Joy to the world: poetry party to launch manifesto*. After one of the strangest years in living memory, having given up on politicians’ prosaic pontification, and fed up with the falsehoods of the media mangle, a group of poets is set to launch their own political party in 2017. As Nobel laureate and one-time US poet laureate Joseph Brodsky said: "By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.”

And we have seen that in abundance in 2016, what with the Brexit “truths”, and the man with his finger on the nuclear button, Mein Trumpf. Rumour has it he plans to get some Mexicans to build a wall between the US and China, an act of pacification; rumour has it. Write Out Loud did try to glean his policies for poetry earlier in the year, but met with police resistance, as reported by the head of our Washington DC bureau.

We at Write Out Loud wish you all the best over Christmas, thanking you – all 9,000 of our signed up members, and many thousands of unregistered users – and hope you take with a pinch of salt where our gig guide says a regular event will be taking place on, say, 25 December. Do check all dates at this time of year please, in spite of our having asked gig owners to cancel where possible.

We wish you a very successful new year too, including those of you involved in bringing poetry to more people, and more people to poetry, especially those involving folks not well represented in our wonderful poetry world, both here in the UK and elsewhere. Over a quarter of our readership is now in the US, with France and Germany also well represented.

If you want a poem to bring you down to earth, whilst simultaneously raising your spirits, I’d recommend Liz Berry’s ‘Christmas Eve’. It’s even better listening to it read by Liz herself:

“Tonight the Black Country is tinselled by sleet / falling on the little towns lit up in the darkness … / … the shed Mick built/ last Autumn when the factory clammed up./ And the work’s gone again/ and the old boys are up at dawn to clock on nowhere/ except walk their dogs and sigh … “

It’s those universals that touch us, isn’t it? Like her last few lines, that remind of recent reports of refugee children in the cold and away from their families:

 

     and I think of you, Eloise, down there in your terrace,

     feeding your baby or touching his hand to the snow

     and although we can’t ever go back or be what we were

     I can tell you, honestly, I’d give up everything I’ve worked for

     or thought I wanted in this life,

     to be with you tonight.

 

Write Out Loud is pitching for funds to get more migrants, refugees and others under-represented in what we do involved in this great poetry revolution. We’d be happy to hear from others wanting to be part of that: contact Julian@writeoutloud.net.

For now, it’s Christmas. Come on, poets, let’s have a party!

 

*This is as true as much of the stuff that passes for news these days online: I made it up, it’s a fabrication, or a dream perhaps.

 

ILLUSTRATION: WITH PERMISSION OF THE BLACK COUNTRY T-SHIRTS COMPANY