Love Quote by Adrian Mitchell

Mitchell is staking out a kind of aesthetic picket line: poetry doesn’t have to wear the starched collar of “literary” seriousness to matter. By naming rock, jazz, and blues rhythms, he’s pointing to forms built on repetition, syncopation, call-and-response, and a physical sense of timing - arts designed to land in the body before they land in the brain. That’s not a cute crossover; it’s a deliberate challenge to a tradition that often treats difficulty as virtue and pleasure as suspect.

The phrase “good-time rock’n roll” is doing sly double duty. On the surface it’s a shrugging, accessible aspiration: poems that move, that swing, that people actually want to be around. Underneath, it’s a political stance. Mitchell came up in postwar Britain, wrote against Vietnam, against state violence, against the deadening language of official life. “Good-time” isn’t escapism here; it’s a claim that joy and energy can be weapons against numbness. Rock and blues emerged from working-class and Black cultural invention; aligning poetry with them nudges verse away from the seminar room and toward the street, the club, the rally.

Most telling is “relationship,” not “imitation.” He’s not begging poetry to cosplay as a guitar riff. He’s arguing for kinship: poems as live performance, communal rather than private, rhythmic rather than merely reflective. Mitchell wants language that keeps its moral bite without losing its beat - protest with a backbeat, conscience with a chorus.