Spring Journal Canto XIV
This is a canto taken from my long poem 'Spring Journal' that I wrote, originally on Twitter, during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, and that was read out in weekly instalments on the online salon 'A Leap in the Dark', and finally published in full by CB Editions in December 2020. It takes its form, structure, style and mood from Louis MacNeice's poem 'Autumn Journal', written in 1938 as Britain prepared for war.
I started the poem on Twitter on my phone, responding almost line by line to MacNeice's poem, updating it, then typing the individual cantos up on my laptop. Gradually, as the poem came to be read out online week by week during the spring and summer, I moved from pastiche to homage, responding sometimes to the theme of individual cantos, and sometimes to world events.
Just as MacNeice had done in 1938, I responded to individual events in the news, as well as my only personal responses to it. There are many moments of life in 2020 that are specifically referenced, both local, national and international, such as the killing of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the removal in Bristol of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston.
