Readers may wish for more information on the whole field of Northern poets than I was able to provide in print. The following casual, scratch-pad, style information is offered with a disclaimer, since there is so little in print on this topic. It is written entirely from memory, on the reckoning that what I can't remember doesn't matter because it was uninteresting and badly written. A few dates (and places of birth) have been copied from Kenneth Allott's anthology. I have written essays on the poets I really care about, to absorb a torrent of vivid memories. Reference is made to Angel Exhaust 13, Lie Dream of a Casino Soul, which is a special issue about northern poetry.
William Watson (1868-1935?) not identified as a son of the North, but that's what he was. Can't relate his work to the region, although his epic on themes of Persian cosmology points forward to J Redwood Anderson's epic cosmological trilogy, both being unread. I like some of Watson's poetry, which is ideal, ornate, and hovering in realms of the pure spirit, to a rare degree. He got knighted for writing an effusive ode to Lloyd George during the Great War, which shows that he had political skills. He wanted to be the conscience of the nation, and wrote odes about injustice in a Very Late Romantic manner. His life story is rather depressing, despite the title.
Lascelles Abercrombie I think there is more to be said about Abercrombie. I knew the Georgian passage had to be very brief, so I didn't go deeply into the matters. He wrote works on theory which I couldn't find, and a lot of poetry, including several verse plays which, as Seymour-Smith said, would have been major plays if they hadn't been in verse. 'The End of the World", a verse play, is in a Georgian Book, and is well worth reading; a peasant expressionist style, like Stanley Spencer perhaps, perhaps a bit anticipatory of Francis Berry.
Herbert Read came from Yorkshire. wrote a lot of free verse which vanishes from my memory as soon as I read it. He certainly represented the poetic reforms of the 1920s, but his creative energy was a very thin stream. Played an important managerial role in British culture; the Permanent Secretary of Modernism, more or less. Promoted the New Romantics as head of the Routledge poetry list in the 1940s. Promoter of Jungian ideas on creativity. Also during the war, testified at the trial of anarchists refusing conscription; I admire him for this, since it was likely to make him unpopular and so end his career in public life. he was an anarchist, wrote about "the dead hand of state intervention in culture", and founded the state-funded Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Basil Bunting There is a lot to be said about Bunting, but there are some books about him, so I will keep quiet. When Barry was an apprentice on the Newcastle Gazette (or whatever), at 16, he had to work out the tide tables, for the use of fishermen; and the staffer who taught him how to read the book of tables was Basil Bunting. Conservative and radical poets seem equally interested in taking possession of him. A good friend of Colin Simms and Eric Mottram.
Lawrence Binyon (1869-1943) I can't remember anything about Binyon's verse, which is cultivated and refined. I think I liked it when I read it, but didn't feel excited. He was a keeper of Oriental prints at the British Museum, something of an expert on Persia, and translated the Divine Comedy.
Kathleen Raine came from Northumberland. an example of northern cultural resentment, and of inability to deal with modern form, meaning regression into song forms and 'timeless' language. Her attempts to use a personal Theosophist-spiritualist theology to write off poets more intelligent than her have distracted attention from her own, at one point good, poems. Like most people who write a lot of theory, her understanding of the defects of her own work was disastrously weak.
Kenneth Allott came from Durham, or at least went to school there. Edited the Penguin anthology Mid-century Poets, with extensive notes on the poets. This is remembered more for leaving out Edith Sitwell, with hideous remarks about her, than for aesthetic excellence. he was part of the male cabal of critics of the 1950s who redefined Sitwell out of sight as not being a Serious Person; and accordingly deserves a good kicking. he published one book. His poetry is in the sub-Auden style, but I can't remember anything about it.
William Empson Empson grew up in Yorkshire and was later a professor at Sheffield. I can't see any local traits in his work.
Os Marron One terrific poem in A New Romantic Anthology; some more in Contemporary Northern Poets. Died very young, of TB I think. (Oswald? Osmond?)
Norman Nicholson b.1914, died sometime in the 90s. came from Millom in Cumberland and never left it. There is a story about Hughes throwing his arms around Nicholson when they met, and regarding him as a trail-blazer, a releaser of inhibitions for a northern youth venturing into the haughty precincts of poetry. I like the story, but I find Nicholson quite uninteresting as a poet. Admittedly, I haven't read most of his work. N. really belongs with a current of Christian poetry, thriving in the 1950s, which the opinion of the 1960s threw away. In this connection, he wrote at least one verse drama in the 1940s, about Elijah; in which there are modest traces of dialect speech. The attempts to stage verse drama (seen as the symbolic plus physical gathering of a Christian community) are interesting, but they should have found a better text. (It was staged by E Martin Browne during his stint at the Mercury Theatre, while Ashley Dukes was away in Germany.)
