Obituary
He was 79 and hadn’t been in the best of health, I believe, so hardly a surprise. But very sad nonetheless. Along with Roger McGough and Adrien Henri he was one of the three poets in Penguin’s bestselling The Mersey Sound, published in 1967 and that book meant a lot to me in the 70s.
Just Roger, the best of them, left now.
‘So, how long does a man live after all?
And how much does he live while he lives?
We fret and ask so many questions –
then when it comes to us
the answer is so simple after all.
A man lives for as long as we carry him inside us,
for as long as we carry the harvest of his dreams,
for as long as we ourselves live,
holding memories in common, a man lives.’
RIP
And this is a more recent poem and very moving in the circumstances.
A bad week for poets, with Tony Harrison dying too. He was 88 and in poor health though, and as he observed himself in A Kumquat for John Keats, ‘life has a skin of death that keeps its zest’. That’s a long poem, though well worth looking up if you feel inclined, so here’s a shorter poem which seems to have been the one that suggested itself to many on the news of Tony’s death.
I was going to post an image, but it seems that Imgur has been blocked in the UK. Any suggested alternatives if that doesn’t sort itself out?
https://poets.org/poem/long-distance-ii
I remember watching him in 1985 recite/perform the infamous ‘V’ from the actual vandalised graveyard of his parents that was the setting and inspiration for the epic poem. A coruscating, visceral tour de force that was both intensely personal and a potent alternative state-of-the-nation address that still resonates so powerfully today.
This isn’t that actual film, but is still a great reading.
https://share.google/KuJefRdfQ9FbXGtUh
I saw him do a reading in St. Albans in the early 90s. It wasn’t well attended and he joined us in the bar after.
That little book, and those three poets, changed my outlook on English literature completely when my English teacher, a gifted writer himself, encouraged us to investigate the Penguin Modern Poets and thereby opened up a new expressive landscape for us, way beyond the stilted curriculum that had been our previous course and curse.
I got a tiny set of books at his gig, one per poet – about 1½” square! Still got it somewhere.
I encountered him in Paris in 1966. We sat by the Seine into the night, shared a joint and a bottle of that French red with the stars on the neck, and all was right with the world. He was there on some Arts Council mission, and we tittered at the thought that that august body was paying for him to get stoned. Nice guy.