Tony Harrison: v

- conflicting voices and the

political imperative -
Contemporary Literature in English
Dr. Natlia Pikli
ELTE
 Tony Harrison (b. 1937)
page, stage and screen:
its all one poetry
Motto of V:
'My father still reads the dictionary every
day. He says your life depends on
your power to master words.
Arthur Scargill
Sunday Times, 10 January 1982
Examining and dramatising the
relationships between

language/power/politics: BARD
(Rutter, Carol (1995). Permanently Bard.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe
Books.)
2010 European Prize for Literature
2015 The DavidCohen Prize for Literature
(to a writer, novelist, short-story writer,
poet, essayist or dramatist in
recognition of an entire body of work,
written in the English language.)
 Major works
The Loiners (1970)
From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1981)
Continuous (50 Sonnets from the School of Eloquence and Other Poems) (1981)
A Kumquat for John Keats (1981)
V (1985)
Dramatic Verse,1973-85 (1985)
Square Rounds (1992)
The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992)
Black Daisies for the Bride (1993)
The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (1995)
Laureate's Block and Other Occasional Poems (2000)
Under the Clock (2005)
Selected Poems (2006)
Collected Poems (2007)
Collected Film Poetry (2007)
Drama translations/adaptations: Aeschyluss The Oresteia, The Mysteries,
Molieres Misanthrope, Euripidess Hecuba, Phaedra Britannica (from Racines)
 Author Statement
http://literature.britishcouncil.org/tony-harrison
Tony Harrison: my upbringing among so-called
'inarticulate' people has given me a passion for
language that communicates directly and
immediately. I prefer the idea of men speaking to
men to a man speaking to God, or even worse
to Oxford's anointed. And books are only a part
of what I see as poetry. It seems to me no
accident that some of the best poetry in the
world is in some of its drama from the Greek
onwards. In it I find a reaffirmation of the power
of the word, eroded by other media and by some
of the speechless events of our worst century.
 a man of contradictions
- Leeds, run-down industrial city, son of a
baker v scholarship (Leeds Grammar
School, Leeds University) the
classics/Oxbridge education
- inherited/childhood lge (non-Standard) v
RP
- scholar, poeta doctus v reaching mass
audiences (National Theatre, TV
film/poems)
 Interview (Guardian, 31 March
2007)
"There are risks of sentimentality," he says. "But my
metre starts ticking in the presence of dumbness and
inarticulacy. Coming from a very inarticulate family
made me try to speak for those who can't express
themselves, and created a need for articulation at its
most ceremonial - poetry."
GIVING VOICE TO the underpriviliged, Hiroshima
victims, Alzheimer victims,
reflecting on Salman Rushdies fatwa, the Iraq war,
the Bosnian conflict, etc.
against an "English reluctance to marry politics and
poetry. Why shouldn't poetry address what happened
yesterday, and be published in the newspaper?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/31/poetry.
tonyharrison
 Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery!

Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
 Them & [uz]
for Professors Richard Hoggart & Leon Cortez
[]
(excerpts)
4 words only of mi art aches and Mines broken,
You barbarian, T.W.! He was nicely spoken.
Cant have our glorious heritage done to death!
[]
Poetry is the speech of kings. Youre one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to : prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
s been dubbed by [s] into RP,
Recieved Pronunciation, please believe [s]
Your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.
We say [s] not [uz], T.W! That shut my trap.
[]
So right, yer buggers, then! Well occupy
Your lousy leasehold Poetry.
[]
RIP RP, RIP T. W.
Im Tony Harrison no longer you!
[]
My first mention in the Times
Automatically made Tony Anthony!
 v (1985) long poem
written during the miners strike 1984-85
Thatcher and transnational corporations v
miners/trade unions
1970, Enoch Powells speech: the enemy within,
1980s: Thatcherite we v the culturally different
who are dangerous to liberty
collapse of such cities as Leeds (coal,
manufacture, cotton, etc.)
Arthur Scargill: National Union of Mineworkers
(NUM)
political statement or poetry? going against the
grain
 v
Going against the grain:
- trochees instead of iambs, alliteration (Middle
Ages/Northerner), colloquial speech
- bard (This pens all I have of magic wand.)

Next millennium you'll have to search quite hard

to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.
 v narrative and context
drama: poet/persona visiting his parents grave in
historical Leeds cemetery (Beeston Hill, overloking the
town/the university/the football field) tombstones
vandalised by skinheads/football fans VANTAGE POINT
personal reflection on what he finds dialogue (skin v
poet, Doppelgnger? his other alternative self if no
educational success?) home summary? : his own
epitaph
Modelled on and mocking the poetic tradition (cf. T.S.
Eliot!) adapting the genre of funeral/pastoral elegy
Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard (1742-1750).
 Thomas Gray: Elegy written
description, a peaceful dirge, melancholy,
monologue, and an epitaph for the poet
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap, Tony Harrisons v
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
countrysideurban
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. peaceful vandalised
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
cemetery
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, monologue dialogue
And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.
(?)
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
elegiac mood
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
aggression
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, losses, remembrance
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God. passive active
 Mocking poetic tradition/role and questioning the
significance and role of a poet:
Byron/Wordsworth/Harrison/skin
problems of IDENTIFICATION
With Byron three graves on Ill not go short
Of company, and Wordsworths opposite.
[]
Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
Luggage cowhide in the age of steam

And there's HARRISON on some Leeds building sites

I've taken in fun as blazoning my name,
which I've also seen on books, in Broadway lights,
so why can't skins with spraycans do the same?
 expletives/four-letter words
language = layers of society (mayor,
nameless ones, skins) cf. rhymes!
The language of this graveyard ranges from
a bit of Latin for a former Mayor
or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,
the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,

how people 'fell asleep in the Good Lord',

brief chisellable bits from the good book
and rhymes whatever length they could afford,
to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!
 v as versus class/education/politics &
general concerns
Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,
the sprayer master of his flourished tool,
get short-armed on the left like that red tick
they never marked his work with much at school.
[]
These Vs are all the versuses of life
From LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

Class v. class as bitter as before,

the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,

East/West, male/female, and the ground
these fixtures are fought on's Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.
 Dialogue 1.
What is it that these crude words are revealing?
What is it that this aggro act implies?
Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling
or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies?

