Pleased to have another Capitalism poem at IT here – with thanks. Love the literal image!

Ted Hughes’ Crow [1970] was always a poetry collection reflecting on a world then, now and continuing. The line Who begat Crow from ‘Lineage’ is answered by an acknowledgement of that foreverness, and its most bleakly enduring element is confirmed as death in ‘Examination at the Womb-Door’ and the poem which follows this, ‘A Kill’.

I came to Crow later than its publication date but can’t quite remember when. At that publication and when I read later, it was beyond the fun, frolics and social commentary of The Mersey Sound, and other ‘popular’ poetry at the time [in my knowing – I’m sure it is much wider than this] was the often muscular Thom Gunn and similarly Seamus Heaney, as well as the genteel cynicism of Philip Larkin whose most direct line was ‘They fuck you up…’ – and I am not one of his detractors.

But Hughes and Crow was the yang to Larkin at the time. I revelled in the collection’s compound-word gallery, the comic brutalities described, and the relentless dark portrayals of ‘the destructive reality we inhabit’ [A. Alvarez – a critic also reflecting the time].

So when I playfully designed my Penguin Classics cover as Crowvid I was also being quite serious, thinking of Hughes as the current UK poet laureate eviscerating the decisions made by a hopeless government in a world as black as it ever was.

Introduced to his poetry yesterday by a friend. Translations from the French, the style of all I have seen is as these list poems – wonderful!

When you have time on your hands, not that I ever need that excuse…

But here is a great idea for combining two easy-to-access methods for producing and printing your writing, albeit on a small scale with a large scale ruse.

The first is the one-page zine, an old idea, but one I came across recently with an easy-to-follow video and template, which you can find here. My first production is the following short set of Lockdown Poems, so a serious endeavour, but enjoyable to make as well as post to a few people at a time when receiving mail is hopefully quite welcome:

The second is using an online generator to produce either a Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics front book cover, as with this post’s lead image. It is a brilliant idea that has been made/released, I think, very recently but which has already gone viral. You can get it here.

So I have combined these two ideas for my next zine product, still to be printed, and below is a screengrab of what will be the front and back covers [I don’t want to give the writing away] here:

With thanks, and to art by JC. Read here.