Plus: Zinedine Zidane and Cameroon feature in another slew of songs about specific games

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“Are there many good poems about football?” wrote M Stapleton last week. “I’ve read a few anthologies and collections but very few stand out, aside from Paul Durcan’s World Cup ‘82.”

Related: Have any songs been written about specific football matches? | The Knowledge

When at Thy call my weary feet I turn
The gates of paradise are opened wide
At Goodison I know a man can learn
Rapture more rich than Anfield can provide.
In Coulter’s skill and Geldard’s subtle speed
I see displayed in all its matchless bounty
The power of which the heavens decreed
The fall of Sunderland and Derby County.
The hands of Sagar, Dixie’s priceless head
Made smooth the path to Wembley till that day
When Bolton came. Now hopes are fled
And all is sunk in bottomless dismay.
And so I watch with heart and temper cool
God’s lesser breed of men at Liverpool.

The pitch is white where the sun’s not been seen
on its hill-cresting flight. The tea queue is long
and shrouded in breath, as men in fat coats
grunt at each other, though the game’s going on –
but I’m on the terrace, with 64 others,
where a bloke in a tank-top and built like a tank
turns to the dug-outs and breaks the near-silence:
‘Cheynge it up, Billeh boy – we’re fukkin’ wank!’
Then he faces the game again, squinting upfield
as one of their wingers slaps a long cross
out for a throw-in. ‘C’mon lads!’ he bellows,
rub-rubbing his hands.

So, this loss is his loss,
and also his triumph. He boos at the whistle,
says ‘See yer’ to others, and runs for a piss,
and doesn’t drive home, cross a ground off his list,
and know he was no-one. No. He lives for this.

Discover loads more questions and answers in the archive

Dear @TheKnowledge_GU . Back in the glory days when football was new, Sky used to give their man of the match a bottle of bubbly. Did it ever go to a youngster under 18? If so, did they have to leave it with the other interviewee from the club? Ben J, S London

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (23) was replaced by Ainsley Maitland-Niles (20) in the Arsenal v Leicester game. That’s a combined letter count of 43 for this substitution. Has there ever been more?

@TheKnowledge_GU With 3 goals scored after only 5 minutes 45 seconds of the Fleetwood v Wycombe play-off first leg tonight, does anyone know of any instances of 3 goals being scored in quicker time at the start of a legitimate match (not counting the famous 149-0 game in 2002)?

The 2011 Kirin Cup ended with ZERO goals with the three teams sharing the trophy - Japan, Czech Republic and Peru. Has this ever happened in a competition before with three or more teams?? Also, I doubt the 2011 Kirin Cup is available on DVD...!!

Sergio Ramos has now scored 22 penalties in a row. Is this a record?

Send your questions and answers to knowledge@theguardian.com or tweet @TheKnowledge_GU.

The Soviet-era dissident writer’s defiant prison lyric has lost none of its immediacy

The Sparrows of Butyrka

Now even the snow has grown sad –
Let overwhelmed reason go,
And let’s smoke our cigarettes through the air-vent,
Let’s at least set the smoke free.
A sparrow flies up –
And looks at us with a searching eye:
‘Share your crust with me!’
And in honourable fashion you share it with him.
The sparrows – they know
Who to ask for bread.
Even though there’s a double grille on the windows –
And only a crumb can get through.
What do they care
Whether you were on trial or not?
If you’ve fed them, you’re OK.
The real trial lies ahead.
You can’t entice a sparrow –
Kindness and talents are no use.
He won’t knock
At the urban double-glazing.
To understand birds
You have to be a convict.
And if you share your bread,
It means your time is done.

Translated by David McDuff

Benjamin Zephaniah and George the Poet aretwo of Britain’s most successful contemporary poets. They discuss why, despite being born a generation apart, their work is still exposing racial injustice

Benjamin Zephaniah became a poet at age 22, when he had his first poetry book published by a worker’s co-op in 1980. He believed poetry should be accessible and that readings should be as lively as gigs, so he started performing with a reggae band. George the Poet (real name George Mpanga), who was born in in 1991, rose to prominence first as a spoken-word poet, then a rapper and, more recently, a podcaster mixing narrative fiction, with contemporary news and rap.

