I Spent Two Years as the Birmingham Poet Laureate – The Rest of my Sentence I Served on Parole
That’s not a line I used when I applied for the position in 2018, but since moving away from the Midlands for work I’ve felt the need to have an ironic quip in my back pocket if this period of my life should ever come up.
Among the many feelings that arise at the intersection of poetry and public life, Ben Lerner writes in The Hatred of Poetry, one of the strongest is ‘embarrassment.’ The unique cultural cachet which still attaches to the form in ‘our imagination of social life’ means that any actual, contemporary poem written by ‘an actual person in a concrete historical situation’ is unlikely ever to match up. In Birmingham – a concrete historical situation if ever there was one – this collision between the lofty image of what poetry is meant to do and the realities of everyday life felt particularly acute. And yet, as one of the city’s best-known twentieth-century poets Roy Fisher put it in a creative credo I took to heart, ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ What would it mean in practice to write from this geographic and mental perspective?
After all, embarrassment has often also been a factor when Birmingham makes it into the national cultural conversation. Unfairly, of course – I loved living there, and was always prepared to defend it to the hilt – but I do remember feeling like a natural urge to defend everything we had to offer could easily slide into an unreflective boosterism. I didn’t like our cultural life being sneered at by people whose engagement with the city extended to the walk between New Street and Moor Street, but I also didn’t feel compelled to express a performative enthusiasm for Spaghetti Junction.
So when it came to writing poems that would serve as a kind of public advocacy for poetry itself in the city, it took me a while to work out the most appropriate route to follow (much like driving through Spaghetti Junction, I imagine). Living in the Jewellery Quarter from 2015-2018, I focused my initial pitch on celebrating the history that was all around us: especially the rich heritage of craft and making.
One early commission came from the JQ Development Trust, for pieces to be read and displayed at Still: a photography exhibition at the Iron House Gallery which aimed to explore ‘the past and present experiences of those who spend their lives working in this important and historic area of Birmingham.’ Keen to get in a good deal of the texture of reality, I read through an online oral history archive of interviews with workers at the Alabaster & Wilson jewellery firm, and produced something which strove to channel the experiences of one long-serving craftsman in what everyone in the area called ‘the trade,’ Rod Mossop:
Mossop Memory MuseumAmong the many feelings that arise at the intersection of poetry and public life, Ben Lerner writes in The Hatred of Poetry, one of the strongest is ‘embarrassment.’ The unique cultural cachet which still attaches to the form in ‘our imagination of social life’ means that any actual, contemporary poem written by ‘an actual person in a concrete historical situation’ is unlikely ever to match up. In Birmingham – a concrete historical situation if ever there was one – this collision between the lofty image of what poetry is meant to do and the realities of everyday life felt particularly acute. And yet, as one of the city’s best-known twentieth-century poets Roy Fisher put it in a creative credo I took to heart, ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ What would it mean in practice to write from this geographic and mental perspective?
After all, embarrassment has often also been a factor when Birmingham makes it into the national cultural conversation. Unfairly, of course – I loved living there, and was always prepared to defend it to the hilt – but I do remember feeling like a natural urge to defend everything we had to offer could easily slide into an unreflective boosterism. I didn’t like our cultural life being sneered at by people whose engagement with the city extended to the walk between New Street and Moor Street, but I also didn’t feel compelled to express a performative enthusiasm for Spaghetti Junction.
So when it came to writing poems that would serve as a kind of public advocacy for poetry itself in the city, it took me a while to work out the most appropriate route to follow (much like driving through Spaghetti Junction, I imagine). Living in the Jewellery Quarter from 2015-2018, I focused my initial pitch on celebrating the history that was all around us: especially the rich heritage of craft and making.
One early commission came from the JQ Development Trust, for pieces to be read and displayed at Still: a photography exhibition at the Iron House Gallery which aimed to explore ‘the past and present experiences of those who spend their lives working in this important and historic area of Birmingham.’ Keen to get in a good deal of the texture of reality, I read through an online oral history archive of interviews with workers at the Alabaster & Wilson jewellery firm, and produced something which strove to channel the experiences of one long-serving craftsman in what everyone in the area called ‘the trade,’ Rod Mossop:
Some see their lives go gleaming past, a movie being shown.
