Bill Griffiths, who would have been seventy this month, sprang onto the UK poetry scene effectively fully formed. Poetry Review 63.3 (Autumn 1972) included, among works by Robert Duncan, Jack Hirschman, David Antin, and younger British poets such as Tom Pickard and Thomas A. Clark, Griffiths’s first published poems: an extract from “Cycles on Dover Borstal,” “Terzetto: Brixton Prison,” and “To Johnny Prez: Hells Angels Nomads.” The titles alone—with their references to Borstal, Brixton Prison, and Hells Angels—were sufficiently striking. Under Eric Mottram’s editorship, the moribund Poetry Review had been given a new lease of life—and had opened an important transatlantic dialogue—but these poems were still a surprise. On the one hand, there was material that fulfilled the expectations of the titles, as in a section that seemed like commentary on a set of photographs: “See this this is Angels getting the booting of their life in Scrubs / This is Johnny / This is me picking up snout-bits in Brixton.” But, on the other, documentary realism was not what these poems offered. This was clear from the opening lines of the first poem:” Ictus! / As I ain’ t like ever to be still but / kaleidoscope.” “Terzetto” similarly gave pause for thought: What has a string trio, a piece of chamber music, to do with Brixton? The poems shifted between the learned and the demotic, the violence of the legal system and casual references to de Cuyp’s cows or Japanese gardens, within a radically new poetic language.
Bill had been born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, the son of a piano teacher, and had attended Kingsbury Grammar. In his teenage years, he had been part of a bike gang—and he carried the tattooed knuckles (LOVE HATE) for the rest of his life. He had spent a brief period in Brixton Prison under the stop and search laws (but was not charged). This gave him his lifelong commitment to prisoners and penal reform. He had also completed a BA in History (Medieval and Modern) at University College London, graduating in 1969. The impact of this was less immediately apparent, but it perhaps explains the long temporal perspectives that characterize much of his work. My first communication with him was in the early 1970s. He was organizing the poetry section of the 1974 Windsor Free Festival, the last and largest of the three unofficial, countercultural festivals held in Windsor Great Park. Several hundred people had turned up in 1972; several thousand were there in 1974. We were booked to read on Thursday, but by then the festival had been closed down by the police—in scenes that cast a shadow forward to the miners’ strike and the Poll Tax riots.
In the early 1970s, Bill worked with Bob Cobbing in the Poetry Society print shop in Earl’s Court Square: this gave him the opportunity to “print continuously,” and began a lifelong engagement with smallpress book production. He ran two imprints, Pirate Press (1971–80) and Amra Press (after 1989 and his move to Seaham), as well as being actively involved with the Association of Little Presses. Although he produced work in a range of formats over the next thirty years—from single-duplicated sheets to offset-litho booklets—what sticks in the mind from early in his career is the 1975 A5-pamphlet, Eight Poems against the Bond and Cement of Civil Society, with its paper cover and front-cover typeface recalling an eighteenth-century political tract, and the 1976 A5-pamphlet second edition of War w/ Windsor, with its hand-stitching and its visual texts by Sean O’ Huigin. Later publications included Starfish Jail (1993), with its hand-drawn letters, hand-colored stars for the front cover, and plastic spiral binding; Review of Brian Greenaway / Notes from Delvan McIntosh (1994), another spiral-bound pamphlet with a cover combining hand-drawn letters for the title and a collage of fragments of prisoners’ handwritten letters; or On the Abuse of Drugs, a slim pamphlet on the use of drugs for social control, with just four sides of text, a hand-painted cover, and a limited run of twenty-five copies. These limited-run, handmade, small productions were characteristic of this stage of Bill’s career—and of a life frequently lived below the poverty line.
