Some comment re poetry published on this site can also be found under Other Contributors (above).

As of today – December 27, 2010 – there are two poems on this site which begin with the word Mr (ie Mister); they have been indexed under Mr rather than the latter. Words such as this, Mrs, Saint (St) Macdonald etc, often cause problems for indexers and searchers alike, but it is no big thing here.

An Address By Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) To A Contemporary Meeting Of The American Association For The Advancement of Science was originally called An Address By Sir Francis Galton (1822-1910) To A Contemporary Meeting Of The American Association For The Advancement of Science. How I got his date of death wrong, I don’t know, I’ve always been meticulous about this sort of thing, even when I wrote this way back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. It was written for a competition; I believe the subject matter was Sir Francis Galton; another was Alexander Pope. The bit about eugenics was my idea!

An Epistle To Mr Pope was written for the same competition as An Address By Sir Francis Galton... and Fill Up Your Days as were a handful of others. I believe they were all written for the same competition – the one run by that bloke and his dog in New York – though not necessarily the same year. I entered it possibly three times but probably twice.

I was quite pleased with this at the time; I did quite a bit of research for it. I have made a few extremely minor alterations – mostly punctuation – to the hand typed original.

Around The World: Most of these/this were/was written when Ronald Reagan was President, then I forgot about this “project”, which was originally called Around The World In Eighty Limericks. As the reader will see for himself, it didn’t turn out quite like that. They are not all limericks, strictly speaking, and depending on how you count them, there are not exactly eighty.

Like many of my other writings, these/it sat on my hard disk for years and years and years, until at the beginning of February 2011, I fished it out, dusted it down, and finished off the last ten or so verses.

Fill Up Your Days (An Address To Paulinus): This was written either in the late 1980s or early 1990s, for a competition. Why else would I have written something like this?

Graceland: This poem was written for a competition, something to do with the World Order Of Narrative Poets. Recently I dug out what I presume is a photocopy of the original as submitted. It was printed out in WordStar, although I can’t remember now how I did it. I can only assume that I printed out the title and first few words in the usual portrait view and then the verses on the same piece of paper in landscape. The document appears to have been printed as such rather than cut and pasted.

I had hoped to be able to display the poem in HTML, apparently there is a way to rotate selected text through ninety degrees, but I was unable to fathom it out, and as usual, the mighty code warrriors of a certain Usenet group were no assistance at all. I created a picture of the poem by keying it into a WORD file, and saving it as a two page PDF. Then I split the file, rotated the bottom half, and created a JPG by using a combination of PrtScn, Microsoft Photoeditor (a delightful little program) and IrfanView.

Apart from the thick black line, this is a fairly faithful reproduction of the poem as submitted, apart from the title, which was neither italicised nor red.

I could have waited until I could get round to scanning the original, but having made the effort, I am more than satisfied with the way it has turned out.

October 15, 2010

Justice: I published this poem on April 4, 2011; it was written on November 30, 1984. In spite of the passage of time and its being undated, I can be absolutely certain of the date I wrote it. On November 30, 1984, a man named John Lambert was sentenced to a mere six years imprisonment for strangling his three young daughters; his motive was to get back at his wife, who’d had an affair.

When I heard the news on the radio in Highpoint, I told Phil the tea boy about Lambert’s conviction for manslaughter due to the legal fiction of diminished responsibility. I remember asking Phil what sentence he thought Lambert had received; I can’t remember his answer, but when I told him six years, he was apoplectic. Phil was a small time burglar; he was serving a sentence of six years. Justice indeed.

This report was published in the Times, December 1, 1984, page 3.

Lines On The Deaths Of Ted Lowe, Henry Cooper And Osama Bin Laden: On May 1, 2011, during the final of the World Professional Snooker Championship, former BBC commentator Ted Lowe died; later I heard that Henry Cooper had died too. And when I turned on the TV the following morning, I was greeted with the sight of Barack Obama telling the world that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan. That’s a lot of explanation for a four line poem.

Seven Species Of Negro Boxer: I wrote this after Hearns-Duran but before Hagler-Hearns, ie between June 15, 1984 and April 15, 1985.

Some lengthy comment is necessary. Muhammad Ali – or Cassius Clay as he was then – was the first sportsman I ever admired. I liked everything about him, especially his attitude. I remember watching both his fights against Liston, if not live then when they were first screened in the UK, in black and white. Actually, I remember watching his first fight against Henry Cooper, which was live, or near enough because it was held here. I was very young at the time, and was naturally rooting for the home fighter.

I went off Ali a lot in the late 70s/early 80s, not so much because of his perceived anti-white statements but because of his attitude to the Vietnam War. How wrong I – and so many of us – were. I’ve written about this elsewhere.

