Reading Barry MacSweeney - review by Terry Kelly

Poet’s life is brought to book


Terry Kelly
Shields Gazette

03 January 2014

A BOOK about the life and work of a former Shields Gazette journalist is out now.

Barry MacSweeney, once deputy editor at the Gazette, died at the age of 51 in 2000 after a long battle with alcoholism.

Despite working as a journalist all his life in the North East and elsewhere in the UK, MacSweeney is better known as a poet.

Reading Barry MacSweeney, published by Northumberland-based Bloodaxe Books, examines the work of the Newcastle-born poet, including collections such as The Book of Demons and Pearl.

His first book, The Boy From the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, published by Hutchinson in 1968, sold thousands of copies, but as a 19-year-old, MacSweeney was put forward for the Oxford chair of poetry, a publicity stunt which backfired.

MacSweeney afterwards developed a distaste for the literary establishment, and most of his subsequent books were published by non-mainstream presses.

But his later poetry won a Paul Hamlyn Award and glowing reviews in leading UK journals, and an archive dedicated to his writing was created at Newcastle University in 2001.

Leading academics and friends contribute to Reading Barry MacSweeney, which looks at different aspects of his poetry, plus his personal life and love of rock music.

Editor Paul Batchelor writes: “A diverse range of writers – academics, poets, journalists and friends of MacSweeney – have been brought together to offer perspectives on this most protean, prolific and contradictory of poets.”

Contributors include his former Gazette colleague Terry Kelly.

Reading Barry MacSweeney is published by Bloodaxe Books, priced at £12.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/what-s-on/poet-s-life-is-brought-to-book-1-6348290

Reading Barry Macsweeney - edited by Paul Batchelor

Barry MacSweeney was described as 'a contrary, lone wolf...[whose] ear for a soaring lyric melody was unmatched' (Nicholas Johnson, Independent). MacSweeney found fame with his first book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother, which appeared when he was just nineteen years old. But he soon retreated from the publicity, and for almost thirty years his poetry appeared only in small press publications. Identifying himself with Chatterton and Rimbaud, MacSweeney developed a poetics based on experiment and excess, from the fragmented lyricism of 'Brother Wolf' to the political anger of 'Jury Vet'; from the dizzying historical perspectives of Ranter to the nightmarish urban landscape of Hellhound Memos.

In 1997, MacSweeney once again found a wider audience, with the publication of his last full-length book, The Book of Demons, which recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism. This book also included Pearl, a sequence of tender lyrics celebrating the poet's first love and his rural Northumbrian childhood. At the time of his death in 2000, MacSweeney was preparing a retrospective selection of his work for publication. When Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 appeared in 2003, it brought a wealth of poetry back into print, displaying the incredible range, ambition and quality of MacSweeney's work. Reading Barry MacSweeney is the first book of essays to assess MacSweeney's achievement. Bringing together academic critics, poets and friends of the poet, the book considers many aspects of MacSweeney's career, including his political verse, his re-imagining of pastoral poetry, his love of popular music, and his mapping of Northumberland. 

Contributors include Professor W.N. Herbert, Matthew Jarvis, Peter Riley, Professor William Rowe, Harriet Tarlo and Professor John Wilkinson, as well as MacSweeney's journalist friend Terry Kelly, and poet S.J. Litherland, MacSweeney's former partner.

Paul Batchelor was born in Northumberland in 1977. In 2003 he received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and in 2004 he was given the Andrew Waterhouse Award by New Writing North. In 2005 he was a winner of the Poetry Business Prize; his pamphlet To Photograph a Snow Crystal was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2006. His first full-length collection, The Sinking Road (Bloodaxe, 2008), was shortlisted for The Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2008 and the Glen Dimplex Prize for Best First Collection. His poem 'Comeuppance' won the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition in 2009. He did his PhD at Newcastle University on the work of Barry MacSweeney, and his critical anthology, Reading Barry MacSweeney, is due from Bloodaxe in 2013. His second collection is due in 2014. Paul Batchelor lives in Manchester and is a freelance reviewer.