Like Durham (1999), based on a visit to Durham jail, these works also register Bill’s continuing concern for prison conditions. They evidence what Mottram termed Bill’s “acute sense” of “the precise points at which social pressure is exerted against the individual.” There are, however, other sides to Bill’s work. In On Plotinus (1993), for example, he engages with the Neoplatonic philosopher’s writings on the relations of body and soul, soul and beauty, the individual soul and the All-Soul. This attention to the nature of the “Good Life” and human relations with animals, plants, and trees is continued in Rousseau and the Wicked (1996), where economic inequalities are placed within a longer temporal perspective from the prehistoric to the posthuman. Nomad Sense (1998) combines laconic reflections on the movements of people, the exploitation of resources, and genocide with the ordinary events of daily life (such as the opening of a fridge). These volumes display Bill’s intellectual toughness, but also an innocent wonder; similarly, they engage with the internal historicity of language and its material and sonic aspects, while also showing a sense of its magic potential.
When I first met Bill in the early 1970s at an event at the Poetry Society, the new team had introduced a series of informal lectures in the Society bar. Lee Harwood had lectured about surrealist poetry (and we begged for his notes to publish in Alembic 3); Bill spoke with passion and erudition about the Old English lyric. After three years of Old English at King’s College, London, I had taken a course on “The Heroic Poetry of the Germanic Peoples” as part of my MA in Toronto. Bill’s fascination with Old English chimed with my own. His translation of “Wulf and Eadwacer”—and his use of the page space for the different voices of that fragmented poem—seemed to me an elegant solution to its well-documented interpretative problems. His edition of The Battle of Maldon (1991) and his translation of Beowulf with John Porter were opportunities for me to revisit old favorites, while his The Nine Herb Charms (1981) was a stunningly beautiful piece of bookmaking. Bill was to go on to complete an MA and an impressively scholarly PhD at King’s College London on the Anglo-Saxon translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae. He also had an interest in the Anglo-Saxon riddles—and composed his own Anglo-Saxon riddles for contemporary objects (such as escalators). I remember a reading he gave at the White Swan in Covent Garden for SubVoicive, where he presented some of these to a puzzled audience— first in Anglo-Saxon and then in translation—and Bill’s evident frustration at the slowness of his audience to solve them even when they had been translated.
Over the course of his career, Bill also translated from a range of other languages—Welsh, Romany, Assyrian. It was his practice to allow the target language to be troubled and disrupted by the practices of the language he was translating. In addition, he drew on what he learned from this translation practice in his handling of lexis and syntax in his own poetry. When he moved to the Northeast, he developed an interest in local dialects and worked closely with Bill Lancaster at the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University, producing a number of books on Northeast dialect and a dictionary of Pitmantic, the specialized language developed by Northumberland miners. As a result, in his last years he was a guest of honor at the annual Miners’ Gala.
In the late 1970s, he was invited to join Konkrete Canticle, the sound poetry group that had been set up by Cobbing and Paula Claire, which stimulated his interest in textual scores for multiple voices. Paula has written about their performances over the next two years in her essay in The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths. She has also written about her response on first meeting Bill: the anxieties prompted by his appearance (the denims, the earring, the heavy boots, and, above all, the tattoos) and the surprise when he then proceeded to “read quietly a beautiful poem.” Mottram told me of a similar response when he had invited Bill to be a guest poet at an Arvon Foundation event. However, as one of his publishers, Paul Holman, recently observed, Bill was “a gentle and unassuming man.” He was also intensely loyal. Mottram had published his first poems; Cobbing’s Writers Forum had nurtured his talent during the 1970s. When the houseboat on which he was living was destroyed in a fire—taking with it many of his books and papers—Mottram supported his legal claim for compensation. After Mottram’s death in 1995, Bill spent two years archiving his books, papers, and photographs. I remember visiting him in this period in part of what had originally been Westfield College, London. Bill was in a huge hall with tables laid out with boxes. I was interested in Mottram’s diary about his first trip to the United States, when he had travelled across to the City Lights Bookstore and met up with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Bill also showed me the photograph albums, and we discussed the impossible task of identifying who many of the people were in the early photographs. We sat at the back of this hall, with the accumulated things of a man’s life spread out in front of us, and Bill made us a cup of tea.
May 2019. This essay is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.