All the Stuff
by Phil Bowen
'All the Stuff' is Bowen’s contemporary take on T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' in its centenary year, commenced in 2004. As Bowen explains, “The phrase cropped up one night after a long chat and stayed with me and I put a few verses around it - about eight quatrains - and never really thought more of it until the Spring of 2005. I thought that if I could juxtapose various contrasting fragments of cultural references, a much-improved oral piece could arise, and it kept arising for over 300 lines when I first thought it was finished. But there always seemed more until - having left if for five years - when it reached 564 lines in 2014. I picked it up again during the Covid lockdown and added some further stanzas - in the middle section - the last 120 lines have always remained the same - until I finished it at the beginning of 2022."
All the Stuff
Audio of All the Stuff reproduced by kind permission of Phil Bowen and Peter Williams. Our thanks to Phil Bowen and Peter Williams for their kind permission to share this link.