The Mersey Sound
Encyclopedia
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
of poems by Liverpool poets
Liverpool poets
The Liverpool Poets are a number of influential 1960s poets from Liverpool, England, influenced by 1950s Beat poetry. They were involved in the 1960s Liverpool scene that gave rise to The Beatles, during a time when the city was termed by US beat poet Allen Ginsberg "the centre of the consciousness...
Roger McGough
Roger McGough
Roger Joseph McGough CBE is a well-known English performance poet. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please and records voice-overs for commercials, as well as performing his own poetry regularly...
, Brian Patten
Brian Patten
-Background:Born near Liverpool's docks, he attended Sefton Park School in the Smithdown Road area of Liverpool, where he was noted for his essays and greatly encouraged in his work by Harry Sutcliffe his form teacher. He left school at fifteen and began work for The Bootle Times writing a column...
and Adrian Henri
Adrian Henri
Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group The Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's...
first published in 1967, when it launched the poets into "considerable acclaim and critical fame". It went on to sell over 500,000 copies, becoming one of the bestselling poetry anthologies of all time. The poems are characterised by "accessibility, relevance and lack of pretension", as well as humour, liveliness and at times melancholy. The book was, and continues to be, widely influential with its direct and often witty language, urban references such as plastic daffodils and bus conductors, and frank, but sensitive (and sometimes romantic) depictions of intimacy.
History
The Mersey Sound is number 10 in a series of slim paperbacks originally published in the 1960s by Penguin in a series called Penguin Modern PoetsPenguin Modern Poets
Penguin Modern Poets was a series of 27 poetry books published by Penguin Books in the 1960s and 1970s, each containing work by three contemporary poets . The series was begun in 1962 and published an average of two volumes per year throughout the 1960s...
. Each book assembled three compatible poets. Number 6, for example, contained George Macbeth
George MacBeth
George Mann MacBeth was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire.When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield....
, Edward Lucie-Smith
Edward Lucie-Smith
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith is a British writer, poet, art critic, curator, broadcaster and author of exhibition catalogues.-Biography:Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946...
and Jack Clemo
Jack Clemo
Reginald John Clemo was a British poet and writer who was strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his strong Christian belief. His work was considered to be visionary and inspired by the rugged Cornish landscape...
. The other books in the series were not given a specific name.
The Mersey Sound contains 128 pages, the half title page being number 1. Henri is first with 44 pages (30 poems), then McGough with 32 pages (24 poems) and Patten with 31 pages (26 poems).
The revised edition was still called The Mersey Sound but subtitled (on the cover only) "Revised Edition". There was a different cover designer (Trickett and Webb Ltd), with a photo of the three poets taken by Dmitri Kasterine. At the same time another book in the same format, and with complementary graphics, was published, titled New Volume with all new poems by each poet, and the same biographies as in the revised edition. Again the space is weighted in favour of Henri (57 pages) with McGough, 33 pages, and Patten, 35 pages, though they each have two more poems included than Henri, whose section includes longer poem sequences such as from "Autobiography".
Poems
Henri took the title of the poem, "Tonight at Noon", from a Charles MingusCharles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music...
LP
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
. He uses it three times in the poem, the first two to introduce a list of contradictions, such as "Supermarkets will add 3d EXTRA on everything" and "The first daffodils of autumn will appear/when the leaves fall upwards to the trees". Having set up this expectation, the poem ends poignantly with:
and
You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon
McGough's "At Lunchtime A Story of Love" is based on then-current fears of a nuclear holocaust. The poet explains the world is going to end at lunchtime in order to persuade a passenger on the bus to make love with him. She did, but it didn't, and "Thatnight, on the bus coming home,/we were all alittle embarrassed..." (The joining of words to make a single word is a characteristic of McGough's work.) The poet "always/having been a bitofalad" then says, "it was a pity that the world didn't nearly/end every lunchtime and that we could always/pretend...", which they proceed to do. He sees the potential to change the world, when this ready excuse for shedding inhibitions and making love spreads, so that everywhere
people pretended that the world was coming
to an end at lunchtime. It still hasn't.
Although in a way it has.
All the poets are capable of a range of emotions and responses, but Patten is regarded as the most serious in tone of the three. "Party Piece" is the first poem in his section, where the poet suggests to a woman that they "make gentle pornography with one another", which they do. The ultimate unfulfillment of the encounter is captured when the poem ends:
And later he caught a bus and she a train
And all there was between them then
was rain.
There is a certain amount of interplay between the three poets. McGough's poem "Aren't We All" also describes a casual sexual encounter at a party with a rather more wry tone:
There's the moon trying to look romantic
Moon's too old that's her trouble
Aren't we all?
The cross-reference is overt on occasion. McGough has a six-line poem, "Vinegar", where he compares himself to a priest buying fish and chips, thinking it would be nice "to buy supper for two". Henri includes "Poem for Roger McGough", which describes a nun similarly thinking what it would be like to "buy groceries for two" in a supermarket.
