{"id":14657,"date":"2022-05-26T20:50:09","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T19:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/poetry-against-the-monarchy\/"},"modified":"2022-05-26T20:50:09","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T19:50:09","slug":"poetry-against-the-monarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/poetry-against-the-monarchy\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry against the monarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-14654\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a-600x450.jpg 600w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a-300x225.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a-441x331.jpg 441w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a-768x576.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/468bf5f58391799e4cdbe1b20493193a-10x8.jpg 10w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Fran Lock<\/strong> presents four poems which\u00a0capture the oddity and the horror of living in a country without class solidarity and where we are encouraged to accept a monarchy symbolising inequality, privilege and oppression. Image above: Paul Harrop<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Queen\u2019s Platinum Jubilee is looming, and my own small section of England\u2019s Garden Coast has already witnessed worrying outbreaks of union bunting. Festivities are threatened. I\u2019m dreading it. Having tried and failed to invite myself somewhere \u2013 anywhere \u2013 else for the entire obnoxious duration, there\u2019s nothing left to do but watch the spectacle unfold with an appropriate mixture of anger and nausea.<\/p>\n<p>I was living in London when Britain \u2018celebrated\u2019 the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. That was stomach-churning enough: a nasty little marketing manoeuvre designed to recast the monarchy as a cultural agent as opposed to a political one. The Diamond Jubilee sought to free the monarchy from its difficult, morally compromised political context, and cement it instead at the very heart of Brand Britain: a series of cultural levers \u2013 music, literature, film, sport, art, and drama \u2013 intended to evoke a nebulous though crowd-pleasing notion of Britishness with which to distract the populace at home and to woo the global marketplace. It was deeply cynical, but it did make some level of strategic sense.<\/p>\n<p>London hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Games that year, taking full advantage of the opportunity to socially cleanse the city of homeless, poor and working-class populations, while promoting the capital as a securitised playground for the rich. The relentless frenzy with which The Games were hyped was matched by an equally zealous clampdown on any potential unrest. Protest was denied through preventative policing, and by a virtual blackout on dissenting voices across the mainstream media. Coverage of the Olympic Games encouraged a profound and disturbing disconnect between the feelgood spectacle and its grim political underpinnings.<\/p>\n<p>A particularly egregious example was Paralympic sponsorship by ATOS, the outsourcing giant and \u2018health care\u2019 provider whose infamous fitness to work tests caused wave upon wave of often fatal misery to be visited upon those with physical disabilities and mental health issues alike. How was it possible for the public to be so inspired and galvanised by the achievements of disabled athletes, yet happy to ignore the injustice meted out against other disabled people, or to accept the cruel irony of ATOS as a \u2018proud\u2019 and prominent Paralympic sponsor?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Irrational jingoism<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Noam Chomsky describes sport as a crucial component of the \u2018indoctrination system\u2019. In <em>Manufacturing Consent<\/em>, he states that sport functions as \u2018a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority. And you know, group cohesion, behind leadership elements. In fact it\u2019s training in irrational jingoism. Which is not to decry sport in and of itself, or those who follow or participate in it. It is rather Chomsky\u2019s call to be conscious of the way notions of \u2018patriotism\u2019 and belonging are manufactured and exploited: by companies like ATOS who hijack the achievements of athletes to rehabilitate their damaged public image, or by nation states and governments to create an uncritical consensus reality.