Sick as a Poet

Football and poetry go together like Liverpool and Everton. Until now that is. Will Simpson mets the worlds first football poets.

We don't mind if people consider this eccentric," says Stuart Butler. "In fact we would like to be considered eccentric. We want to inspire people, share what we've got and maybe change people's attitudes if we can."

Stuart and his compadre Crispin Thomas are poets - football poets. From Stroud. A few years ago these facts would have been met with puzzled looks or howls of laughter. But times have changed. The worlds of letters and football have been drawing ever closer ever since the landmark publication of Fever Pitch in the early 1990s. You could probably fill Wembley with the reams that have been published about the game since Nick Hornby's best-seiling diary of an Arsenal fan. Poetry about football is not such a daft idea when you think about it - after all what are the songs that have traditionally rung up and down the nation's terraces but a form of urban poetry? Accessible, irreverent, funny and sometimes quite beautiful.

The Stroud Football Poets are the next logical step in the increasingly entwined relationship between footie and literature - the world's only known poetry group entirely devoted to the beautiful game. At the core of the group are Stuart and Crispin. Stuart (outside right, teacher by profession) was once on the books of Swindon Town and still supports the club. Crispin, for his sins, is a Chelsea fan and has more than a touch of the John Cooper Clark about him. The idea for the group grew from one'night in 1995 when Stuart spurred fellow local bard Dennis Gould into putting on an evening of football-related poetry at a nearby venue. Gould agreed, with one proviso, that Stuart himseif would write some football verse for the event.
"I hadn't written anything since my teenage hippy days but people turned up and they seemed to like it. 1 think we really caught the zeitgeist." Indeed they had - running concurrent to the football boom of the 1990s was the resurgence of interest in performance poetry.

"In the past 15 years people have become more and more confident in wielding the pen and performing," says Stuart. "it's not that new," cuts in Crispin. "Attila The Stockbroker has always written about football and Roger McGough has done the odd thing. But more and more people are swapping ideas about the game. Nowadays people are so much more tuned in to expressing their feelings and poetry is part of that." By the time the poets got to perform at Swindon Town FC in May 1996 they were six strong. Now in 2001 the poets have a squad of 21 contributors to their website plus a thriving youth team from the work they have done in local schools. They've taken their show on the road too - the bards of ball control have performed all over the country with Crispin recently taking his verse to San Francisco.
"I was sandwiched between these two DJs. I think they thought I was a bit weird, but they were all sitting on the floor listening. I suppose it was unusual - Ifelt like a circus act."

There hasn't been any shortage of material to wax lyrical about this season or in recent years. A scan of their website reveals that all aspects of the game are covered from personal odes to Emile Heskey to memories of Reading-Swindon derby games. But Stuart is keen to point out that they want to tackle the larger issues concerning the game itself. "The phrase we keep using is 'the people's game'. We are fighting to keep that alive because it is increasingly becoming a rich people's game. It saddens me when you hear that the average wage for a premiership footballer is £400,000 a year. That is a monstrosity. "I'am annoyed at the way the game has been taken from us," agrees Crispin. "Tickets are £30, £40, £50 a game now. I've only been able to go to one Chelsea match this season."

"But there is this double-edged thing," explains his team mate. "You've got more and more people identifying with the game but the way they do it is by buying the shirt and having the logo. Against this you have more and more people confident with their self-expression about the game. For us football is a conduit for a wider analysis of culture and society."

Erm, right. But why in Stroud? After all the Gloucestershire town is hardly known as a hotbed for the game (with due respect to local Conference side Forest Green Rovers) "Actually there are more poets per head of population here than anywhere else in the UK," points out Stuart. "Stroud has always had a lot of artists, writers and bohemian types and it's a community where people support one another. The bloke who does our website does it for nothing."

The poets are already thinking big. A book is planned and a national festival of football music and poetry is on the cards for next year. But when all is said and done isn't it all a bit pretentious and psuedy? It's only a short step from football poetry to Andrew Lloyd Webber writing football musicals. Stuart considers this. "I agree in a sense. Since ltalia 90 it has become a bourgeois and paradoxically we are part of the process.- I think poetry in particular is considered pretentious but it also talks about and empowers individual people."

"Poetry still has a bad image," says Crispin. "if we say we've got a poet to speak now, you imagine some drippy bioke who goes (affects a Neil the Hippy type voice) 'hello I've got some poetry to read now'. But what we do is dynamic and energetic."
Eccentric they might seem but there's method in the poets' madness. When the England team were in disarray last autumn, team mascot Basil (Stuart's one-year-old Scottish Terrier) decided he should respond to his nation's call and apply for the vacant manager's job.

"I sent a letter on Basil's behalf," explains Stuart. "He really thought he could make a good job of it. In his private life he is whiter than white and he is a terrier in the tackle." "Basil is free of any nationalist prejudice even if he is originally from Scotland," points out Crispin. He said in the letter that he is a dog but the FA didn't seem to mind - he still got back a uniform letter of rejection."

Stroud Football Poets play Tiverton College as part of the Tiverton Spring Festival on Saturday May 12. For more information or to contribute yourself log on to www.footballpoets. org

By Will Simpson, MAY 7 - 13 2001 THE BIG ISSUE