It started as a blog after the 2015 general election. New Boots and Pantisocracies was intended to run for just a year, publishing poems that reacted to the new political regime. Then came Brexit, and so the poems carried on. Then came the anthology.   

The blog was launched by WN Herbert, pictured, professor of poetry and creative writing at Newcastle University, and Andy Jackson, poet and medical librarian at Dundee University. The newly-launched anthology includes poems by Sean O’Brien, Daljit Nagra, Ian Duhig, Michael Rosen, Ian McMillan, Andrew McMillan, Pascale Petit, Helen Ivory, Jaqueline Saphra, Sheenagh Pugh, George Szirtes, Malika Booker, Roddy Lumsden, Tim Wells, Luke Wright, and many more. Well over 100, in fact.

New Boots and Pantisocracies, published by Smokestack Books, takes its name from the idealistic plans of Coleridge and Southey for a social utopia or “pantisocracy”, and from Ian Dury’s first album with the Blockheads, with its “ironic and melancholy celebration of working class identity” on the eve of Mrs Thatcher’s accession to power. The front of the book is a homage to Dury’s album cover.

A poem that seems to capture the flavour of the anthology is Paul McGrane’s, which begins: “It wasn’t me and it can’t have been you / but I’m afraid to have to tell you that / somebody voted for the government.”  

In his editor’s introduction to the anthology, WN Herbert says: “Back in 2015, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new government. We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect to the new unrealpolitik.”

How were the poems selected? Most were commissioned, but a fifth were given over to open submissions, which “did not, for once in the poetry world flood in … but thankfully the work we received fulfilled that original remit of delivering surprising and exciting new angles”.  

The blog is continuing – under its latest title, Neu! Boots are Made for Walking -  and submissions are open until 30 October. You can send a poem as a Word document or pdf to azjackson65@gmail.com. Bill Herbert’s latest message is: “Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next.”

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD