Tell Good People Good Things

'With Love, Grief and Fury' tour diary

May 13, 2024

Good morning, good mourning,

It is dawn when I write this: I am getting up and watching the changing light. It’s been over a week since my last confession. I mean Substack post. I don’t intend to make this a regular weekly thing or even a paid thing right now, but rather a place to spill over, a place to share and write and think aloud and delve into some of this time and this feeling and the people and the magic I find. Maybe this will be a diary of times that are fleeting. Or a record of time of life that is so short and cluttered. Or a sharing of a questioning mind that gets distracted by every shiny and urgent thing.

The heart of us is breaking over and over again, another death, another lie, another betrayal, another struggle, another ride, another story, another battle, another drama, another protest, another love, another grief, another fury, and on and on it goes … this emotional beating that is called the 2020s. This heat, this hot and pulsating sensation, this compulsion, this watchful eye, this baring witness, this noticing things, this being alive and awake with a pen in one hand and a pint of tea in the other. Yet every morning by some miracle the sun still rises, the sky gets lighter each day, the flowers miraculously grow in the dirt, and we get another spin in the wheel. How lucky we are.

I’m on tour now. I am currently going up and down the country telling the truth and sharing our global Love, Grief and Fury. It's an honour and a privilege and a great adventure. It feels like a brave thing. It feels different out there in 2024. Like all my years of being bold and saying the quiet part loudly was training for this time and age. Thank you to everyone who made it down to The Social for the private boozy double book launch of my two new books. ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ and ‘Springfield Road’ are in the shops now. It was a beautiful gathering. Thank you for the beautiful live music from Simeon Hammond Dallas. Go and check out all of her gigs and music, she is phenomenal. I listen to her music daily. She is the real deal.

I have been on a roll of dream gigs: Thank you to everyone at Blackwells in Manchester at the Anthony Burgess Foundation and to my fellow poets that evening Christine Roseeta Walker and Rebecca Hurst. Stunning poetry. Thank you to everyone who made it to my show at the Brighton Festival at The Brighton Dome. Always a joy to chat with founder of Afrori Books, legendary Carolynn Bain. Thank you to my dear Oli Spleen and the Kemptown Bookshop too. And thank you to WOW festival, Writing On The Wall, Liverpool and everyone at the Bluecoat and the brilliant performances from excellent Paul Birtill and Natalie Denny. Thank you and Happy Birthday to the News From Nowhere bookshop, now in its 50th year as an indie bookseller. It has been feeling like visiting family doing these gigs. I am so grateful to share these poems and books, thank you.

I keep thinking back to how I got his job, how I made this my business, how I learned about poetry in the 1990's. How I was taught that poetry lives in people. Your poetry does not live in a phone in your hand. I am aware that the algorithm is censoring some of our posts and poetry on instagram. But I am from the before-times. I know that poetry lives and breathes in here, out there, in the graffiti, in our blood and tears and rage and laughter. Poetry lives in hearts and minds and souls. I cannot waste time worrying about algorithms. You cannot stop the people-rhythm. You cannot unthink an idea, a feeling, a learning, a growing momentum. At every city and at every gig now, I am reminded of it, how a poem can make a room of complete strangers unite and gasp and weep and cheer and stand together. Also how you don’t know what a poem is about until you share it and feel it in the room. These books and poems are new, I haven’t performed them before, you, the audience, your feelings and responses, tears and laughter, are telling me what this is. Thank you.

I love this fearless work I do. I love the courage every gig begs me conjure. I love how at every gig you are all reminding me I am not alone in feeling like this. I love poets. Yes. It's scary as fuck out there in the world, but not with these poets by my side speaking their truth too. And not with these poems, and not with this book in my hand, and not with 30 years of doing this behind me and another 30 years of this ahead of me. See? It's what we do! We keep on keeping on! Thank you for making it out to see these live gigs. If you feel alone in this, then come find me. I see you.

You are a lighthouse. We are a lighthouse. See how we cast our light on jagged rocks and stormy seas. We are a lighthouse. We can withstand any weather. We are in a state of alert to seek out danger and threat. We are the lighthouse, witnessing and illuminating these times, our dark past, our shadowy present, with a bright and beaming light searching for a better tomorrow. That’s your job. Be a lighthouse, shine on, you massive lighthouse head, shine on. Yes. I know, it’s exhausting, and it hurts, but shine on, please, shine on.