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EuwmWnphqII\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The Diamond Jubilee rode the surge of nationalistic sentiment stirred up by \u2018Team GB\u2019 and the Olympic Games. What was being celebrated was not so much the Queen herself, and certainly not the monarchy, but the amorphous sense of Britain or Britishness, an idea of which Elizabeth Windsor is the kitsch and endlessly marketable signifier. A symbol, in other words, ripe for reproduction across one hundred thousand souvenir keychains. The flag-waving spectacle created by mainstream media discourses empties the monarchy of historical and political context, allowing them to become a hollow receptacle for whatever idea is expedient to government. Cultural discourses have tended to heavily moralise the monarchy through representations of nationhood, philanthropy, and family, effectively masking their relationship to centuries of exploitation, accumulation, corruption, and conquest.<\/p>\n<p>Fast forward to 2022 and the monarchy seems symbolically shaky. The glorious moment during Liverpool\u2019s FA Cup match against Chelsea on the 15th of May, when fans booed the National Anthem, seems to suggest both a disillusionment with these British figureheads, and an abiding frustration with the \u2018values\u2019 they are supposed to represent. It isn\u2019t only that the royals themselves have shrunk in the public estimation, as indeed they might, but that government propaganda has welded the idea of Britain to these fallible individuals too successfully for either party\u2019s good. What, after all, are we being summoned to celebrate with \u2018God Save the Queen\u2019?<\/p>\n<p>The leak of the \u2018Paradise Papers\u2019 way back in 2017 revealed the extent to which the Queen\u2019s private estate used offshore private equity funds to avoid paying tax on its holdings. Not exactly a scrupulous move, especially when you consider that the Crown is already exempt by law from taxation, and also from inheritance tax on \u2018sovereign to sovereign\u2019 bequests. As <a href=\"https:\/\/manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk\/9781526158758\/\">Laura Clancy has pointed out<\/a>, the royal family \u2018relies on the (uncodified) British constitution and political custom to play the same game\u2019 as corporate tax avoidance giants such Amazon and Facebook, thus the monarchy \u2018stitches together historical customs with financial capitalist logic.\u2019 The scale of this corruption is immense, and sharply felt by the poorest amongst us during times of austerity. According to findings published by the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2019, Austerity caused 130,000 preventable deaths. As the cost-of-living crisis escalates, this terrible toll can only increase, blighting the families, communities, and individual lives of our most vulnerable citizens. Under such conditions why wouldn\u2019t a hymn of subservience to monumental privilege be booed?<\/p>\n<p>But if obscene wealth corruption weren\u2019t enough, over the last couple of years we have also witnessed the sickening sexual assault allegations against the walking disgrace that is Prince Andrew, alongside the ongoing and surpassingly tedious saga of \u2018Megxit\u2019 with its troubling overtones of racism and misogyny. I could go on. But it begs the question: if we\u2019re not evoking love for Britain\u2019s ruling elite when we broadcast \u2018God Save the Queen\u2019, what are we evoking? Britain itself? Britishness? What\u2019s that? A country in which food banks are now forced to provide kettles and cold boxes, for those who cannot afford to use their cookers. A country in which Tory MP, Lee Anderson, felt secure enough of his position to brag that people in his constituency are now required to sign up to \u2018budgeting\u2019 and \u2018cooking\u2019 courses when they register at a food bank. Anderson is the same hypocritical toad who claimed \u00a3222,000 in expenses last year. Just saying.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Partygate, pandemics, profits and poverty<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Britain is the Britain of Partygate; of the callous and incompetent handling of a global pandemic that exacerbated the shocking extent of inequality between rich and poor. It\u2019s a country in which energy companies and supermarkets are currently enjoying treble profits, profits that the Tory Government are monumentally reluctant to tax. It\u2019s a country with an asylum policy so staggeringly inhumane as to draw condemnation from every quarter; of wrongful deportations enacted against those who have made Britain their home for decades, and illegal detention of those recently arrived and fleeing from violence.<\/p>\n<p>There is little there to be proud of. So why should fans passively condone the achievements of their team being yoked to dynastic wealth by a bunch of gilded hypocrites? The team weren\u2019t playing for \u2018Queen and Country\u2019, but representing a city that has a long, bitter association with poverty, hunger, state violence, and the remorseless grinding of the class system. That sport might be activated as a place of protest is a potentially mighty thing. Grassroots initiatives such as Liverpool and Everton\u2019s Fans Supporting Foodbanks scheme suggest that rather than an indoctrination tool, sport might provide a space of solidarity and shared social consciousness. Once, that is, it is stripped of its tired, jingoistic trappings.