What are you writing about...?!

A few weeks ago on Twitter, I posted a short tweet that seemed to strike a chord if the shares and likes were anything to go by. In the afore-mentioned tweet, I suggested that I sometimes think I’m writing about one thing, only to discover, on rereading the poem months later, that my subconscious was writing about something completely different.

The tweet in question was implicitly referring to my poems about football in Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, my forthcoming second full collection from HappenStance Press. These poems are grouped together in the book as a section titled ‘Starting Eleven’, subtitled ‘Aldershot F.C. Footballers of the 1980s’. When first showing them to my editor, Helena Nelson, I was sceptical as to whether she’d like them, as she’s a self-declared football atheist. So I was stunned when she really enjoyed them!

On reflection, I feel this is because the poems aren’t really about football at all. Football is just a setting and a point of departure for the real issues that they tackle. In ‘Starting Eleven’, I’m exploring the classical themes of triumph and failure via the small-town heroes of my childhood, while also reflecting on 1980s masculinity, on how it was to be a boy or a man in that period in suburban England.

In summary, I hope you’re not put off Whatever You Do, Just Don’t just because you don’t relish watching people chase after a round ball! Apart from only comprising one single section of the book, they’re actually football poems for football atheists, poems that might seem about one thing but end up being about something altogether different…