Refugees

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Image: “We need to see them for who they really are / Chancers and scroungers / Layabouts and loungers / With bombs up their sleeves / Cut-throats and thieves” Britain has a rich tradition of literary diarists, from Samuel Pepys and James Boswell to Frances Partridge and Alan Bennett. We also have a rich tradition of spoof diarists, who seem realer than real to many readers: Charles Pooter, Bridget Jones, Adrian Mole.

Thanks very much for getting in touch – and for choosing my book for your English analysis. Here’s my attempt to answer your questions:

Quotes to be Used

Often, giving “both sides” equal weight in an attempt to be fair is a false equivalence. Flat earthers shouldn’t get as much air time, column inches, or lesson time as demonstrable science. The cleverness of this poem is that it uses both sides in a provocative, productive, and positive way. Bilston’s message that has been retweeted over 10,000 times since it was posted last week, is an inspiring act of humanity. I think that there can be a certain self-importance that comes with defining oneself as a poet. I hold the view that too much poetry seems to be written with an audience of fellow poets in mind; it’s almost wilfully opaque, as if poetry isn’t any good unless the reader has to read it ten times to understand it. Whilst I don’t believe poetry should be unchallenging, a balance is needed or readers become alienated. And then people wonder why the average poetry book only sells a couple of hundred copies.” It’s important to remember that this poem was not written about nice white refugees; it’s about refugees of all colours.

The poet explained that he'd been working on writing something in this format for a while - taking inspiration from The Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed - but just couldn't nailed down the topic: literary devices bring variety into simple poetic pieces. Brian Bilston has also used some literary devices in this poem whose analysis is as follows. It’s not a deliberate ploy to up my Brian-ness,” he says. “That has all happened by happenstance, really, a very happy happenstance. I would like to somehow to get paid for writing but I don’t know how that works. And no one ever got rich from writing poetry. It’s not part of the poet’s quintessential ‘look’.” Sorry to mention the C word but my book of Christmas poems– And So This is Christmas – which publishes in the UK in October won’t be available in print in North America until next year (presumably to prevent too much excitement happening in any one year). Pipe smoke or not, Bilston’s commitment to his poetry and his followers is clear, with new poems appearing daily. Form plays a major part in his writing; poems appear as tweets, Scrabble clues, tree images, Excel spreadsheets and even Venn diagrams, as with his poem At the Intersection, which won the 2014 Great British Write Off.

Refugees

Teachers have found the activities particularly useful throughout teaching, or for revision or guided reading sessions. Students have found these resources extremely engaging, and it is clearly highlighted within each task regarding which assessment strands the task is designed to demonstrate. Bilston’s popularity saw his Unbound project to publish a debut collection of poems get funded in under three days, with donations continuing to amass. Currently funded at 160 per cent, You Took the Last Bus Home will be published later this year. Enjambment: It is defined as a thought in verse that does not come to an end at a line break; rather, it rolls over to the next line. For example; All too often, however, that means that innocent men, women and children living in extreme hardship are turned away or not welcomed. He’s partial to cryptic crosswords, the doggerel of Ogden Nash and titles like “No, You Cannot Borrow My Mobile Phone Charger.” “I’m not particularly keen on abstract poems so willfully opaque that they can only be enjoyed by other poets or academics,” he says. Bilston might as well be deconstructing the appeal of his own verse when he says his favorites “all have a magical blend of poignancy and accessibility. And they make me laugh.”