On Reading Tony Harrison...

Tony Harrison is a Leeds poet and translator-cum-playwright who's now one of the older generation of scribes.

He hit the tabloid headlines in the late 1980s when his poem V, which begins when he visits the graveyard where his parents are buried and finds it has been vandalised by a gang of racist skinheads, was broadcast on C4 – and it brought a storm of protests because it featured many of the four-letter words and terms of racial abuse that were daubed on the tombstones. The fact it’s a truly moving and raw and vibrant piece of work seemed to be neither here or there to those who complained.

At college I remember reading V and thinking it was a fantastically relevant piece of work and subsequently getting quite annoyed with poets whose work was more dated and less contemporary. I also liked his other work because much of it deals with ideas of cultural displacement and it addresses his own guilt about leaving his Yorkshire home to find a new life and success far away both in terms of geography and in terms of culture. It made sense then on a personal level and it and it still does now.

I've been rereading Harrison’s poetry recently because I've got a new play brewing and I wanted to remind myself of that initial excitement on reading V and some 20 years after first coming across it still doesn't disappoint. It’s one of those visceral works that gets the gut before it gets the brain and just carries you along.

It’s good research, a bit like finding an old friend again and realising there are still connections there despite the passage of time.

The new play is called Stock, as in London stock bricks or stock as in breeding stock. It’s about heritage and culture and I’ll have a fuller rundown of it later this week but I got the idea after seeing our local cemetery wall collapsed earlier this year.

Ideas come from the oddest places…