Back in Liverpool in 1953 after university, Roger McGough was well placed to see the link between the kind of humorous poetry that the Hull student newspaper had liked and the more strident and incisive work of Christopher Logue, whose writing had so impressed him compared with the more intellectual poetry he had met both at school and again in the literary circles of the university and its magazine. Logue had produced his poems as posters, for instance, and written forPrivate Eye. When McGough was a student in Hull, trying to get his work published, Philip Larkin wrote in...

Contemporary poetry is in trouble. An indication of the depth of the malaise was given by Oxford University Press’s attempt to cancel its poetry list at the end of 1998, on the grounds of its insufficient profitability.¹ Another symptom, which will be familiar to those who teach contemporary poetry at university, is the comparatively low take-up of degree-level poetry courses whenever they are optional. The symptoms, then, are obvious enough, but what are the causes? A major one, I believe, is that poetry lacks street-cred, or to be more specific,street-cred. In other words, the experience that is explored in...

I was brought up in one of Liverpool’s many quiet suburbs. Most of the area’s housing had been built after the Second World War. There was a smattering of schools and small shops, but no local cinema. The only public spaces were churches or pubs. It seemed designed for a certain kind of private life, one that focused on the domestic. My mum was an auxiliary nurse in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital; my dad painted the green-and-cream livery on Merseyside’s buses. He also stencilled the zebra stripes onto a bus advertising Knowsley Safari Park and painted the sunflower-yellow railway carriage...

Like Freud’s ‘screen memories’ which mask the actual traumatic events of childhood – what Adam Phillips calls ‘a waking dream of the past’– the poem has a wonderful capacity to transform experience or make something new of it, but also to disguise it. Sometimes this happens consciously; sometimes it comes about simply through the process of writing. Curiously, it isn’t necessarily the most important feelings or memories that make themselves available as poems. The ‘tell it slant’ capacity of the poem, which allows the writer to be surprised, is one of the things I enjoy most about writing: memories creep up...

In 1994 a letter came out of the Antipodean blue. It was from the Australian poet and organiser of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, Tim Thorne, inviting me to take up a poetry residency at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. Launceston is Tasmania’s second city (it has in effect the dimensions of a small market town); Hobart is its capital and the gateway to Antarctica.

There was more than just good fortune to it. Yes, it was like winning the lottery without knowing that someone had bought you a ticket. But it was also in a...

Adrian Henri’s major achievements are as a poet and a painter, and his sheer versatility in the arts helped to transform the popular impression of British poetry in the 1960s. His cultural eclecticism and his organising ability and enthusiasm were key elements in making the 1960s Liverpool poetry explosion happen the way it did.

The huge range of his influences and his deliberate changes of style have resulted in some unevenness in his own work, and he has frequently been damned with faint praise. Yet the best of his poetry, from the 1960s through to his most recent publications, presents...

I spoke to Brian Patten in London; the interview had been arranged in something of a rush, as he had a new book out that week and his schedule was hectic. But there we were, in a quiet room at last, and time to bring his Liverpool phase back to mind. In some ways, the phrase ‘Liverpool poet’ is a suit that doesn’t fit comfortably any more in Patten’s case. He seems to have outreached, but certainly not abandoned his writing about his origins and early years; quite the contrary. It becomes more and more obvious that with Patten, as...

Open-floor nights are those sessions, usually in the back rooms or basement bars of pubs, at which anyone can get up and have their five minutes performing their poetry, music, comedy, or whatever it is they think they can do. If the organisers have some money to invest they may book in a known performer as a headline act; but usually the organisers are volunteers doing it for love and running the events on a shoestring, and always it goes without saying that most of the participants aren’t famous and never will be. On the other hand, these sessions are...

As the man said (gloomily), nobody writes poetry when they’re happy. Undeniably, many people take it up as therapy, though a glint of talent enables them to move on to bigger and better things. So I’ll own up: despite having had my first piece published at the age of 11 (OK, in the school magazine, a cunning pastiche on Browning’sMy Last Duchess), I turned to poetry with a vengeance after divorcing my husband. The matter was compounded not long after with a big fat dose of unrequited love. Moving swiftly on (a good decade further on), I certainly never...

As I’m married to a librarian, all my books are neatly filed. I have a shelf of poetry books and it is a wonderful reminder of the 1960s and early 1970s in Liverpool. Some of the poets had their work published by major publishers or national presses (Adrian Henri and Roger McGough by Jonathan Cape, Brian Patten by Allen and Unwin, Henry Graham by Andre Deutsch, Spike Hawkins by Fulcrum); some by local presses (Brian Jacques, Dave Calder, Sid Hoddes, Matt Simpson, Richard Hill and Malcolm Barnes by Raven Books: Matt, Sid, Nigel Walker and David Porter by Toulouse Press);...

Back in 1974 a group of local residents on the Halewood estate were looking for a name for a poetry and music show that they were putting on in Bridgefield Sports Forum. ‘Windows’ was the title of a poem in the show by Icilda McLean who worked as a play leader and school meals assistant. It was adopted as the title of the production, which went down so well that ‘Windows’ became the title for regular poetry and music events staged every month in Halewood Library. These hosted visits by some of the leading poets of the day: Adrian Mitchell,...

The question of Merseyside’s importance in the history of the development of pop music in the UK in the 1960s has been pondered many times. Why did such unprecedented developments occur in Liverpool and the surrounding areas, rather than in Southampton or Sheffield? Although other areas of the country had their own beat groups, some of which eventually came to national prominence, those from Merseyside were the ground-breakers. However, groups such as the Beatles, the Searchers and Gerry and the Pacemakers did not suddenly emerge ‘out of nowhere’. Rather, Mersey Beat, as with many popular culture explosions, occurred in a...

Although the jazz world was unaware of the fact, by the early 1960s its last period of cultural ascendancy was coming to an end. Within a few years, and especially after the stunning impact of the Beatles on the USA in 1964, rock would begin to take the place of jazz in all the culturally prestigious areas in which jazz had seemed to be the most expressive and important modern popular musical form. Jazz was still heard up to the mid-1960s, for instance, in film music, but rock would soon take over this function, as it would a few years...