'Barry MacSweeney was a contrary, lone wolf. For 25 years his work was marginalised and was absent from official records of poetry - MacSweeney's ear for a soaring, lyric melody was unmatched - his poetry became dark as blue steel, edging towards what became his domain: the lament' - Nicholas Johnson, Independent.

'His notion of the artist was formed around a myth of exemplary failure and belated recognition: Rimbaud was an early model for this - Such identifications were the basis for a poetics of direct utterance in which MacSweeney's voice mixed with others to inveigh, to celebrate or entreat - Pearl, a work of redemptive pathos, evoking the figure of a childhood sweetheart as a presence in nature, on the confines of social existence, was reprinted in The Book of Demons, where he projects himself as maimed and abject, hapless yet percipient victim of the demon drink, in writing that is both comic and terrifying' - Andrew Crozier, Guardian.

'MacSweeney's poetry places a radical, critical energy, unsparing of illusions, and bitter and comic in its self-appraisal, at the disposal of a clear-eyed celebration of the world. In lyrical and experimental forms the poet bears outraged witness to a culture in decline - as battered prophet, demonic wanderer and clown of misspent desire' - Clive Bush.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reading-Barry-MacSweeney-Paul-Batchelor/dp/1852249889/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1365938308&sr=8-3&keywords=barry+macsweeney

http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852249889

Reading Barry MacSweeney

Reading Barry MacSweeney
Essays Edited By Paul Batchelor

Barry MacSweeney was described as 'a contrary, lone wolf... [whose] ear for a soaring lyric melody was unmatched' (Nicholas Johnson, Independent). MacSweeney found fame with his first book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother, which appeared when he was just nineteen years old. But he soon retreated from the publicity, and for almost thirty years his poetry appeared only in small press publications. Identifying himself with Chatterton and Rimbaud, MacSweeney developed a poetics based on experiment and excess, from the fragmented lyricism of 'Brother Wolf' to the political anger of 'Jury Vet'; from the dizzying historical perspectives of Ranter to the nightmarish urban landscape of Hellhound Memos.

In 1997, MacSweeney once again found a wider audience, with the publication of his last full-length book,The Book of Demons, which recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism. This book also included Pearl, a sequence of tender lyrics celebrating the poet's first love and his rural Northumbrian childhood. At the time of his death in 2000, MacSweeney was preparing a retrospective selection of his work for publication. WhenWolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 appeared in 2003, it brought a wealth of poetry back into print, displaying the incredible range, ambition and quality of MacSweeney's work.

Reading Barry MacSweeney is the first book of essays to assess MacSweeney's achievement. Bringing together academic critics, poets and friends of the poet, the book considers many aspects of MacSweeney's career, including his political verse, his re-imagining of pastoral poetry, his love of popular music, and his mapping of Northumberland. Contributors include Professor W.N. Herbert, Matthew Jarvis, Peter Riley, Professor William Rowe, Harriet Tarlo and Professor John Wilkinson, as well as MacSweeney's journalist friend Terry Kelly, and poet S.J. Litherland, MacSweeney's former partner.

Co-published with Newcastle University

http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852249889

Don't bother with the link to Amazon - the book's not there. Yet.

Barry MacSweeney at Live Theatre

Green Cabaret
Part of Fuses: Live Lab 2012 New Writing Festival

By Paul Sellar
Directed by Steve Gilroy
Presented as part of DOCUMENT

A unique insight into the world of Barry Mac Sweeney, the precociously talented but troubled Tyneside poet.

