Sorry about the title for the post: as we were advised when I started in journalism,  'Avoid clichés like the plague!' but....

I have had two bits of good news among the usual 'Sorry, but no thanks' emails this week.

First was that I was among three winners named for the Eastbourne Poetry Café’s National Poetry Day competition with my poem, 'The counting of sheep...'

And on the last day of the month, I was notified that I had won the inaugural Ashdown Forest Poetry Competition. The poem was 'The family tartan'. It is available to read on the Forest's website.

​I started to earn a living from writing in my first job after leaving school. It was not perhaps where I foresaw myself, but you take what you can get. Between ambition, drinking and testosterone, I would carve out time for poetry.
 
I read it avidly as our house was full of the latest collections from Australian publishers, thanks to my father’s job as a journalist involving reviewing. Even as a teenager I would read a volume a day, dreaming of cracking the code that would allow me into the ranks of these gods who, on reading their biographies, seemed to be mostly the kind of people who surrounded us in 1960s and 70s suburban Sydney.  Australia was a more egalitarian place than it is now.
 
Something happened with the election of the first Labor government for 22 years and, all of a sudden, Australian arts in all forms blossomed, beginning the plethora of opportunities that continue, despite the right wing tendency to see profit over service and ideas, to this day.
 
I started on police rounds but ended up in a range of settings—pop music, politics and some theatre reviewing—as well as postings to Melbourne and to national parliament in Canberra. Between the calls of work and hangovers, I burned the late night creative candle and maintained a steady output of poetry, prose and drama. Much of it, no doubt, was rubbish but—and here is the change—you were able to send it to editors and producers and they would respond. Sometimes it was with encouragement, but more often than not, especially in poetry, it was with the standard rejection note.
 
When I lived in Melbourne in what my journalistic colleagues used to misname a commune, I would send off poems and when each of these slips of paper arrived I would stick them onto the kitchen wall beneath a large poster of Brigitte Bardot folding her arms across her otherwise assumed naked chest. When I was recalled to Sydney by my newspaper, my housemates gathered them up and posted them on to me, with a note along the lines of their knowing how important such tokens of rejection were to my psyche.
 
The odd piece made it into print, usually in small, fringe journals, all of them now defunct. One, probably one of the worst pieces of tosh I have written, certainly in published form, was titled ‘2AM Destination’ and made into the second and final edition of a Melbourne journal Unknown Poets. If my effort was anything to go by, the title was deserved.
 
I could possibly have avoided a lot of this had I gone to Sydney University and studied English, which seemed to be the traditional avenue into the literary life. That at no time did anyone suggest this to me, given my tastes and predilections at school, is a mystery. Still, there have been many entertaining and distracting adventures on the way.
 
Later, after I had graduated from NIDA and was trying to graft my way as an actor, I came to an understanding of the importance of ‘the scene’. I recall one director, a mentor and unsuccessful promoter of my work, once telling me I had to lift my game in the small talk and networking in bars before, at intervals and after plays. I had hoped, foolishly no doubt, that the work would speak for itself.
 
In latter years I have returned to places of learning, as well as hanging around holy houses, pubs and bars and libraries. I have never left them but now it is with concentration, and I have been able to pick up on current trends, craft and reading. One effort got me on the longlist of a prize but, to be honest, it’s been slim pickings—one or two poems accepted a year.
 
I am about to start the final term of my MA at the Poetry School and what is apparent is the change of landscape since I sat in my room bashing out fair drafts for despatch on the latest of my tortured manual typewriters. Talent among my colleagues is prodigious and the tuition is a great mix of input and assessment of students’ efforts.
 
The Poetry School is, of course, one of many routes in the now standard model of literary education in higher learning. This was pioneered in the United States and now almost every university has some kind of offering in creative writing, even journalism. It is, as many who work in the sector will tell you, one of the few ways of earning a living in the writing trade.
 
It is also favours those with disposable income—the Tories will be pleased, as their desire to reward their own and well-off continues apace—and it is tough as so much of the landscape is based on entry and tuition fees. In the US you often have to pay for submission to a magazine, with a sliding scale of costs for speed in response/feedback.
 
Despite the challenges, what this means is that competition is fiercer than ever and the complex nature of poetry, spoken word and publishing is more difficult than ever for an outsider to negotiate. To look at the figures of only one magazine, the wonderful Butcher’s Dog, about 25 poems made it through the long and shortlist culling from an 2079 submissions.
 
What keeps people going? I will leave it for others to opine on that. For me, I ask the  question which has haunted me most of my life—how can I stop now?

Wildhart Radio's Poetry Bath is no more.

The wonderful host, Sian Thomas, is transitioning the programme, which ran for two years, into a podcast.

Her final broadcast was on August 25. It was an honour to be asked back for a second time, this time to discuss my pamphlet, For The Journey.

You can listen to the episode here.

And if you want to buy a copy, you can do so here.

Having spent time walking, praying, talking and generally hanging out on the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path for just over a year, a pamphlet, For The Journey, was launched at an event at the amazing Berwick Church in Sussex on July 12.

That evening also involved the reading of four poems written by members of the Hastings Stanza, who held an ekphrastic poetry workshop in the church in September 2022.

I read the pamphlet's poems in order of publication, which mirrors a walk around the path (with a few surprising diversions) that can be started anywhere.

It was a delightful project to be part of and some of the work was bounced off other writers as part of my MA (Writing Poetry) at the Poetry School and workshops run by the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society.

Mark Oakley, author of The Splash of Words, has written:

Kevin Scully's poems work like sandpaper to the soul. Unafraid to embrace the disquiet of both inner and outer landscapes, he nevertheless leads to places of epiphany and radiance. Alerting us to the locality of his residency, je makes the heart local to us too, provoking us to wonder at rumours of transcendence.

To buy a copy, click here.

​For a while in my journalistic career, I was the rock reporter with a weekly column which had the awful title of Pop People.
 
I have toyed with writing some memoirs of that time, probably called Notes from a Nobody in 1970s Australian Rock and Roll.
 
I mention the column as it was in the days before photos of journalists routinely appeared over or beside  their writing. It was the byline we longed for. I had that, at least.

Pictures of hacks started to appear at The Sun in Sydney with the return from America of the shy new editor, Derryn Hinch, who ensured his face appeared all over the paper, a bit like an earlier Evgeny Lebedev in London’s Evening Standard.
 
As a writer of poetry and prose I have not really needed a likeness on my books. Theatre programmes only wanted one sometimes. Actors must have their day.

The website is a different story, and I have been lucky to have Adey Grummet, my wife of almost forty years, who has somehow captured me on various occasions in a not zombie-like rictus that is my reaction to having a photo taken.
 
But I found myself being asked about a mugshot, which the publishers of my first poetry pamphlet required. Publication was something of a surprise but Peter Blee, the priest behind the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path for which I was inaugural Poet in Residence, thought a gathering of poems from the year would be a fitting end to my time there.
 
So it was I found myself thinking apart from the fabulous Adey Grummet, who could carry out this office?
 
Our village held a street party to coincide with the weekend of King Charles’s coronation. Photographer and local resident Karolina Krasuska took a number of candid shots on the day and two of those caught me in a way I recognised myself.
 
We set a date for an hour’s shoot as light faded in the churchyard and some great images emerged. Which is a testament to Karolina, who tends to eschew formal portraiture.
 
From the proofs emerged a number of images, one which will be on the back cover of the pamphlet, For The Journey. It can be seen here.
 
Another adorns this page, along with me striding through a field. That was by Adey, and it appears on the front of the book.
 
I will let you know how you can obtain it soon. 

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: [email protected] or Phone: +44 20 7324 8701.