So what's a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can't you speak

the language that yer mam spoke. Think of 'er!
Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?
Go and fuck yourself with cri-de-coeur!

'She didn't talk like you do for a start!'

I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been.
She didn't understand yer fucking 'art'!
She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!
 Dialogue 2. role/dialect reversal
can you represent the ones you come from/ separated
from by education and language? (Who needs / yer
fucking poufy words? Ah write mi own)
'Listen, cunt!' I said, 'before you start your jeering
the reason why I want this in a book
's to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!'
A book, yer stupid cunt, 's not worth a fuck!

'The only reason why I write this poem at all

on yobs like you who do the dirt on death
's to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.'
Don't fucking bother, cunt! Don't waste your breath!

'You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn't know

and it doesn't fucking matter if you do,
the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud
but the autre that je est is fucking you.

Ah've told yer, no more Greek...That's yer last warning!

Ah'll boot yer fucking balls to Kingdom Come.
They'll find yer cold on t'grave tomorrer morning.
So don't speak Greek. Don't treat me like I'm dumb.

(the poets act of aggro silencing a horrible opera singer with water from a fire hose)
 Identification?

'OK!' (thinking I had him trapped) 'OK!'

'If you're so proud of it, then sign your name
when next you're full of HARP and armed with spray,
next time you take this short cut from the game.'

He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried

and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign
the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried.
He aerosolled his name. And it was mine.
 racism/problems of multiculturalism/PC or
problem? todays skin v poets father
But why inscribe these graves with CUNT
and SHIT?
Why choose neglected tombstones to disfigure?
This pitman's of last century daubed PAKI GIT,
this grocer Broadbent's aerosolled with NIGGER?
[]
House after house FOR SALE where we'd played cricket
with white roses cut from flour-sacks on our caps,
with stumps chalked on the coal-grate for our wicket,
and every one bought now by 'coloured chaps',

dad's most liberal label as he felt

squeezed by the unfamiliar, and fear
of foreign food and faces, when he smelt
curry in the shop where he'd bought beer.
 UNITED - changing signification - is
poetic application/appropriaton morally
right? (football club/metaphor)
sprayed on his parents tombstone
Though I dont believe in afterlife at all
And know its cheating its hard not to make
A sort of furtive prayer from this skins crawl,
His UNITED mean in Heaven for their sake,

an accident of meaning to redeem

An act intended as mere desecration
And make the thoughtless spraying of his team
Apply to higher things, and to the nation.
 negative conclusion - UNITED

Half versus half, the enemies within

the heart that can't be whole till they unite.
As I stoop to grab the crushed HARP lager tin
the day's already dusk, half dark, half light.

That UNITED that I'd wished onto the nation

or as reunion for dead parents soon recedes.
The word's once more a mindless desecration
by some HARPoholic yob supporting Leeds.
 Motif of here Comes the Bride (3x)
love united?

Home, home to my woman, where the fire's lit

these still chilly mid-May evenings, home to you,
[]
The ones we choose to love become our anchor
[]
My alter ego wouldn't want to know it,
His aerosol vocab would baulk at LOVE,
the skin's UNITED underwrites the poet,
the measures carved below the ones above.
 The Epitaph:
self-definition, self-articulation, memory
Next millenium youll have to search quite hard
To find out where Im buried [.]

Beneath your feet's a poet, then a pit.

Poetry supporter, if you're here to find
How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.

- death/the great leveller/material and spiritual

united
- remembrance
 v
versus
verses
victory sign
four-letter sign
red tick at school
Heteroglossia (Bakhtin) plurality of voices
semantic ambivalence puns and role/uncertainty of
lge
personal memory: fiction or reality? a recreation of
the event (lge never passive) or political/authorial
statement
author/narrator/character (cf. Fowles)
The film, dir. R. Eyre, BBC Channel
4, 1987 great publicity
Teddy Taylor Tory MP
appealed to Channel 4
chiefs to see sense:
a poem full of
obscenities is clearly so
objectionable that it will
lead to the government
being forced to take
action it would prefer not
to have to take.
Charges of obscenity, bullying,
misrepresentation, prejudice
Gerald Howarth said that Harrison was
"Probably another Bolshie poet wishing
to impose his frustrations on the rest of
us".
Harrison retorted that Howarth was
"Probably anotheridiot MP wishing to
impose his intellectual limitations on the
rest of us".
Blake Morrison poet and critic in The
Independent said: Those MPs are right
to believe that the poem is shocking, but
not because of its language. It shocks
because it describes unflinchingly what
is meant by a divided society, because it
takes the abstractions we have learned
to live with unemployment, racial
tension, inequality, deprivation and
gives them a kind of physical existence
on the page.
Harold Pinter:
The criticism against the poem has been
offensive, juvenile and, of course, philistine.
It should certainly be broadcast.
 Tony Harrison in Hungary
Lettre (Vol.52. 2004.
Spring)
Szab T. Anna:
Hlaads
Mesterhzi Mnika: A
fogfjs (short story)
Ferencz Gyz: v
(excerpts)
http://www.epa.hu/0000
0/00012/00036/vers_har
rison.htm