I always reckon that a county can be defined by the people who write about it; in the modern era James Herriot and Gervase Phinn have presented the face of Yorkshire to the world and of course Emily Bronte gave us the shape of much of the way we think about the White Rose County in Wuthering Heights. Poets who catalogue Yorkshire for posterity and for the people on the Huddersfield bus include Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage, and one writer who I reckon has been, until recently, in danger of being forgotten: Pete Morgan
On a breezy night in late spring of this year I was proud to be part, along with the new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and the great Yorkshire singer Martin Carthy, of a celebration of Pete Morgan’s work as he turns seventy. The setting was the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at York University and it felt majestic enough and yet informal enough to present Pete’s unique talent.
Pete was born in Lancashire in 1939 and, after a spell in the army and a time in Edinburgh during the ‘pop poetry’ boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he then moved to York, and then to Robin Hood’s Bay where I think he wrote some of the best poems ever written about the town that hangs onto the cliffs for dear life. He’s since lived in Beverley and villages on the outskirts of York, and he’s now back in York and writing as well as ever about the county.
I first met Pete at a writing course in the West Riding in the mid-1970s. I was a young lad with a wispy beard who wanted to be a full-time poet but I really had no idea about how I could do it. Pete was a glamorous figure to a lad from Barnsley because he made his living giving readings and doing school visits and running workshops and getting asked to write poems. He also didn’t live in London, which made him even more of a hero in my eyes at a time when we were told (as we’re still being told, though perhaps less so) that we’ve got to live in London if we want to be anybody.
Pete left Robin Hood’s Bay in the 1980s but the Yorkshire sea and the Yorkshire shore continued to haunt his writing. After a long period of poetic silence he published August Light in 2005 with Arc Press, a fantastically enterprising Todmorden publisher, and the book proves that you can take the boy out of the Bay but you can’t take the Bay out of the boy.
Here’s the opening of one of the best Yorkshire-based winkle-picking poems ever written, in my humble opinion:
Yesterday through rock and wrack
Someone in God’s likeness stepped
Between the tideline and the sea
And bent to judgement, made his choice
From rockpools where his image quivered.
Or how about this marvellous stanza about fishing from the poem ‘Fish'
The fish we haul from dark to light
Smack and flicker at the sun
Angry with their own decision
Raging at their muscle’s failure
Tapering to helplessness
Pete Morgan is a poet who has written memorable poems about Yorkshire, and my view and vision of Yorkshire has been refined by reading his work over many decades. August Light is still in print, and I’d urge you to get hold of it, and if you ever see any of his other books in a second-hand shop, grab the shopkeeper’s hand off! As Carol Ann Duffy said that evening in York, “Pete’s the real thing…”
Ian McMillan |
…but first, it’s time to crack open the wine, switch off the telly, take the phone off the hook and crash out on the sofa, it’s a new Pete Morgan book, an event to relish. Here we have it, seventy-five pages of August Light, this is not just ray of sunshine poetry, this is, in my book, the whole fulgent sun. August Light opens with a sequence of poems with titles such as Fish, Seal, Bats and Badgers. Then there’s NP94B1721, a poem about finding a dead pigeon. Here Peter is casting his eye over wildlife, his view of nature is rooted in an urban perspective, by this I mean, I get the impression that the author is very interested in wildlife, but if he wants to see it, he has to pull his wellies on and get out for a drive. There is something honest about these poems, as I’m writing I’m trying to pin this down, why honest? It’s as if we live in a world where we are sold things, where writer’s make things up to an extent that the thriller has to be the most thrilling, the romance the most romantic, with Pete, he examines and he says this is how it is. He doesn’t make it cosy, if it’s not cosy. It’s not just observation, it is imaginative too, but we are asked d to imagine the spiritual or Mr M gives us his experience and passes on to us, the job of making out what we will of the poems. That, in my book, is exactly what a good poet should do.
Section two of August Light, residency at a psychiatric hospital, poems marked by Mr M’s characteristic strength of rhythm and unflinching eye. For me, these poems seem a little unfulfilled. We do get good descriptions and a particularly poignant poem, Taking Leave, about Lizzie leaving her home to go into residential care. However, any work carried out with psychiatric patients carries with it an obligation of confidentiality, and rightly so. But what stories? The mind boggles to think of all that raw material in the hands of such a capable poet.
Part three is a bit of a miscellany, of particular interest is the poem, The Passionate Adventure, which recalls a very similar, perhaps the same incident, too that captured in Simon Armitage’s, The Strid (from Universal Home Doctor), the incident being the inexplicable drowning of a newly married couple. Simon values the anecdotal, the tight on the page, he maintains this consideration for the reader to the point that his tone comes across as slightly jocular, whereas Mr M’s tone is more formal, more radio four, more Shakespeare, less hip. One of the reasons for this is, Mr A aims for the earwigged, he tries to surprise you by keeping the tone so close to the chinwagged that you become surprised to hear you’ve just read a poem, he camouflages the rhymes by using slant or half rhyme in conjunction with enjambments. Hugely influential this technique has proved to be. Mr M’s poetry is an uncompromising positive celebration of the ancient tradition of the lyric, of poetry as different to prose. The predominantly fully end-stopped rhymes don’t hide. They are proud of themselves. As unfashionable as it is, I like this standing up for poetry as poetry. I like rhyme if it drives the poem, if it doesn’t get in the way of the meaning, if it isn’t bent in. I have no bones o pick with August Light on this score, but I know it won’t appeal to everyone. Peter Knaggs |
CAROL ANN DUFFY
The poet on her fellow poet Pete Morgan
Who is he?
Pete Morgan, a professional poet, was born in 1939 in Leigh, Lancashire, and now lives in Beverley, East Yorkshire, with his wife, Kate. They have two children. At 16, he was living alone in London – sticking his anonymous poems to the trees on Hampstead Heath. Two years later, he was serving as an infantry platoon commander in West Germany. In 1964, he became a pacifist and resigned his commission. He moved to Edinburgh and began to publish his poems and give public readings.
What does he do?
His first full-length collection, The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed, appeared from Secker & Warburg in 1973. It was followed by The Spring Collection (1979) and One Greek Alphabet (1980). A Winter Visitor (1983) celebrated the North Yorkshire fishing village of Robin Hoods Bay. He also had a BBC TV series called A Voyage Between Two Seas. In 1984, he was diagnosed as having a tumour on the brain. Although it was benign and he made a full recovery, he was largely forgotten on the publishing front. He is a member of the Arvon Foundation Council, a charity that runs residential creative writing centres.
Why do I admire him?
Poetry, like a battleground, is strewn with forgotten heroes – dead poets no longer read by the living, pulped poets, out-of-print poets, poets captured alive by advertising – and those of us lucky enough to make it across to the other side should remember them. When I was a young, unpublished poet, Pete Morgan was one of most inspirational performers of poetry around, an influence on poets like Kit Wright and Liz Lochhead, who in turn influenced those younger than themselves. There are famous poets of my generation and younger who have no idea of the debt they owe to Pete Morgan. His poems are dramatic, formally superb, funny, toughly tender, lyrical and never less than entertaining. Ted Hughes was a fan of his. As far as I know he is currently out of print and it is a bloody scandal.
INTERVIEW BY CHARLOTTE CRIPPS
Carol Ann Duffy |
