Gladsongs and gatherings: poetry and its social context in Liverpool since the 1960s

217 Pages·2001·1.158 MB·English

by  Wade, Stephen(Editor)

GLADSONGS
AND
GATHERINGS

GLADSONGS
AND
GATHERINGS
Poetry and its social context
in Liverpool since the 1960s
Edited by Stephen Wade
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2001 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0-85323-727-1
Typeset by Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd, Bolton
Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
I will make all that is possible step out of time
to a land of giant hoorays!
Brian Patten, January Gladsong
In memory of Adrian Henri (1932–2001)
He Painted Poems…
He painted poems of an imaginary England
which was also the real one.
Something nasty beyond the shrubbery.
ElevenDennis Nilsens disguised as Bruce Wayne
quietly eating their Campbell’s soup
before opening that dark door Night.
But there is something real beyond the neon,
something he looked for in the ordinary
streets, in the kitchens and bedrooms,
with the ordinary names of lovers and heroes,
the names themselves their magic signs.
Roads and skyways the rolling backdrops
in between, he travelled ever hopefully
along the sweaty entangled valleys of love,
sending out detailed reports on the botany.
He liked to fold things in unusual ways
to see if they would jump or fly:
paper that flowered into banners of panties
like doves over city landscapes
where ghosts and the living mingle.
He planted imaginary gardens
full of real plastic daffodils
for the silent grandmothers
and the children who come after.
David Bateman
Contents
Introduction Stephen Wade ix
Poems
Liverpool at the Millennium Matt Simpson 1
Streets of Hope Levi Tafari 3
1. Literary Matters
The Arrival of McGough Stephen Wade 7
‘The Hard Lyric’: Re-registering Liverpool Poetry
Peter Barry 19
2. Reflections on the Craft
Liverpool Peasant Michael Murphy 45
Screen Memories: The Kiss Deryn Rees-Jones 53
A Poetry Residency in Tasmania: The Story behind
Cutting the Clouds Towards Matt Simpson 60
3. Interviews
Adrian Henri: Singer of Meat and Flowers David Bateman 73
An Interview with Brian Patten Stephen Wade 103
4. Autobiographies/Social Histories
Open Floor! Live Poetry Nights in Liverpool, 1967–2001
David Bateman 111
Dead Good Poets, Dead Good Poetry Carol Baldock 138
All You Need is Words Spencer Leigh 143
The Windows Project Dave Ward 150
5. Broader Views
These Boys: The Rise of Mersey Beat Richard Stakes 157
Jazz Scene, Liverpool Scene: The Early 1960s
Pete Townsend 168
Notes on Contributors 177
Select Bibliography 181
Index 182
Acknowledgement
Peter Barry’s essay, ‘“The Hard Lyric”: Re-registering Liverpool Poetry’,
first appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly 28 (4), 1999, pp. 328–48. The
editor is grateful to Oxford University Press for kindly giving permission
for its inclusion in this volume.
Introduction
Stephen Wade
This book was prompted by a vague feeling that the city of Liverpool and
the three poets associated with the now-celebrated Mersey Soundvolume
(in the Penguin Modern Poets series, 1967) presented an assortment of
paradoxes. First, there was the notion that Liverpool was hardly a ‘cul-
tural centre’ in the way that such a thing had been explained to me
during my schooling. My secondary modern education in Leeds had led
me to classify poetry as something that bore no relation to the pop lyrics
of the late 1950s and early 1960s; yet critics were talking about Liver-
pool as a place of renaissance and music revolution.
Secondly, there was the realisation that the poets in that volume were
somehow not the same as the poets I was given to study in the first year
of my English degree. My friends and I separated Roger McGough from
Stephen Spender but were unable to say why we did so. With hindsight,
it is possible to see McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten and their
associated world of students, workers and musicians as a key element
in a movement of literary renewal – one that was not conscious of being
‘literary’ at all.
Gladsongs and Gatherings, then, began with a conviction that
McGough, Patten and Henri were important in British literary history
for several reasons. Their attitudes, despite having literary antecedents
in writers such as Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), Allen Ginsberg
(1926–97) and Adrian Mitchell (born 1932), were hard to define in per-
formance, and it was surely the delivery and realisation of often throw-
away lines that emphasised their achievement. Those who saw the
performances in coffee bars and pubs attest to something different, a
direct and somehow natural sensibility and wit that was already well
established in the city and its people.
In the course of interviewing McGough and Patten in preparation for
this collection, I became aware that the actual practitioners are reluc-