The performance will be followed by a panel and post show discussion

Saturday 17 March, 5.30pm LOCATION: Studio Theatre TICKETS: £5

http://www.live.org.uk/whatson/index.php?next=16&next=21

In Memory of Barry MacSweeney by Terry Kelly

Geordie Bigfoot shape-shifter
moving like a cipher
at the edge of Chopwell Woods
lurking below the tidal mark
between Lemington Glass Works
and the single lane road bridge at Newburn
the strange wind on your face

displaced from Bluff Creek
northern Californian woods
October 1967
his smudged after-image snapped
in a 16mm frame
he roams the blurry margins
of rumour and vague sightings

like a fool in a monkey suit
or the Memphis Flash zipping
from Shreveport to Texarkana
to rip up the Municipal Auditorium
November 24, 1954
burning up his first pink Cadillac
between Hope and Sweetwater

Geordie Bigfoot the Hillybilly Cat
came to me in a dream
not as a hot stink of fox
printing the midnight page
but as high-pitched abandon
swaggering like Jimmy Cagney
in Yankee Doodle Dandy

roaming through dead Tyneside pits
up on his hind legs just like a man
Geordie Bigfoot Memphis Flash
shape-shifting cipher ghosting
through the forgotten places
holding in his blackened paws
the last piece of coal in England

Terry Kelly

No Such Thing

Grassblade glintstreak in one of the last mornings
before I come to meet you, Pearl,
as the rain shies. How bright and sudden the dogrose,
briefly touched by dew, flaming
between the deep emerald and smoky blue
Dogrose, pink as Pearl's lips, no
city chemist or salon. We set
our colour charts in the rain
by feldspar heaved from the streambed;
cusloppe, burn peat in summer
and wild trampled marigolds.
Pearl, somewhere there is a stern receiver
and all accounts are open in the rain.
Once more through the heifer muck
and into the brilliant cooling of the watermint beds.
Sky to the west today, where you are, Pearl, is
a fantastic freak bruise, which hurts the world.
Coward rain scared of our joy refuses to come.
Deep despair destroys and dents delight
now that I have pledged my future to you, Pearl,
from the edge of the roaring bypass, from
the home of the broken bottle and fiery
battleground of the seiged estate.

BARRY MACSWEENEY

http://www.poetropical.co.uk/treefrog/nosuch.htm

Writers at Warwick

This archive has over 200 recordings of writers from all disciplines and includes both readings of their work and discussions which afford an insight into their creative process. From the poetry of the 1970s to the latest Writers at Warwick events, the archive contains recordings of writers such as Basil Bunting, Germaine Greer, Salman Rushdie and Sarah Waters - not to mention such FNB favourites like Hugo Williams, Barry MacSweeney, Tom Pickard, Paul Muldoon and Allen Ginsberg (the poet of choice for ex-FNB Paul McConkey).

You can search for recordings, use an A-Z index of writers, view collections of recordings or browse by date, genre or theme. The entire archive is free of charge and can be used only for educational and research purposes.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/

Song - Barry MacSweeney

Song

Out of our seats
we watch the starlit company.
All those animal garments
of the hungry soul.
They fall on the stars
and the stars absorb them.
To win, suck seed.

BARRY MACSWEENEY

Yet more Barry MacSweeney...

Comment on the BBC Radio 4 programme:
http://damnthecaesars.blogspot.com/

Barry MacSweeney, Tom Pickard and all...

There's a neat blog, Poets in a Lens, that features photography of, and comments about, readings held between 1969 and 1987 throughout the north-east of England in a series of venues, including Morden Tower and The Colpitts - here, the actual pub, well before the event relocated to North Bailey near Durham Cathedral.

It's been put together by Jeremy James from the photography and writings of his father, David, who cearly attended the events on a regular basis. Among the poets featured are Basil Bunting, Peter Porter, Adrian Henri, Gillian Clarke, Seamus Heaney, U. A. Fanthorpe and FNB favourites Hugo Williams, Tom Pickard and Barry MacSweeney.

It's interesting to note that for a while, readings were held upstairs at The Old George, long before it became a haunt of 55 year-old married women on the pull.

Tom Pickard reading at The Old George in 1973.

Poets in a Lens: http://poetsinalens.blogspot.com/

Colpitts: http://www.colpittspoetry.co.uk/about.php

Morden Tower: http://www.mordentower.org

Barry MacSweeney - again...

