Tony Harrison
A tribute
Getting taught poetry in School during the 1980s was a pretty dour time, it has to be said and left me with no interest in really writing poetry until I got into the late 1990s when I went to university with the usual veins of Shakespeare, and later on Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne and Arnold dominant in my Secondary School.
I still have a loving close to 40 years later for some aspects of Tennyson and Browning’s work, even now and recently watched David Tennant in a televised version of Macbeth, which I liked, but my wife, Amanda, didn’t like, but there was a total lack of variety of poetry then in my school. I am not blaming my school for it, and I know things have changed since then and for the better, with a few friends of mine who are very good modern poets coming into schools, but in the 1980s, the poetry we got taught was pretty dour and held little to no interest for me.
I didn’t see Tony Harrison’s V when it was first broadcast on 04 November 1987, who has recently passed away, I am writing about him here, really, but remember the reaction of our English Literature teacher the next time we saw her a few days later with her exact words “That’s not poetry” still sticking in my head decades later.
I can’t recall reading lots more of his work over time, but he always carried my respect from that day with his poem “V” and the way he brought my English Literature group kicking and screaming into the modern world, away from poets who had been dead for centuries.
It proved a gateway to looking at poetry in different ways, encouraged me not to use language which I wouldn’t have dreamed of using back and in a major way stopped me trying to write poetry in a homage of something of 1890s and in a way still has me running free (whether swearing or not) in my poetry and stories (be in a different way of course altogether in my forthcoming short story collection ‘Threads and other stories of Isolation’) and most encouraged me not to be afraid with my work and not hold back in anything I do.
R.I.P.
