wordsout
THE
PLACE WHERE SOCKS GO about
THE PLACE WHERE
SOCKS GO
Poems 1980-90.
I started writing poems again in 1980 after a break of some years, and began performing them regularly from 1983 in concerts with Geoff Shattock (as a guitar/vocal duo called, excitingly, Shattock and Rust). This led to requests for copies and the first edition of The Place Where Socks Go in 1985.
It was an early exercise in print-on-demand: I laser-printed and comb-bound copies as needed and so was able to add, amend and remove poems in successive reprints. There were three distinct editions (1985, 1988 and 1990), the last with a cover (above) by Simon Jenkins, now editor of Ship of Fools. About two thousand were sold.
The first edition contained 45 poems, and by the third edition 29 had been added and 16 dropped. Most of the survivors found their way into Breaking the Chains, a further dozen being retired, at which point production of Socks ceased. Of the poems which lasted the course, several underwent major surgery along the way, including the title poem, and others were renamed.
The
contents list on this website shows the Table of Contents for the final
edition. The poems are published here in their current form. Those
which were not included in Breaking the Chains are
mostly not reproduced, although for curiosity value I have included Babel, the
first poem I wrote in 1980, and a few others that I enjoyed on
re-reading.