
by Nick Moss
When I began writing poetry in jail, there were a core group of writers who influenced me – Bertolt Brecht, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Pablo Neruda – and provided a precedent for believing that it was possible to use poetry to explore possibilities of radical political change.
Another writer who was a long-standing influence was Chris Searle, a practitioner of a kind of unillusioned long-form documentary poem, which recorded grounds for optimism and revolutionary hope – and recorded also with undaunted ferocity the suppression of such hopes.
Chris Searle took part as a teacher in offering his skills to the revolutions in Grenada and Mozambique. He tried also to give voice to the hopes of working-class kids in Stepney and Sheffield. As he put it in his To My English Teacher:
Now I think I know how hard it must have been
To make words laugh and cry and feel,
For they can cross well-ordered avenues, melt the suburbs of the brain
And reach that part within that reaches out.
– from To My English Teacher, in Red Earth, The Journeyman Press, 1980
In the same poem, Searle talks of how “those poems prised away the boulders heaped upon me”, and I still believe that a poetry that aims to do less than that isn’t worth the writing. Anyway, when I was released and committed myself to exploring poetry as a way of at least keeping open the space for conceptualising a different kind of world, and expressing rage and disgust at the world as it is now, I would take myself off to the Poetry Library and read, to try and find my way round the state of contemporary poetry, and the range of small presses keeping the poetry scene alive.
I love the smell of burning banks
Fairly soon I realised there was a lot of shit out there. A large chunk of current poetry plays a similar role to the sepia’d maunderings of a particular kind of crap Americana. If the essential message of this Americana is a laying claim to a kind of bewildered American innocence about why half the world hates America (and why working-class Americans can’t just roll over and accept that the Democrats wish them the best even as they screw them again) then much poetry reads as if a middlebrow fiction writer had been told to churn out a more bookish version of a Hallmark greeting card verse.
I stumbled on Smokestack Books when I found that they published a book called Lightning of Your Eyes, a book by Chris Searle that included much of the 1980 collection in Red Earth, which had been so important to me. I also referred back to a small book of poems, Sounds and Echoes, by Ishaq Imruh Bakari, whose poetry resonated like a song – Burning Spear singing Christopher Columbus, Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus’ haunted, captivating Cast Them in the Fire:
I do not
Write or speak
English well
But I understand
Sentences and equations
So do the women
I have known
In the marketplace
Selling yams
With expectant eyes
And the men
Chopping coconuts
Or hauling nets
From the sea
I hear the sound
Of the abeng
And the conch shell
I love
The smell
Of burning banks.
– excerpt from Talking Drums and Flag Waving (for Bristol 1980) in Sounds and Echoes, Karnak House Books, 1980
Turns out Smokestack Books had published 2 volumes by Ishaq Imruh Bakari – Without Passport or Apology, and The Madman In This House. I began to read every Smokestack title I could get my hands on. When I had enough material ready for my first collection I submitted it to Smokestack and got a reply from Andy Croft after a few weeks, offering to publish it. Andy was consistently supportive and positive. He was encouraging , in a media landscape of cynicism and back-biting and it was clear that we shared an agenda around the possibilities offered up by sharply-directed interventions within the literary world – trying, I guess, to somehow poison the culture industry to death.
Andy Croft has now announced that Smokestack Books will no longer publish new material, but will keep all existing titles in print. Smokestack’s record is a wholly impressive one:
I set up Smokestack Books in 2004 with the aim of publishing poets a long way from the centres of cultural authority, especially oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets. Since then, Smokestack has sold over 65, 000 books and published 237 titles, including books by John Berger, Victor Jara, Michael Rosen, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vernon Scannell, Linda France, Louis Aragon, Bertolt Brecht, Nikola Vaptsarov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yiannis Ritsos and anthologies of poetry from Cuba, Greece, Kurdistan, France, Russia, Algeria and Palestine.
Smokestack Books functioned as a repository of militant poetry, and its internationalist focus, together with its commitment to working with translators who sought to recover and make accessible the poetic resources of a communist legacy that was able to speak of revolutionary possibilities from both within and against the history of the official communist movement, made Smokestack unique.
Thanks to Smokestack…
Smokestack also brought new voices to light – and gave exposure to a group of working-class poets all linked by a common experience of living through the defeat of the official labour movement during the Thatcher years and after, and determined to explore how that played out on the closing-off of possibilities at the level of community and in individual lives. There was a combination of plain-speaking and experimental abuse of language in order to arrive at a proximity to the truth of life.