Context
The three poets were active in "swinging" Liverpool at a time when it was a centre of world attention, due to the eruption of The BeatlesThe Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and the associated bands, known generically as the "Mersey Sound", after which the book is titled.
Phil Bowen in A Gallery to Play To: The Story of the Mersey Poets considers that the poets were as central to their generation as the poets centred around W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
were to theirs. He distinguishes between them and other contemporary "underground" poets such as Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz is an English poet, artist and translator.-Life and career:Michael Horovitz was the youngest of ten children who were brought to England from Nazi Germany by their parents, both of whom were part of a network of European-rabbinical families...
and Pete Brown
Pete Brown
Peter Ronald Brown is an English performance poet and lyricist.Best known for his collaborations with Jack Bruce, Brown also worked with The Battered Ornaments, formed his own group Pete Brown & Piblokto!, and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan. Brown also writes film scores and formed a film...
, who modelled themselves and their verse forms on the American Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
poets, whereas the Liverpool trio derived their major inspiration from the environment in which they lived. He even suggests that The Mersey Sound might not have been published at all, had it not been for the focus that Liverpool had generated musically.
Contemporary effect
It has been said of the 1960s: "the rebirth of poetry then was largely due to the humour and fresh appeal of this collection." The book had a magical effect on many people who read it, opening their eyes from "dull" poetry to a world of accessible language and the evocative use of everyday symbolism. Leading anthologist, Neil AstleyNeil Astley
Neil Astley is a British publisher, editor and writer.-Life and work:Astley grew up in Fareham, Hampshire, and was educated at Price's School, Fareham , the Alliance Française, Paris , and Newcastle University...
, describes how he had been reading the classic poets at school in the 1960s, and one day his teacher read from The Mersey Sound: "That woke us up." The same experience is described by a freelance writer Sid Smith years later in a 2005 blog, looking back at his first encounter with the book in 1968, when again a teacher read from it:
Legacy
The three poets in The Mersey Sound paved the way for later performance and "people's" poets, such as John Cooper ClarkeJohn Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke is an English performance poet who first became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s when he became known as a "punk poet"...
, Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is an English writer and dub poet. He is a well-known figure in contemporary English literature, and was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008....
, Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson is a UK-based dub poet. He became the second living poet, and the only black poet, to be published in the Penguin Classics series. His poetry involves the recitation of his own verse in Jamaican Patois over dub-reggae, usually written in collaboration with renowned British...
, Attila the Stockbroker
Attila the Stockbroker
Attila the Stockbroker is a punk poet, and a folk punk musician and songwriter. He performs solo and as the leader of the band Barnstormer...
, John Hegley
John Hegley
John Richard Hegley is an English performance poet, comedian, musician and songwriter.-Early life:He was born in the Newington Green area of Islington, London, England, into a Roman Catholic household. He was brought up in Luton and Bristol...
and others who "have pursued the goal of creating poetry for a wide audience".
The idea of titling after a river was later adopted by The Medway Poets
The Medway Poets
The Medway Poets were founded in Medway, North Kent in 1979. They were an English punk based poetry performance group and later formed the core of the first Stuckists Art Group. The members were Miriam Carney, Billy Childish, Rob Earl, Bill Lewis, Sexton Ming and Charles Thomson...
in 1979. They read with Henri, McGough and Patten on occasion.
Paul Weller of The Jam
The Jam
The Jam were an English punk rock/New Wave/mod revival band active during the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were formed in Woking, Surrey. While they shared the "angry young men" outlook and fast tempos of their punk rock contemporaries, The Jam wore smartly tailored suits rather than ripped...
has expressed his admiration for the poets, particularly Henri. The second Jam album This Is the Modern World has a track with the same title as the Henri poem, "Tonight At Noon" and the lyrics are a collage tribute to Henri's poetry.
The book was one which stayed with some of its readers for years afterwards, and could help form bonds, as 1960s reader of it, Sid Smith, describes:
Flashing forward to the 90s and I’ve just met a woman called Debra at a party. We are introduced by a mutual friend and get talking. Somehow poetry comes into the conversation. “One of my favourite collections is The Mersey Sound” she tells me and in that moment I knew my life was going to change forever.
As the early readers of the book got families of their own, they could find the simple language and rhyme of some of the poems suitable for bedtime reading for their children. In addition all three poets went on to also write dedicated and successful books of children's poetry.
In 2002 the three poets were given the Freedom of the City of Liverpool.
See also
- Liverpool poetsLiverpool poetsThe Liverpool Poets are a number of influential 1960s poets from Liverpool, England, influenced by 1950s Beat poetry. They were involved in the 1960s Liverpool scene that gave rise to The Beatles, during a time when the city was termed by US beat poet Allen Ginsberg "the centre of the consciousness...
- Merseybeat
- The Medway PoetsThe Medway PoetsThe Medway Poets were founded in Medway, North Kent in 1979. They were an English punk based poetry performance group and later formed the core of the first Stuckists Art Group. The members were Miriam Carney, Billy Childish, Rob Earl, Bill Lewis, Sexton Ming and Charles Thomson...
- United Kingdom Underground
- British Poetry since 1945