Me, I know my memories are cast in cuttlebone.
Saw an old chap gilding in a young enamel bowl.
Felt how blue impressions settle deep into the soul.
’55: the sandpit graves. The villas. Cobbled streets.
Watch the sculper hover on the bone’s blank sheet.
Phoned up Alabaster, where they made the signet rings.
Charlie cast in cuttlefish; Alf was burnishing,
so half the workshop smelt like beer; the other half like teeth.
Lignum vitae sticks around. Other things are brief.
Old Sid Wright, deaf as a peg, eyes sharp as his homemade drill.
Tommy Evans, dead at the back, and me with his chasing tools.
Dolly did the polishing; Arthur would only lap.
Sometimes there’s no second chance. Not everything has scrap.
Bilious Padgett cracks his neck; his hands can’t close on a beer.
Some of them have done this work for fifty-seven years.
Things I’ve made might last a person twice as long as that.
I’ve got family in the trade six generations back.
Draw the border, carve the airvents, leave a space for sprue.
Don’t forget to brush away the residue.
Poor Frank Harris did the cufflinks. Died young. Never good.
I punched a master maker’s mark on everything I could —
M, and a rod through an arrowhead. These things I made my own.
My memories are cast in cuttlebone.
Meeting Rod at the exhibition launch was a humbling experience which indicated how far from the texture of reality my work had, nonetheless, strayed. ‘You don’t cast in cuttlebone,’ he said to me afterwards, seeming more perplexed than grateful: ‘you carve in it.’ I’d certainly read this formulation – casting in cuttlebone – online, so I knew it was a phrasing at least some jewellers would recognise, but there was no point arguing with Rod about it; I was outside of his life’s work, looking in, and I hadn’t presented it in a way which had meaning for him.
This spoke to an issue which I’d been weighing up for most of my tenure. How can one person speak for a city? According to census data, by 2021 Birmingham had a population of 1.14 million people. I was one of the many who were born elsewhere (brought up in a village in Lincolnshire with a rather more modest population of fewer than 300), and on taking up the role I was conscious of the diversity of people’s backgrounds in the city, of the varied urban landscapes of its many distinct areas – in short, of how much of Birmingham I didn’t really know. Who would care about my own, necessarily limited perspective on such a broad and polyphonic environment?
I didn’t want to centre myself as an individual, but there were also pitfalls in trying to think myself into the lives of others, as I'd learned first-hand from Rod. A poem I wrote for a different exhibition, organised by the West Midlands Combined Authority, began with some real, granular details about people in the nineteenth century learning Esperanto on the Dudley Road, but soon fell into a kind of bland, universalist overreach: ‘when the kids / give us an evening’s blessed rest, we come / for mental health and mentoring and tea…’ In aiming to speak for everyone at once, I felt like the result belonged to nothing and no one.
Since handing over the position in 2020, I’ve found that some of the poems I produced couldn’t really justify their place in my body of work when I’ve since come to collect it for submissions to editors; not because it was too closely pinned to a particular time and place, but because these anxieties about what my writing was supposed to be doing undermined its coherence as writing.
