This is a re-post from Chris’s blog. If a poet was going to announce the start of a poetry tour, perhaps they would do it like this!

I have mentioned a few times the plan for this year was to take some poetry from ‘After the apocalypse‘ on the road. We made a number of steps in this direction – identifying some hosts and venues (thankyou!) and imagining how I hoped this would work – but I have struggled to bring the final ideas together. Partly this is because the last year has been one of the hardest of my life. I have been struggling with a number of things, probably related to the recent loss of both my sister and my mother. This left me grappling with the boy I was and still am within, bruised and broken by my upbringing, struggling to hide the shame that all survivors of abuse carry with them. Alongside some other family things, I was struggling to find the energy needed to invest in such a creative and collaborative endevour as I had imagined. In turn, this made me feel worse, as though I had nothing to give, nothing to offer. As if I was over. In some senses, such is the creative life. We mostly create out of our vulnerabilities and brokenness. Or perhaps not all do, but the works that moved me most came from these places. Because of this, creativity always comes with a shadow of self doubt and even (in my case) self loathing. The nature of creativity can be so self-centred too, so endlessly self-referential, which can form a loop in which the urge to make reflects backwards in a harsh light. (Some of you will know exactly what I mean.) With that as confessional context, you will appreciate all the more what I am about to describe. It is the rack that you too are stretched upon. No amount of ‘sucess’ seems to change the realities of this kind of being.

Images by Si Smith, from ‘After the apocalypse’ Yesterday (because Michaela had not given up on me when I more or less had) I took a few more steps.I did it almost unaware, just knowing that I had to keep moving. (But Michaela had been making connections, doing things that seemed to me to be almost futile.)She had already been doing the drudge-work, without which no good thing can ever happen. The form filling, the diary making. The frustration suppressing. The loving. She thought I did not see it, but I did, I just mostly thought she was wasting her time. Then, yesterday, things took an entirely unexpected (by me at least) turn.

  Before I tell you what happened, perhaps I should describe my longings for these poetry events. I have come to realise, that the things I do that bring me the greatest joy have to start with a certain kind of ‘uuughh’. It is that feeling you get when your chest feels pregnant with… how can I describe it?… goodness? Hope? Love? Grace? Excitement? None of these words quite contain what I mean, so let’s stick with ‘uuughh’. I know too that for me, uuughh is a spiritual thing as much as a physical one. It may seem totally fanciful to you to suggest that uughh is about connection to the great spirit that made the world and holds it all together, but there it is, this is what I feel, somewhere deep inside myself. I have tried to learn to look out (above all things) for the uuughh and to trust it when I feel it. To follow it when I can. I think of this as a spiritual practice, informed by thinking around theopoetics that I have spoken a lot about on this blog. In my experience, uuuhgg is most likely to be encountered around some of these things; Kindness (always always kindness, that most underated for virtues.) Community, when we do good things together Friendship, which is precious and rare, particularly for introspective men like me Hope, even in the shadow of despair Beauty (particularly arising from brokenness) Stories of hope and redemption Stories of liberation Justice bringing and peace-making It is perhaps most readily accessed when art (particularly for me, poetry and music) becomes a channel for the above. Things like this;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaSnmZLTQSE

Or this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QSivy1fkL4

  You will understand then that despite the pressures we all feel to make a living, the plan for taking these poems ‘on the road’ was not about making money. It was about making moments of uuughh for others. Small moments of kindness and transformation. This or nothing. But I knew I needed help. I needed to make community. I am fortunate enough to live in a family of musicians, but despite the best intentions, it can be hard to do things with your family. There is too much baggage and boundaries are too weak, even if love remains strong. Besides, what young musician wants to do something with dad? What we needed above all was a gifted catalyst from outside. But who would be kind enough to put themselves in the middle of such a project? Our friend Yvonne certainly has the giftedness. She has even done poetry collaborations before;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO4Cj9E422s

  Yesterday we got together to see how it would feel. My lad Will joined us on guitar and vocals. I read poetry whilst they wove sounds and then slid into song. I can only describe what happened by saying one word. Uuughh.

After the apocalypse is now out on all those unmentionable global websites that used to sell books and now sell everything.

It is also available on our website here, so forget what I just said.

After all the hard work by lots of people to get the book into some kind of shape – the editing, the design work, the proof reading… and of course Si’s magnificent images – I think it time to take make grateful pause.

