Green on Harrison

The current programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society finishes next Weds, 17th July, 7.30, St. Mark's Church, Derby Road, Portsmouth, with an evening on Tony Harrison. And I have inherited the very pleasant job of introducing it.
I offer my few minutes on the subject below but will also make mention of a story to be found in Romana Huk's essay Tony Harrison and the Leeds Renaissance, which can be found in the Bloodaxe Critical Anthology edited by Neil Astley. As well as a strong contingent of poets in Leeds in the early 60's was the emerging comedian Barry Cryer and Harrison appeared in reviews there at the time. It says that Cryer wanted to take Tony on tour with him as the straight man as part of his show.
How different things could have been if Cryer and Harrison had become an item.

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison is probably best known for his film poems. These have included The Blasphemer’s Banquet, which gathered together a number of banned writers at a dinner party for Salman Rushdie; Black Daisies for the Bride, about Alzheimer’s Disease; The Shadow of Hiroshima, about the atomic bomb; Prometheus, about coal miners, and most famously, v., about the desecration of the cemetery where his parents are buried.

v. was the subject of outraged headlines in 1985 in some newspapers on account of its insistent use of a particular word that Philip Larkin had also used from time to time but the condemnation served mainly to demonstrate that The Daily Mail, amongst others, is not the best place to go for commentary on contemporary poetry.

Born in 1937, Harrison emerged in the early 60’s at a time when a group of young poets were based around Leeds University, like Geoffrey Hill, Wole Soyinka, Ken Smith, Jon Silkin, John Heath-Stubbs and more. These were perceived as considerably more politically engaged and challenging poets than the more sedate ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950’s.

In the 1980’s I remember reading that Harrisonwas the only person to have ‘poet’ recorded as his occupation in his British passport but I suspect there are many more now. But another part of his work has been adapting Classical drama for the modern theatre. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is an adaptation of Sophocles, and there are versions of The Oreisteiaby Aeschylus, Moliere’s The Misanthropeand further classical French and ancient texts.

His poems have predominantly had this political edge, the School of Eloquence being a set of sonnets on the ownership of language and the class divide; he also writes of his parents’ lives as well as meditations such as Cypress and Cedarand A Kumquat for John Keats that make apposite contrasts between life’s various sweetness and bitterness.

In 2000, he published Laureate’s Block which contained the poems written after the death of Ted Hughes and before the appointment of Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate. He had been widely suggested as the rightful successor but having published a poem in celebration the ‘Abdication of King Charles III’, he then issued the Laureate’s Block poem, expressing his vexation at still being associated with the post.

In fact, his sympathies are more with one of his other great heroes, the Roundhead Puritan, John Milton.

It has not been easy to find an illustrative stanza to quote that both shows Harrison’s passionate mode of expression and can be broadcast in our pre-watershed slot here, but these lines from Them & Uz are representative of much of his brilliant and polemical writing,