written word, then I am connected to the whole world, I can build movements, I can move mountains, I can understand the nature of that which keeps me down. If I am dexterous with language, then I understand how language is used to ensnare and enslave me. If I understand how language is used then I know when I'm being lied about and when I'm being lied to. If I have poetry, I have a voice, and that voice is a sword and a shield. If I can think for myself, speak for myself, then I can define myself and represent myself. That is a dangerous and wonderful thing.
Better for some if art and culture remain behind high fences in self-policing middle-class enclaves. They'll stuff my head with shit instead, with disposable, sneerable pop and dross. They'll create a climate of bread and circuses. They’ll dehumanise the lumpenproles because all we've got are stunted words for ugly lives – because we're rough, ill-educated, stupid.
We’re not stupid. I love language. I love poetry, all poetry: the Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Clare, Keats, Yeats, Fiacc, Plath, Brookes, all of it. I reclaim it, I appropriate it, I snatch it back as an act of daily, defiant radicalism. It all belongs to all of us.
And language belongs to us, in all its complexity and richness, in all its rolling, roiling musicality. I was told once that my writing was inauthentic because working-class women don't think or speak that way. Bollocks. I am a working-class woman, and I do write and think and speak this way. There is no one homogeneous working-class voice, any more than there is a single monolithic working-class culture. No one has any right to set limits on the way we sound or the words we use.
The poems in this collection revel in richness and in strangeness, they positively wallow in it. I don't apologise for that. I won’t strenuously enact anybody else’s vision of working-class identity – I assert my right to be lavish, to be complicated. The poems are about beauty and meaning and the unlikely places working-class women and girls find these things, the unlikely materials from which they are composed. Steev's collages bring this to the fore, a mixture of decadence and squalor; grind and grime with a lick of glitter.
Emma Goldman is often misquoted as saying that without dancing it's not her revolution. She didn’t actually say this, but I approve the sentiment, and I'd go further. Without dancing – or poetry – there is no revolution of any description. We first have to recognise our right to joy, to pleasure. Poetry is waiting, go and claim it.
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Sacred, not wise, the black cat's acid casualty stare, traversing a crumbling cul-de-sac, under a starlessly inkjet sky. We cross each other's path, and she leans into my unluck, a clot of deeper dark, unstuck from the rest of the night. Then she is gone, the quick misshapen sleek of her; the yellow pellets of her eyes dissolving into distance. I am alone on the corner, holding my shoes in my hand. Her charm unwinds from around my ankles. The night returns to bind my wrists.
Breath
In the concrete playground, city kids, the pigeon-chested victims of chimneys, wheezing like slow punctures through gritted teeth and cigarettey breath. I was young. I remember well, the boy with a laugh like a chewed-up cassette, hocking his egg-yolk phlegm at passing girls. It was exciting then to press my lips to his, taste and acrid copper shock and run, uphill, where he could not follow. My own chest tightens now to think of it, and his strained white face like an old balloon.
Everything you think you know about me
At home, in my cradle of copper wire, I spin the unvaried light into curses. I sleep on a soiled mattress stuffed with horsehair, lucky heather, hubcaps, stolen modems, baby's breath. I devour men whole, licking the piquant gloss of their blood from my scrimshawed scramasax blade. I suck the meat from their fingers, melt their wedding rings down for ingots of bling, golden molars. My pit-bull dog is a brute, he's a gallowglass with a tactical mouth. In the still cold pond beyond the site, the babies unfold like lilies.
You are not your nine to five prison
Monday beings and ends with the need to numb my own desperate tendency. I keep catching the loose threads of an old pain on the jagged edges of the day. London, like a hardman with hate tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and hate tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand. There's an ant farm under my skin, and my brain is tuned to some bumfuck nowhere bandwidth, all Armageddon and Christian rock. Between work and hospital visits I pass the same graffiti every day. Sometimes I smile in lowercase, but today its optimism irks me. I think, in fact, I am the clock. I turn, but in a circle, chase the self I can't outrun.
We will never again – in any future conflict – let those activist, left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave – the men and women of Britain’s Armed Forces - PM Theresa May at the Conservative Party Conference 2016
you could spit this distance. a night carved up along our wounded latitudes. these, the deathbed territories: houses you can wake at night with howling; weekends, when flags mutate the gaptooth terraces. blue dufflecoat, spineless in a sightline; a black lung, obliviously butterflied, small matters. a pristine buckle of bone; the plump dependency of children, milk teeth courting spores in yellow bedrooms. you could spit this distance. the engine’s wheezing sync, the armoured pig, the gun. your anti-language gratifies itself. the blind eye keeps your worshipful company. all laws in accordance with screeching. curfew. groping sorceries. the tv screen, a white sail stretched tight by light, not air. no one is there. a smile that spreads like an infection; your hands sculpt the flesh of us from silence. a body’s soft reckoning. you crouch in stairwells like botanists. we are searched out, sampled, categories of life. vexing scent of humankind. warren. open sewer. running sore. subspecies. the trigger bristles with fingers. flatblocks hum with it: picturesque demises, velvety texture of mouths you smash like oysters, plumbing pearl. fatigue, amplified, unfocussed. a church you crumple like an egg box. conceal a solemn promise in fist. you could spit this distance. in your vindictive livery. we have nothing but a vagrant immortality; insinuating holiness, a hope that stops just short. you name the slate, the dust. you lure the earth to language. our culture is a bitten tongue. young girls, knotting their hair like nylon ropes. such deeds. and who will speak of them? it is an antique zero you are counting on. the rust around the hole. a boot prevails upon a bending back forever; persuades a face to open in a failure to scream.
