What Is Suffolk Punch Anyway?

Readers may be starting to wonder exactly what kind of site this is, now football has had extensive coverage on top of the usual crazed mixture of topics. The Reading Room links suggest mainly poetry and music; and I imagine that's what readers are mostly expecting to find when they come here--though it's usually the politics or the bad-tempered perorations on everything being stupid that get people stirred up enough to leave comments or email me. But I'm just passing on whatever interests or irritates me in the hope that it will do the same to you (hey, that's rather funny). And I don't know about the other writers, but my mind ranges over ten completely opposing subjects in a day--most of them seeming, on the surface, to have nothing at all to do with poetry. Poetry is the mode of expression. Everything else is the material: football, drinking bouts, music, the back country, love, loss, the curse of memory. SUFFOLK PUNCH shows the mind of the poet chewing over the material that goes, directly or otherwise, into the poetry. It's an act of self-exposure that has no benefit for the poet or the reader, and it cannot be remotely justified by any intellectual argument. But since I would keep a journal anyway--and have done since the mid-80s-- I figure I might as well use modern technology to ensure that somebody, somewhere, has a chance of reading it. Those paper journals'll probably be tossed into a skip by a guy doing the house clearance after I die, and end up rotting in a landfill site under dog food and tin cans and banana skins and seagull shit. DESPITE the earth-shattering wisdom writing that glows inside them like messages from Heaven.