About Bruce Hodder

Getting John Clare to proofread.

 I'm a poet. I've had two collections published, 'The Journey Home' (Whiskey City Press) and 'The Last Time I Saw Ipswich' (Alien Buddha Press). Neither one is a masterpiece and let's just say I learned a great deal about editing and proofreading as I was putting them together. But at least the books are out there. What's the quote? These fragments I have shored up against my ruin.

I've also had several poems in a collection called 'Other Voices', which came out a few years ago on the late Norb Blei's imprint Cross+Roads Press, and an essay in a big book about Jack Kerouac alongside Ron Whitehead and Michael Madsen, with an illustration by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But that's enough namedropping. Individual poems have appeared on websites and in magazines around the world.

I was born in Ipswich, Suffolk in 1964. Since 1969 or '70 I have lived in Northamptonshire, first in Little Harrowden, which is just down the road from the rather large residence of another poet, Thomas Vaux, 2nd Baron of Harrowden (1509 - 1556). I haven't been able to find too many of Vaux's poems. I suspect he would have considered me a bit of a barbarian.

Thomas Vaux

After I left Little Harrowden, I moved to Wilby, another village,and then Earls Barton. But not driving and working in Northampton, which I was by then, proved to be an expensive pain in the arse. So I decided to give up on my desire never to live in a place I couldn't walk out of in fifteen minutes and I moved into the town.

Northampton has a fascinating cultural history. Alan Moore lives here. Lucia Joyce was incarcerated here, in St. Andrew's Hospital. So was Violet Gibson, famed as the woman who shot Mussolini. John Clare was incarcerated here too, in the same place, then known rather indecorously as Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The town takes a certain civic pride in its association with Clare, 'the Northamptonshire peasant poet', as the picture at the top of the page demonstrates, but Clare's home village of Helpston is now part of the Peterborough Unitary Authority. Michelle and I were planning a trip to Helpston before the first lockdown but we haven't quite got there yet.