Anushka Asthana talks to them both about growing up as young black men in England, the issues that inform their work and why the British empire’s legacy meant they have both turned down honours.

‘I watched the blood spill / its perfect pomegranate seeds / into the aluminium spaceship / of the kitchen sink ...’

Welcome to the Guardian’s Power of Touch series

I still wonder
why the knife was
in my left hand
when I pressed it into
the watermelon bark
blade-side up,
pressed it hard and slow
and felt it stop at my bone,
felt no pain at all
as it split my thumb
along a perfect meridian.
I watched the blood spill
its perfect pomegranate seeds
into the aluminium spaceship
of the kitchen sink.

I was six.
I was learning directions.
Left became encoded
in the scar.
Across this slice of spacetime,
this half a lifetime,
I still glide my index finger over it
in animal instinct
when asked to orient.

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, US-based writer and critic.

‘Never been one much for skin on skin / or / never much cared for the skin I live in / but / NOW / The mind rolls back’

Welcome to the Guardian’s Power of Touch series

I’ve never really been one for touch

Oh sure
A hug now
And

‘Your hand to my face / thumb upon my cheek / palm cupping my jaw / touching my skin like a silk to dress yourself in’

Welcome to the Guardian’s Power of Touch series

You get into the shower and ask
Will you keep me company?
I sit on the toilet’s lid
and while you wash yourself and water
at the same time the ferns the spider plant
the pothos vining over the tile
marvelling out loud how you love
to water them while showering
I read to you from a book I once owned
only just this morn having bought again
because I didn’t want to write any poems today
but I did today want to read them
to let what light touches what grasses that in me run wild
to let that light happen by reading to another
poems that once led me to the ways
my heart might bigger itself
poems of the sea and the earth and the calling that comes from
all that wells and springs from love and love
so I read the wells to you
say aloud the springs
with you on the other side
of the shower curtain – your body behind
it looking like a pastel from Degas
with the window’s light holding your shoulders and I
trembling the Chilean’s words into the air
read and read aloud and out loud you
pull the veil aside
and with the drops of water
on your mouth you
leaning past the vines scrolling over the wall
out the shower to touch
your hand to my face
thumb upon my cheek
palm cupping my jaw
touching my skin like a silk to dress yourself in
lifting my chin and lowering yours
down to me kissing
your wet lips to mine
leaving my heart breathing
behind its own jungle of wet leaves
softest tongue to my teeth
the water of you on my mouth

Previously unseen letters show that the wartime romance was much more than a casual fling, and may even have inspired the American’s later works

He was one of the 20th century’s most famous American poets and she was a Parisian sex worker. Now previously unpublished letters written by EE Cummings and Marie Louise Lallemand during the first world war reveal for the first time that the pair had been deeply in love.

Cummings is best known for his love poem, i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart), written in 1952, which starts with the lines: “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)”.

Lallemand has been pushed to the margins because she was a sex worker, and that is wrong

A Swedish family at war, tales from the Asbo frontline, and an affecting memoir of brutality and hope

The Family Clause
Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Harvill Secker, £16.99, pp320

A man dreads the arrival of his critical, overbearing father, but a family agreement entitles the elderly patriarch to stay in the family’s Stockholm apartment whenever he visits. These visits are not happy affairs and the unnamed son – a stay-at-home dad who has lost his professional way – wants to revoke the agreement. What follows is a claustrophobic and melancholic portrayal of a dysfunctional family, in which the narrative drama never quite lives up to the novel’s foreboding tone.

Behind-the-scenes talents Dan Carey, Jimmy Napes and Jamie Hartman join Kate Tempest with a pair of nominations each in UK songwriting awards

Race, sex, and self-worth are some of the topics explored by 2020’s nominees for the Ivor Novellos, the UK’s most prestigious songwriting awards.