A final reminder, if one were needed, that you can catch the BBC Radio Four programme about poet Barry MacSweeney (including the contribution of a certain Friday Night Boy) once more on Saturday at 11.30pm and, of course, on BBC iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mf3ds.

More Barry MacSweeney

In case you missed it, the BBC Radio 4 feature on Barry MacSweeney can be heard on BBC iPlayer. And wasn't our Terry good? Much more informative (and a far better reader) than Sean O'Brien. He should have his own show.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mf3ds/The_Poet_of_Sparty_Lea_In_Search_of_Barry_MacSweeney/

Barry MacSweeney- "the fringes of the poetry scene"

The Book of Demons (publ. 1997)
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
'Angry, fierce, unruly verse that does what English verse has supposedly forgotten how to do visions of demons that haunted the author's long recovery from alcoholism'
- Steven Waling, City Life.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Demons-Barry-MacSweeney/dp/1852244143
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852244143

Wolf Tongue - Poems 1975-2000 (publ. 2003)
"Barry MacSweeney's last book, The Book of Demons, recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism as well as the great love of those who helped save his life - though only for three more years. When he died in 2000, he had just assembled a retrospective of his work. Wolf Tongue is his own selection, with the addition of the two late books many regard as his finest work, Pearl and The Book of Demons."
- Bloodaxe Books
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852246669
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wolf-Tongue-1975-2000-Barry-MacSweeney/dp/1852246669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251915996&sr=1-1

Horses in Boiling Blood (Equipage, Cambridge, 2004) http://www.cambridgepoetry.org/equipage.htm

"Rod Mengham’s Equipage has published the extraordinary imitations of Apollinaire
that Barry MacSweeney wrote before his death in 2000. MacSweeney’s death by alcoholism was a harsh end to a long drinking lifetime, and his relationship to Apollinaire was an addiction to the Frenchman’s spirits, a neediness visceral, cultural, and political.

The chimes of consonance between provide an intellectual rationale for the project: Apollinaire spent his last years witnessing a new century’s wondrous flights of technological and human form, as well as the unprecedented carnage of the First World War; MacSweeney spent his last days seeing that century out, between two wars in Iraq, singing songs of praise and lament.

But more powerful than this cultural exchange is the exchange of affections
across time. To imitate Apollinaire, as MacSweeney does here, is to perform a dynamic transfusion of life fluids, to imagine the Frenchman as a drinking partner across death’s way. It is also to make friends with European modernism, to go to the innocent heart of modernist experiments with the language of the new, while bypassing the obduracies of the Poundian line. In recovering Apollinaire’s transfiguring love of the ordinary, MacSweeney goes straight back to the source that underwrote both Breton’s fraîcheur and Ginsberg’s kindliness."

More at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/531_piette_macsweeney.pdf

Barry McSweeney on the Radio

Sun 6 Sep 2009 16:30 BBC Radio 4 (FM) only

"Young poet Tom Chivers reclaims the reputation of counter-cultural poet Barry MacSweeney, who wrote his first poem at seven, began a lifelong struggle with solitary hard drinking at 16 and was nominated for the Oxford Poetry Chair at 18.

A protégée of Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, he was a regular at the Morden Tower in Newcastle along with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, and Ed Dorn. MacSweeney was a man of contradictions; a Romantic poet, a political journalist who raged against the world but also a naturalist whose writing was rooted in the Northumbrian landscape. His refusal to engage with the Establishment was incompatible with commercial or mainstream success, and he died an alcoholic's death, on the fringes of the poetry scene.

A 16-year-old Tom Chivers encountered MacSweeney at what would turn out to be his final poetry reading; a week later he was dead. Now Tom goes on a personal journey to explore the life and work of his hero. Travelling to the Northumbrian landscape which anchored MacSweeney's work, Tom investigates why his radical style was never palatable to the mainstream but also why his work still appeals to a new generation of poets today."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mf3ds

Possibly starring FNB TK. What more could anyone want? Dancing girls! Hotcha! Hotcha!

The Barry McSweeney Collection at Newcastle University:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/research/literature/macsweeney/