<\/p>\n<p>But jingoistic trappings die hard, and here on the coast I have a close-up view of the way in which national identity is selectively edited towards political ends. The Border Force patrol boats frequently mar an otherwise idyllic view of the Channel, and the hateful Napier barracks, where asylum seekers are detained under the most appalling conditions, are a stone\u2019s throw from the gorgeous rolling hills in which I walk my dog. In the build-up to the EU referendum in 2016, the White Cliffs across which I often hike had become symbolic in the debate over immigration. It is difficult to square such stunning natural beauty with their difficult legacy as icons of British insular exceptionalism and racially exclusive identity. As you walk into Dover there is no shortage of racist and anti-immigrant graffiti, no shortage of union flags, no shortage of embattled border mentality. The paraphernalia of the Platinum Jubilee merges with and glosses these more overt forms of racism, a racism that Tory Brexit legitimated and exposed.<\/p>\n<p>Dover and Thanet voted overwhelming to leave the EU, a campaign that recruited the Cliffs and the town\u2019s historic status as a defensive stronghold to project an image of Britain besieged by menacing \u2018others\u2019. There\u2019s a sad irony here: according to the Centre for Progressive Policy, Dover and Thanet are likely to be \u2018pushed into poverty\u2019 by the Tory government\u2019s failure to tackle a cost-of-living crisis they themselves created. Dover, hit by P&#038;O\u2019s sudden sacking of 800 seafarers, is especially suffering. The town has become, in recent years, a post-Brexit carpark, and this chaos seems set to continue indefinitely. These towns are not served by the class system, by the ruling elite, or by the monarchy that is their symbolic head. Britain needs better symbols, and a more inclusive, empathetic vision of itself.<\/p>\n<p>A good place to start in creating that vision would be in ridding ourselves of an institution whose wealth and history is inseparable from the depredations of colonialism, and whose cornerstone is inequality. In recent months, many former British colonies in the Caribbean have declared their intent to abolish the monarchy and remove Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state, including Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica and St. Kitts. Barbados has already cut ties with the British monarchy to become the world\u2019s newest republic, and to rightly pursue reparations for the horrors of the slave trade. Campaigners are right: an apology is not enough. Prince Charles \u2018acknowledging\u2019 the \u2018atrocity\u2019 of slavery isn\u2019t enough. An institution whose wealth was built on and maintained by slavery telling the descendants of slaves, whose families, cultures, and communities were scarred by colonialism, that they feel their pain is frankly insulting. You cannot cherry-pick which parts of Empire to whitewash and to fetishize. The foundation of Empire is slavery; slavery is the direct consequence of empire. The same applies to hierarchy, poverty, and gross inequality at home.<\/p>\n<p>Much of the criticism levelled against the monarchy \u2013 at least much of the criticism that is allowed to be heard \u2013 has been rather toothless in nature, preferring to focus on the monarchy as an irrelevant and anachronistic institution, rather than a powerful political tool, enmeshed in the structures and the logics of capitalism at its absolute worst. I think that poetry can provide a place for wrestling with these thornier complexities; to resist and reshape notions of identity, solidarity and belonging. The four poems I want to share today achieve this through very different, but interconnected strategies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Al Hutchins\u2019 \u2018Jubilee\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Al Hutchins\u2019 \u2018Jubilee\u2019 emerges from the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 2012. It tackles the callous criminalising and forcible removal of homeless populations from city centres in the run up to planned \u2018festivities\u2019. In hounding the suffering and destitute from sight, class war is enacted even as its evidence is erased. The homeless protagonist in Hutchins\u2019 poem is a \u2018Jesus, shoeless, on the London Orbital\u2019. He is a subject: subject to and under a law that carts him around like freight. He is not, and never will be, an implied audience, or ideal citizen. Throughout the poem, his erratic movement across the city is embodied by the staggered, halting line. Hutchins\u2019 distinctive use of minimal punctuation gives the poem a provisional and precarious feel, emblematic not only of a difficult and marginal existence, but the way in which that existence always teeters on the brink of invisibility; the wilful blindness with which such lives are met.