Roy Fuller early poems showed a certain dissociation, attendant on being a Marxist in the Royal Navy, and not without tension and the suggestion of hidden furies. he missed the lyric years of youth through this personal withdrawal, and then became rather conservative in attitudes. His later poetry reveals less the hidden abnormality beneath the surface of the suburb than the concealed bureaucratic order behind the pentameter. he was always a neat writer, and his later attacks on all poetry by people younger than him were well turned if fundamentally wrong. this version of political extremism went down well with the panels. he excelled at explaining why irony and withdrawal were necessary, although undesirable.
Hubert Nicholson a journalist. was associated with Communist poets in the 1940s (New Lyrical Ballads), and wrote weird new Romantic plus socialist realist (socialist surrealist?) work. Was a mainstay of a writers' group in or near Brighton for many years.
Francis Scarfe came from Tyneside. On analysis, my memory of Scarfe actually relates to poems by DS Savage. I retract it all. Scarfe was head of the British Council branch in Paris for many years.
James Kirkup there are thousands of pages of Kirkup's poetry, most of which I certainly haven't read. has been publishing prolifically since the 1940s. There is no Selected Poems. who will be courageous enough to swallow the six volumes of collected?
Ted Hughes everyone knows about Hughes and there are several books about him. Enough.
John Arden never published much poetry, although his dramas are as close to poetic drama as English theatre has got. parts of Armstrong's Last Goodnight are in verse.
Jon Silkin Not a northerner. there is a significant pattern whereby the leading cultural managers in the North, Silkin, Neil Astley, Ric Caddel, etc., are actually southerners. This is related to the pattern whereby the middle class in the North is close to southern values and speech habits. Also, to that whereby cultural fashions tend to start in the south, so that the people best able to write convincing grant applications are not locals but immigrant southerners. This is part of a generic lack of self-confidence; while filling the form in, you feel that you fail by the standards of the panel but also that their standards are superior to yours. This is related to the problem of being embarrassed by the sound of your own voice when reading aloud. It goes against the grain to say this, but the imported skills may have been very useful; however, outsiders were never going to be tendentiously northern-patriotic or to emphasize northern separateness. This is why a small country, like Norway, has more of a cultural identity than a large, populous region of England.
Tom Pickard When I went to interview Barry MacSweeney in Newcastle, his mother remarked at one point that Pickard had made his whole career out of being a friend of Basil Bunting in the 1960s. Maybe I should have interviewed her. I can remember in 1973 when the word on the streets was that Pickard was going to be really significant. 27 years later, we are still waiting for him to write something significant. At that point, I used to read poems by famed underground writers, find them vacuous, and think that I was just unlucky, and the really wonderful stuff was somewhere else, hidden from the squares, if I just got inside the scene enough to find it. Now we have Pickard's collected poems, doubt is no longer possible. A regime of inarticulate resentment. The word on the streets is wrong almost the whole time. He wrote one not-bad poem (about a fire ceremony in rural Northumberland); I feel he was embarrassed by his own complexity here, and unhappy with this way out of normality. I heard him read while in the middle of these notes, and he read one good poem about Saatchi and Saatchi, simple but pursued to the critical point.
Barry MacSweeney I seem to have spent the last 5 years writing about Barry. Remarks on him in at least six places. I wrote a full-scale review of The Book of Demons in Blade, and a career survey in Salzburg Poetry Review. I removed material on him from Centre-Periphery because of space problems (now on this site). There is a chapter of more than 100 pages on him in Clive Bush's book Out of Dissent, and an article in Angel Exhaust Ten by John Wilkinson.
Ken Smith I wrote about Smith in an unpublished book called The failure of conservatism in modern British poetry. He is a good poet, a typical product of the americanophilia of the 1960s, writing poetry exclusively paratactic and of the present moment. His lack of attraction to the prevalent literary norms of that moment (the mid 1960s) could be related to a northern distrust of southerners; emerging as an openness to international ideas.
John Riley lived in Leeds but possibly came from the South. I reviewed one of his books in Angel Exhaust. work in A Various Art.
Peter Riley b.1940 there is a lot of Riley in book form, and rumour has it there are thousands of pages more in the attic. A special issue of The Gig (no.5) discusses his work at length. See A Various Art for a sample. This is very hard to paraphrase, being extensive in form and philosophical in nature. Not an excitable poet. Does he have a thesis?
Spike Hawkins Pig Poems was a period classic of 1968. a dandyish depiction of disorder. insouciant and free of meaning. unlike so many drug-based disorientations, it is complete in itself and not just concise. whatever happened to Spike? It would be more than disobliging to print the rumours. I think he's still in Liverpool.
