Poetry

On Poetry

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Steve McAuliffe 

 

I have been writing now in earnest for around 25 years. I started writing TV and film scripts, and then moved to playwriting before – a little over a year ago – I found myself inexplicably returning to poetry (where in truth it all began) – this time, however, I found I had a fully-formed voice and since that day I have dedicated my writing almost exclusively to poetry.
A few months back I had my first collection published: Thamesmead by Steve McAuliffe (available on Amazon now).

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My poetry is a mixture of political-polemic and spiritual liberation, with a healthy disdain for the State and all its soulless machinations thrown in for good measure. In this I more than occasionally feel the influence of William Blake:

No, there was no Grand Tour for poor old William,
And how was he to know his Arcadian Jerusalem would be appropriated
By fat-faced Tories in their elite drinking clubs up in Oxford?
Those heirs to the Satanic Mills he so abhorred
They flipped the mills for a profit before the bubble-burst,
And floated mythical Albion on the market as
Jerusalem PLC.
I must, I really must…
I must create something

However, it’s the politics of the individual that truly concerns me; the possibility of liberation once the individual’s enormous potential has been rediscovered. Thus in many of poems, liberation occurs in the most mundane and soul-less of environments: concrete sprawling estates; old people’s homes; the trees of Peckham Rye…

I believe that in order to create Jerusalem we must first reject all the artificial limitations imposed-upon-us. After all, it is the firing of our imaginations and the articulation of our determination to see real change that will finally free us of those pesky mind-forged manacles. The revolution begins inside of us.

No more waxing waning moon for me it seems
No more marking down allotted time in artificial markers
For there are new eternal tales to tell

New myths to weave from out of stardust
Truths formerly forbidden under Time’s totalitarian stranglehold

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