Pete Green on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal and on their own poem Sheffield Almanac

In this episode, Pete Green reads and discusses Chapter Eight from Louis MacNeice’s book-length poem Autumn Journal and how it played a part in the writing of their own long poem Sheffield Almanac.   In the programme, Pete talks about their own long relationship with MacNeice’s poem, how it ‘works’ as a poem, stitching together contemporary ‘pinch points’ of late 1930s history and the author's own autobiography.  In a wide-ranging (roaming) conversation Pete talks about how the form of MacNeice’s poem influenced their own approach to Sheffield Almanac. They also explore how MacNiece brings together high and low culture to discuss notions of privilege, politics, and the state of the nation. Pete goes on to reflect on the first and second editions of Sheffield Almanac, and how their own work as a song writer has informed their own poetry writing skills. Pete talks about conflating the personal and political in Sheffield Almanac, and 'the predicament of the city of Sheffield' that is interrogated in this extended lyrical narrative.   The edition that Pete reads from here is Autumn Journal (Faber, 2012).   Pete Green is a song writer, musician, and poet. They have published two pamphlets with Longbarrow Press - Sheffield Almanac (first edition, 2017 and second edition, 2022), and Hemisphere (2021).  Pete’s first full-length came out with Salt in 2022, entitled The Meanwhile Sites. from Chapter One of Sheffield Almanac (second edition, Longbarrow 2022):                And we were timeless
 As the empty afternoons when we would settle    In for desultory shifts at the Fellow & Firkin  Unprepared to take one more step    Toward the millennium’s unmapped plains  Without a pint of cloudy ale and a doorstep    Sandwich loaded with fat chips.  Some seminar on Woolf and Joyce just finished,    We might stay put, we might loose happenstance  With suburban wanderlust undiminished —    Let the current bus us to Cotteridge or West Bromwich,  Let the bondage of deadlines unravel    Free in time and space, at least within the bounds  Of an off-peak pass from West Midlands Travel.     Suede supplanting Blur, Blair succeeding Smith:  Tumbleweed days. None of us paused to cherish     Carefreedom since we never knew — or just  Suppressed the knowledge — that it could perish     While the ink dried on our dissertations.  Weeks were some abundant currency one borrows     At deceptive interest rates, pays back At breakneck terms, in repossessed tomorrows     And when the time came to consolidate  Sheffield was our redemption, our second     Bite at adulthood’s sour cherry;  And when it’s done, when the tallies are reckoned     And we feel the slowing of the birthdays zipping  Past like the exit signs for junction     33, will we have come this far  Only for the settled life itself to seal our dysfunction     Rather than those years of frenzied chasing?  We thought those threadbare rented rooms, curtained    With frost and damp, would be the time the  Low tide turned amid the hurt and
    Searching. What if they prove instead the  High water mark? These kids have 4G, streaming media, wi-fi,     Colossal debt, jobs pre-empted by machines;  We had payphones, typewriters, a dust-strewn, scratchy hi-fi,    Student grants and jobs that worked us like machines  And all of us austerity, austerity and ISIS,
    Seas that go on rising through each summit,  Refugees, and leaders somehow baffled by a crisis     Every bugger else could spot a mile off Just as, this time last year, we watched the occupation     Of Central Office while they pricetagged hope and knowledge, Surprised by the moral pluck and spunk of a generation
    Dismissed as dismal materialist go-getters. Equally  Wrong-footed, the coppers made a kettle,
    Flung kids from wheelchair seats, performed the miracle  Of raising a new cohort to its feet and on its mettle     To pick up where we left the poll tax off.  This time, beyond London’s hall of mirrors, every region      Saw insurgent youth again  And round Coles Corner marched a stoked-up legion
    Of sophomores and schoolkids side by side. We know any  Booming cogwheels will surely crunch and seize up     Should we live to see recovery, we know the rest:  Clegg and the Tories put the fees up —
    But now we know the nature of autumn’s bonus hope:  Despite the cost of learning going treble,
    The spirit that radiates as halls of residence revive  Is the spirit not of the entrepreneur but the rebel.     Let’s go again:  Psychology, Landscape Architecture,     Biotechnology, East Asian Studies:  An occupied theatre hosts a free lecture —     From barricades to trending topics  I followed the movement online while tending     The baby: one feed for the jaded, one  Feed for the pure. While we’re expending     Reproductive energies, a revolution’s spent  And look now: winter extends a brittle hand, calling    Last orders on the year  But I’ll be the obstinate last drinker, stalling
    For time while autumn’s tables are wiped down;  I’ll be the flâneur in the park, passing
    Dead leaves and regrets from hand to hand  While squirrels hunker below the slow massing
    Of polar air at the season’s borders. I’ll see you on the Other side. Perhaps they’re right, perhaps the interweaving     Of our threads into our children will be our Making after all, and soon we’ll be retrieving     Optimism from these lengthened nights as our  Adopted city draws new breath this morning     Like this oblique first light along the streets of Crookes With those unloaded bags of socks and books adorning     Freshman lawns. Let them be young  And daft, let fortune attend their drunken     Stumbling into roads. Let the kids be alright.  The shine will dull on this clutch of conkers, their shrunken    Drying bulk brittle like ageing bone, as blown  And brushed from grates go the last of the old year’s embers    And the season’s first curls of chimney smoke  Stroke the underside of the first chilly sky, while September’s     Evenings graduate from the grey of slate to the black of carbon.  Let the nights not draw in quite yet nor the kids grow sober —     Autumn’s advance and the slants of the Earth  Shade on these vestiges of warmth into October,
    Shade on, prolong, the welcome of this shifted city,  Let its embrace still widen. Now’s no moment for this prudent     Stock-taking, bean-counting, the accountant’s wary eye.  Let this place take in the refugee, the student,
    The one and all who reinvent, renew, regenerate.  Underfoot the leaves accrue like debts for tuition,     Degenerate to mulch: this is the dying season  Yet these guests now unpacking lives make scant imposition     But loan this city life, new blood, new reason.