from the book that accompanied his album Earthed, 1988

There's no money in poetry, but then again, there's no poetry in money.

• Robert Graves

Obviously this is not The Golden Age. The great seers and holy men who send us their prophesies from the middle ages and before have been grimly accurate, and their visions of hunger, killing machines and holocausts have not failed to materialise. But who could have foretold the tedium we would have to endure? Who pictured the numbing sterility left in the wake of barren progress as we all stooped to pay homage to Success At Any Cost and its attendant swarm of greedy ideologies? Somewhere along the way we lost touch with our own spirit as we scrambled for a share of transparent Glamour and nebulous Reward.

Lost, the fragile connection that linked us, mere mortals, to the bottomless well of... ah, what should one call it... Inspiration? Magic? God? Drifting away, like Avalon, into the unreachable mists, all the reasons we possessed for remaining impervious to the squalor, the ugliness, the glaring injustices.

We are all Jacob Marleys wearing the heavy chains of that loss, chains we forge every time we choose Money before Love, Power before Happiness, Facts before the Truth, Destruction before Creation. We've given the most precious things we had away: the things that nourished the various deities within us and stabilised those outside, call them The Muses or call it Creativity, call them Naiads and Dryads or call it Ecology, call them Miracles or call them Phenomena... we're blinded with syntax and symbols so it doesn't really matter... either you feel it or you don't.

The Moneymakers have gotten hold of our paintings, our music, our oceans, our rainforests, our parents, our children. And in return they give us... ENTERTAINMENT. We live in days when you have to always stop and ask, 'I wonder if it's real?' Yes, it's all superimposed, sampled or synthesised or recreated on an unfeeling contraption... but you never have to guess the Ulterior Motive, do you?

Grey roads scar our Edens, the beautiful intelligent creatures which wandered the Earth and swam in its waters are fettered, clubbed and exterminated. Weaker or gentle peoples are conveniently deleted and replaced by stock exchanges and mortgages and space programs and prisons and great open sores that go deep into our mother planet until all her marrow is sucked out by her insane, cannibalistic offspring.

The Arts have been entrusted to the brokers, to the accountants, to the media... It's all gauged in Quantity instead of Quality or stuck in Mausoleum Museums to be doled out by condescending custodians. The Arts tell us something priceless about ourselves; Entertainment admits Nothing yet the price of that admission is so great.

Poetry, and all that falls under its ambiguous umbrella, is still relatively pure, still relatively untainted by the eddying currents of supply and demand, dollars, deutschmarks and big, big deals; in other words, it's safe because there's no money to be made out of it. The writer of today, like the writer of the past, is still armed only with his pen and paper to effect his art, to transfer and imprint his images and ideas into the minds of others, letting those ideas and images resonate as they will, through the readers nerves and pleasure response endings, or if you like, soul.

A book contains no Aural Excitation, no Todd-AO widescreen cinemagraphic simulation. It hasn't been made with a Quantising Metre Machine or a sophisticated Harmoniser. There's no airbrushing or visual enhancement. No Distortion Pedals, Holograms, Special Effects, Negative Passive Research, Hi-Con Subliminal Hooks nor Probability Studies... it's only plain old words and, in a linear way, it's probably un-understandable... but there exists something that's better than mere understanding. It resides in the part of you which is not Earthed.