Ethel Carney wrote many of her poems while working at the St Lawrence Mill in Blackburn.  She is a rare example of a successful working class female writer from the early twentieth century and she represents everybody who has ever tried to live a creative life while working long and difficult hours. This poem is a tribute to her poem ‘Household Gods’ in which she considers the things we cherish in our homes.

The picture you paint of your gods is at once sweet

and frightening – the warmth of the hearth, firelight

against black stone.  Spaces which have held friends

now call to you with memories. Things which ought to be

lifeless are not.  They call out in your voice.

You are careful to warn that I will not see them

if I stop by your small house.  That’s fine – they are

yours and I would not try to take them. You tell me

I may have my own shrine, in my own small house.

But things have changed now. You’d be surprised by

our world.  Things are differently full.  Information

follows us around.  We no longer find the time to listen

to the cheerfully whistling kettle – today’s gods

have other qualities.  We carry our phones like icons

– reach for their reassuring weight in our pockets

– notice their absence like an empty chair.  A strange god,

this one – needing no prayers or devotion – just our

constant attention, like a bored child tugging on a sleeve. 

Look at me.  Look at me. You’d be bemused.  You’d

wonder why we give our time to something

that doesn’t love us back.  Why we ignore one another

at bus stops, avoid eye contact in the street.

A glass with a small fracture.

The water leaks so slowly you

barely notice until

it’s half empty.  But it’s the

only one you have, so you

continue.  Every day it is

refilled, every day a little

less, and it continues to

leak.  Nobody can understand

why you’re always thirsty.  You

can’t explain why this water

is suddenly so precious to you.

There’s so much of it that

it rains from the sky, but

you can’t catch it. While

others are putting up

umbrellas you’re trying

to fill your broken glass.

For Mum.

You remind me of pink.

Not cocktail-dress

perfume bottle pink,

not frilly knickers pink.

You are the pink of

chrysanthemums, roses,

the pink of cheeks

or the underside of a paw.

You are the pink

at the end of a sunny day

or the dripping of

blossom at the start

of spring.  Or, if you prefer,

a pair of fluffy slippers.

You remind me of pink.

Not of pink lipstick

or freshly painted nails.

Not hot pink or

polka dot pink.

You are the pink of

a mouse’s tail

or a sweet plum.

A favourite jumper

or a hand, held out.

You remind me of pink.

1994.  Salford.  A hot day.  The heat

wriggles up from white concrete.  Dogs

stretch on cracked pavements.

I’m 15 and going out.  I don’t know where.

Leanne is a new friend – hasn’t

yet realised I’m the weird girl.

She’s a liar, so the others say.

I’m wearing white stretch leggings

and I don’t yet know that they show

my knickers.  A T shirt.

Mum and Lucy express surprise

from inside a pother of

blueish smoke

but they’re too polite to say.

On Gore Avenue the men stop

working.  There’s Laughter.

Shouting. Eyes down.

Hurry past.  Don’t stop.

To Weaste Lane, to Buile Hill Park.

But it happens again and then again.

Shouting.  Whistling.

By the time I reach my friend

I’m bewildered – I tell her

but she doesn’t believe me.

She thinks everyone lies, like her.

We go to the precinct, past,

through tunnels of dirty yellow bricks.

Groups of boys by the flats. Eyes

and words following us.

More shouting.  A mix of

shame and pride. 

Because they see me,

they at least see me as

something more than the

weird girl from school.

Then we’re walking and talking

through sunny Salford streets,

the two of us.  It feels like

friendship.  Joyful.

Finally night comes and

we’re walking home.  We walk

back through the yellow tunnels,

back past the piss smells

with a woman who’s

scared to walk through them alone.

This is freedom and independence

and real life, at last.  It’s

exciting and fun and horrifying

and it is friendship.

The next day at school

Leanne tells everyone I made it all up.

We can still walk those streets –

past the chippy and the offie at the end

of my road, over the motorway bridge

to the street where you grew up.

These were our places.  Tightly knitted

red brick rows with a memory of cobbles.

Chimney pots and black slate roofs.

Yours and mine: a mile apart,

two Salford roads filled with our

stories.  Both of us playing the same

games, differently.  A version of you

I never knew with a turmoil of yellow

hair, in the middle of a group of kids

whose names you’ll tell me a few years

later, playing, running, learning

how to be the man I’ll marry. 

