I've been pretty poor at posting anything just lately, although for once it's been because I've actually been getting on with some proper writing.
But anyway, here's the latest of poet and Tears In The Fence editor David Caddy's So Here We Are letters. I'll be having a careful read of it over the weekend, because he touches on a few things close to my heart. One is John Clare, of course, but another is the whole idea of the forest in this country, bound up as it is with the Norman Conquest, Robin Hood, and so on. Over several years, I've been piecing together a sequence of poems about Leicestershire-based Hood inspiration Roger Godberd, and this might give me a bit of new impetus to get on with it and finish it.
He also touches on enclosures - although he's talking about events that took place in the 19th century, it was something that had been going on since at least the end of the 16th century, and was the main cause of another of my historical hobby-horses, the Midlands Revolt of 1607. So, read and enjoy, and expect a flood of historical poems from me some time around 2012.
4 comments:
They hang the man
And flog the woman
that steals the goose from off the common;
But leave the greater
Villain loose,
Who steals the common from the goose.....
Exactly! I've used that to preface some of my 1607 poems.
Matt, good to see someone else interested in the Midlands revolt. The village of Cotesbach, where some of the revolt took place, is only a few miles down the road from me. Do you know the story of Captain Pouch?
I do, Jane. I first came across it in a JL Carr novel (The Battle of Pollock's Crossing), and thought he had made it up, but then years later rediscovered it when I read a biography of Carr. I've been working for a couple of years on a sequence of poems about Pouch and the revolt, and have just about reached the stage where I'm polishing them up a bit.
Post a Comment