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| Jim Sells from the Literacy Trust is manager of the Reading the Game project that aims to get young people into books through their love of football. Further details of that initiative can be found here. |
| Tim Parks has written on sport in both his fiction and non-fiction. Here he explores the dramatic impact of sporting thrills and spills in literature. |
| The British Council in Germany recently ran a project profiling football and literature. Here, British Council organiser Marijke Brouwer talks about the impact of this stunning event while writer Chris Dolan explains what it all meant to him. |
| Will Buckley and Sarah Wardle are both keen football fans and here explore this great British obsession. Will talks about how it is reflected in our literature generally while Sarah takes on football, poetry and fiction. |
| Sports journalism in the UK is in a great state. The broadsheets are producing their own supplements, the tabloids have some fantastic writers and even the fanzines are going strong. Kevin Mitchell looks at exactly where it's at. Meanwhile Hunter Davies offers an overview of footballing biographies and how they have changed over the years. |
| Although some may argue that sport and politics aren’t a comfortable mix, in the end it’s hard to keep the two separate. Simon Kuper examines the ties that bind literature, politics and sport while Liz Crolley explores issues around women in sports writing. |
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Poet Ian McMillan had an inspired idea and talked Barnsley Football Club into helping him to achieve his goal. Here he talks about being the first poet-in-residence at a British football club.
It was 1997 and in Barnsley football was in the air; Barnsley FC were about to be promoted to the Premier League for the first time in their history and the whole town was getting excited.
Poetry was in the air, too. I’d just been doing a huge project in schools all over Barnsley getting primary and secondary pupils reading and writing poems, and I’d been making a series of little films for Yorkshire TV as their ‘Investigative Poet’. When people saw me on the street they’d say ‘Look, it’s that poet’ and I liked that, not just because I’m a show-off but because I’ve always believed that poetry should be a public, celebratory thing as well as a private art.
In March 1997, I was sitting in a pub with my mate Julian Wroe, a local head teacher, poetry enthusiast and Barnsley fan. We were talking about the excitement of poetry and the excitement of sport. We were talking about the early Olympic Games when athletes would run a mile and then recite a poem. We were talking about the fact that football chants were like huge tribal poems, and we remarked sadly (as the beer flowed) that poetry wasn’t always as exciting as a football match.
Then Julian said ‘Why don’t you see if you can be Poet-in-Residence at Barnsley Football Club?’. Maybe it was the beer and maybe it was the excitement of football and poetry in the air but I decided to do it. I rang them up to ask if they wanted a poet. It was as simple as that. I’d always had this theory that poetry could fit in anywhere, could be a central part of the life of any kind of organisation, of any kind of group of people, and now maybe it was to be put to the test.
Julian came with me to a meeting with Michael Spinks, the administrative manager. Michael was friendly but blunt and to the point ‘are you a football fan?’ he said. I nodded ‘are you a Barnsley fan?’, I nodded again. I explained the concept, such as it was, realising as I blabbered on that I hadn’t really thought it through. I talked about doing workshops with kids, writing poems about matches, maybe doing workshops with players. Michael held up his hand like a copper directing traffic ‘will it cost us anything?’ he said.
Now, this was a dilemma. I’ve always done poetry as a job, and I don’t like the idea that poets always do it for the love of the art. I’ve lost count of the number of meetings I’ve sat in where everybody else in the meeting is being paid except me. On the other hand I had an instinct that this was going to be big and important for poetry, for football and for me. So I said I’d do it for nothing. And we shook hands in that white room.
In April 1997, after beating Bradford 2-0 (goals by Wilkinson and Marcelle), Barnsley were promoted to the Premier League and we sent out a press release to a local press agency. They did an interview with me and the Yorkshire Post and printed a little piece headlined ‘Barnsley’s First Premiership Signing’ with a photograph of me holding a notebook and looking poetic. Then all hell broke loose and this was because poetry was in the air, and football was in the air, and Barnsley was a town that had gone through a lot since the closure of the coal mines and the fact that we’d got to the top division was seen as a miracle and the fact that the team had got a poet was, for the press, pure gold.
So I was in all the newspapers, often pictured holding a notebook; I was on television and radio in this country and abroad. A German TV filmed me as well as an American crew. Yorkshire Television made two half-hour documentaries and the local paper asked me to write a poem each week. I also made a schools TV programme linking poetry and football. I published a book of my football poems that sold out pretty quickly. I did a few workshops with children (none with the players). But to be honest, the main impact of being Poet-in-Residence was raising the profile of what poetry is and what it can do and be in the modern arena. Too often poetry lives in its own world, a world of workshops and readings, slim volumes and well-crafted poems that are often no more than anecdotes with few morals at the end. I prefer, and have always preferred, a kind of rough poetry, whether it’s the poetry of the streets or the kind of incomprehensible modernist poetry that revels in its own music and chutzpah.
What I liked (and still like) was the way that people reacted to the idea of me as a poet at the football match. After we lost 1-0 to a disputed penalty at Coventry, a man grabbed me as I went back to the supporters’ bus. I’m not a lightweight but he picked me up and held me against the side of the bus ‘you’d better write a good poem about that game’ he said, and I nodded, making mental notes about this exciting poet/audience interface.
We beat Manchester United 3-2 in an FA Cup game and afterwards a man said to me ‘you won’t write a poem about this, you’ll write a sonnet’, which I still regard as one of the best things anyone has ever said about my work.
So that’s the point of these unusual residencies; that’s why I enjoyed being a poet attached to the Humberside Police, or the Northern Spirit rail system, or why I write poems for Tea companies or for the BBC’s election coverage. It all widens the idea of what poetry consists of and what I hope is that when people have read the poems I’ve written in these odd (for poetry, anyway) places, they’ll want to have a go themselves. Nothing would make me happier.
Ian McMillan is a poet and broadcaster and has been described as 'the Shirley Bassey of performance poetry' by the Times Educational Supplement |
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