The renowned northern poet Tony Harrison, who courted controversy with contemporary war poetry and with another poem closer to home, has died at his home in Newcastle upon Tyne at the age of 88. A highly regarded poet-playwright, he preferred to refer to himself principally as a poet, saying: “Poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the opera house and concert hall, or even for TV.”

Harrison once said of his work: “My upbringing among so-called ‘inarticulate’ people has given me a passion for language that communicates directly and immediately.” The poet laureate and fellow Yorkshireman, Simon Armitage, writing in the New Statesman, has praised the way  [Harrison] dealt “with his upbringing and background in his poems, and more specifically, his accent … Who’d have thought that some of t’most moving poems in t’language would have been composed in a form of English normally reserved for sheep-shaggers and colliers?”

Tony Harrison was born on 30 April 1937 into a working-class family in Beeston, Leeds. He was a scholarship pupil at Leeds Grammar School and later read Classics at the University of Leeds.

Many of his works were performed at the National Theatre. He is noted for his versions of dramatic works such as the tragedies Oresteia and Lysistrata from ancient Greek, Molière's The Misanthrope from French, and The Mysteries from Middle English. He was also noted for his outspoken views, particularly those on the Iraq war.

In 1995, the Guardian sent him to Bosnia to cover the war. A poem written while travelling in an armoured vehicle outside Sarajevo made the paper’s front page. “Why shouldn’t poetry address what happened yesterday, and be published in the newspaper?” he told the Guardian 20 years later in a 2007 interview.

He was committed to metrical verse, saying once that “it’s associated with the heart beat, with the sexual instinct, with all those physical rhythms which go on despite the moments when you feel suicidal … That rhythmical thing is like a life-support system. It means I feel I can go closer to the fire, deeper into the darkness . . . I know I have this rhythm to carry me to the other side”.

Harrison’s Gulf war poem, ‘A Cold Coming’, was triggered by a photograph by Kenneth Jarecke in The Observer newspaper that graphically showed the charred head of an Iraqi soldier leaning through the windscreen of his burned-out truck which had been hit by Allied forces as Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait City.

But perhaps his most famous poem, and his first foray into television, was v. (1985), set at his parents’ grave in Leeds cemetery. The film, when broadcast by the BBC, caused a media firestorm, which Write Out Loud’s co-founder Dave Morgan looked back on in a long article for this website in 2013. As a tribute to Tony Harrison, we reproduce extracts of Dave Morgan’s article here:

“Harrison, this educated, literate academic, makes a periodic visit to his home city Leeds to find his parents' gravestone, along with many others, desecrated by drunken Leeds United supporters. His anger and revulsion at the graffiti leads to an imaginary dialogue between a skinhead and the poet in which no linguistic holds are barred.

“The poem was written in 1985, during the national miners' strike, a period which saw the country violently polarised, as the embers of the north's industrial revolution flickered to an end …. Alongside this theme the poet grapples with his own chosen detachment from the situation, looking backwards for moral reference to a world he walked away from and abandoned, liberated through education and talking proper. In realising his parents' aspirations he has only created a gulf between himself as an artist and the people he was made from.

“None of these themes was new to Harrison. Similarities abound in his earlier work and he was never averse to blunt Anglo-Saxon to drive home a point, or just to describe those visceral acts of everyday life, those physical pre-occupations and drives, that power our troubled lives (or did do when I was younger). The Loiners ( London Magazine editions 1970), one of his first collections, is awash with Rabelasian excess in West Africa, Central Europe or wherever his formidable language skills had taken him. So it was not really a departure for him, a respectable man of the theatre and opera by 1980, to lapse into his vernacular and use the language of the street, not to desecrate the dead but to antagonise the living.

“V. had an agonised quality to it the first time round. It was raw and current and screamed for attention, as if a call for help. The issue was too big for one man to deal with. The destruction of the cycle of certainty that had held communities fast was horrible to behold, and its ramifications are still being felt. Strange that that certainty had probably only existed for three generations, riding on the back of Britain's role as workshop of the world.

“The rhyming quatrains of Harrison's elegy on an urban graveyard may not make next century's Golden Treasury but its exploration of layered meaning in language, such as the contradictions and nuances in the abbreviation v. (versus, opposition, victory), and united (in this and the afterlife), should maintain its importance not only as a social record but as testimony to the importance of literacy and communication in a civilised world.!”

In 2013 Dave Morgan’s long, thoughtful article concluded: “It’s too much to expect it will ever make the A-level syllabus …” In fact, it is now studied by pupils along with other of Harrison’s works.

 

Background: The commodification of outrage