Four individuals lead with two nominations each. Performance poet Kate Tempest and producer Dan Carey are nominated for their collaborations on Tempest’s album The Book of Traps and Lessons. It was nominated for best album, with Firesmoke – a song about the enriching, transcendental power of sex – nominated for best contemporary song.

The classroom’s unpredictable demands provide surprisingly poetical inspiration

On First Knowing You’re a Teacher

Robert’s not coming in, my boss tells me.
I’m sitting sweating in a windowless office,
a stack of résumés eye-balling me, stinking
up the desk – I’m first screener and sleepy
in this stuffy box. Would you be able to lead
a workshop on résumé writing? I’m 22
and my own résumé got me the most boring
gig at Jobs for Youth-Chicago. Some of the “youth”
I’d be teaching are nearly my age, but there are
windows, and people, in that classroom
so I nearly yell, yes! 30 students look at me
and 45 minutes later look to me and I’m hooked.
And I’m floating and anchored at the same time.
For the first time. And I’m whole and broken
open. And I’m spinning and stunned still.

Mixing Britten’s folksongs with poetry and soundscapes, soprano Marci Meth took inspiration from the composer himself to create an album inspired by and embedded in the countryside that he loved

There’s no place like home, and no one knew that better than Benjamin Britten. He began composing folksong arrangements in 1941, when he was homesick in the US. Those songs brought him back to Suffolk – to the people and landscape he loved. Accepting the inaugural Aspen award in 1964, Britten said: “I belong at home – there – in Aldeburgh … and all the music I write comes from it.”

I had been studying Britten’s folksong arrangements for a year when I read that. I knew intuitively that his songs were rooted in the land, and I decided I needed to go to Aldeburgh to hear the music of that place for myself.

Yehudi Menuhin once said, 'if wind and water could write music, it would sound like Ben’s'

Nadim Shamma-Sourgen’s words, evoking a ‘whole world full of hugs’, were spotted by the writer Kate Clanchy and will be published next summer

Keats’s first book of poetry was published when he was 21; Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein. But both of their youthful achievements are dwarfed by the newest star in the UK’s poetry firmament: four-year-old Nadim Shamma-Sourgen, who has just landed a book deal.

Nadim’s poems range from Coming Home (“Take our gloves off / Take our shoes off / Put them where they’re supposed to go. / You take off your brave feeling / Because there’s nothing / to be scared of in the house”), to Love (“Everyone has love / Even baddies”).

The composer Dmitri Smirnov, who has died aged 71 of Covid-19, had a deep affinity with the poet William Blake. In 1967, when a new student at the Moscow Conservatoire, he was captivated by the paradoxes of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour”. He had started learning English in search of texts to set to music, and, in time, turned to everything else Blake wrote and drew. Eventually he went on to produce published translations of all Blake’s completed works into Russian, and the language’s first biography of him (2016).https://blakequarterly.org/index.php/blake/article/viewArticle/smirnov514/smirnov514html

Blake’s words, images and ideas inspired more than 50 of Smirnov’s compositions. One of the first was his song cycle The Seasons (1979), a setting of the first four of Blake’s early Poetical Sketches. The following year he transformed and extended this cycle in purely orchestral terms, without voice, for his First Symphony, The Seasons, whose mastery of colour and texture helped establish his reputation internationally.

Imagining an impossible encounter with herself as a child, the poet discreetly evokes the girl’s intense life

If I Were to Meet

If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood running
with slipping shoulder-straps
and half-plaited hair
beside a brown expanse
of memorising water
and the mellow faces of wooden houses
half-hidden by a weave
of coconut, mango, guenip trees

Related: Poem of the week: Weeping Woman by Grace Nichols

Michael Rosen on the serious consequences of the government’s poor handling of the pandemic

Your article (Lack of testing and PPE among key England Covid-19 mistakes, MPs told, 24 July) confirms that the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is political. This government has shown itself to be in part responsible for thousands of deaths, many of us becoming seriously ill, being in intensive care and suffering long-term and, in some cases, irreversible damage. In my case, and with many others, this has also had a direct effect on our capacity to work and earn, and has put enormous pressure on those closest to us.

