In 2018, I decided to write a couple of sonnets that omit certain vowels. Looking back, this exercise was deeply pretentious, and the effect is only really visual. I recall reading George Perec’s La Disparition, and the way in which a common vowel is missing in order to highlight the absence of something once ubiquitous, the Jewish people, in the strange recoiling trauma of the post-war period. I wish I was making a point as sophisticated, and serious, in my own Grail Sonnets.

Grail Sonnets III
Tonight – I know it – she’ll love me for a night,
one night alone. Beneath this fire moon –
shedding each fibre of its black cocoon –
she is finally set free. Her hand is grappling mine…
and each sinew, static, now bleeds electric light,
each dry bone is dripping wet in bloom.
Within the heart of her tabernacled room –
incensed – the Dark is clawing from her mind,
one night alone. We met again: a mighty weight
drags down each inch as if a chrysalis,
or as that shadow of the moon’s embrace
and (needless to say) that shell finally slipped
away, for good, seeing as she died with it
and they wonder why I wear her as a skein.

I love the sunshine-laden irony of the fact there is a “John Clare Hall” in the University of Northampton. It is better than the shopping centre in Peterborough. Maybe Clare would even have been happy here, modulating between attending lectures, going to the Flash Fringe Festival, downing Jaegerbombs on the top floor of his very own brutalist edifice, and going to the Ecology Centre, a festoon of hawthorn that lie beyond the official student campus. Who knows.

The last leper to be saved
scratches out the plaster of the moon
and children fall by bell swoon.

This is all the grace
I spin for you – if I hold you just
so, unfazed by being loved,

the warmth of your goodness flickers away
the law, and we surrender to this fine
corruption, a whirlwind of reason,

and when I reason you
a cloister loiters on a mountain edge
where you are leading me to emptiness

and then I empty every whirling question
towards the rose window of your mind’s soft arch.
The sun light of your spirit calms the fire,
forming in every word of wickedness.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334

I went down to an open mic in Manchester on Monday. It was very sweet; a rotating tapas board of folk singing of thwarted love, cosmic interplay, and how shit everything it is. I respect all of these themes.

Apparently, the procedure is to record the set, so here are a few photos and videos of me performing. Let’s see how long they will stick around on the fluidity of the internet. Please check out the other performers, too, and you may flimsically flamily flamingishly wish to go down to the Flour and Flagon on a Monday night.

Let peace reigneith, Sam.

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMIOoxkUDDLNwgJ3KRR8vw-d1BgqNEgLllmDcerCbfTmrGVzeLDzsLiQVxqmiXAnQ?pli=1&key=N1l2RFhUbDVPTEtuOV9WYkhCajh2NmdJRkIxckxn

How the Church can fight racism in Rochdale and Oldham

This is forthcoming in this week’s print edition of The Tablet. I wanted to write a piece about how we might create some sort of utopia in my unutopian home town, starting with fostering a whirlwind of multi-lingual and multi-racial tablet. Thanks to Brendan, who turned my Blakean reverie into something publishable with

I am working on something called Down and Loathing in Boarhills. It is a work of fiction. An extract of it was published in Counterblast, a whirlwinding grassroots magazine seeking after authentic expression of injustice, doing more than others to grapple with the reality of our global human condition, the precarity of our artificial borders, and aiming to speak out in hopeful projectiles. It can be found here, and some physical copies can be purchased: https://counterblast.uk/. Peace, Sam.

When I went to a psychiatrist at fifteen and was given, alongside a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, “depression with mild psychosis”, it was the “psychosis” that most stung, and that I felt most ashamed of. Instead of admit to people at my school that I had “psychosis”, which has a terrible name, I feigned some kind of mysterious, verbose-sounding head injury (“occipital neuralgia”).

Depression and autism are both derided and misunderstood, but they both have slightly positive representations, even if those positive representations are inaccurate and often stupid. Sheldon Cooper eventually gets a girlfriend, while the “Black Dog” gave Winston Churchill the ultimately realistic outlook to defeat the Nazis.

While people with depression and autism struggle, it is psychosis that still remains totally maligned, misunderstood, and resolutely unsexy. Picture someone with psychosis and the first thought is that Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho, or Jack Nicholson hacking a wall with an axe.

These prejudices pass to the psychiatric profession and to personal relationships. Mention to someone that you “hear voices”. Psychiatrists will often ask you “what the voices say” or “do the voices tell you to hurt people?” Girlfriends, and friends, meanwhile, will run a country mile, even if “depression” and “autism” can be cute, plushy signs of macholessness.