<\/p>\n<p>The poem makes reference to food waste with great effect. It begins with the lines: \u2018It is still daylight and the string\/ Round the meat has been thrown\u2019 and later evokes \u2018Good food thrown for\/ Spite\/ Meat and eggs crumped\/ Like old letters\u2019. The discarded food in these lines does double duty: it signals the wasteful attitudes and behaviours of those with a degree of privilege, but it also associates Hutchins\u2019 protagonist with the detritus and trash that are aimed at him and alongside which he is forced to subsist. He too is considered waste. He too has been discarded. Hutchins uses meat and eggs specifically to summon an image of the suffering animal bodies that provided the food. An image of slaughtered cattle closes the poem, the sound of the rain evoking the \u2018clatter\u2019 of their hooves. No one wishes to be reminded of where their food comes from or what happens to it after it has been thrown away, but Hutchins\u2019 poem exposes both those things as it exposes the fact that immense wealth can only exist by metaphorically cannibalising the bodies of the poor and desperate.<\/p>\n<p>I think the most haunting passage of this poem is when Hutchins\u2019 speaker breaks the mood of internal reverie to ask the reader a direct question that contains both imploring and accusatory elements: \u2018What is the merriment of\/ 60 years like this?\u2019 Here Hutchins\u2019 contrasts the sixty years of grim endurance suffered by his homeless protagonist, with the sixty years of privilege and ease afforded the Queen. The survival of homeless persons is a miracle of resilience and resourcefulness. The survival of a person born into obscene wealth with access to the best of everything is hardly surprising. Why should the Queen\u2019s longevity be feted, and Hutchins\u2019 \u2018Jesus\u2019 scorned? Further, the speaker summons his own sixty years like a sentence, inviting us to empathise with his long experience of abjection, but also to reflect that a sixty-year reign in which conditions such as his persist is a mark of shame, not an occasion for celebration.<\/p>\n<p><strong>P. V. Tims satire on the reptilian royals<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>P.V. Tims takes an entirely different approach to protest in the poem \u2018If David Icke was Right\u2019. On the surface, this whimsical piece imagines what our society would look like supposing Icke\u2019s crackpot conspiracy theory of a blood-drinking \u2018reptilian elite\u2019 in Buckingham Palace was literally true. Tims has a light, humourist\u2019s touch, accentuated through the use of a simple alternating rhyme scheme with an easy, mostly regular meter. The poem can be enjoyed as an absurd satire on Britain\u2019s slavish attachment to the monarchy: not to be discouraged by the fact that the entire royal family have revealed themselves as a race of vicious space lizards, \u2018Blighty\u2019 loses no time in converting Buckingham Palace into a spacious reptile house, opening it to the public, and generally \u2018Flaunting our cold-blooded monarchist grace\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>However, there is a violence lurking within the poem: the \u2018flies and raw gizzards\u2019 that have replaced the twee Victoria sponges of <em>The Great British Bake Off<\/em> are funny in context, but also repellently visceral. The juxtaposition of raw offal with the kitschy TV show suggests something disgusting and lethal hidden just beneath the surface of its carefully stage-managed, people-pleasing Britishness. Tims furthers this unsettling ambiguity by use of the phrases \u2018cold-blooded\u2019 and \u2018forked-tongued\u2019, which we are used to encountering in their figurative sense as applied to people who are ruthless, glib, and deceptive. Because the poem is placed in the present active tense, Tims blurs the line not only between reptile and human, but speculative future and lived present, implying that those qualities of cruelty and deceitfulness belong equally to our human royal family.<\/p>\n<p>The final stanza concludes with the hapless \u2018silver-lining\u2019 that at least in their lizard form the royal family make more attractive stamps. This weak justification is reminiscent of the arguments often offered in favour of the monarchy: that they are \u2018harmless\u2019, \u2018amusing\u2019, \u2018good for tourism\u2019, as if any of those things excuse or balance the towering inequality and historical violence they represent and preside over.