All this is without factoring in the knock-on effect of how this government’s handing of the pandemic has forced the NHS to postpone treatment for people with other illnesses. You have also documented how New Zealand approached the matter in a much better way, again confirming that this is a matter of political choices.
Michael Rosen
London

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, released as an audiobook this week and in print in September, is a reminder of the singer’s strengths and shortcomings

Lana Del Rey has a decided aesthetic: a kitsch, drag queen femininity, always heartbroken, always nostalgic for 1950s California. From early albums such as Born to Die and Ultraviolence, to her latest Norman Fucking Rockwell!, all her music sounds kind of the same. I’m OK with that; it’s camp, it’s silly, it’s a mood.

When her debut poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, was announced, I wasn’t surprised that Del Rey had poetic aspirations. In her 2019 song, hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it, Del Rey refers to herself “tearing around in my fucking nightgown / a 24-7 Sylvia Plath”. This is the fun of her work, combining high Americana (in Young and Beautiful) with a lackadaisical, millennial nihilism (see Fucked My Way Up to the Top).

Related: Lana Del Rey's swipes at her peers of colour undermine her feminist argument | Laura Snapes

(Interscope)

The singer’s first audiobook-with-music shows skill but suffers from flowery wordplay

This being Lana Del Rey, the title track of her poetry-audiobook-with-music suggests some sordid gymnastics at a garden party. Not so: the image captures a young girl doing an accidental backbend. Her uninhibited joy catches Del Rey unawares, throwing the writer’s resolute, but unrevealed plans off-kilter.

Del Rey’s poetry collection is punctuated by skilfully rendered moments such as these, pregnant freeze-frames in language that justify the singer calling herself a poet. But just as often, Del Rey can lapse into verbose descriptiveness, her wordplay flowery or overcooked. She is great on place specifics and internal assonance, less so as she wafts on about her own gentle nature. Throughout, producer Jack Antonoff contributes mostly unobtrusive backings; tense strings only accompany Bare Feet on Linoleum.

Melancholy but without self-pity, this sonnet self-portrait is one of the finest of the Romantic period

Long Time a Child

Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I, —
For yet I lived like one not born to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking,
I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran:
A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, though I be old:
Time is my debtor for my years untold.

The novelist teaches lessons in miniature in this deft and entertaining collection

Whenever a novelist takes flight into poetry, one has, however unreasonably, misgivings – based on a received, under-examined idea of poetry as an exclusive vocation. And with a novelist of Kingsolver’s stature, the last thing one wants is to see her as an impostor. I had imagined myself putting How to Fly quietly aside, but instead – only a few poems in – found it to be irresistible, the purest pleasure to read. In an age where almost no one writes letters, this collection is a stand-in for a personal, entertaining and generous correspondence. Is this a way of saying Kingsolver is not a poet? Absolutely not. As a novelist, she is a smart craftswoman, at ease with the grand scale, and here proves herself a committed miniaturist, innovative with the shape of poems, at home with a villanelle and with a particular flair for last lines that concisely turn the tables.

Kingsolver’s wisdom and wit are always proportionate – she never misses the bigger picture

Ofqual’s ruling comes at a time when more children than ever are reading and writing verse

Ofqual, the exams authority, has announced that next year schools won’t have to do all the components of English literature GCSE. Students must answer on Shakespeare, but can choose two out of three from the 19th-century novel, a modern drama or novel, and poetry, as represented by a themed anthology. So, for the first time since the inception of GCSE and indeed any other exam in the short history of English literature, poetry is an option.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s only for a year. Plenty of teachers will stick with the poems, especially if they’ve already studied them. It doesn’t speak well of the status of English, though. The content of double science – the popular three-in-one science GCSE – is presumably also, as Ofqual says of poetry, difficult to deliver online, but Ofqual isn’t telling teachers they can pick between chemistry and biology next year providing they stick with the physics. It would cause outrage: we all know that all three sciences are important. So what do we know about poetry? Cutting just English and the speaking elements of modern foreign language sends a wider message about the importance of these subjects, a message about who can be bossed and what is dispensable.