(If you’ve enjoyed this, please consider buying my poetry collection, Poems Sketched Upon the M60: https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334. I’m so poor that I eat from bins.
I recently had a very well-meaning and wholly lovely visit from a friend who advised me that the key to becoming a successful poet is a more coordinated PR campaign. My friend from school has also advised me this for years. I am entirely convinced that this is true, being excessively cynical about the world.
Equally, I don’t want this to be true and wish it would not, be true. Some of my earliest Facebook activity after recovering from the anodyne of a silent monastery a couple of years ago was directly ridiculing this notion. A juveniler me would tag myself at locations I’d never been to and write poems as if I was there, in direct and pretentious-prickish satire of the idea of a dramatic monologue. (I was recently called a pretentious prick, jokingly and banterously, twice, while giving guided tours around St. Andrews, so the term is on my mind a little.)
Maybe I can pinpoint what finally made me cave. Picture this scene, reader; FlixBus from Glasgow to Manchester, get in to Manchester Central Coach Station at 2.30 am, there’s a guy walking round the coach station shouting at everyone in sight, you get a coffee in a 24/7 SPAR. Then a security man in a High Viz Jacket tells you that you look “70% homeless”. You tell him that you teach at St Andrews, have a book. He says you need to buy some clothes from NEXT and then – in his words – “your students will be able to come to you”.
Maybe it is my incorrigible autism that just makes me not understand why going to NEXT is the next step towards “being taken seriously”. Are we seriously so blind towards the general import of what people are saying that we fixate on what brand they are wearing in order to decide whether or not to take them seriously? Fair enough that we think people with tattoos are cool, or that we think people with top hats are a little silly and antiquated. But having some sort of textile radar that can swoop into the whim of iron that a vestment has been branded with… surely this is a condition of late capitalism gone mad?
Maybe I’m still a bit angry at my very well-meaning boss’ boss, who flitted around the five star hotel I briefbriefbriefly worked in like an osprey, checking who hadn’t ironed their clothes and making a prey of them. Multiple times, despite doing my job very well and handling its multifaceted responsibilities well, and despite being good at schnozzing with rich people (a skill I never though I had, looking as 70% homeless as I do), it being precisely transferable to wiping arses in care homes, I was frequently given the slip by some complex chain of command that my presentation skills were not good enough. I missed a spot polishing my boots, I had urine all over my face, etc. etc.
But I have caved, reader, and so this blog post is now just some pictures of me taken by someone else and an accompanying set of narcissistic photos. Isn’t that what you want? But you shall be given poems, that you shall not read, which is the only twist.
In the morning, let me know your love,
O megalith, for you spun this circus where
howls of racist abuse shall be our matins,
conical clouds will sing us from above.
And when all of this is in rabid disuse
what manner of vehicle serves to infuse
the whole temple of its plate-glass life?
Artificial fertility of stone-hewn
moss. A priory or two
to beat the sediment to dross
of spirit. Three hundred years
to imagine and relove.
The habitat’s trance, arboured
legacies of beyond pine
symphonies, starboard
new solitudes.
Will you accept my narcissism, God?
Squidditas 