A few streets away I’m walking

around Langworthy estate with

my brothers solving invented mysteries

like some working class Enid Blyton kid,

unbrushed hair down to my waist

and Digby, my black mongrel dog at the

end of a lead.  Salford Mams standing

in doorways tut-tutting at us, hands

on hips, while their own kids are climbing

over garden fences or smoking in

the park.  Signs that say Play Street

in front of boarded up houses;

Ginnels lined with wooden gates hiding

outdoor toilets covered in rusted paint cans.

Crofts which one day will be housing

but for now are empty apart from fly-tipped

treasures – wood for bonfires or old pram wheels

to turn into a go kart with no braking system.

Our lives, separate and connected.

You there and me here, us before

we were us, quietly unaware of the

other half of our story a few streets away.

When it finally passed

there was no announcement

on the six o clock news.  The flags

continued to flap languidly

at the end of their poles. A notice

went up outside a gallery:

today Working Class Art died.

It had been ailing for years; had

been fed an unhealthy diet due

to rising food prices and

had been breathing dirty air.

During the pandemic while

some art grew fat and robust,

while ballet dancers practiced

in kitchens and the nation

baked bread, working

class art was fighting

to survive in a small flat,

working two jobs and

caring for its elderly mum.

But it had survived, until now.

A crowd began to gather

outside the gallery at four

o clock.  They didn’t bring

flowers or balloons or cards.

They didn’t light candles

or hold hands.  Instead they

brought poems, scribbled

on receipts and the backs

of letters – poems which

showed the light which

squeezed through the cracks

of a difficult life.  Poems which

said yes, but this is what we

can do.  They brought

paintings of streets

and shops and flats and

people, of bent backs and

hidden scars.  They

brought music, played on

second hand instruments

and stories about ordinary

lives.  They brought all of

these things, the intention

to remember and celebrate.

The intention to show that

even though, on that day,

working class art had finally

succumbed to a protracted

illness, nobody could claim

that it had never existed at all.

Pretentious.

A strange word.  Quite long

and fussy, as though it’s

trying to draw attention to itself –

the dot sitting above the I like

a small hat, the crossbars of

the Ts flourishing across the

page like wiggling eyebrows.

Pretentious.

A manacle of a word.  A lasso

waiting to be thrown around

the neck of the unwary.  It is

strangely attracted to the

working class artist, to those

tentatively dipping their toe

into waters overpopulated

by the creative wealthy.

Pretentious.

A sneering word.  It follows

you around spitting out

criticism, reminding you

to know your place.  Don’t

stand out.  Don’t draw

attention.  Who do you

think you are? 

Pretentious.

A pernicious word.  Killing working

class creativity at its root

with its insistence on conformity,

on sameness.  We do this to each

other.  We use the word

to stifle and to stop, to mock

and to derail.

Pretentious. A useful word. 

A word to remind you.

To show you that you

are extraordinary.  A word

to be tamed and never

feared.  To be kept on a

lead made from the work

of working class artists who

never gave up.

I teach creative writing at a college and one thing I have found is that often my students dread poetry week. This is partly because at school we’re taught to dissect poetry as if it’s a dead rat in a science lab – to pull apart the words and root out the ‘correct’ interpretation.

But it’s also because culturally we’re taught that there are two types of poetry- good poetry (which generally means deeply esoteric poetry) and bad poetry (the rest).

I’ve been listening to Lemn Sissay’s podcast Poetry Rebels and in one of the episodes he talks about how the Liverpool Poets were initially dismissed by the poetry establishment because they didn’t use poetic technique.

And it’s still happening. The poetry world is chock full of gatekeepers. There are so many different types of poetry these days which is great – there has never been a better time to get involved. But sometimes it seems like each crowd wants to stifle the others.

I’m not sure how to define my poetry. It isn’t particulatly cerebral, it isn’t folk poetry and I’m definitely not a performer. It’s taken me a while to fully embrace the label poet for myself because I’m not too sure where I fit in. But I have embraced it. I have learned to own my poetry without placing it in a box.

I wonder if it’s time we stopped dismissing the poetry of others as bad, just because it isn’t to our taste? Can’t we all learn to co-exist and embrace the creativity instead of pushing people out of the club? There’s space for everyone.