Poets like Pete Raynard (whose Proletarian Poetry website also gave a key platform to this group), Amir Darwish, Owen Gallagher, Alan Morrison, Ross Wilson, John Tait, Karl Riordan and Martin Hayes share what Croft, in The Privatisation of Poetry, calls a commitment to “knowing ourselves and others better.”
The new Smokestack writers share a bitter contempt for the brutalities and hypocrisies of capitalism, and this can manifest in flensing satire – Martin Rowson and Graham Fulton are the best examples of this. Smokestack also brought into print brilliant working-class women whose poetry would have struggled for exposure in a poetry scene generally focused on the “trivial and self-important, characterised by snobbery, narcissism, humourlessness and political indifference.”
Thanks to Smokestack we have the droll, biting writings of Marilyn Longstaff and SJ Litherland, from the Vane Women collective from the north-east; the dark childhood tales of Jennifer Copley; Alison Carr’s brutal surrealism, Anna Robinson’s unsentimental celebrations of community and solidarity and Selina Rodrigues’s remarkable “Ferocious”, which brings together tales of call centres, sweatshops, and night shift cleaning jobs, to carve poems of solidarity and precarity with a beautiful scalpel.
All of these are as good as, in many cases better than, the works of other poetry publishers. Martin Hayes, I’d argue, is unique – not only in that he writes primarily about work and its drudgery, but that he writes a longform, experimental poetry that communicates powerfully and with an icy clarity. One reason for this is that he is prepared to “write ugly”, about ugly things.
….but no thanks to The Guardian
All of these books and writers were completely passed over, ignored. As Andy Croft points out “No Smokestack title was ever reviewed in The Guardian.”
In the essays reproduced in The Privatisation of Poetry, Croft works through some of the reasons why this might be. Smokestack Books, he writes, was an “attempt to break out of poetry’s self-imposed isolation by bringing together serious readers and serious writers around serious issues.” It was a determined effort to “keep open a space for what is left of the radical poetic tradition in the twenty first century.”
I may differ from Andy Croft on this point, insofar as I don’t think that the network of small poetry presses generally neglects this tradition – Peepal Tree Press, Salt, Enitharnon, Bloodaxe and even, at times, Carcanet all publish and keep in print poets committed to both political radicalism and poetic experimentation.
The problem is primarily with the gatekeepers in the various media that congeal around the poetry scene – the broadsheets, the prizes, the festivals, the Poetry Society/Poetry Review. None of these want dirty feet and lager stains on their pristine carpets. Croft nails this, and all of us have experienced it, at various points – the feeling that “the culture belongs to others who are better qualified by class and money and culture and geography and education.”
Croft ‘s belief is that “poetry is essentially a public and collective expression of emotionally shared symbolic meaning.” He quotes Randall Swingler (whose work he has done much to keep in print and to champion) that “poetry fulfils…the original function of language…to keep people together…to make them aware of their common nature and interest, their essential community with one another…”
In this, then, it is like theatre, and like theatre it is not intended to be consumed as private experience. The novel is the quintessential art-form of the bourgeois age, intended to be consumed as precisely as a private experience and created initially around the development of an interior (and again, therefore) private voice. Poetry, though, ought to be able to exist primarily as orated experience:
A poem is an exchange of factual and imaginative information. It is also a potential exchange of trust, vulnerability and kindness. The writer of a poem has to trust that strangers will treat kindly their best attempt to express, describe, imagine and understand the world. The reader has to trust that the writer will treat them kindly by helping them to make sense of and enjoy a poem that they have never seen before. Each relies on the others’ understanding that this exchange is both difficult and important.
So the “shared symbolic meaning” of poetry is derived through dialogue. It is not imposed by the poet – some blows might not land, and it is for the poet to learn from that and think again, rewrite, hack away. Some readers/listeners will take away a meaning that extends or entirely mutates that impression the poet originally intended. The “symbolic meaning” is always in flux, partly because the process of meaning-creation is dialogic, and also because capitalism creates a living world that is always in the process of destruction and always in flux. The first reason, then, for the passing-over of the type of poetry Croft has championed is because it is too savage, too uncouth and, crucially, too democratic, for the tastemakers of the poetry scene. Their poetry is rooted in an attempt to maintain as essential to poetry that sensibility of interiority which is the core of the novel in its original form. Croft describes this as “the commodification of poetry, the privatisation of feeling.” Not every poem needs to be about a fucking geranium. Not when some people don’t have patios to decorate, because they don’t have homes at all…
Poetry – an elite sport played by professionals
Moreover, “Contemporary British poetry is not so much a game which everyone can play as an elite sport played by professionals to which the rest of us are invited as spectators.” As small presses, venues, magazines and alternative bookshops disappear, the position of the poetry establishment, as expressed by Jane Holland in Poetry Review, is that “there are too many people out there writing poetry.”