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sabrina Lyall&#8217;s evocation of class-based oppression<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In Sabrina Lyall\u2019s \u2018The Subject\u2019, both Hutchins\u2019 bleak realism and Tims\u2019 gleeful absurdism meet. As the title implies, the poem presents us with a portrait of the ideal royal subject. Lyall uses a surrealistic turn to create a grotesque and troubling image of an obedient model citizen, \u2018white\/ as a weak emergency\u2019, who thinks \u2018Kate Middleton\/ looks beautiful in green\u2019 and that the Queen is \u2018doing a marvellous job\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Lyall\u2019s images are suggestive, rather than declarative, and she builds her picture by small self-contained increments, offering strange and unsettling glimpses of her poetic subject. The third stanza is particularly disturbing: \u2018The subject\u2019s body\/ is a neat briquette,\/ catching fire\/\/ (nobody minds).\u2019 Here Lyall plays the shocking violence of a woman being burnt against the banality of a tidy suburban barbeque. Even in an extremis of pain and suffering the subject is \u2018neat\u2019. The parenthesised \u2018nobody minds\u2019 is chilling: so long as the subject suffers tidily, nobody need take offence at her distress. That this is her priority recalls <a href=\"https:\/\/www.abebooks.co.uk\/Write-What-Steve-Biko-Pearson-Education\/30750798553\/bd\">Steve Biko\u2019s dictum<\/a> that \u2018The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.\u2019 Lyall is repeatedly signalling throughout the poem that what allegiance to monarchy and empire requires of us is to be bland and self-effacing to the point of our own destruction; to ignore our self-interest and that of our class cohort in favour of identification with those who seek to exploit and control us.<\/p>\n<p>Lyall\u2019s subject apes the behaviours of her social \u201cbetters\u201d in the hopes of passing as one of them. While she is permitted to exist within their orbit, she is never quite accepted, she \u2018has a permit\/ for her face\u2019, is \u2018allowed\/ to park here\u2019, is \u2018trusted\/ with the key\/ to the community\/ allotment.\u2019 These mediocre privileges are only accorded to her because she has made of herself an insipid mask of conformity, acceptably middle-class and feminine in her appearance and opinions. Her life is small, \u2018a tiny Hell\/ enclosed inside\/ a Margate snow globe\u2019; she is forced to live inside \u2018a wicker hamper\u2019. These metaphors conjure the restriction and claustrophobia of working-class life, especially during the pandemic. Margate, with its large Tory majority, voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. The poem captures the dislocation of a working-class subject hemmed in and stifled by an experience of class-based oppression with which they cannot identity. Rather, the poem ends with Lyall\u2019s subject stuffed like so much dirty laundry into her hamper, still mouthing platitudes about the \u2018marvellous\u2019 Queen.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kevin McCann&#8217;s mirroring of privilege and poverty<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A different kind of willed inattention is the subject of Kevin McCann\u2019s \u2018Jubilee\u2019: a direct address to the sanctimonious and smugly complacent. When I read it for the first time, I found myself thinking again of Lee Anderson, forcing his constituents to enrol in \u201cbudgeting\u201d courses because there is, as the poem states, \u2018no money tree\u2019. I thought about Tory Party chairman Oliver Dowden auctioning off a champagne bottle signed by Boris Johnson as a \u201csouvenir of partygate\u201d, and of other acts equally devoid of empathy. McCann\u2019s opening lines are chilling, his subject wakes up, \u2018dry-eyed with excitement\u2019 on their \u2018special day\u2019. This image is immediately followed by the parenthesised lines \u2018This morning another ex-squaddie\u2019s\/ Found dead in another doorway\u2019. The brackets function as an afterthought or aside, performing the pushing away, closing off and containing of this unpalatable piece of information. It isn\u2019t allowed to intrude upon a scene of happy anticipation, and the poem\u2019s subject will not allow themselves to perceive its relationship to their own privilege and pleasure.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Dry-eyed\u2019 is telling, unblinking and unaffected. \u2018Your special day\u2019 is telling too. It conjures both a hopelessly self-involved narcissism and an absolute identification with the Queen, whose \u2018special day\u2019 it really is. The repetition of \u2018another\u2019 achieves two effects: to signal the dailiness of what should be a shocking and nationally shaming incident, and to dramatize the numbness with which such news is actually met. In this context \u2018squaddie\u2019 feels sneering, a way of reducing the human being at the centre of the tragedy to a faceless and expendable unit. The irony is sharp: how many times have British soldiers been \u2013 often posthumously \u2013 recruited for the purposes of jingoistic propaganda and monarchic spectacle? Is working-class life only valuable if expended in the service of the military industrial complex? Are those who have survived such service not worthy of care?