One notable exception was a piece I wrote towards the start of my tenure, on a surreal funded residency in a serviced apartment (complete with orange-juicer) on the eighteenth floor of the Rotunda, which took inspiration from a bridge in Highgate to look back at the founding of the city. The form of it wasn’t intended to look like the 1970s Central Library, but I was delighted when a reader made the connection and have mentioned it every time I’ve read it since – including to the genial, leftist then-President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, on his visit to Birmingham in February 2019.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the challenges of writing to commission (and have continued to do so since moving to the North East, where I edit the poetry section of the I Love North Shields community newspaper). And one of the joys of revisiting the poems I wrote from 2018 to 2020 for this essay has been discovering small, passing references to elements of the urban landscape which either no longer exist, or which I’d forgotten having ever encountered: ‘the rubble that used to be Fletcher’s Walk’; ‘the stretch of water / between Rentokil and Vincent Timber’; ‘the sign / for Han Dynasty, and, if I squint, / something that might be Rod Roj, curving round / into a memory’; ‘whatever processes led to / something I saw on fire in a skip in Tyseley, / early this morning, even before the dawn.’ Baudelaire once wrote that ‘the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart’ – he wasn’t talking about Rod Roj, but he might have understood how I felt to stumble across that name, all the same.
The period of my laureateship covered a strange, transitional time in my own life – I’d moved in 2019 to a shared house on the Pershore Road, and spent much of that year re-learning the place I lived from a new vantage point – and, eventually, a strange, transitional time in everyone’s. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to a number of public-facing engagements, and meant that most of the writing I ended up doing in 2020 became, once again, a largely personal affair. My time as laureate doesn’t seem to me now like unfinished business, exactly, but it’s hard to remember it now outside of that context of sudden suspended animation, a scene I described in a poem that March:
A bus goes by, at ten percent capacity,
past windows full of people freaking out
in quiet ways; somehow a day goes by
in reading guidance, in suspending plans —
as if we’d all got halfway up a ladder
and then found out we couldn’t get back down
One lasting legacy of my time in the role is still on display in the Warstone Lane cemetery, just down the street from where I used to live; a poem that forms part of the display in the Garden of Memory that was installed during renovations completed in 2021, which borrows its title from a line by Roy Fisher: ‘A Cliff, A Centre.’ Pulled together from more oral history interviews, it’s probably the closest I ever came to the kind of interwoven plurality I felt the role demanded; but since it’s still in place for any passers-by to see in person, I’ll finish instead with a piece which, like most of my civic commissions, had a shorter shelf-life.
This is a poem which was visible for a week on an A-board outside 43 Frederick Street for a local heritage event in January 2020; a piece which tries to put some love into a description of a vanished world, and which now seems to me to belong to a different one. Whatever I think with these days, though, those years in Birmingham will always be part of the picture.
Vittoria Restaurant, 1976Me, I know my memories are cast in cuttlebone.
Saw an old chap gilding in a young enamel bowl.
Felt how blue impressions settle deep into the soul.
’55: the sandpit graves. The villas. Cobbled streets.
Watch the sculper hover on the bone’s blank sheet.
Phoned up Alabaster, where they made the signet rings.
Charlie cast in cuttlefish; Alf was burnishing,
so half the workshop smelt like beer; the other half like teeth.
Lignum vitae sticks around. Other things are brief.
Old Sid Wright, deaf as a peg, eyes sharp as his homemade drill.
Tommy Evans, dead at the back, and me with his chasing tools.
Dolly did the polishing; Arthur would only lap.
Sometimes there’s no second chance. Not everything has scrap.
Bilious Padgett cracks his neck; his hands can’t close on a beer.
Some of them have done this work for fifty-seven years.
Things I’ve made might last a person twice as long as that.
I’ve got family in the trade six generations back.
Draw the border, carve the airvents, leave a space for sprue.
Don’t forget to brush away the residue.
Poor Frank Harris did the cufflinks. Died young. Never good.
I punched a master maker’s mark on everything I could —
M, and a rod through an arrowhead. These things I made my own.
My memories are cast in cuttlebone.
Meeting Rod at the exhibition launch was a humbling experience which indicated how far from the texture of reality my work had, nonetheless, strayed. ‘You don’t cast in cuttlebone,’ he said to me afterwards, seeming more perplexed than grateful: ‘you carve in it.’ I’d certainly read this formulation – casting in cuttlebone – online, so I knew it was a phrasing at least some jewellers would recognise, but there was no point arguing with Rod about it; I was outside of his life’s work, looking in, and I hadn’t presented it in a way which had meaning for him.
