How 60 years of drought became this deluge of new poetry

Yes, I’ve just added 40 per cent to my lifetime output of Poems. So this blog is an excited celebration and explanation of the simultaneous publication on this site of three new longer pieces of verse, bringing the total (after the removal of a duff one) to a magnificent seven.

This landmark may not sound like much, but it’s clearly a dramatic increase in creativity in the context of my dismal production rate to up to now. The three new Poems unveiled in early 2025 are Where Power Lies, The Commodity News and The Reinvention of Time Travel, a totally new version of The Invention of Time Travel (that’s “Invention” without the “Re” prefix) which appeared in 2022, and is now abandoned to a hard drive which advancing technology probably won’t be able to read in 20 years’ time).

An unsympathetic reader might not see how the already glacial pace of my writing activity could be improved by composing the same Poem twice. But a description of the latest three Poems and how they came about may throw some light on this apparent waste of time.

The shortest of the three, The Commodity News, is also the most accessible, though possibly not the most poetic or palatable. The Poem takes the form of a railway carriage conversation about our real oncoming global catastrophe. It originated in a dozen or so lines scribbled almost 20 years ago which were considered and rejected for The Invention and then tucked away in an ever-expanding computer file called Bits.

The verse is an experimental riot of alliteration, rhyme, half-rhyme and, as my friend Roger Bagnall points out, any number of smaller fractions of rhyme too.

The stampeding pachyderm in the Oval Office

This way of writing is not entirely new to me, but in previous outings I’ve usually known when to stop. My favourite Nobel laureate Bob Dylan achieves stunning lyrical effects with quadruple end-of-line rhymes. Rap is less constrained than that. And in a Poem about the environmental and social damage caused by corporate and governmental greed, linguistic excess is not entirely out place. So I felt entitled to push my luck.

The “commodities” of the title are of course both all the crap we consume and ourselves, the consumers. Bleak, unoriginal certainly. But it feels almost dishonest not to join the chorus of protest against capitalism’s disastrous inertia, particularly since the elephant in the board room has been joined by a stampeding pachyderm in the Oval Office.

The best way to read it is probably to tune in to the rhythm and just go with the flow.

Where Power Lies is also pretty direct. It provides several dozen reasons drawn from history not to be proud of Britain’s military past. There is also the odd suggestion that, despite the temptations, it’s a good idea to avoid armed conflict altogether.

The Poem’s references aren’t particularly topical, though their relevance clearly is. But I’m forced to reflect that current news broadcasts get a great deal closer to the barbarity than my angry attempts in verse invoking our historical baggage.

There is a progression in the Poem’s three sections. From causes (and causes) to some of the realities of combat. Then to an outcome which the winning side will always refuse to concede – that warfare may make us less, not more patriotic. You don’t have to support the Taliban or Isis to revile Tony Blair, or to feel ultimately stateless.

These two are by far my most political Poems. The third in the batch, The Reinvention of Time Travel, is the longest, and could hardly be more different in tone and subject, even though it has a common source with Where Power Lies. A lot of the verse for both was salvaged from the brutal dismemberment of the earlier Invention saga.

All the angry bits about history, war and power

The blog I wrote three years ago to accompany the publication here of The Invention of Time Travel suggested it was the “tightest” long Poem I’d written to date. Within months I’d realised that it was in fact a vast, embarrassingly indulgent ramble that went nowhere and required the mechanism of time travel to get from one end of it to the other. The fact that, unsurprisingly, no one had read it was also indicative. To clarify its nebulous point it needed to be hacked to pieces, completely restructured and rewritten, and the original then made to disappear. All the angry bits about history, war and power would have to be extracted and turned into a different poem.

The Reinvention of Time Travel is now a much more carefully planned journey back through personal memories, family history and, it’s worth emphasising, pure invention.

Hopefully the concept of a “journey” won’t be confused with the distance celebrities travel when they merely do something different. This one moves backwards through the narrator’s lifetime (and before he existed) in a series of snapshots and postcards. The changes in time and place are accompanied by evolving perspectives – the passive viewer, the casual sightseer, the increasingly engaged visitor and observer, and driven explorer, until places and times eventually become firm and settled.

The dubious conceit concluding this regression is that time travel might then be achievable, if only we weren’t all so self-obsessed. (OK, I do get the irony.) The lengthy Unfolding the Map section towards the end is perhaps the weirdest thing I’ve ever written. No one who’s read any of my other poetry will be expecting a nice tidy resolution or an optimistic conclusion. So this denouement should come as either a heart-warming surprise or a cheap cop out.

Bringing inert matter to life

One of the pleasures of the two-year task of writing The Reinvention of Time Travel and Where Power Lies has been the discovery of how I could easily make quite striking improvements by putting effort into reworking the original lines. It was like bringing inert matter to life for the first time (one imagines). I can’t say whether the end result is worthwhile, but I definitely learned that the original wasn’t. Yet this was how the whole thing had been pulled together piece by piece from random scraps of verse written over the decades. This means of course that any boast about writing three new poems in the space of a few months is entirely spurious. They’ve been there all along, and I’ve only recently worked out how to fit them together.

I’m using the word “Poem” with an upper case “P” to differentiate the seven long Poems published on the website from the series of short self-contained, loosely linked sections (usually with their own titles, like conventional poems) from which they are composed, and from my other shorter standalone poems elsewhere. They tend to be more like narratives than simple collections or “poem cycles”, and I can’t think what else to call them. My apologies if this sounds pretentious. How I came to write in this obsessively disjointed and time-coming manner is explained in the accompanying blog “What to do when poetry becomes obsolete”. I hope my website helps to show it was good thing to ignore that potentially paralysing juvenile insight and to keep on writing – albeit slowly.