Being a poet can be like the proverbial bus wait: a long time with nothing happening and then two or three opportunities come along at once.

I was delighted to be asked by the wonderful Sian Thomas to be a guest on The Poetry Bath on Wildhart Radio just before Christmas 2022. The discussion, with readings from  my work, is now available on catch-up.

Sian's shows are great: she is a natural interviewer, with a keen sense of humour and poetic pomposities are often interspersed with giggles. They also provide a broader insight into the lives and work of her guests. I do commend a soak in the bath to you.

I am also a member of the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society, an organisation with a 75 year history. It currently has about 90 members, who meet monthly for workshops on Zoom and alternately in person or online for open mics and a reading by a leading light of poetry.

Once a year, in January, the guest slot is opened to three members of the society and I will be one of them on Tuesday January 17  at the Royal Wells Hotel, starting at 2000. Non-members can attend for an admission fee of £3.00.

I expect I am due for a good long wait before anything else happens.

​Writing is full of detours and cul-de-sacs. Sometimes you take them wittingly; other times they just occur, or maybe are mistakes.
 
It has been a quirk of my writing career that a number of journals (including the daily newspaper where I started working as a journalist in the 1970s) have gone out of print or existence.
 
The titles that make up a CV can be beguiling. But what happened to the editors of Greenwich Window, Poems in Public Places or Unknown Poets (which ran for two editions) as did the more recent Saccharine Poetry.
 
It’s been a decent, albeit slow, couple of years on the publication front but last week I got work into two editions from different sources—a convent and a football fanzine.
 
In the former I had a poem, calling uncollared, which had a nod towards Jenny Joseph’s Warning. I have known, and been privileged to say mass occasionally at St Saviour’s Priory, Haggerston for nearly 30 years.
 
So it was an honour to have my poem published in their annual magazine, The Orient.
 
It so happens that I am a longstanding supporter of the Os, Leyton Orient Football Club. I can be found in the Supporters Club before the game (and sometimes after full time) and in the West Stand. I have been going there since the church deployed me in the East End, first at Stepney, then Bethnal Green.
 
There are two fanzines at the Os: The Leyton Orientear and Pandemonium. In the former, for which I have penned a number of articles over the past few years, I have written about Poets in Residence at football clubs. There are more than you might expect.
 
Having featured in these two publications—and thanks to the respective editors of each—I can only hope the revkev Curse does not follow their decision to put my work in print.

It is inevitable you have to promote yourself in poetry, and garner any good comments that come your way.

In my duties as Treasurer of the Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival I had an exchange with AP Staunton, a poet who once wrote a great poem about pissing in a posh boss's sink. AP was featuring in an event for the Festival which had an open mic.

I read a couple of pieces of mine, which the compere said came from my 'potty mouth' but Staunton later called me King of the Haiku.

Both arrows struck but I know which one gives me pleasure.

You take what you can get.

I am delighted to have been appointed Poet in Residence to the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path. Feel free to join us for the launch. 
​

I am pleased that some of five of my poems - Envoi, Water Works,
To A New Priest, Lifting and Cadwr wenyn have been published in the latest edition of Theology (Vol. 124 No.4 July 2021),
Single copies of the journal can be purchased via Sage Publishing
Email: subscriptions@sagepub.co.uk or Phone: +44 20 7324 8701.

What follows is a work in progress, I welcome suggestions on its improvement.
I would not normally be putting this out but after the leader of the dishonest, inept and corrupt administration of what passes for a UK government made his view clear, I thought it worth asking some questions.....
 
                     MARBLES

Is it a truth or beauty that calls you a thief?
Broke but nobly connected you somehow
convinced mother parliament, no doubt by the brief
of your class, to pay thousands to put on show
part of ill-gotten gains. You claimed you acquired
these statues legitimately, using your post in diplomacy
to build up the nation’s cultural capital, required
to understand classical inheritance. It’s a fantasy.
So some say, but the inheritors claim you had permission.
Whose hands can touch the missing firman? I bet ambition
burns in the well connected liar in a government of blue
never to return the Parthenon’s jewels. Beauty is not always true.
 
 
© Kevin Scully 2021

People are starving
Pumpkins become jack'o'lights
All you need to know.

© Kevin Scully 2020

There is a new journal of religious poetry.

If you want to learn more about it, this blog may help.

Oh, and you will find three of my poems in the launch edition.

As kids we mucked
about in mud,
dabbled in dirt,
frolicked in filth.
 
But lockdown love
means sep’rate beds;
intimate space
holds new meanings:
 
Social distance,
isolated,
selves sealed off by
lines on the ground.
 
Hygienic hands
waving hello
while longing hearts
dare not unleash.

© Kevin Scully 2020

My neighbour could infect me
So I will stay away from him.
My neighbour might subject me;
Good thoughts of him grow grim.
My neighbour may dissect me--
I’ll have to tear him limb from limb.
Yet my neighbour can protect me
So why not shelter him?
 
© Kevin Scully 2020
 
This is an early draft. Any comments to shape it better? Get in contact.