Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

It’s taken 10 years and a whole lifetime to bring my new collection to fruition. As with my previous books, there have been false starts and a great many changes as this one has evolved. I’ve needed the help of feedback on drafts of poems – by Red Door Poets, an in-person workshopping group, of whom I was a member from its founding until 2020; South Ken. Stanza, a fortnightly email workshopping group; and, above all, the Collective, a fortnightly Zoom group, whose comments and support have been invaluable. But then again, writing poems is almost always a solitary activity, so first and foremost I’ve had to trust my instincts and have faith in whatever ability I have. By the end of collating the collection, 56 of its 62 poems had been previously published in journals.

As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.

I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.

As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.

So why did I choose this title? Well, it derives from the title of the longest poem in the book. That poem was largely concerned with the now long-gone phenomenon of the footballer–cricketer, who excelled enough to play at the highest levels at both sports. Beyond that though, is a sense that the phrase the last Corinthians alludes to how England, Britain, the UK and beyond has changed, mostly for the better, during my, and my immediate antecedents’ lives. I don’t have the slightest hint of rose-tinted hankering for the past, in which imperialism and discrimination very openly thrived; yet, the world before the internet and social media naturally had some pluses as well as technological and societal limitations.

My parents’ generation were born during the desperately tough times of the 1930s, experienced the trauma of war on the home front, and came of age in the Fifties, a decade when rationing was still in force for half of it, opportunities for young women were still extremely limited and young men, including my father, were called up to do National Service, some of whom ended up fighting in Korea or against independence movements in Kenya and Cyprus. Others were even exposed to the fall-out of atomic bomb tests in Australian deserts. Class and other forms of social exclusion were endemic. Roy Jenkins’s and others’ work in the Labour governments of the Sixties and Seventies to improve society through legislation – the Race Relations Act, the decriminalisation of male homosexuality and of abortion, the Sex Discrimination Act, etc. – was crucial, as was further legislation, most notably the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the overarching Equality Act 2010.

As is obvious, though, improvement was, and is, wrought not just by the law, but much more so through changes or reinforcements of individual and collective behaviours and moral values. Despite the Farage riots last August, Reform’s recent local government successes, and many inequalities which our current government is yet to address (and in some instances has worsened, e.g. the assault on people with disabilities and support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians), and despite the influence of despots on the wider world stage, this country remains one in which the overwhelming majority of people seem to act in accordance with a sense of community and compassion for most of their time. Throughout my career in local government, I was motivated by a sense of moral purpose, of wanting to help to improve the lives of children, young people and their families.

So, I hope that readers of The Last Corinthians will be able to discern some or all of that in the poems and themes which it contains. On the back cover (photo above), it says, that the book, ‘veers psychedelically through history, pausing for quieter moments’ and my inkling of what ‘psychedelic’ means is a nostalgia, in the present, for a past which never quite existed in the way I remember it. Is it absurd to self-identify as a psychedelic poet? Answers on a postcard from the future, please.