About

This blog is about poetry, learning and understanding: call it justice, identity and community; or equity, diversity and inclusion or belonging. I think the epi-stem is the same.

The keyboard, the page, the screen and the adult classroom defined much of me to myself for many years. From 1986 to 2020 I worked in education, learning, teaching, research and skills. Before that, from 1973-1987 (there was some overlap), I mostly earned money as a sous chef. I was a good journeyman kitchen worker in some nice places in the US and UK. I was also a student and latterly an academic.

I started writing poetry at school in the late 1960s/early 1970s, inspired by William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, e e cummings, Gregory Corso, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Bob Dylan, William Blake, W B Yeats, Dylan Thomas, John Donne… And friends, Clay Debevoise, Bill Floweree, Brian Crockett. Through various jobs and cities, I sought out local poetry groups. I was Secretary to the Oxford University Poetry Society 1985-86 (with W. N. Herbert, Gwyneth Lewis, Keith Jebb, Helen Kidd, Mick Herron, Jo Lloyd, Russell Whitehead). My poems have appeared in Fire, A3, Password Scop, Magma, New Poetry from Oxford, Pulpsmith, The Nail, Catweazle Magazine, Clarion, Dark Mountain, Outside Left… Later influences were the Ranting Poets and then the UK slam scene through Steve Larkin, Sophia Blackwell, and the Hammer and Tongue massive; I met Brum poets Spoz and Dreadlock Alien through Hammer and Tongue.  I have performed in a number of collaborations: Rhyme and Reason with Alan Buckley, and: Broadside, and the Quarterly Report with Alan, Joe Butler and Stephen Hancock. I am currently working with Tobias Sturmer and Sam Twigg Johnson as Spoken Folk.

The names I mention are in my lineage. Lines: lineages and “songlines” are important. But recognise, with irony, the self serving attachment to something called important. This is the thousand mile question: the atomist at work with the -archy, dividing and ordering, smaller and smaller, higher and higher.

Poetry is visceral, generating feeling with the reader/listener/hearer. Feelings range. There are the personal primal libidinal thrill and ache to be in flow, at one and together; and the public, political, compassionate empathies and sympathies. Ultimately, I want to own my own shit. There is trauma everywhere. I have – and I believe we all have – a/my/our “porn-buzz”. And, there is healing. We are bodies of matter that bump and bruise and blush with pleasure; bleed and suffer pain. Keep doing the physio. Breathe.

In my poetry I want to connect public and personal. In poetry terms, to be both bardic and confessional. Bardic poetry addresses a public: the audience, you, “our” collective history, elegy, myth, grief, warnings, broadsides, parodies, socials, weddings and beddings, praise and celebration. Confessional poetry addresses “my” memory-experience- body in an attested timeline, evidentially “factual,” authentic, shown/revealed with consent and shared.

Many of my poems were collected in When Life Looks Like Easy Street, Albion Beatnik, 2014 https://www.abpress.co.uk/books/when-life-

Newer poetry is here (https://soundcloud.com/thelastpoet) and scattered about

Continuing education. I got a BA (1976) in English Lit in the US; an MPhil (1986) in English Language from Oxford University. I got an MA Ed (2001) from the Open University and a PhD (2011) on adult community learning from Southampton University.  After the kitchen, I worked as a community education tutor from 1987 to 1989 before becoming a training materials editor and subsequently training consultant in the international energy industry from 1989 to 2000, travelling to Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Russia and many other countries.

I worked at Oxford Brookes University from August 2000 until August 2020. A neat 20 years. I started in “Business Development”, became “Development Director for Off-Campus eLearning”. I didn’t, to be honest, “develop” much. I advised the Head of e-Learning and the Senior Management Team of the University on policy for off-campus e-learning and e-learning partnerships. I like to think I helped the University not to make big expensive mistakes.  I joined the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development OCSLD in June 2006 as a Senior Lecturer and Educational Development Consultant (e-Learning). I led the  Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PCTHE) and the MA Education (Higher Education) module “Philosophy and Policy of Higher Education”. And, I taught on many other educational development activities, workshops and consultancies. My doctorate (July 2011) at the University of Southampton told the stories of adult users of a community IT centre on a large estate.

With colleagues, I won funding for a number of large support and synthesis projects for the JISC and was funded by the Higher Education Academy to develop one of the first open online courses (MOOCs) to carry academic credit: First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. I also studied the pedagogical, social and technical dimensions of learning nationally and internationally. I am interested in the interactions between personal identity and the values and beliefs that are embedded in the outcomes and artefacts of – well, everything – but I first wrote “learning”, you know, like book ‘n’ word ‘n’ t’ing. Previously, I taught on the Open University MA course, “Language and Literacy in a Changing World”. I was on the Executive Committee of the  Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and head of the organising committee of the ALT-C conference from 2005-2007.

I prefer to envisage the progression of learning not through a metaphor of upward linear or hierarchical ascension but rather as a journey through concentric layers towards the core or heart of communities of knowledge, inquiry or practice: think of tree rings or onions. I take a broad social perspective on learning (Goodman, Lillis et al. 2003). Learning occurs through purposeful activity (Leont’ev 1978 ) and reflection (Dewey 1933), and with the use of tools. My vision is informed by Wenger and Lave’s community of practice theory (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Through purposeful engagement with communities of practice (trades, professions, arts and sciences, thieves and theologians) people progress from a state of peripheral participation on the margins of a community towards a state of mastery of the forms and norms of the community at its heart. Like Peer Gynt’s onion the journey is never complete; there are always more layers – and more journeys: more metaphors – to be investigated. This “learning journey” is sometimes mirrored by progression in formal education from school to college to university, but as often as not is supported by episodes of informal and semi-formal learning which may or may not be accredited. This may take place in institutions of education, but perhaps more often occurs in the workplace, the home, the community centre and all the other places where people interact. In Educational Development I am seeking to model this journey through layers and to test the model in discrete parts.

In my poetry I want to connect public and personal. In poetry terms, to be both bardic and confessional. Face – the public: the audience, you, “our” history, elegy, myth, grief, warnings, broadsides, parodies, socials, weddings and beddings, praise and celebration. Face – the personal: “my” memory-experience- body in an attested timeline, evidentially “factual,” authentic, shown/revealed with consent and shared. There is truth in each. There is feeling in each.

Many of my poems were collected in When Life Looks Like Easy Street, Albion Beatnik, (2014 https://www.abpress.co.uk/books/when-life- ). I am thelastpoet on Soundcloud. (https://soundcloud.com/thelastpoet). I am currently performing Spoken Folk (https://spokenfolk.net/) with Tobias Sturmer and Sam Twigg Johnson. I blog – sporadically – here at rworld2.net (https://www.rworld2.net). Some versions of some poems are there..

My very civil partner and I have two big teenage boys.

Elsewhere I am on:

Mastodon

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