About me

I am just over 60.  My unusual forename Rogan is Irish, but although my cocktail of bloods includes some Irish, the actual name was taken from a fairly forgettable romantic English novel – called “The Road to Nowhere !”

I have three sons, all now grown up and my close friends.  I have a sister with Down’s Syndrome called Kim. I ride a push bike everywhere and I jog and garden and make bread. I do not have a TV. My mobile is for emergencies only. I’m hunky, picky and grumpy and I agonise over the future which we as a race seem to have made for ourselves.  But, curiously, at the same time  I’m really doing ok and laughing quite a lot. Many of my days include moments of exstacy.

Now here is a summary of the writing that follows in this section. I’m giving you this summary, as I tend to gas on and you might prefer to pick and choose.

First I talk about my own poetry and offer to give readings of it to anyone – but especially to social and healthcare workers and their managers and trainers, for reasons I give below.

Second I talk about my years of work as a mental health social worker, managing community centres and – more lately – involving myself in helping users of the services to inform service managers on what works in the system and what doesn’t and to push for improvements.

I sound off a bit on the subject and on the skills associated with good social work. I think these apply more widely than the mere functions of a pressured profession. I explain a bit why I think that.

Lastly I briefly describe a charity I run called Hyphen-21 and a project that has arisen from that charity, which is called Poemsfor… The latter offers small bilingual poem-posters for public display in schools, libraries and waiting rooms.

The Poetry

I believe and have been told that I am mostly myself when reading out my own poetry.  I know I read well and with power. I have been writing poetry since adolescence and these days am still maybe writing always better.

From time to time the work gets published. I’ve had most success with a long poem called “A Light Summer Dying” which has been praised highly by Moniza Alvi, Caroline Carver, Debjani Chatterjee, Andrew Motion and various others . It has also been read with dramatic success in various settings, principally to people whose job may involve dealing with the dying. It can be found here.

But still I look for a satisfactory social identity as “poet.” And I question the  meaning and value of just getting “published.” Surely publication should mean sharing, or “broadcasting” as seed is broadcast, a potent sending out. But sharing with whom, broadcasting to whom, sending to whom ?

At least in the UK, your average little poetry pamphlet has precious little to do with real sharing,  real broadcasting, real publication. For the community’s sake, the good-enough poet belongs at large as a potent voice to do with wholeness and truth-telling, not as a “wierdo” muttering to fellow “wierdos” in some arty café. (I know that, thanks to immense efforts by large numbers of people, things in fact are getting a bit better).

As a poet, I find the following quote of real importance. It is part of an address given by David Jenkins, then Bishop of Durham. During the 80’s, when Thatcherism was even more dominant than it is today, his was a wonderfully refreshing voice of authenticity, of integrity and of opposition. Jenkins’ address was given to a conference for social workers in 1988 : “Social workers are a group of people who are being called upon to live dangerously at many of the pressure points in our present confused, confusing and increasingly divided society. As such you are the objects of, and therefore presumably in your own persons and reflections the subjects of, a great deal of confusion, anxiety and uncertainty. Your position is highly ambivalent and ambiguous and therefore both actually painful now and potentially promising with regard to the future of our society and, indeed, of human beings on this earth.”

I don’t think the quote applies just to social workers, but to anyone at all who works at the frontiers between Have/Have-not, Cope/Uncope, Contol/Uncontrol, Sense/UnSense, Well/Ill,  Alive/Dead, In/Out, I/Other.

This is the community whose poet I want to be, the public I want to address. I would like to recite my poems to people who spend their time at these fraught frontiers and divisions, trying to make bridges by means of the  “Skills of Love”. That’s an offer and an advertisment, perhaps the longest ever written.

Mental Health Social Work

I have acted as a mental health social worker pretty well all my adult life.

I used to run community centres for people with mental health problems. I developed a model which made these places effectively parish centres for people who were otherwise without centre or network to belong to. But there was also constant two-way inter-action between the community of “parishioners” and the community round-about. The building could and should therefore act as unconditional refuge and stable reference-point – but also and at the same time as a place of constant possibility, renewal and re-connection.

