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I found this today in searching for other things from the past!

Written with Rupert Loydell, we reflect on the importance of writers working in schools: he visiting mine on a number of occasions to run always purposeful, productive writing workshops.

Seems to me that little has changed, apart from how now I suspect it is so much more difficult to ‘justify’ paying to have visiting writers. 2004 was hardly a time of creative purpose in those running education from afar, but there was more freedom for those with the will to personally direct some of their focus on what mattered – like creative writing within schools whose curriculums (general, and English in particular) were otherwise geared to testing as well as narrow applications; certainly little celebration of the metaphorical! It’s more complex than this, but anyone bothering to read here will understand.

The final piece from my satirical novel Writing with Hammers will, I trust, speak for its own metaphoric self.

Probably the first ‘grid’ concrete poem I have written – many years ago and prompted by the work of Edwin Morgan

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Many of us will have felt the need to say something – thanks to IT and Rupert for providing my outlet here.

Pleased to have a poem here today at the recently resurrected Stride. My thanks to Rupert who for many years has provided a platform for my writing. Stride‘s return – after a brief break – is now featuring a wide range of poets’ work on a regular, rolling basis.

(image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand)

It is a wonderful conversion with large, open
and airy space for this pair of triple-vaccinated

older guys who are still being conscientious
when meeting up to imagine what will alter

for the new year. He has set out two wooden chairs
and a small table in between – it is as if we will

engage in debate or play a game of chess when
the board arrives. On the first fanciful probability,

there’s no argument as we both decimate the
Tories for their lies, corruption and sleaze: not

that hopeful for change here when the same is
happening on that other continent with its own

disintegrating democracy; of the second, there’s
no chess – we have never played together (me

not once) – but I am challenged to a test of table
tennis, another beneficiary of the barn dimensions.

I’ve genuinely not played for years, and he –
surely – has had combats with the many in his

family who visit there, not least this Christmas
just gone when he honed his skills.

It is a cameo bout, a sparring for things to
come when I return more readied and willing:

and now I know his shot – that flick to the side
just over the net and hard to reach, even more

taxing then bending down to chase errant balls
across the great expanse of that beautiful floor.

Pleased to have a work with collaborator Nick Dormand in the current issue of BlueHouse Journal. Go here to view. With thanks to Meredith.