Eric Mottram I left Eric out of the printed version of this list because I just didn't associate him with the North. Yet he went to Blackpool Grammar School. Eric was one of the revolutionaries in English poetry (publishing from about 1970), but he couldn't really write poetry. he went further with the sampling and montage principle than anyone else except Allen Fisher. As a kind of library of techniques and cultural ideas, his poems will always be of interest to the specialist. I had this experience with Eric where I'd written a re-versification of an English translation of a 2000 year old Manichaean poem in Syriac called The Pearl. An unusual idea, I thought. Then I noticed that a poem of Eric's (in Angel Exhaust 6) had scooped up the same poem, cut its 200 lines to about 11, and stuck it in the middle of dozens of other themes. Almost any idea you can think of is in the Mottram work somewhere. I should think the whole history of Mesopotamia is in there somewhere. But I think he'd got the pace wrong.
There is a huge amount of Mottram poetry I haven't read. One of the other themes in that poem is Henri Corbin, a writer on the sacred geometry of Islamic architecture. Corbin was a co-editor of Temenos, Kathleen Raine's magazine; just the opposite pole to Eric and his associates. There are some rather obvious comments to be made about assets, and ownership of assets, and ownership of assets meaning that other people aren't ALLOWED to use them. The trouble with using symbolic shared space in a culture like ours is precisely that it isn't shared, and the owners fight tirelessly to drive away people they don't want. The point is that Eric would scarf anything up: he pointed a kind of tape-recorder at everything which caught his eye, and then made the poems by collage.
John Seed very important poet. from Durham. work in A Various Art. I reviewed one of his books in Angel Exhaust.
Eddie (Everard) Flintoff friend of Colin Simms. Classicist. Wrote one extraordinary long poem, "Sarmatians", in a bizarre metre, about an Iranian tribe of horsemen migrating to Western Europe (in about 300 AD?). A great poem, I think. What else did he do? I couldn't get any more info out of Colin.
John Ash I wrote about Ash in an unpublished book. Which we will see someday. He now lives in Turkey.
Geraldine Monk writes in the free verse plus anti-syntax style associated with Eric Mottram. I just can't read this poetry. I read a page or so and have by then reached a point of near-sleep. It is full of powerful subliminal messages saying "switch off". Significant for style in that it is part of the Mottram movement, with free verse and the abandon of syntax. She is an enthusiastic performer. Perhaps it's significant that she has a command of oral skills, to go with her acute lack of academic skills. See Floating Capital for a survey of this school. comes from Lancashire (Oldham?) and annoyed me by making rude remarks about the adjacent part of Yorkshire where she lives.
Tony Harrison dull, tendentious, pasticheur. Bullying manner. lack of expression. Comes from Leeds.
David Chaloner from Cheshire. I reviewed one of his pamphlets in AE 14. There is a good selection of work in A Various Art. An extremely gifted poet.
Grace Lake came from somewhere in Cheshire, I can't remember where. I wrote a review of her in Angel Exhaust 12. Some poems in the anthology Conductors of Chaos. Much work in pamphlets. A legendary, probably unfinished, book-length, poem, Sibyl. A Selected Poems, Implacable Art, has now come out from Folio Salt.
Brian Marley see Annex. My article on him was published in Eratica 2.
Tony Jackson his poetry is very similar to that of Asa Benveniste and Brian Marley.
I didn't mention the Liverpool Pop poets, because they just fill me with horror. They exclude everything I value and enjoy about poetry. This is not a personal attack, because when Adrian Henri came to read at our school in 1973, he was very sympathetic, and this was for me a moment of realising that poets really existed. Roger McGough's stint circa 1973 as poet in residence in Loughborough, my home town, was also agreeable for everyone. But poetry can be better than this.
William Martin This really must be some of the worst contemporary poetry. the style is familiar from the Mottramites; radical juxtaposition of different strands of data, minimal use of syntax and articulation, use of mythology, etc. So many people worked in this style, but Martin writes as if he had never seen anyone else do it. This is true provincialism. These were key conceptual innovations of the 1960s, but they don't cover up lack of talent. Closer to William Watson than might appear.
Peter Didsbury wrote two really good books, third one not so good.
Ian Duhig has lived in Leeds for a long time although he was brought up in London and Birmingham, I think. See a review of his second book, by John Goodby, in Angel Exhaust 13. I really liked his first two books but the third one is a disaster.
Michael Ayres from Middlesbrough. a very important poet. I reviewed his book Poems 1987-92 in AE 12.
Chris Bendon man from Leeds who has lived in Wales for at least 20 years. see Annex.
Robert Hampson a Conrad specialist. born 1953? student of Mottram and linked with all that project of building the real world into the poem and showing the flights of reason by montage. I'm not too familiar with his work outside Seaport, a terrific documentary poem about the construction over centuries of the Liverpool docks, and Liverpool as the great port for Atlantic emigration. I'm not sure what else you can find in print. Ah, but there is now a selected poems, Assembled Fugitives. highly recommended.