Back in the late seventies I mustered enough courage to stand up and
read a couple of poems in public. The man who encouraged me to do
it was the man to whom this book is dedicated, Harold Hikins, poet,
editor, publisher, librarian, encourager and organiser. He, along
with others, ran monthly readings at the Why Not pub in Liverpool city centre, readings which began
in the sixties and, with a few changes of venue, continued into the
eighties. Acknowledgement of his contribution in offering poets a
platform has long been overdue and all praise should go to Kevin McCann
for carefully selecting work, old and new, by writers who appeared
at these readings.
And scanning this selection is like being back in the downstairs room
where I first heard the late Keith Whitelaw reading Roger Crawford’s
The Scrap Heap, a pastiche of The Waste Land, in Scouse, where Adrian
Mitchell was heckled and duly heckled back while Roger McGough melted
into the foreground of the audience but didn’t read. It was the room
where I bought a copy of Kevin McCann’s The
Trouble With Wings, published by Hikins’, Toulouse Press, and wished
I’d written the title poem.
The other inhabitants of this wide-ranging tribute include Scousers,
Jimmy McGovern, Matt Simpson and the Mersey Three, of course, with
a couple of old favourites from the late Henri and Patten’s magnificent
‘Interruption At The Opera House’
closing the book. There is also poetry from the long dormant, Alasdair
Paterson, whose Glasshouse Press published some fine work, including
his own, Poems For Douanier
Rousseau. Where is he now?
Still active, Pete Morgan’s contributions display a craft and precision
often missing from work in performance but then he is a master on
page or stage. His work is seamless and difficult to quote from but
I’d recommend you look at ‘Late Fire’ and ‘In Absentia’ and see what
I mean. I’m not sure what Michael Cunningham is doing now but he hosted
some superior readings himself at The Pilgrim pub in the nineties.
His work never got the recognition it deserved despite being championed
at one time by the likes of Simon Armitage. Here ‘Injury Time’ and
its bleak portrayal of educational bullies is a good example of how
he could write telling and memorable lines :
We knew by heart the
mythology of straps,
how the old and worn
ones hurt more,
how to hold the hand
so that it caught only the edge
and the indignity of
entering a junior class
to ’borrow’ one from
another master.
Dave Calder was also very active on the Liverpool poetry scene as part of Windows
Project and co-editor of Smoke
magazine. He appropriately asks, in ‘Leavings’, ‘what will we be remembered by?’ and
also constructs a miniature narrative of failure in ‘Birdman’, a poem
which reflects his eye for
the precise image, every word made to count. It would
have sat well next to Kevin McCann’s ‘The Trouble With
Wings’.
With so many voices to listen to it is sometimes easy to overlook
one or two. Richard Hill was published by Hikins and others but often
seemed a quieter voice. It is good to revisit the realm of cowboy
fiction with him in ‘Tombstone Library’ where Wyatt Earp has to pay
his fine before ‘he turns and moves towards “Mythology”.’ It is also
worth taking time to read his more personal tribute, ‘My Father Worked
At Cammell Lairds’.
I mentioned seeing Keith Whitelaw at the Why Not and it is satisfying
to see his work remembered here. His early death in 1988 arrested
a poetic development which was always full of promise. Again, Toulouse
Press kept a selection of his work in print in the posthumous booklet,
Beautify The
Nation. Some of this
is available again here. Moving from the splenetic view of the British
in ‘National Anthem’ through the manic wit of ‘Elbows In The Sugar’
he makes one of his most poignant statements in ‘Mental Ward, December’:
chiefly it’s the fear
that I remember
the phonograph, the
light, a wartime tune,
how we can be destroyed
in dark December
however bold we are
in May or June.
The whole book stands as an important document of the work Hikins
did and it is good to see something of his own writing too. In this
case it is his appraisal of the Liverpudlian attitude to the arts
and artists and the vitality of the scene, as it was in 1977 when
he wrote the piece from which this book takes its title. He valued
the honest performer with something to say and he extends this to
the Liverpool audience who had a rich diet of
poetry and other arts available to the point where they sometimes
became, in his words, ‘blasé’. This article, taken from the magazine
Poetry Merseyside, which he co-edited for a few years, recalls a time
when I went to hear people read their words in the beer and smoke
and came away inspired. It is a superb reminder of how some of that
work has lasted and who made sure it was heard initially. It is gratifying
that once again it is available to be read and enjoyed.
©
Paul Donnelly 2002
The Isle is Full of Noises
is available from : Phil Taylor, Arts &
Culture Unit, 3rd Floor, Millenium House, Victoria Street, Liverpool, L1 6JH.