This spoke to an issue which I’d been weighing up for most of my tenure. How can one person speak for a city? According to census data, by 2021 Birmingham had a population of 1.14 million people. I was one of the many who were born elsewhere (brought up in a village in Lincolnshire with a rather more modest population of fewer than 300), and on taking up the role I was conscious of the diversity of people’s backgrounds in the city, of the varied urban landscapes of its many distinct areas – in short, of how much of Birmingham I didn’t really know. Who would care about my own, necessarily limited perspective on such a broad and polyphonic environment?
I didn’t want to centre myself as an individual, but there were also pitfalls in trying to think myself into the lives of others, as I'd learned first-hand from Rod. A poem I wrote for a different exhibition, organised by the West Midlands Combined Authority, began with some real, granular details about people in the nineteenth century learning Esperanto on the Dudley Road, but soon fell into a kind of bland, universalist overreach: ‘when the kids / give us an evening’s blessed rest, we come / for mental health and mentoring and tea…’ In aiming to speak for everyone at once, I felt like the result belonged to nothing and no one.
Since handing over the position in 2020, I’ve found that some of the poems I produced couldn’t really justify their place in my body of work when I’ve since come to collect it for submissions to editors; not because it was too closely pinned to a particular time and place, but because these anxieties about what my writing was supposed to be doing undermined its coherence as writing.
One notable exception was a piece I wrote towards the start of my tenure, on a surreal funded residency in a serviced apartment (complete with orange-juicer) on the eighteenth floor of the Rotunda, which took inspiration from a bridge in Highgate to look back at the founding of the city. The form of it wasn’t intended to look like the 1970s Central Library, but I was delighted when a reader made the connection and have mentioned it every time I’ve read it since – including to the genial, leftist then-President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, on his visit to Birmingham in February 2019.
Beorma
‘This is as good a place as any’ — our beer-headed chief,
fording the trickling river, thumped down a stake.
Thick forest and thin soil. We scraped
out dwellings, built a dyke, a gate,
raised cows and killed them.
Salt for stubborn winters
dragged us through:
more above ground
than not.
Life;
death,
and then
a better life.
The glitter under
the torn-back earth.
The streets spreading
like roots, like heated iron:
something sharp and gathering.
The wince of tracks, the steam erupting forth,
careening into neon, glass. As good a place as any.
Something this poem has going for it, I can now see, is that theoretically it could be about lots of places – any settlement that has grown from a few dwellings into a shiny modern city, which is to say all cities. But its sparseness, on which Higgins commented approvingly, is largely the result of the form driving the content – of producing a poem which was interesting to create as a constructed object, first and foremost, rather than one directed towards a particular civic obligation.‘This is as good a place as any’ — our beer-headed chief,
fording the trickling river, thumped down a stake.
Thick forest and thin soil. We scraped
out dwellings, built a dyke, a gate,
raised cows and killed them.
Salt for stubborn winters
dragged us through:
more above ground
than not.
Life;
death,
and then
a better life.
The glitter under
the torn-back earth.
The streets spreading
like roots, like heated iron:
something sharp and gathering.
The wince of tracks, the steam erupting forth,
careening into neon, glass. As good a place as any.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the challenges of writing to commission (and have continued to do so since moving to the North East, where I edit the poetry section of the I Love North Shields community newspaper). And one of the joys of revisiting the poems I wrote from 2018 to 2020 for this essay has been discovering small, passing references to elements of the urban landscape which either no longer exist, or which I’d forgotten having ever encountered: ‘the rubble that used to be Fletcher’s Walk’; ‘the stretch of water / between Rentokil and Vincent Timber’; ‘the sign / for Han Dynasty, and, if I squint, / something that might be Rod Roj, curving round / into a memory’; ‘whatever processes led to / something I saw on fire in a skip in Tyseley, / early this morning, even before the dawn.’ Baudelaire once wrote that ‘the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart’ – he wasn’t talking about Rod Roj, but he might have understood how I felt to stumble across that name, all the same.