When I was a teenage poet, I wore a blue cap with a CND badge on the front. My poems were anti-war and vehemently vegetarian. I wrote of my nightmares and hopes, I wrote poems about war and peace. I loved Tracy Chapman and Prince. I remember my art GCSE and how I spent weeks painting this one epic image: it was a giant nuclear bomb explosion with the faces of Thatcher and Reagan looming in the mushroom cloud. I wasn’t particularly good at art, my mother is a fabulous painter, but I didn’t inherit her gift. For some reason lately, I keep thinking about completing that enormously ambitious and badly-made charcoal and flame painting, and how it felt to be fifteen and angry and frustrated with the injustices of the world. I can also recall my art teacher, I forget her name, but don’t forget how she was warm and colourful with chunky wooden beads and silk hippy scarves. I remember how she made me feel, how she asked me why I’d picked that image, and how I’d chosen to make that painting. I can remember her face, when she looked at my work, the grotesque faces of Thatcher and Reagan grimacing in a smudged nuclear cloud, and she asked me if that was what I feared? I ranted about Chernobyl, and I played her my cassette tapes so she could listen to Prince ‘Sign O’ The Times’ and Tracy Chapman’s ‘Why?’ And now looking back in my remembering she was lovely about it, I liked how she listened to me. I think in those days it was quite rare to talk like that with an adult. And something about that magic moment and that conversation with that art teacher and that really hilariously awful painting keeps coming back to my mind. I think it was the first time that my fury and fear were validated by a teacher or an adult like that. I liked the way she listened to me. Of course, she told me not to worry, she agreed, it is a scary world, and told me, you’re quite right to wish and hope for peace and love. I don’t remember my score for the painting, believe me, I cannot stress enough, that it was a terrible and very funny-bad painting. But I remember how it made me feel to finish it and to feel heard, I can recall the listening, the feeling of the conversation it sparked that one afternoon in an art class back in the 1980s. Picture me if you can, my wet look gel curls in a blue cap with a CND badge on the front with Prince purple hearts and CND symbols tipex’d on my canvas army surplus bag.

Here we are in 2024: The student protests which began in US universities are escalating. This is the generation of Sandy Hook. What did we expect? The younger generation to sit by and watch the world explode and do nothing, to see bloody teenagers under rubble and feel nothing? This is the generation that saw the last super tusker elephant die, the teenagers that see the real-life real-time extinction of thousands of species, a deliberate destruction of life. Globally teenagers have seen this in their own phones, this escalation of violence, war and corruption, injustice and greed. So I hear you and here’s a resounding shout out to all the student protester globally and here in the UK and Scotland. Some Liberation zones I have been keenly following and supporting: Warwick, Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, Sheffield, SOAS, Manchester, Swansea, Kent, UCL, Goldsmiths, Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Birmingham. The list is growing and growing, look it up, it is fantastic. I also suggest you check out and follow Youth Demand.

We have a fundamental human right to protest, to speak up and to stand up for what we believe in, for a better tomorrow, for peace and unity, to protest against the arms trade, the profiteers of war and oil and gas, to protest the financing of genocide and to stop the bombs.

Thank you for reading this post. Thank you for making it to see my gigs. If you feel alone in this … then come find me. Next stops are London’s Jawdance at Rich Mix in Shoreditch on May 15th. Then Outspoken at the Purcell Rooms at the Southbank Centre on May 16th. Then May 18th I’m at Bath Lit Fest and then on May 23rd I will be with my friends at Toast Poetry in Norfolk and Norwich Festival. And on and on it goes, more more more, busy bee summer, plus lots of delicious podcasts and radio bits coming in too. I’ll share more links later…

For now my fellow lighthouses, shine on,

and may we remain united in our

love, grief and fury,

sgxx

May 15: Jawdance, Rich Mix, London

May 16: Out-Spoken, Southbank, London

May 18: The Bath Festival of Literature

May 23: Norfolk and Norwich Festival

May 31: Wanstead Tap, Forest Gate, London

June 2: Bad Betty Live, Nottingham

Find more on my linktree: https://linktr.ee/salenagodden