I hear voices. And, no, these voices do not tell me to ‘hurt people” or to hurtle an axe into a wall. Quite often, they don’t “tell me” anything. They are more like a malfunctioning computer, a high pitched sound emitted from a broken TV. Often, I will hear the voice of people I know, singing a note, while not actually singing any particular word. There is no message. Or I will hear bodies of water, rivers, oceans, running, that aren’t there. Or I will hear creatures that aren’t there.

Yet when I am tired also people’s voices will remold themselves into actual messages. These are usually negative, and deceptive, but still don’t involve commanding me to do anything. But they are fearful. When I was a teenager I would frequently hear a familiar voice saying, “I am coming to get you”.

But they can also be positive. They can be familiar tones of people I like heard at the creak of a door. There is a particular door that I open near my office and it reminds me, every time, of the distinct, imperceptible hum of someone that I like, a lot.

So saying “hearing voices” is a simplification. They are auditory hallucinations. They are a little like dreams, except your mind is carrying over concepts from dreams into reality, and asserting the rational part of your brain takes actual work. They are made worse by tiredness or hunger.

They are also a little like an imagination gone wild, or wrong. And imaginations are good, and necessary for writers, artists, and children, as well as everyone else.

So, in other words, “psychosis”, like depression or autism, can often be unpleasant, and undesirable. But there’s also a creative component to it. If it is well-managed, and the rational part of yourself is strong, it’s even possible to control it, to snap out of it.

This is something that medical professionals do not seem to understand. Nor do religious people, often. The religious response to saying you “hear voices” is often to declaim you as a fraud, or a madman, who needs the grace of God. Who needs healing. Not that you might, just might, have the fragments of an authentic, prophetic gift (while clearly not being the God, or the Messiah, etc.)

Our inability to take people who hear voices seriously leads them to the extremes of proclaiming themselves to be God.

So this is why I am writing this, here, now. Because I think that hearing voices needs to be less taboo. I think we need to be able to say, without societal derision or fear. I have had two points in my life where the hearing of voices has actually been an assault.

But in the last two years the condition has been well-managed. It will never fully go away. But part of helping “psychosis” not to be aggressive, or uncontrollable, is to actually take the content of what people with “psychosis” are actually saying seriously, and to have an awareness that hearing voices is something that a lot of the population report. Not just axe-murderers.

If psychotics are given the space and trust to share their visions, they will be better, and society will be better, able to incorporate the extreme creativity and originality they are able to showcase.  

People have only admitted to me that they hear voices under the most extreme promises of confidence. This should not be the case.

We are heading towards a braver new world of e-parenting, or tele-parenting. Diminished is the genuinely absent parent; the absent parent is often available virtually, if only a child’s attention span can access them.

For one of my friends with daughters, their father is not available as he frequently is away, working on an oil-rig. But, from the oil-rig, he has data, wi-fi, so he can organise little video chats with them.

For me, virtually my only contact with my child has been online since just before he turned 2, for reasons I shall not go into.

During the pandemic, I worked in care homes, homeless shelters, and was an online tutor. I never had a job that involved excessive Zoom use. I also have this little thing called “autism”.

We spoke virtually before he could even speak. This is not an intuitive way to speak to a non-verbal child. How do you tap into a child’s emotions or practise non-verbal communication electronically?

When my son did learn to speak, I missed his first word, and had to learn how to understand his speech, or see the developments in his speech, via Zoom.

I think, after this situation rages for two years, it is only recently I have begun to learn what to do. I think the key was to incorporate ideas from online tutoring. I’m trying to learn never to just waffle, and keep every single activity, dynamic, reciprocal, and engaged. So it’s not “read stories” but co-create stories – talk about characters, ask if he likes words, ask what he thinks will happen next. I have written stories with my son together online.

Part of this is using the screen share function, and reading an old children’s book while pointing out pictures, slowly reading.

But the problem is that seeing parenting a three year old online as “teaching” is also problematic. It’s extractivist, for one: kids of that age do not need militant educational programs, pushing them to build their vocabulary. At that age, children can, for once, be free of expectations to accumulate knowledge.

So it’s with reluctance, and nervousness, that I’m experimenting more with play, even if there are innate technological limits. Puppets were a great discovery, but can you stage an online puppet show for a three year old? It’s an interesting challenge.

Similarly, can you actually play hide and seek online? Or how hard is it to synchronise different activities, or talk about what would work together, often with difficult emotions and atomised family units after a relationship?

As I actually start to research this, more and more, one of the best resources I have found is this: https://www.socialworkerstoolbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Virtual-Family-Time-and-Contact-Fun-Activities-and-Games.pdf. These ideas, often with a bit of coordination and preparation, are all genuinely possible to implement. Many of them are just verbal, and therefore don’t necessarily need embodied interaction.

