Phil Bowen

The Liverpool poets (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten) brought about a resurgence in the popularity of poetry in Britain and were the precursors of the performance poets of today. They wrote their poems not for the printed page but to be performed in coffee bars and pubs. They ‘brought poetry down from the dusty shelf and onto the street’ and touched the people other poets couldn’t reach.

I remember chancing upon The Mersey Sound (Penguin Modern Poets 10), the 1967 anthology which introduced their work to a national audience, as a metrophobic teenager and being thrilled by the revelation that poetry could be fun and relevant to my own life. Here were poems that spoke of supermarkets, fish and chip shops, bus conductors, pop culture, the inner city, sex and nuclear annihilation. Poems that were playfully inventive, funny and touching. Poems infused with an optimistic spirit counterbalanced by sardonic humour. Poems of everyday life rendered hallucinatory and magical. Poems that hit me where I lived.

A Gallery to Play To makes it clear there was a poetry scene in Liverpool before ‘the big three’ got involved. I’m sure it had its merits, in fact I wish I could have been there, but there do seem to have been an awful lot of poets living a fantasy life that they were Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac and actually in New York rather than Liverpool. McGough remembers hearing poems written ‘in beatnik jargon about getting into a yellow cab and going down 43rd street’. All written, of course, by poets who had never even been to America. The great breakthrough made by McGough, Henri and Patten was to take the bohemian spirit of the Beats, and the French Symbolists, and thoroughly anglicise it, rather as the Beatles did with rock ‘n’ roll. They wrote about their own experience and preoccupations in their own idiom. Henri, in particular, used Liverpool itself as a setting for many of his poems, albeit a Liverpool made surreal as Père Ubu walks across Lime Street and Marcel Proust dips madeleine butties in his tea in a cafe.

Bowen captures the cultural moment in the 1960s that the Liverpool poets came out of and exemplify. It was an era when traditional notions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art were being challenged and the boundaries between the various art forms beginning to blur. A time when pop singers aspired to the status of poet and poets formed pop groups (as Henri and McGough did). In their performances the Liverpool poets brought together poetry, music and humour; art and entertainment became one. The ridiculous but then widespread notions that solemnity equals seriousness and the entertaining is inherently trivial were decisively rejected. Henri, who was also an artist, organised happenings (he is on record as saying that he was the first person in Britain to do so) which all the poets sometimes participated in. As described in this book many of the Liverpool poetry readings, attended by a young and predominantly non-student audience, sound more like parties. Exactly as it should be, says I. The audience itself would sometimes compose a collective poem by the exquisite corpse method of the surrealists.

Despite the immediate popularity of The Mersey Sound, the initial print run of 20,000 sold out within three months, the London literary critics were, by and large, not impressed and dismissed the anthology as not proper poetry (‘proper poetry’ evidently being that written by themselves and their relatives). Fortunately, the Liverpool poets didn’t pay too much attention to metropolitan opinion, and continued on their merrily innovative way.

The second half of A Gallery to Play To, while not without interest, does rather fall into the ‘and then he did this’ school of biography. The first half, however, which deals with the evolution of the Liverpool poetry scene and the gradual emergence of the poets as national figures, is fascinating. Bowen packs so much in: social and cultural history, group biography, literary criticism and, not least, lots of funny stories. Also, while identifying what united them, he doesn’t make the familiar mistake of regarding the poets as a three-headed monster and writes perceptively about their individual voices and artistic approaches. Meticulously researched, and written with the authority of the insider (Phil Bowen is himself a Liverpool poet), this is an extremely enjoyable and informative book about a transformative moment in British culture which resonates to this day.… (mais)