Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger McGough

Poetry, McGough suggests, gets to be both public art and private habit - a craft you can practice without filing a permit with the world. The line is slyly liberating: in a culture that demands proof-of-work for everything (credentials, audiences, engagement), poetry remains one of the few forms where the act itself can be the whole point. You can write a poem in the margins, in secret, badly, brilliantly, just for the pleasure of hearing language click into place.

The phrasing matters. "Show anybody really" has the offhand cadence of someone shrugging at the modern compulsion to perform. And "tell anyone you're doing it" is even sharper: it skewers the need to announce creativity as identity, to convert making into branding. McGough isn't romanticizing obscurity so much as defending a low-stakes freedom. Poetry can survive without the marketplace's applause track.

Contextually, this tracks with McGough's career as a public-facing poet who nonetheless championed accessibility and everyday speech. Coming out of the Liverpool scene and the postwar democratization of culture, he understood both the stage and the page. The subtext is almost a wink: yes, poetry can be read aloud and sold and taught - he did all of that - but its secret power is that it doesn't require permission. In an era where visibility is treated like value, he reminds us that the most radical creative act may be the one that refuses to audition.