<\/p>\n<p>Throughout McCann\u2019s poem repetition is used to superb effect. Lines five to eight lead us through a litany of delightful surprises, from the ring at the doorbell, to the appearance of guests bringing wine and beer, linked together in rapid succession with the conjunction \u2018and\u2019. Lines thirteen to sixteen mirror this listing, but link their incidents with the phrase \u2018out there\u2019: \u2018Out there the cupboards are empty,\/ Out there someone takes their own life,\/ Out there every state celebration\u2019. The effect is to contrast what is happening \u2018inside\u2019 the subject\u2019s insular and insulated bubble of privilege with the horrors visited upon those who struggle to exist outside of it, while also signalling the entanglement of these two worlds. Because both sets of repetition have the same metrical structure with the same number of syllables, McCann creates the sense that the events they describe are unfolding at the same time; that the latter is the consequence of the former.<\/p>\n<p>In the second poem of this short sequence there is a powerful shift of perspective, also achieved through mirroring. The poem still uses direct address to an unnamed \u2018you\u2019, but one who wakes up \u2018hungry and tired\u2019. The bracketed thoughts this poetic subject wishes to push away and enclose are those that bring despair in their wake, \u2018Every morning\u2019s the same\u2019, tea and toast for breakfast \u2018Ditto lunch and your evening meal\u2019. This shift from privilege to poverty is both an accusation and an invitation towards empathy: imagine this was you, waking up cold, tired, broke, with little to look forward to. It asks the cold, complacent middle-classes evoked in the first section to make the imaginative effort to see themselves in another\u2019s skin. Lines seven to nine repeat McCann\u2019s list formula, connecting this time a terrible set of circumstances through the conjunction \u2018and\u2019. The subject aches and is exhausted; they cough but they cannot afford to turn on their heating. This is the most affecting point in the poem. While the Queen celebrates seventy years on the throne, many elderly people in Britain are living in dire poverty, undeserved but unlamented. It is a moving contrast. It reminds us why we should be \u2013 and remain \u2013 furious.<\/p>\n<p>All four poems in their various ways capture the oddity and the horror of living in a country without class solidarity, encouraged to identify instead with an elite authority who could not give a toss about you. But the poems also provide a strategy and a space of speaking back to that experience, of holding it to the light and exposing it for the cheap trick that it is.<br \/>\u2026<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><strong>Jubilee (01.06.12)<\/strong><\/span><br \/><em>By Al Hutchins<\/em> <\/p>\n<p>It is still daylight and the string<br \/>Round the meat has been thrown<br \/> Under the bridge all the blood<br \/>And water went<br \/>Workless<br \/> Drawn down to a bead of <br \/> Victoriana<br \/>Before the avalanche of toil:<br \/>Jesus, shoeless, on the London Orbital<\/p>\n<p>My desire for drink<br \/>Has gone <br \/>Oblivion will not mend<br \/>This<br \/>I dream of a ha ha<br \/>And howl<br \/>Good enough for a plague of kings<br \/>Hard pretend to happy<br \/>Ape interest in the regular<br \/>While the water levels in me <br \/> like a duel<\/p>\n<p>And my birds lose wing\u2026<\/p>\n<p>What is the merriment of <br \/>60 years like this?<\/p>\n<p>Good food thrown for <br \/>Spite <br \/>Meat and eggs crumped<br \/>Like old letters<br \/>Red rude<br \/>Ruby lips<br \/>Pressed against us while <br \/>We try to sleep?<\/p>\n<p>\u2026Well, that was extensively apologised<br \/>There were logistical errors\u2026<\/p>\n<p>I listen<\/p>\n<p>And the rain slaughters<br \/>Clatters<br \/> Its cattle down<br \/>\u2026<br \/><em>Al Hutchins is a West Midlands-based poet, performing \u201cstuff\u201d since 1997. His rhythm, holler and tune-mongering thing, The Courtesy Group has been lauded by the likes of John Peel, Stuart Maconie and John Cooper Clarke. His poetry and fiction have been published by New River Press, Eccentric City, Tindal Street Press, and by <strong>Culture Matters<\/strong>.<\/em> <br \/>\u2026<br \/><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><strong>If David Icke Was Right<\/strong><\/span><br \/><em>By P.V. Tims<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Our grey, grieving Liz, tired of the lie,<br \/>Shuffles old Buck\u2019 to a room filled with sun;<br \/>Takes off her skin with a lingering sigh<br \/>And admits to herself the deception is done.<br \/>In place of a Queen, a monitor lizard!<br \/>In place of a palace, a reptile tank!<br \/>In place of the Bake Off, flies and raw gizzards!<br \/>This is now Britain; we have Liz to thank!<br \/>What is unleashed by our scuttling Empress?<br \/>What fresh nightmare does Blighty now face?