The biggest mistake Larry Holmes made was to be born in Ali’s shadow; undisputed heavyweight champion of the world for seven years, he ignored my advice, took on Father Time, and lost. I can’t remember what the faux pas alludes to; after his loss to Michael Spinks he said Rocky Marciano (whose record of 49-0 he had just failed to equal) was not fit to carry his jock strap. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t that though because of the chronology. Marvis Frazier, ah yes. Well, I suppose nepotism is marginally less insufferable than incest.

I was surprised Hearns blasted out Duran in two rounds, and I knew he would employ the same tactics against Hagler. I also knew that would be a big mistake, and had a small bet on Hagler to win in three rounds. If Hearns had boxed him instead, the fight would have lasted longer but he would still have lost. But if he’d done that, the two men wouldn’t have produced what is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest fights of all time. All eight minutes of it.

Leonard came out of retirement to fight Hagler. Alan Minter said he thought Hagler would walk right through him. I agreed. Some people – including better judges than me – thought Hagler edged it. I was rooting for Hagler, and couldn’t disagree with the decision. I thought Leonard won it by two rounds. Hagler never fought again, and like Liberace, he cried all the way to the bank, as a career in commentating and films beckoned.

Leonard did not exhibit such good judgment; he scored a draw and a win in big money return fights with Hearns and Duran, but ended his boxing career with an ignominious 5 round loss to Hector Camacho in March 1997!

Once an enthusiastic fan, I lost all interest in boxing after seeing Herol Graham knocked out by Julian Jackson, a fighter with a big punch but absolutely no talent.

March 4, 2011

Sodomy Or Sharia? (An Ode To The AEDL): I couldn’t quite believe it when I heard the EDL had a gay division – excuse the lower case. It was bad enough their attempting to crawl up to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, like the leader of a certain “extremist” political party I’m too diplomatic to name. For decades, Organised Jewry on both sides of the Atlantic have smeared all white nationalists, indeed all white people as racist, anti-Semitic, and, bore, bore, Nazis anytime they exhibited the slightest resistance to miscegenation, forced race-mixing, or even the colonisation of their countries by alien races. The healthy instincts white people – indeed the people of all races – have of preserving their racial and cultural inheritance has not only been attacked as some sort of mental disease but subjected to the most Draconian and pernicious “anti-hate” legislation at their behest. Partly as a result of this, non-white immigrants from all over the world have flooded into the white nations, and, surprise, surprise, the vast majority of them are anything but sympathetic to Organised Jewry’s beloved Israel, partly because to them the Israelis are the last manifestation of the white “Imperialism” they have all been so conditioned to hate, and partly because of increasingly unbiased mass media reporting on the ongoing brutalisation of the Palestinian people by the Zionists.

Now, in an extraordinary about-face, we are supposed to believe that Israel is in the frontline of the war on terror, and that we are comrades in arms with the people who – even before the Second World War was finished – turned on the British who had saved so many Jews from the Nazi gas chambers – stabbing them in the back, and in many cases blowing them to Kingdom Come, as in the King David Hotel atrocity of July 1946.

Though it should surprise no one that the enemies of all nations bar one would attempt to foster this grotesque piece of fiction, it remains to be seen why anyone on the so-called racist right should give it any credence whatsoever. Are we really supposed to believe that Islam is the real enemy within? Is Islam or Zionism the reason the West is so hated? And is it Islam or the organised homosexual movement that is responsible for the spread of AIDS? Whom the gods would destroy...

March 9, 2011

Song For Damien was written in the small hours of April 5, 2011 and E-Mailed to Michael Stone in Full Sutton High Security Prison before I hit the sack. I still find it difficult to believe anyone could be convicted of any offence on the “evidence” adduced by the Crown at Stone’s trial, but having had personal and painful experience of the corrupt scum who control our criminal justice system, I suppose I shouldn’t.

The New X Certificate Nursery Rhymes: New is not the word, this lot goes back to the mid 1980s. The first one (i) was inspired by a cartoon I saw in a newspaper or somewhere. It showed a villain in a police station; he had obviously asked a question of a police officer, and the reply was something like: "Of course you can speak to your solicitor; he’s in the next cell."

Number iv is a rather bad taste comment on Aberfan – a disaster I am just about old enough to remember.

Re Number xiii, yes, I do occasionally use the dreaded N word, but nowhere near as often as Mike Tyson (who deserves it).

Number xxii: ER is a truly remarkable woman, unfortunately, her younger sibling...

Number xxix is pure bad taste.

Number xxxii was inspired by a comedy sketch I saw on a TV programme, just don’t ask me what or when, sometime in the late 1970s, I think.

January 14, 2010

 

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