Poetry didn’t really hit home with me at school.
Part of the reason was that I could never have told my mates (if I’d had any) that I was into it, but also I was in the sixth form before I started reading any and found Pope’s Rape of the Lock a touch difficult, couldn’t relate to Tennyson (I don’t mind some of it now) and had enough Shakespeare to contend with in Othello and King Lear.
My degree didn’t help, offering up Romantics such as John Donne, though I didn’t mind TS Eliot’s The Wasteland.
At about the same time, late one night on Channel 4, Tony Harrison’s V was broadcast.
I would have been flicking channels and had my interest stirred by this poet with a northern accent strolling round a cemetery above Leeds, detailing an encounter with a skinhead who had daubed racist graffiti on his parents’ grave.
It had beer cans, an off license, a reference to Leeds United, but was much deeper.
Importantly it expressed some of the working class anger I felt in a working class accent I could understand.
In a copy of the NME I read about the Merseybeat poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri and – thanks to Janice Long and John Peel - as I was getting into bands from Liverpool (Wah! The Icicle Works, Pale Fountains, Half Man Half Biscuit and, more obscurely Western Promise, The High Five and The Press Gang) I thought I may as well have a look at the poetry as well.
I took a train to Lime Street Station during the summer holidays, armed with my new Selected Poems of Tony Harrison and a booklet given away with Jamming! magazine that told me all I thought I needed to know about the Liverpool music scene.
I read the poems of TH on the way and bought The Mersey Sound while walking the streets and disused docks of Liverpool, meaning I could read McGough, Patten and Henri on the return leg.
It would be a stretch to say everything changed that day, but a lot did and it wasn’t all about the poetry or the music.
There’s nothing wrong with poetry about love (Patten wrote plenty of it) or war, but it always seemed to be written by the upper classes about the upper classes, but this poetry, this music, was real. It was about places and people that, if I hadn’t yet discovered, didn’t seem to be beyond my reach.
It brought a change in me, awakened me, and also, I thought, signalled a new era when the arts would not be dominated by those born into money. That may even have been the case for a while, or maybe what I was reading/listening to merely served as an echo chamber of my own views.
Now, I feel, it’s gone even further the other way. Musicians such as the Mumfords, Frank Turner and Chris Martin are far easier for the industry to deal with than troublesome council estate types like a young Shaun Ryder, who no label would take a risk on these days. Oasis too, maybe.
The same goes with poetry, art, comedy, acting, media and politics. I Google people when they appear on TV, or I read about them, and even those playing the hard man/woman in films have normally had a leg up from the establishment.
Good luck to all of you who fit into that category, but don’t pretend to be something you are not. Don’t rewrite your own histories as well as ours.
Some of you may be brilliant at what you do, but that never guaranteed anyone anything and many better than you have been left unread, unheard and unseen.
It was the case 200 years ago with the likes of Lord Byron and it’s still the case now.
Tony Harrison and Brian Patten have both gone over the past week. Who will be their successors? Will we ever be allowed to read them?