From ‘Form Photograph’ to ‘Starting Eleven’

Three or four years ago, I knew I wanted to write about the footballing heroes of my childhood, those lower-league footballers who triumphed and failed before my eyes, who evoked a sense of masculinity that was hugely different to today’s view of men, whose team generated a sense of belonging among the local fans. In short, I knew I wanted to write directly about Aldershot F.C. footballers of the 1980s, but indirectly about far more. However, I didn’t know how to go about putting such a group of poems together. And that was when I read Stanley Cook’s excellent poetry for the first time.

Cook wrote two separate pamphlets on the back of his time working as a schoolteacher, Form Photograph (Phoenix/Peterloo, 1971) and Staff Photograph (Peterloo Poets, 1972). In each case, he created a set of vignettes. The first batch, of course, were pupils, while the second were teachers. He generated these portraits of individuals within a specific context, building a wider picture of society through the implicit dialogues that were generated among the poems, accumulating his effects via verbal collage.

On reading Cook’s poems, I admired them immensely and suddenly realised I could adapt his technique to my footballers. And rather than using a photo, I was drawn to the team sheet that appeared on the back of every programme, and thus ‘Starting Eleven’, the second section in Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, started to take shape. Thank you, Stanley! I’d like to think you’d enjoy my poems too…

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…

Three poems from Starting Eleven on Wild Court

Poetry needs readers from beyond its bubble. It's got to engage with stuff that might not seem "poetic", reaching out to people who think poems are irrelevant to their lives. That was my aim when writing my sequence Starting Eleven - Aldershot F.C. Footballers of the 1980s, which is featured today on Wild Court (see here).

i.m. Paul Shrubb

Over the past few months, I've been working on a sequence of poems titled Starting Eleven. It revolves around Aldershot F.C. footballers of the 1980s and around what it meant to be a fan of a Division Four team at that time.

One of the players to feature is Paul Shrubb, who passed away this last week from Motor Neurone Disease. As a consequence, I'm breaking the habit of a lifetime today to post an unpublished poem here in his memory...

2 Paul Shrubb

Neat, precise and unassuming

in his haircut, passes and gait,

he times his tackles perfectly,

patrolling our flank as he's done

for years. If the fans cherish him,

it's because we can picture him

in a warehouse, office or shop

on a Monday soon, one of us.