<br \/>And must we still court the hordes of tourists,<br \/>Flaunting our cold-blooded monarchist grace?<br \/>They queue round the block to see the glass wall,<br \/>Of Buckingham\u2019s new hothouse renovation,<br \/>Where Princes and Dukes are having a ball.<br \/>Forked tongues and tails! All pomp and elation!<br \/>Not much to choose twixt a Prince and a gecko.<br \/>For either specimen, what price is fair?<br \/>\u201cGod Save The Queen\u201d still resounds with an echo.<br \/>But at least with the reptiles our stamps have flair.<br \/>\u2026<\/p>\n<p><em>Paul Victor Tims is a Durham based sci-fi writer, cultural pundit and die-hard socialist. He sometimes does poetry (not very well).<\/em><br \/> \u2026<br \/><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><strong>The Subject<\/strong><\/span><br \/><em>By Sabrina Lyall<\/em><\/p>\n<p>is white<br \/>as a weak emergency.<\/p>\n<p>The subject <br \/>has emptied her eyes<br \/>into ashtrays.<\/p>\n<p>The subject\u2019s body<br \/>is a neat briquette,<br \/>catching fire<\/p>\n<p>(nobody minds).<\/p>\n<p>The subject\u2019s blood<br \/>is a meek scouse broth,<br \/>is a milky supper,<br \/>is a pale tea sucked<br \/>through a crazy straw.<\/p>\n<p>The subject<br \/>is a bird<br \/>with lectern wings.<\/p>\n<p>The subject <br \/>has a permit<br \/>for her face,<\/p>\n<p>she is allowed<br \/>to park here;<\/p>\n<p>is trusted<br \/>with the key<br \/>to the community<br \/>allotment.<\/p>\n<p>The subject is<br \/>a little latte-stripling,<br \/>takes selfies in a Starbucks,<br \/>lengthens her lashes,<br \/>blogs about saving the bees.<\/p>\n<p>The subject is<br \/>a twelve yr old girl,<br \/>trapped in the body<br \/>of a 53 year-old<br \/>daily mail reader<\/p>\n<p>(she has hussy eyes).<\/p>\n<p>Her world is a tiny Hell<br \/>enclosed inside <br \/>a Margate a snow globe.<\/p>\n<p>The subject thinks Kate Middleton<br \/>looks beautiful in green.<\/p>\n<p>The subject trails<br \/>her cursor<br \/>like a planchette over<br \/>the day\u2019s indifferent news.<\/p>\n<p>The subject is <br \/>in therapy,<br \/>but not really.<\/p>\n<p>The subject is <br \/>kind to animals,<br \/>but only some animals<br \/>and not when they shit<br \/>on the floor.<\/p>\n<p>The subject is<br \/>on a diet<br \/>since 1982.<\/p>\n<p>The subject pretends<br \/>to have a peanut allergy<br \/>so people will think<br \/>she\u2019s interesting.<\/p>\n<p>The subject lives<br \/>in a wicker hamper,<br \/>she says doesn\u2019t the queen<br \/>do a marvellous job?<br \/>\u2026<br \/><em>Sabrina Lyall divides her time between Clonmel and London. She is new to poetry, but is currently working on her first collection.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u2026<br \/><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><strong>Jubilee<\/strong><\/span><br \/><em>By Kevin McCann<\/em><\/p>\n<p>(Jubilee: from the Latin Jubilo = to shout)<\/p>\n<p>1.<\/p>\n<p>Wake up dry eyed with excitement<br \/>On this your special day<br \/>(This morning another ex-squaddie\u2019s<br \/>Found dead in another doorway)<br \/>And now there\u2019s a ring on the doorbell<br \/>And the first of your friends are here<br \/>And she\u2019s brought a bottle of Moet<br \/>And he\u2019s brought some rather nice beer<br \/>So you nip out and fire up the Barbie<br \/>And then pour a large G and T<br \/>And talk of the need for harsh measures<br \/>Because there\u2019s no money tree:<br \/>Out there the cupboards are empty,<br \/>Out there someone takes their own life,<br \/>Out there every state celebration<br \/>Is another twist of the knife.<\/p>\n<p>2.<\/p>\n<p>You wake up hungry and tired<br \/>(Every morning\u2019s always the same)<br \/>Make tea and toast for your breakfast<br \/>(Ditto lunch and your evening meal)<br \/>Then have a quick flick through the Ceefax<br \/>Because daily papers aren\u2019t free:<br \/>And all of your bills have just doubled<br \/>And you can\u2019t seem to shake off that cough<br \/>And though your cold bones are aching<br \/>You\u2019ll still keep the heating switched off.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026<br \/><em>Kevin Patrick McCann has published eight collections of poetry for adults, and one for children: Diary of a Shapeshifter (Beul Aithris Publications). There is also a book of ghost stories: It\u2019s Gone Dark (The Otherside Books), and Teach Yourself Self-Publishing (Hodder), co-written with the playwright Tom Green. Ov (Beul Aithris Publications) is a fantasy novel for children.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fran Lock presents four poems which\u00a0capture the oddity and the horror of living in a country without class solidarity and where we are encouraged to accept a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":14654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[1751,2627,2352],"class_list":["post-14657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2","tag-empire","tag-jubilee","tag-queen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}