In the mid-nineties I went off to Greece for a three-month Sabbatical and came back as a free-lance worker. Since then I have been mostly involved in consulting with users of mental health services about the quality of the services they receive. This is a confusing activity whose essential purpose (to help the services be more attentive, responsive and person-centred)  is often undermined by the clumsy and careless and irresponsible means by which consultation itself is put into practice. I would say without hesitation that much of the practice conducted as part of the mental health services’ obligation to involve and consult with their service users, actually puts those people’s mental health at risk – surely a bit of a contradiction. Weren’t the service created to help people, then ?  But, on the positive side,  the role allows for some creative bottom-up initiatives and brings up some central issues.

Here’s one of those issues, expressed well by this true anecdote. A respected psycho-analyst based at the Tavistock Clinic called Isobel Menzies-Leith was called in as consultant to a hospital where there were problems. (It was actually not a psychiatric hospital but I think the story applies even more to psychiatry, than to general medicine). She studied the situation and gave her view. This can roughly be summarised as follows : that many of the working practices of the hospital were designed primarily (though unconsiously) to protect the staff and managers from the pain and anxiety of their difficult work, rather than to achieve the best possible healing outcomes. Her findings caused a stir. Many years later, not long before she died, a conversation between her and a colleague was published in a Tavistock book – they were discussing why her findings, despite the stir they had caused, had nevertheless been largely ignored (and still are).

And yet I still believe that the skills and knowledge-base of a good social worker apply across all the helping professions and can be found there in plenty ; I also believe they apply to many walks of life outside the helping professions and Society would have more hope and be more healthy were they to flourish there. The phrase “the skills of love” is a translation of a term used in the Buddhist tract, the Metta Sutra. One hesitates to use that phrase as a way of describing the skills which social workers must use, all day, every day. It sounds religious. Or wishy washy, or self-righteous. But I can think of nothing better, nor more accurate. Social work is love. It is a hard and rigorous discipline of abiding love (thanks Iain).

So how do we support the skills of love (having defined them) ? How do we promote, support, defend, extend, their practice ?

Hyphen-21

I have founded and run a small charity called Hyphen-21. It aims to articulate and support the skills of human connection, since in times when slogan causes and concepts such as Rights, Equality, Choice and Inclusion have held centre stage, and material “aspiration” has raged unchecked and unregulated, and change across the board has simply carried on accelerating, the skills and bindings which actually connect people despite difference, seem too easily to be belittled,  neglected or denied. They are “soft” and hard to measure. So harry them. Burn them. But without them Society falls apart.

The charity is a small shy affair, chiefly highlighting initiatives which seem to improve conditions for the most vulnerable in some way, while challenging attitudes of detachment and withdrawal where these are unhelpful and unsuitable.

Tucked away in the Background section of the charity’s site, are various attempts to understand developments and conditions, using poetry, parable, anecdote – and sometimes just rant. Anything that might throw light.  Maybe that’s the best section of the site. Visitors seem to agree. People actually come looking for the “Shadow poems” that can be found there.  But they also come looking for a code of good conduct for healthcare ward rounds – initiatives like that which I’m responsible for and which the charity has adopted.

Poems for…

One Hyphen project has attracted  serious funding. It is  called Poems for… and has been going for about ten years now. The main funder has always been the Arts Council. But others over the decade include the King’s Fund, NHS Estates, the Baring Foundation, the Foreign Office, the Department of Health and the John Lewis Partnership.

Individuals who have played significant helping roles have been : Chris Meade, Alison Combes, Malcolm Rigler, David Hart, Debjani Chatterjee, Susan Elizabeth, Denis Macshane, Fiona Sampson, Nigel Crisp, Jane Riley, Andrew Motion, Stephen Watts, Joseph Wolf.

In 2005, Andrew Motion launched a new collection for “Poems for…” consisting of 45 poem-posters, each of them bilingual. About twenty five different languages can be found among the collection, each with its English translation alongside.

In April 2008, Andrew obliged again and launched a separate web site for us. Since then the project has been largely adopted by schools. In large numbers, teachers have requested the hard-copy packs, and are downloading the online collections. Poems celebrating diversity are finding an important role for themselves in classrooms where children from many many different cultures now congregate. And the project has gone global.