Stan Smith: The first serious poem I wrote was an angry tirade in response to TV images of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. I was thirteen and the poem was rubbish, but the anguish and anger were real. Thereafter, as for Crusoe in the first poem here, television has been the constant source of images which move to outrage and action, whether over Vietnam, or Iraq, or so many other places in this collapsing world. These last pictures from Gaza have driven me into desperate silence. I cannot bear to watch the news, enraged by my impotence and irrelevancy. Poetry falls silent. The ‘Breaking News’ has finally broken us.

Stan Smith's work featured in Stand Magazine comprises one contribution of poetry.