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Poets are 'tortured'
people in the popular imagination. I'm only
slightly tortured. That probably tells you
something about my poetry. I admit, some of it is
flippant but given an option of being really
tortured and writing great and stirring poetry as a
result, I'd say - no contest. Someone else can have
the torture. And anyway, some of my pomes are
serious.
I was born in an
idyllic Suffolk village of which I was the
blond-haired darling. I can feel people beginning
to dislike me already as they read this, but don't
worry, I have almost black hair now, to match my
degenerate nature. Degeneracy goes with the
territory too. It's so painful being a poet - you
feel such a cliché most of the time. That's
not torture though - it's just an occupational
hazard, along with the floppy hat I keep in the
pocket of my waxed jacket which really ought to be
a long flowing black cape, but isn't because I also
have a strong practical streak.
The reason I'm
personally tortured is that at five years old, I
was snatched away from our rose-covered Suffolk
cottage, to move to Birmingham via an East Midlands
pit-village. This was in spite of the fact that I
warned my parents that it was a bad idea when they
asked me what I thought about it. But after the
initial desolation of my lost country home, I
discovered that I quite liked the suburbs of
Birmingham which were full of the energy and
innovation of 1960s Britain. It wasn't at all like
the rural dream from which I was by now quite glad
to have escaped. Suburban Brumagem was a great
place to be a kid in the '60s.
We moved back to East
Anglia when I was 10. It was a journey back in
time. I'd already started writing poetry but I
didn't really make a habit of it until I went to a
Norfolk Grammar School that was like a glum version
of Hogwarts. I used to post anonymous pomes on a
classroom noticeboard, describing the school
goings-on. I signed them 'PP' - I don't know why.
When I asked our Head Boy about it, he told me that
it stood for 'Phantom Poet'. They were bawdy and
lewd and mostly written in rhyming couplets. So no
change there then...
All told though, I
wasn't exactly delighted to be dragged back to the
Middle Ages by my parents in this way. So I escaped
East Anglia again, just as soon as ever I could.
From that second escape, there was to be no
returning. Much of my poetry is about escape,
either directly or indirectly. And about
exile.
That's about it then.
In the 1980s I left college and first discovered
computers and the weird people who went with them.
I started to make a living by smashing 7 different
kinds of shit out of them. The computers, not the
people. There was lots of gold in old computers in
them thar days. Enough to make a tidy living for a
while until I went off to make my fortune by
working as a plasterer.
At some stage in the
'80s I discovered Apple Macs and the Internet, so I
came to the conclusion that not all computers
should be attacked with an angle-grinder. By the
time the 1990s arrived, I'd also discovered
Newsgroups and Message Boards and found that having
the ability to retaliate swiftly in verse made
flame-wars into one whole bundle of fun. By now I'd
also started working in offices and fathering
children, and something about those two things made
more poetry come. Boredom often leads to
procreation of one kind or another, which is why
office parties are traditionally such exciting
occasions.
I've tried straight
writing. I have a major writing project that's a
non-fiction book that spans popular science and
philosophy. But that's hard, and writing pomes is
easy. For that reason, I never took my poetry
seriously until the frustration of straight writing
made me take another look at it. The rest of the
story, you can find spread about in the pomes that
you'll find on this site. Oh yes - and to answer
the inevitable question : a pome, thas wut
they call em back 'n Narfuk.
Andy Morley, October
30th 2007
Written in
my caravan on Moss Hall Farm, Blackburn, West
Lothian this dark evening in late October to the
tune of the World Music that's playing on Radio
Scotland right now. Come Friday and the end of my
working week, I'll be on a plane down South back to
my home and family in Worcestershire, and I'll put
this on the Internet. But all that is another
story.
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