A few people have asked me why I have not been performing my poetry lately. The honest answer to this is odd, but it is certainly not that I have lost interest.

I have made quite a few performances of my poetry at different venues, although I am not happy about being part of this "scene". Apart from being incredibly "bitchy" it is also dominated by inept scribblers who believe that merely having the ability to write down and then shout a series of rants or idle thoughts about cheese pasties, illegal wars or wet dreams constitutes poetry.

I have to go to these events and be made to feel like a snob by being juxtaposed against this self-obsessed tat who scorn and rebuke me because I hold to the belief that poetry is distinct from prose by rhythmic and/or metrical properties, as well as an attempt to make a reach towards the sublime. I am also very uncomfortable with the ideals of contemporary "street" poetry whereby it is assumed that all the unchecked and random thoughts of anyone are all equally valid and clever. This "witch-hunt" of the techniques of poetry, whereby the ancient masonry of this noble trade has been stripped away, is merely an excuse for bad "poets", who cannot understand or use poetic techniques, to cover up their ineptitude by claiming their poetry is "raw" and not "bound by convention". I say this contemporary vision of poetry is rubbish.

I find it very hard for my work to be accepted by this regime, this dictatorship of the untalented. If poor Keats was alive now they would have driven him to suicide before the tuberculosis had managed to grip him. If I did not have to do a day job (like Byron) I know I could emerge from these slums of antipoetry and rise into the distinguished poetry world and, whilst I know I could never match Yeats or Heaney, I could become a successful and respected poet. But in the small amounts of time I have I refuse to waste going to these trivial events or submitting my work to insignificant magazines that no-one, bar the Editor and the contributors themselves, reads.

That is why I embarked on my Masters course. This way, I can become distinguished by the authority of intellectual titans, not by "poet" Editors, who have only ever been published in each others' "magazines". And theology is the most poetic subject in existence. When I read the Psalms of David, verse from the Qu'ran, Vedic scripts or mystical works I think - "this is where poetry came from... this is where my muse wants me to go... not mixing in circles in dirty bars and badly photocopied journals, but scanning the heights of the angels"!!!!

So I shall be continuing my poetry alongside my theological career and at some point, these two strands will merge... beautifully.