After years of working towards getting a collection of poems published, I've finally made it, and I am very pleased with the result, both in terms of the poems I chose for it, and the excellent job the publishers, Oversteps Books, have made of the book. It looks beautiful to my eyes, and I hope it will find readers who will like it too.

So I am pleased with myself, sitting back on my laurels, taking pleasure in having arrived at my destination, revelling in a moment's relaxation. But with just a fraction of my mind, wondering how long I can get away with living in this state, knowing that in some dark mental corner lurks the question--what next?

I don't like using words like 'inspiration' in connection with writing, because in too many minds this word has an almost magical significance, and I don't believe in magic. As the artist Edward Atkinson Hornel said 'The real mood of inspiration comes oftener through work than by waiting'. This quote has often been responsible for getting me back to work.

It's better to write something, even if it falls short of what you wanted, than to sit around waiting for an unspecified magic to produce 'would be' perfect words. There are, of course, those subconscious promptings, which may be what people mean by inspiration, but they don't come without the hard work of thinking about what you are seeing and doing. That is where the words really come from. If you don't do that, the unseen part of your mind doesn't supply the prompts that I could--but won't--call inspiration.

In the same way that I try not to use words like inspiration, I prefer using utilitarian words where possible. Our species frequently likes to imagine itself superior to other forms of life, happy to ignore our rather obvious failings, while casually demoting the significance of other living things, both sentient and insentient. We don't need much encouraging to use words that confer a special status to our existence, so I try not to make things worse. Meanwhile, it's unlikely that the universe notices, or cares about, our tiny specks crawling all over just one small planet in a cast of billions.

My word for life is the functional word 'process'. I see life as a process that continues on its way whether we take an interest in it or not. My idea of being alive is to engage with that process, to interact with it as best I can, rather than to passively accept, without comment, what happens around me. The significance of an art is that it takes the raw material of the world, whether its physical reality, or the imagining of it, and reassembles existence in a personal realisation of its significance, that at its best may have some universal value. I would argue that this is far better than living life 'off the peg', as consumers not creators.

As I suggested at the beginning of this piece, the question 'what next' lurks momentarily unacknowledged in my mind, but in actual fact I am already halfway through a collection provisionally entitled Consciousness. I'm sure I won't be able to say anything especially new about the subject, but I might be able to supply a personal insight into what it feels like to be conscious, and I am willing to try. Failure is a distinct possibility, but it wouldn't be so worth trying if failure wasn't a real risk. What was actually loitering in my thoughts was what do when that is finished, which, at my age, is the nearest I come to optimism.

Many people, perhaps some poets themselves, consider poetry, what it has to say, and the way it says it, to be irrelevant. Poets are sometimes chided, more often than not from within their own community, for not tackling say, big political issues of the day.

But I think that poetry has its sights on long term relevance. Whereas in the banking community the blind pursuit of short-term profit outweighed everything else, which eventually led to the 2008 financial collapse, huge PPI fines, the Libor rate fixing débâcle and its like, and the subsequent dire (collateral damage) consequences for the wider world, poets look to the long-term, and different values altogether.

When I woke the other morning the first things I heard about were the brutal eviction from a plane of a man who had a valid ticket, but had to be ejected because of the incompetence and greed of the airline, the same airline that spends a large amount of money in advertising trying to convince people that the said airline really cares about them.

Where do I start to express the various items of news about the American president who, for example, appears to be about to ensure American companies who have been hiding large amounts of money from the tax man by keeping it overseas, will be able to repatriate it at a lower than expected rate of tax. This from the man who was supposed to be a champion of the little man against elites.

Uber, the taxi company, were in the news again because yet another of it's executives has resigned, and although she wouldn't give a reason why, it is not hard to suspect that she may be another executive who finds Uber's behaviour so objectionable she can't stomach it any more.

The airline is getting its comeuppance, as is Uber who appear to be in all sorts of trouble, and President Trump has failed so far to do most of the things he said he would do, so he is not proving very successful. That is all well and good, and perhaps reason for some optimism.

But what is really needed is something more than prevention, and punishment of ills when they happen. Which is where poetry comes in. We need alternatives. Poetry has two great strengths to my mind:

1/ It is done for the love of language and the truth that can be expressed using language, without any expectation of personal gain. No greed is involved. Getting rich writing poetry is as near to impossibility as it is possible to get

2/ It can be beautiful, can benefit its readers with a moment of loveliness and worthwhile thought in a frequently ugly and thoughtless world (as described above).

I therefore offer poetry as a revolutionary beacon of beauty and truth in an ugly world, and that, among other things, is desperately needed. It won't change things on its own, of course, but if people stop making things for the reasons I have just given, expressing as far as is possible, higher thoughts and feelings, we will be in even more trouble than we are already.

One of the things that poetry does well is to join up dots in a way that is unexpected. Some poet somewhere might spot the relevance for example, of the apparent irrelevance of Easter Island to Donald Trump's environmental policies. Although there were various reasons for the demise of the civilization that created the huge stone images on the island, a significant factor was the deforestation (much of it due to the resources used to erect the stone images) that made it impossible to sustain previous population levels. If one squinted slightly, I wonder whether one of the overblown stone faces might bear a resemblance to President Trump. I couldn't say, but perhaps there is a poem in it.

Then there is the humble bee, with industrious habits you would have thought might appeal to the president. I can't say precisely what effect his environmental policies will have on bees, but the current problems these hard-working insects face is well known, and their decline may be a result of man's environmental mismanagement, so it would seem to be a good time to invest more in environmental matters, not less. Not to mention climate-change of course. However, I am sure the president may feel he has so many more pressing matters, that bees are irrelevant, what possible relevance can the efficient pollination of crops have anyway.

Then there is education, there are many people advocating strict relevance in that field, relevance that is to producing graduates who might say, be useful to the needs of the economy. Perhaps some of them might even be bankers. Goodness knows, we need them to continue the good work the last lot started. It would of course be relevant to produce graduates with a working knowledge of the Chinese language, to help promote our trade with the Chinese in the post-brexit world, but entirely irrelevant to produce people well-versed in ancient Chinese thought. What earthly use would it be to have people versed in Chuang Tzu's response to Hui Tzu's alleged comment that “Your teachings are of no practical use”, to which it is said Chuang Tzu responded “Only those who already know the value of the useless can be talked to about the useful. This earth we walk upon is of vast extent, yet in order to walk a man uses no more of it than the soles of his two feet will cover. But suppose one cut away the ground around his feet till one reached the Yellow Springs,1 would his patches of ground still be of any use to him for walking? Hui Tzu said, “They would be of no use.” Chuang Tzu said, “So then the usefulness of the useless is evident.”

Think about it if you are listening Donald old chap, and anyone else that thinks they know what is relevant and what is not.

1. Yellow Springs = The world of the dead.