.png)
Graham Clifford
© Martin Juhasz
back
next
the poet
CEO of a large Multi Academy Trust and author of five poetry collections – published, variously, by Seren Books, Against the Grain and The Black Light Engine Room – Graham Clifford is the author of The Hitting Game. He's seen his work chiselled into paving slabs in Walthamstow, translated into Romanian and German, and featured in the UK's Poetry Archive. He's had poems in Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Magma, Ink, Sweat & Tears and The London Magazine, been anthologised by Faber & Faber and Broken Sleep Books, and rejected by The New Yorker.
the poems
No Alternative Now
Let’s grow a forest and hide in it.
We will stay there for years,
our clothes dropping from us in leaf shapes
in the dim crunchiness
where we copulate quickly like foxes,
and crap standing, ready to run.
After a while, reporters will arrive
but we will be up a tree,
bearded and matted.
Puffballs come up in the areas where we urinate:
they are delicately luminescent,
buzz in the dark like candle-lit, drizzly planets.
Shivering, curled together, one night
I smell death about to bloom in you –
next thing, you don’t want your hazelnuts,
can’t pull yourself up onto our branch.
From then on, until it happens,
every night I dream we drive sharp cars
and eat from tins.
We will never get this life out of our system.
Why He was Chosen
The man whose body accepted the pig’s heart had a violent past and worked with a machine that de-beaked chicks.
The heart lasted three years partly because of immunosuppressant drugs. The night before the transplant he watched a YouTube video of a black and white Russian experiment where a dog’s head was severed, reattached and had its nose tickled and it reacted.
It is reported the man mostly stayed alive because he studied calm and practised identifying and eradicating stress with the fidelity of a bear goring salmon full of semen and roe from a terrifyingly cold river in the dark.
The Best Poem Ever Written
I write a poem that is the best. Massive.
Not just long, but huge intellectually
and although it is book length
reading is like freefalling,
each line greased with two genius thoughts.
The poem makes me famous.
I wander oxygen-depleted nights
down city streets and hear
lines of my poem bartered
between sticky lovers.
On the train, I peek over the top
of a hardback book about me
at a man in a suit nodding off
and recognise the words he’s mouthing in his swoon.
All front pages, every day,
showcase stanzas of my poem –
bombings and murders get tucked inside.
The new novelist pays well
to get my poem printed as an introduction:
she knows her work makes no sense without it.
Everyone I have ever known
rings me to ask how I did it.
I say I don’t know and that’s the truth.
After a year the fuss hasn’t died away.
I sit at my computer
and hear downstairs turn the TV on.
I put my ear to a gap in the floorboards.
It’s an actor, and he’s reading my poem.
It’s a good version: I’ve heard it before.
He has a Shakespearean voice
doing justice to what the introducer called
The Best Poem Ever Written.
I listen to it all, I travel where the poem takes me,
then get back in my chair
and write a better one.
Publishing credits
No Alternative Now: The Hitting Game (Seren Books)
Why He was Chosen: The Rialto (No. 100)
The Best Poem Ever Written: Obsessed with Pipework (No. 24)