Poetry
Childish is a confessional poet and has published over 40 collections of his work. In 1979, Childish was a founder member of The Medway Poets, a poetry performance group, who read at the Kent Literature Festival and the 1981 international Cambridge Poetry Festival. There were, however, personality clashes in the group, particularly between Childish and Charles Thomson, who said: "There was friction between us, especially when he started heckling my poetry reading and I threatened to ban him from a forthcoming TV documentary." However, a TV South documentary on the group in 1982 brought them to a wider regional audience, though Childish's poetry was "deemed unbroadcastable". According to Childish: "Me & Charles were at war from 1979 until 1999. He even threatened having bouncers on the doors of Medway Poets' readings to keep me out." Childish has twice won commendations in the National Poetry Prize.
Read more about this topic: Billy Childish
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead.
It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over
Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face
Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey, stupid!”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army’s strength is the foot soldiers.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)