Here is a link to the poem Power and Wealth that was published in the Morning Star Newspaper in 2021. Morning Star Poem
And here is the Poem.
Power and Wealth
on the outside
looking in
at power and wealth
not being a mind reader
it is difficult to disconnect
from feelings of utter revulsion and disgust
at them and their acolytes –
their carryings on
that are destroying everything
regardless.
it’s hard to spot
a psychopath
without having full measure
Read the original blog post here Carlisle Poetry Symposium, or as reposted below:
I was invited to attend the Carlisle Poetry Symposium , (a day of readings), on May 19th 2018, and I read the poem A Philosophical Provocation. Here is the Poet Andy Hopkins response to the poem.
Andy Hopkins writes:
Posted on July 5, 2018 by darkhorsepicture
I was thinking, as the weeks have gone by, of the Poetry Symposium that we ran on May 19th. Again and again I keep coming back to seven wonderful moments. So I thought I’d share them.
I have talked elsewhere of Alan John Stubbs’ modesty and great skill. So I wanted to show you an example of this that demonstrates it so well. Alan started his reading on the day of the Symposium with his poem ‘a philosophical provocation’. The tree the poem is written abut is visible from the windows of the Phil and Lit… so you can see how all the stars aligned for this Symposium moment.
I have taken a photograph of the poem (see below). You can enjoy the poem for yourself, of course. But allow me to point out how playful it is itself, in artfully showing how playful the tree is. And then – on top of that – is the way that meaning is not beamed from a extraneous source into our brains ready formed. What we see makes it. What we are makes it. Our history makes it. The object itself makes it. And the humour we are in when we see it makes it. I love the way the poem itself plays with this idea. In fact, our conceptual understanding of the tree changes as the lines develop; more than that, the concept of what a tree is changes. And this is not occurring in a projected, inflated tone – this is on the bedrock of empirical assertion. It is less: ‘I think therefore I am’. It is more: ‘I am because thinking is‘. It is an exposition of thought as a warping thing. You can see the new sentence for yourself at the end – when we trace a thought back to its origins these are the sorts of transformations that it undergoes. If a tree is the processor of light and water – it is the processor of its self. We, the reader, are processing the thought as we are reading it: translating it. How rare is it for a poem to seek to invest its meaning in the transitory nature of perception itself? How rare is it for the form to fit that meaning without being stretched to breaking? There is such tightness of structure here, and carefully considered form; by all means read ‘Free Verse as Formal Constraint’ by Andrew Crozier (no you haven’t), but you’d do better to read Alan’s poem a few more times.
Poets often try to recreate an object for us. Usually there is an quality of loss bound up in that. The thingyness of the thing is so frequently woven into a regret that the thingy is less thingy than it was, or will be less thingy than it should be. But here, in Alan’s poem, is a celebration of thought and change and changing thought as the only truth, or constant, that we can experience. Yes, the door is blind shut at the end; yes we don’t know if it’s lit, but the value of thought, and thinking, provoked by the contemplation of things (and, by extension, our own thinking – not someone else’s given/found interpretation) is the key here. Some poets would give you the tree. Alan gives you the sinewy twists of thought that you try to bring together when you consider the tree. Yes, we cannot by united by some sublime tree truth, but the playful and non-didactic nature of the poem (and all Alan’s work) frees the reader to acknowledge the difficulties of thought. This is as good a poem about meaning and thought as ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. But then again, ‘this/ is an interpretation’…
The Poem.
Here is Fiona Sampson's Preface.
Preface
Alan Stubbs writes like no-one else. That’s a hugely important thing to say about a poet. Yet for the poet himself, it can feel like a mixed blessing to be “out there”, “on a limb”, at the waney edge of practice itself; for all the world like this book’s exiled ‘Ovid at the water’.
Another way to say this is that a poet like Stubbs has to have enormous artistic courage. To the quotidian terror of the blank page, he must add the vertiginous realizationt hat every new poem requires from him nothing less than a complete reinvention of poetic form.
This is not to suggest that Stubbs’s darkly narrative book is a Macedonian salad of styles and projects. On the contrary: a deep coherence underlies the work. Images and register recur and, in recurring, speak at angles to themselves. A consistently angry, inelegant and anti-elegant imaginary is at work here, with equal detail, on both the inhabited local world and dystopian fantasy, relationship and place, language and image.
Stubbs’s ever-expanding verse often has a motor of narrative, but it is also impelled by urgent tone and by frequently risky thought-experiment. There is curiosity, too, and an energetically appropriative take on the world, particularly the world this book’s “narrator” travels to. ‘Ithaca’ may be imagined or real, but Florence, in ‘in Firenze art’, is embodied in the marble of Michelangelo’s David, while a Turkish coastline from Nazim Hikmet’s work is reconstructed in ‘On the days’.
The Lost Box of Eyes takes us to New York, Havana, Prague and Madrid, and its cosmopolitan sophistication is a useful rejoinder to the reader who assumes that the passionate concentration with which other poems detail English birds and trees is a sign of a local imagination: of some latter-day John Clare, single-handedly modernizing English verse.
It is no such sign. Yet Stubbs is like Clare in the stubborn courage of his unique poetics; and in its rootedness in a vividly re-rendered materiality.
These “nature” poems are hyper-real; as absolutely contemporary as any urban anecdote. And these thought experiments repeat no single theory, but place everything comfortable and comforting from musical formal tropes to the so-readily-digested argumentation of lyric conventions in question.
When I first came across Alan Stubbs’s work, among the submissions to a magazine, I was reading tens of thousands of unsolicited poems a year. I was punch-drunk with the repeated strategies and repetitive ideas that dominated and still dominate if not British verse as a whole, then the whole middle ground of that verse. I was, as any committed reader of verse must be, frequently bored by the riskless, irreproachable poetry I so often found arranged on the page before me. Alan Stubbs’s poetry, by contrast, came searing off the page: restless, energetic, uncomfortable and discomforting, like a call to poetic arms. And so it does today.
Fiona Sampson
Coleshill, 12th February, 2016
Fiona Sampson.
Fiona has been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and awarded a Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize and the Ziaten Prsten (Macedonia) among others. A Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature, she is Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and is the Editor of Poem magazine.
Just to say that I have realised that the Collected Poems (2000 - 2025) does not contain 4 poems that I wrote for the anthology To kingdom come, published by the Onslaught Press in 2016. I am especially proud of one of these poems that is based on a Reuters article of the time titled The Afghan Housing Crisis. Perhaps I should include these in the Selected Poems? Decisions decisions!
Very Best,
Alan
Just to say that I have started work on publishing a 'Selected' edition of my poems 2000 - 2025.
And good news celebrated award winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson has agreed to the use of her Preface to The Lost Box of Eyes, as a Preface to the Selected. Thank you Fiona, that's very kind.
looking forward to completing this personal selection.
Best Regards,
Alan John Stubbs
