Barry MacSweeney’s Followers (2)

Barry MacSweeney

Born

in Newcastle upon Tyne, The United Kingdom

July 17, 1948

Died

May 09, 2000

Genre

Poetry

Influences

Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Basil Bunting, Tom Pickard, Jon Si ...more

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From The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother:
‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Then Baudelaire, Laforgue. Wrote first poems at school. That was a cissy thing to do of course. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. Met Basil Bunting, poet. Met Tom Pickard and Jon Silkin. Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. My first real lesson. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. Open to the city and the country. You can w From The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother:
‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Then Baudelaire, Laforgue. Wrote first poems at school. That was a cissy thing to do of course. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. Met Basil Bunting, poet. Met Tom Pickard and Jon Silkin. Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. My first real lesson. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. Open to the city and the country. You can walk out of Newcastle for half an hour and be in greenery. The city gave words a harshness, like the steel or coal. Then I wd flit off to little stone cottage on the fells and fish for trout, and pick mushrooms. & swim in the freshwater lakes. Began to translate Laforgue, Cros, Corbiere.
1966-67: newspaper packed me off to Harlow Technical College, Essex, on a full-time journalist diploma course. An opposite life altogether. Synthetic new town, a dormitory to London. Its population, commuters with a vengeance. And the land was flat, that was a shock. An utter antithesis to Newcastle. Everything was so clean and clear-cut, and the people, they didn't belong, and had no roots in the town. Oasis. It was impossible to get involved. My eye, my colour/sluice became arbitrary for the first time. It was merely a funnel, and events and actions got a natural response from me. In Newcastle I was always too involved, always leaving pieces of myself against the walls. I wrote The Boy From The Green Cabaret poems in Harlow, and some political things for the first time. It was here I really woke up. Poems were fast and often, but it was bitter and solitary too. Spent days looking for some natural spot in the whole synthesis: found it, a small duck pond with sluice and lily-pads and footbridge. Told later it was one of the town planner's landscaping tricks.
Left here July 1967, sans honneur, carrying a bad character report in my hand & some poems, returned home to get the sack. But they didn’t like the cut of my face either. Since then jobs as chief reporter in Cumberland, dole, reporter, social security, dole, gardener, dole. Now helps run Morden Tower poetry readings, and publishing posters and books. & of course writing poems. Wants to see poets get away from revisionism. Nobody returns in glory to Lucknow. and this is June, 1968, Newcastle.’ ...more

Combine Editions
Barry MacSweeney’s books

Average rating: 4.27 · 78 ratings · 3 reviews · 34 distinct works

	Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 4.63 avg rating — 24 ratings — published 2003 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Book of Demons 4.71 avg rating — 14 ratings — published 1997 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Pearl in the Silver Morning 4.57 avg rating — 7 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother 3.57 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 1968 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ranter 3.50 avg rating — 4 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Brother wolf really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1972 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Desire Lines: Unselected Poems 1966-2000 by Barry MacSweeney, Luke Roberts (Editor) 4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Our mutual scarlet boulevard really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blackbird: Elegy for William Gordon Calvert : being book two of Black torch really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Hellhound Memos really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Barry MacSweeney…

Quotes by Barry MacSweeney (?)

“God help us
you full of talk of a city called Edinburgh
and me in silence so very deep we were so very much in love.

And the burns and sikes and streams
though shallow
were deep music to us.
You trout-tickler,
you flower-picker,
climber in willow trees, me laughing below

as best I could laugh, though you never thought it ugly.
Indeed the word you used was the word beautiful,
pinning cowslips behind my ears,

you patting and running fingers through our
beckwashed hair.
Lying by the marigold beds
bare toes entwined, then dancing under branches
before the elms ever died. But our mutual hearts never did.

Bar it is 7 and your raining rage
must cease
under my morning moon.
In my dawn shawl looking dawndown upon you
in your foot-striding fellhighhighupuptopheavyrainbeatingrainrain.
We have always walked together so long.
In the long grass we walked and walked forever so long so very language long
and I could say so once you had the slate in my lap.

My tongue blank - FOREVER, word we wrote on a slate, remember
when you taught me? - only my hands and eyes moving now - two
daughters we could have had -

but I am looking kindly and lovingly on you
'Please do it'
- cool your raging fire lovelorn heart - for me.

And love me - forever.”
― Barry MacSweeney, Pearl in the Silver Morning

tags: love, love-poem, newcastle-poet, pearl, pearl-in-the-silver-morning, poetry

1 likes

“together we had water and silence and fire and togetherness
the lights of all you didn't say knots my life and all dreams.”
― Barry MacSweeney, Pearl in the Silver Morning

tags: daft-patter, newcastle-poet, pearl, poetry

0 likes

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