Work
A former winner of the Wales Book of the Year competition for Wanting to Belong (Seren), Jenkins is a former editor of Poetry Wales and a long-term co–editor of Red Poets. He taught English at Radyr Comprehensive School in Cardiff for nearly a decade and Penydre High School, Gurnos, Merthyr Tydfil, for approximately two decades prior to that. At the end of the academic year 2008/2009 Jenkins took voluntary redundancy. He now writes full-time capitalising on experiences gleaned from former pupils.
An extract from one of Mike Jenkins' poems has been used as part of the public realm regeneration of Merthyr Tydfil town centre.
In 2011 - 12 he produced an Arts Council of Wales funded exhibition and booklet titled Dim Gobaith Caneri, in collaboration with fellow Merthyr Tydfil resident, the painter Gustavius Payne, using Welsh language idioms, through the medium of English, to comment on current world affairs, including the banking crisis and a local open cast mine. He continues to live in Merthyr Tydfil, and has done for over 30 years.
His latest collection, Barkin!, was published in March 2013 by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.
Read more about this topic: Mike Jenkins (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“We’d like to fight but we fear defeat,
We’d like to work but we’re feeling too weak,
We’d like to be sick but we’d get the sack,
We’d like to behave, we’d like to believe,
We’d like to love, but we’ve lost the knack.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“So work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)