The period of my laureateship covered a strange, transitional time in my own life – I’d moved in 2019 to a shared house on the Pershore Road, and spent much of that year re-learning the place I lived from a new vantage point – and, eventually, a strange, transitional time in everyone’s. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to a number of public-facing engagements, and meant that most of the writing I ended up doing in 2020 became, once again, a largely personal affair. My time as laureate doesn’t seem to me now like unfinished business, exactly, but it’s hard to remember it now outside of that context of sudden suspended animation, a scene I described in a poem that March:
A bus goes by, at ten percent capacity,
past windows full of people freaking out
in quiet ways; somehow a day goes by
in reading guidance, in suspending plans —
as if we’d all got halfway up a ladder
and then found out we couldn’t get back down
One lasting legacy of my time in the role is still on display in the Warstone Lane cemetery, just down the street from where I used to live; a poem that forms part of the display in the Garden of Memory that was installed during renovations completed in 2021, which borrows its title from a line by Roy Fisher: ‘A Cliff, A Centre.’ Pulled together from more oral history interviews, it’s probably the closest I ever came to the kind of interwoven plurality I felt the role demanded; but since it’s still in place for any passers-by to see in person, I’ll finish instead with a piece which, like most of my civic commissions, had a shorter shelf-life.
This is a poem which was visible for a week on an A-board outside 43 Frederick Street for a local heritage event in January 2020; a piece which tries to put some love into a description of a vanished world, and which now seems to me to belong to a different one. Whatever I think with these days, though, those years in Birmingham will always be part of the picture.
No more utilitarian stews
for those who spend dim hours
plating Bentley badges,
while the twisted rails
of Fattorini’s stay unhealed;
we know what we deserve.
We dip our hands
in bowls of cyanide
and, having clad
the morning’s last watch-bracelet
in its perfect hue of gold,
emerge to feast
on omelettes, ravioli, leg of lamb,
chicken à la Pozarski;
watch them steaming through
round windows in swing doors,
all afternoon tasting
the evening’s smoke:
fur coats on gummy tablecloths,
then where the tables were,
a clear floor
and the bullion of our lives.
Thanks to everyone who commissioned the poems which I’ve reflected on in this piece – especially Kate O’Connor and Josie Wall of the Jewellery Quarter Development Trust – and to Jonathan Davidson and Tom Epps from the initial appointment panel.
Some of Richard's more recent civically-engaged poetry can be read in the Memory Lane and Bus Poems zines, collaboratively produced with Adam Dixon.
Richard has also released 'Blue Light', his second album under the artist name 'Groundbird'. Listen to it on Bandcamp now!
Richard's next poetry pamphlet will be 'Coterie' with Broken Sleep Books in Feb 2027 - find out when it releases via Richard's Instagram!
for those who spend dim hours
plating Bentley badges,
while the twisted rails
of Fattorini’s stay unhealed;
we know what we deserve.
We dip our hands
in bowls of cyanide
and, having clad
the morning’s last watch-bracelet
in its perfect hue of gold,
emerge to feast
on omelettes, ravioli, leg of lamb,
chicken à la Pozarski;
watch them steaming through
round windows in swing doors,
all afternoon tasting
the evening’s smoke:
fur coats on gummy tablecloths,
then where the tables were,
a clear floor
and the bullion of our lives.
Footnotes
Thanks to everyone who commissioned the poems which I’ve reflected on in this piece – especially Kate O’Connor and Josie Wall of the Jewellery Quarter Development Trust – and to Jonathan Davidson and Tom Epps from the initial appointment panel.
Some of Richard's more recent civically-engaged poetry can be read in the Memory Lane and Bus Poems zines, collaboratively produced with Adam Dixon.
Richard has also released 'Blue Light', his second album under the artist name 'Groundbird'. Listen to it on Bandcamp now!
Richard's next poetry pamphlet will be 'Coterie' with Broken Sleep Books in Feb 2027 - find out when it releases via Richard's Instagram!