Some of this kind of bullshit is just bog-standard cultural elitism, whereby poetry becomes a form of “self-display” and a means to the acquisition of cultural capital, which necessarily involves the manoeuvring to deny the same to others, in order to maintain position. The Poetry Society no more wants to encourage an outpouring of poetic creativity than the Royal Academy wants to promote the artistic flourishing of the masses – it will bring the price down, darling.
There is also, though, a class prejudice at work which is partly a dread of rough types in the drawing room, but also a fear (a real and deep fear) of what is being said. In The Privatisation of Poetry Andy Croft quotes Adrian Mitchell “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” I think this is half right. It’s true that the themes of a poetry which has become a middle-class preserve don’t touch upon the interests and agonies of working-class life and so have no obvious relevance. This, I think, is as much to do with the sterility of its language and imagery and tone as the themes as such. As Raul Vaniegem put it, of those “who do not understand what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth”.
I think Fran Lock is ultimately right on this, though:
I’ve got a lot of love for the late Adrian Mitchell but I think he was wrong about this. I didn’t have much access to poetry growing up, but that wasn’t because poetry was ignoring me , that was because poetry had been deliberately engineered out of my life…poetry does not ignore people, but there is a system at work designed to exclude people from poetry …It starts at school, with a hidden curriculum that attempts to circumscribe and manipulate the cultural expectations of working-class kids by telling them what is and isn’t for them.
– Fran Lock, Spectres//Defectors///No Respecters, Culture Matters 2024
Croft says that “the shared, public music of mean language and common experience remains (poetry’s) greatest asset-the power to communicate, universalise and shape a common human identity.” This is what the gatekeepers fear. And the fear works on many levels and runs through the response to Smokestack Books. Ignoring the books is thus a political response.
At its simplest, it exists as the attempt to maintain a monopoly over cultural capital, and therefore a monopoly over who gets to speak. So that shaping of a common human identity has to have a contradiction running through it so far as the gatekeepers are concerned – there can be a “common experience” (to deny this would be to deny the history and legacy of the poetic tradition) but that common experience has to be articulated by a cultural elite. To let anyone slip through the net would be to lay the contradiction wide open. And,as Croft sets it out , “Art can be many things…but it cannot be property. As soon as a work of art is owned by one individual it is not shared; if it is not shared, then it is not art.” That dismal wing of the culture industry which presides over poetry prizes and reviews is committed to the maintenance of poetry as a commodity, not as art.
No Them Only Us
Secondly, the poetry elite, good liberals as they may be (and the Guardian is probably the best example of this kind of consciousness at work) does not in practice believe in a common human identity, if by that, we mean an identity rooted in the commons. Any belief in the possibility of going-beyond a society rooted in exploitation, environmental destruction and inequality has been ditched for an acceptance of “things as they are.”
At the same time, as Croft puts it, “These days power has to dress up in democratic rags in order to get what it wants and to keep what it already possesses.” So a consensus forms around an atrophied bourgeois democracy as the limit-point of politics. In relation to poetry, “The result is the victory march of Dullness, characterised by humourlessness, political indifference, a disregard for tradition, a serious underestimation of poetry’s music and a snobbish hostility to amateurs.”
Smokestack Book’s catalogue of radical internationalist poets from within the communist tradition was a manifestation of the bad conscience of the liberal arts mainstream, the ex-radicals, the formerly militant ’68ers, now churning out saccharine drivel and facile quippery. (I mean “bad conscience” in precisely its Nietzschean sense; “this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within.”)

The writings of Roque Dalton, or Jan Carew or Louis Aragon remind the good liberals of the aesthetic and political possibilities inhering in the tradition they tell us is dead and buried. I think in fact that the poetry that emerges from within the official communist tradition threatens the good liberal poet/reviewer the most, because it demonstrates that within the tradition they use to demonstrate the death of revolutionary possibility (and roll out their “totalitarianism” shibboleth) there always existed a utopian aesthetic voice that was never silenced.