I used to love taking my son to museums. But it strikes me as I write this that, for a child, it could be pretty much identical to just get the British Museum website up and look through the exhibits online, and respond emotionally to what you see together. What is this? What is that? I’ve often found myself just randomly listening to stuff my son says and trying to approximate what he’s talking about with my own ideas. I spent a long time recently looking up pressure cookers after he was talking about a “flat thing that makes steam come out”.

Yes, it could be fun to write an e-mail together while virtual parenting. Admittedly, it feels so much inferior to being there. But I suppose part of the challenge of the twenty-first century is we will have to get over that sense we have to “be there”. Families will be increasingly divided and learning how to digitally parent may save us all.

And it’s never going to be the same. But it might be, sometimes, as good, as real parenting, if we put enough work into it. But we need to put the work in, to prepare, because nobody knows how to teleparent a child. It’s an unfamiliar concept that our parents and parents’ parents had no notion of. So I’m writing this as a starting point to prepare some idea how of how to parent when forced into a situation when digital conversations are practically all you have.

John Walsh sees the “emancipatory interest” of unmasking “dramaturgical society” for its “fraudulent or repressive character”. The “thing-in-itself reality” of an object can be mystified by its “phenomenal presentation”.

The default presentation of poetry is from the lectern. This is a phenomenal presentation of Protestant piety. Poets at readings are largely consigned to the role of Anglican priests, gently entertaining their flock. Invariably, people are sitting. Invariably, the poet does not know their work off by heart.

In the “Prologue” of God’s Gift to Women, Don Paterson mocks these conventions richly, and the general tone of poetry readings. We’re at a poetry reading, we proudly announce to ourselves. They become enlightened opportunities to show we “get the clever stuff”. They become boringly fraudulent activities, where we finally put to use the expensive literary training (either financially or temporally) by a network of sighs and snorts.

Elsewhere, Paterson also mocks these conventions, beautifully, in 40 Sonnets. Poets are sorcerers, magicians, encouraged to talk in the gaps of their poems but certainly not actually read them. “Anything but read your poem”, the audience is imagined to demand. Legend has it that Paterson became so bored of readings that he no longer does it.

I thought I could upend the whole customs of poetry readings. But what are the alternatives? And are we ready for them?

The griot – the troubadour-historian, for example – retells, in verse, the history of the people. Can we be this? Can we train ourselves to do this?

In a culture obsessed with specialisation, perhaps not? Is there a market for a good griot?

We are shamefully aware, for example, that peppering our cryptic verse (for our verse is cryptic if it is mysterious to… the people….. the pub… the crowd at Spoons… the guy under the bridge…) with musical interludes exposes our incompetence. In a culture where “to sing well” is to be able to shoot dopamine into someone’s face, the kind of light, lilting singing that inevitably accompanied an entire history will take ages to work. It will be a gradual cultural process. Nobody in this lifetime will reinstitute the folk storyteller, the troubadour, hobbling from place to place.

So let’s chip away at it? In my Fringe show, a poetry reading, I tried to abolish not only the lectern but the concept of applause, the idea that readings should not have musical accompaniments, the idea that poetry readings should necessarily be soporific encounters. For that is what marketing demands. It is keeping the youth away. Probably.

But I am equally not interested in the alternative. The alternative, I realised, is that we become comedians. And that, therefore, to some extent, our poetry becomes therapy for ourselves, and for the audience. A ritual of immolation, for comedy inevitably directs somewhere. We are shooting for laughs, or for sobs, in other words. And the only way to do this is to expose ourselves so much that we become loud……

So why can’t we learn to shut up? To perform poetry as sacred ritual? We already have the lectern for that. Why not stand our books on the lectern, and use them as springboards for incantation, reverie? With an explicitly religious focus, we can get away with the bad singing. It is excusable as praise.

But ultimately performers, at least today, are only ever drug dealers. You pay 5 pounds for a dopamine hit. What you should perhaps be paying for is a poet to truly lodge him or herself into your skull. For their words to become your landscape, your pavement. Perhaps paying for love. And, if we poets know how to do one thing better than carpenters or shepherds or AI programmers, it is to love.

How can performance not be drug dealing? Certainly not at the Fringe. I think we need to reinstitute the procession. Let them pay 5 pounds to dance, scatter dye, wear masks, and recite. Then afterwards we will try to sell them our small-press books.

Maybe I should have somehow perfected my show. In some crystalline structure.
Panicking, I get Instagram, in a desperate effort of promotion. I have always flattered myself that Instagram is the last bastion of social media that I have not defected to. An uncharted territory.
And I imagine some baleful reality, the continuation of some awful “for now”, where I have this forever, and I am doomed, in some circle of hell, to look at Reels.
Meanwhile, everything else distracts, such as the awful agony, etc.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/brother-smudge-s-strange-meditation
https://www.instagram.com/brothersmudge163/