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November 5 always starts with a loud bang in Ottery St Mary, as the explosions of rock cannons echo around the town from 5am, with shots fired at various locations. This morning’s wake-up call announced the start of the town’s most celebrated event – the Tar Barrels

(illustration for my list poem by Chris Wakefield)

KS2 English SATs always have been and always will be shite. It seems that regardless of the government in power, they remain in annual, tortuous existence. They remain despite my taking the piss out of them over the years: many examples of doing so on this site. Here is one I don’t recall previously posting – there is an exam question with the ‘answer’ and this is from the Answer Book, and markers/examiners have no choice but to reject anything other than the ‘answer’ provided; then there is my response, this one more poetically sarcastic than usual reactions…

If you are uncertain (!), ‘whimper’ must surely be an acceptable answer! And it is surely better than ‘shriek’, but that’s not really the point. It is a stupid definitive question/answer in an English test/exam where such exist to be purely functional: easy to set, easy to mark, easy to provide a numerical score/outcome, easy to produce ‘results’, easy to be judged, easy to compare with targets, easy to claim THIS IS NATIONAL ASSESSMENT

On this day in 1965, Benjamin Britten’s choral work ‘Voices for Today’ premiered, commissioned by UN Secretary-General U Thant

Delighted to be in this wonderful issue, with thanks to editor Philip Rowland. This is a genuinely great read to be experienced ‘as a renga-like chain of poems’.

You can access here.

Continuing with a series of poems and lyrics about/related to Nebraska, my birth state, begun in April 2016. My last post on this was in November, 2024.

Matt Mason served as Nebraska State Poet from 2019 – 2024

To watch a video of my reading of these two poems, go here

(On this day in 1961, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ premiered in New York City)

I’m unfortunately unable to upload here my gravyfromthegazebo YouTube channel video of this brief reading, but you can access it here