It is not perfect. A few errors slipped through. The print quality on the images has not totally passed the Smith test. Despite this, I am feel a sense of satisfaction that I have not always felt after a book has been completed. I think it is because this book, despite its limitations, is as honest as I can be. Its limitations are my limitations. If it carries any hope, any beauty- these are ones that I have lived through or am reaching towards. Also, despite the commercial nature of any project like this, the book was not written to sell anything. It started in frustration, anger and dissatisfaction with the world we have made, and ends in a great sigh of connection with the spirit that sings within us all.

I hope people will read it, but if you don’t that is OK. I needed to say these things anyway. More than this though, I feel a sense of responsibility towards the ideas that the book contains.

I stand by the anger. There is lots to be angry about. But we can not exist on anger alone.

I appreciate the pause that poetry gave me, the chance to ponder and reframe the way we look. But pausing is only the beginning of change.

And even if the book offers no blueprint for betterment (because I know my limitations) I think it carries some clues. It feels to me as if these are not my own insights, but ones I have discovered, almost by accident, in the margins of the scribbles I was making as poetry was forming. This is the gift of poetry – it takes is both inside ourselves and then, if we are lucky, it draws us towards new places.

Or perhaps it is nothing to do with luck. My contention is that if a solution is anything at all, it begins in the ‘theatre of the spirit’ (as Havel put it), or to put it another way, we first have to re-encounter the meaning of our lives as individuals, but even more so collectively. We have to remember that the human world we live in has been made by humans, so it is quite possible to re-make it.

In the next season of the life of this book, I hope to be bring together some actual ‘theatres of the spirit’, by putting together some gatherings where we read together and dream together. If you are interesting in hosting/attending then get in touch.

It is hard to choose poems from the book now. They are all fragments of a five year journey. But this one will do.

.

I want to live

.

I want to live in a world in which refugees are welcomed

As if coming home. As if the food they are given

Was cooked by their own mothers.

.

I want to live in a world in which people share what they have

With those who have nothing. Where fear of scarcity is foolish

Because we finally recognised abundance.

.

I want to live in a world in which love for neighbours

Made hedges and fences inconvenient. As if real estate

Is not real after all.

.

I want to live in a world in which guns are things for museums

Behind glass with suits of armour. Where tanks are

Used only to store liquid.

.

I want to live in a world in which nothing is expendable, as if landfills

were already full. As if bags of bolts and empty cans

Can be used again tomorrow.

.

I want to live in a world in which children are thrilled by birdsong

and gloriously appalled by black beetles. Where great adventure is made

Out of mountain and forest.

.

I want to live…

Chris participated in a zoom reading with a couple of friends the other night to mark National Poetry day. It was a lovely evening, full of those tender moments that only poetry can bring. It was recorded, so if you fancy dipping in to some poetry, I’ve posted them here.

Chris was reading poems (mostly) from hie new book, which can now be ordered directly from here (as well as the usual Amazon behemoth and the like).

Those who kindly pre-ordered their copies will be getting them soon too – we are waiting for a batch to arrive here.

Here are the two recordings.

Words from Chris:

It has been a long time coming. Five years in fact. It started out when Si Smith (more of him later) asked me to do a kind of poet-in-residence thing at an art exhibition he was curating entitled ‘World upside down’ back in 2017.

This exhibition was inspired (if that is the right word) by Donald Trump’s use of the Beatitudes in his inauguration speech. For me, this began a long period of writing words of resistance against an increasingly right wing world ignoring the crises of climate change and widening inequality.

A lot has happened over the last five years. Trump came and almost went. His trusty side-kick Boris Johnson the same. Oh, and we had this thing called a pandemic.

Writing protest poems is a kind of sickness – I found myself being sucked inside a vortex of negativity. I could still see compassion and goodness but it seemed stilted, fleeting and fragile. Then the Great Silence caused us all to STOP.

What next? Where do we see hope? What have we learned and where do we find inspiration for the journey to come?

These three periods – before, during and after the apocalypse give shape to this book which will be out very soon!

I am so grateful to Si for his incredible images. He did them at a time when he was desperately trying to work on another big project (which I hope to be able to shout about in the future.)

If you have never seen his work before, he is an artist, illustrator, print maker and graphic novelist based in Leeds. Some of his work includes 40 which we collaborated on and the beautiful How to disappear completely.