As the Smokestack-published communist poet Francis Combes puts it “History is not over. There are more surprises still to come. And I do not think for my part that humanity is ready to commit suicide.” But nothing shall intrude upon the comforts of the world of the Guardian or Poetry Review – that same world where Polly Toynbee still says that Starmer will remove the child benefit cap but keeps shifting the date by which she believes it will happen.
There is, though, something else at work, located in poetry produced by (and for) working-class people that gives rise to a particular kind of fear. Croft references poetry as “still a way of saying things that cannot be said in other ways.” The key, I’d say, is still in who is saying what to who.
Andy Croft has a long and important history to draw on, of working as writer in residence with the Great North Run, Middlesbrough Town Hall, and HMP Holme House and HMP Moorland. He writes of time with Middlesborough’s Evening Gazette, editing a weekly column of readers’ poems. These poems “set out to celebrate, others to question, to denounce, praise, remember, challenge, entertain, scare, glorify, shock, criticise, ridicule, hint, complain, shout, whisper and giggle. In other words, for all their limitations, these poems do what all poetry must do.”

The poems thus offer a universalisation of experience through language – and there arises the first note of fear. Capitalist society rests on a particular kind of universalisation – that universal right of both rich and poor to sleep under bridges. For working-class people to come to see each other and the commonality of their experience through the medium of their own artistic production is a direct challenge to the fiction of bourgeois universality. Poetry as a “democratic creative act” might herald a possibility of the realisation of a genuine creative, cultural, political and economic democracy!
Pen to paper, not fist to mouth
We can push this point further. One thing lacking in most working-class peoples’ lives is time. Even what can appear to be a surfeit of time secured by the non-working section of the class is time policed by welfare bureaucracy and curtailed by poverty. Lack of time means lack of time to think and to play with concepts.
Specifically, therefore, it means that the creation of a working-class subject conscious of its own interests, the cohering of a working class for-itself, is thwarted by this lack of time. Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach — “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” should be read as assuming that in order to change the world, we have to also first be able to interpret it. The professionalisation of philosophy as the property of the academy, and the decline of the tradition of working-class self–education all militate against this.
Poetry, though, is a medium available to anyone, if they can find the time. It allows for conceptual play and abstraction. If you look at (as a random example) the current issue of Inside Times (20 January 2025), the newspaper produced by and for prisoners, and go to its poetry page, you will find poems on a variety of themes: friendship, self-sabotage, masculinity, dealing with death – and this from Nemo, in Wormwood Scrubs:-
When to put pen to paper, instead of fist to mouth
How to be comfortably alone with myself
How to express myself through poetry and prose
And finally; never to underestimate the
Transportational power of a book.
– Things I learned in Gaol
And this, from Robert L, in Dovegate:
Now imagine free movement, we could live any place
And men aren’t defined by religion and race
What a respectful life that would be
Imagine if politicians were paid not to lie
And if all world leaders could see eye-to-eye
What a conscientious mankind that would be
Imagine each man was paid what he’s worth
And poverty was wiped off the face of the earth
What a stress-free life that would be
– Imagine
The point is that all the poems show a desire to communicate, an element of introspection and self-examination that is a precondition to agency and self-consciousness as a political subject, and a fortitude in the face of circumstance. (As an aside, I’ve seen plenty of cons get degrees and doctorates while inside, but hardly any from my schooldays peer group. Draw what lessons you will).
You’re sitting on your bunk; you have time to think; you start to play with concepts and mull over ideas and put them into shapes of your own. This is the first stage of what Alain Badiou, in The Age of the Poets, Verso 2014, has described as “the escape from nihilistic resignation” (the form of consciousness which is the common sense of a capitalism no longer able to masquerade as the agent of growth and futurity.
Take this new sense of self-awareness one stage on. Imagine it as it appears in the creations of working-class poets who have mastered the craft of poetry and have been able to engineer imagery that communicates to others of their class about their shared experience. How to interpret the world, as a step towards changing it.
As Badiou has it, how to produce, through a communist poetry, “a subjectivity capable of confronting the long run because it has confidence in itself.” Now think again about why the status quo-embracing liberal intelligentsia can’t bring themselves to review a book produced by Smokestack, however important it may be.
Vladimir Mayakovsky used to rage against the byt, which one of his translators has called “daily life with its routine and its insipidity.” Let’s say that byt is the everyday common sense of the times. Mayakovsky showed how poetry could undermine and push against the byt. In The Privatisation of Poetry Andy Croft argues in theory, and shows continuously through his practice, how we can do the same. It is an important book, drawing on a history of important work.