Brian Patten is arguably one of the UK's finest love poets; he is also now one of the top children's writers in the UK. Furthermore, with the publication in 1996 of his book 'Armada' he also became, for many, a working class hero, with his relevant, touching portrait of the struggle, turmoil and humour of working class life.

Liverpool’s Poetic Hero

By Darren Guy

Brian grew up in Liverpool, but I wonder how many scousers have heard of him? If they have, it's often only in relation to the other 60s Mersey Beat poets’ Roger McGough and Adrian Henri.
Brian's books have been translated into many different languages and he has read poetry alongside such international giants as Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg. It's difficult to find his poems in any of the Twentieth century modern poetry anthologies, despite him reaching a far wider audience than many of our celebrated poets. Maybe that is Brian's point; he does not aim to appeal to 'the poetry elite', instead he touches the lives of many people who would not ordinarily read poetry. I managed to catch him before a performance at Ormskirk's new Rose Theatre.

Brian can you tell me why you started writing? Was there anything in particular that inspired you?
Brian: I started writing because I was quite isolated. My family didn't talk to each other, it was one of those nightmare families. My father had left.
I grew up in a quite violent and strange house and I just felt very isolated, so I started writing to try and articulate my own feelings really you know. I wasn't thinking about whether it was poetry or not, I was just trying to articulate what was going on inside me.
I had one teacher at school, a guy called Mr Sutcliffe, who was really ace and he was inspirational to me. That was at a school called Sefton Park Secondary Modern; I think there is a little Norwegian supermarket there now.

What other things influenced you around that time and later on?
I think we all have influences when we start off, don't we? For me it was just different poems, groups of poems that were really influential. Originally I'd gone for a job at a local butchers, and they didn't have any jobs so I had a brother-in-law who was running a Liverpool newspaper 'The Bootle times', so they sent me along there. I could have been an up-and-coming pork butcher, couldn't I? Roger McGough has got a poem about a butcher ‘I could have been a butcher like my dad’. So my influences were really a hotchpotch of people; later on it was people like Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, all these people - not one person.

Did you try to copy their style?
Well yeah, very much, I think everybody does that when they start out - you need to - it's like building your own house; you need the scaffolding around it, and the scaffolding is other people. It’s only later on when you've got your own style that you don't need the scaffolding, it falls away until you can build poems by yourself in your own voice, confidently, yeah?

Do you still see yourself as very much part of the Liverpool poets, the Mersey sound? Even though that was a sixties thing?
I mean it’s stuck with us and there was a time when all of us, Roger and Adrian Henri and myself, were pissed off with it - but... really… it's been a useful handle in a way, but it’s also been a kind of handle that a lot of academic critics have used to dismiss us with, if you see what I mean, you know, they often said at first, 'Those poets are not real poets, they're just flashes in the pan,' you know, but it’s been a bloody long flash, so I don't mind that.

Do you think they were dismissive for those reasons?
There was a lot of that at the time; also at the time most poetry was coming out of universities and universities were more orientated towards the middle classes than they are now. It’s much wider now, but back in the late 50s, and early 60s, it was a very tight academic kind of world of poetry. But my favourite thing about poetry is what Adrian Mitchell said, 'Most people ignore most poetry, because most poetry ignores most people.' You know. I think that's brilliant.

I think that's why you appeal to people who may not normally be attracted to poetry, especially the 'Love Poems'. There was one poem in particular in the 'Mersey Sound Book', 'Song for Last Year’s Wife' I read when I was a teenager and it stuck with me.
The one about Alice and the love affair?

Perhaps it is winter,
It's isolation from other seasons, that
Sends me your ghost to witness
When I wake. Somebody came here today, asked
How you were keeping, what you were doing.
I imagine you, waking in another city,
Enclosed by the same hour. So
Ordinary a thing as loss comes now
And touches me.¹

It was much later on when I discovered the 'Love Poems' and I thought they were fantastic - a whole host of poems that related to my life too - 'No Taxis Available' was just one of many in that volume.

How useless it is knowing that where you want to go
Is nowhere concrete.
The trains will not take you there,
The red buses glide past without stopping
No taxis available²

That's funny, that whole area; I'm still writing a lot like that but not publishing as much. I suppose that was a very much different time, but that was a very personal thing. But even love poems are public, they are the most private thing. But yet they are the most public, because they are the most commonly shared experience, aren't they?

Most of your love poems seem to be about relationships that begin with so much beauty and intensity that start turning cold and come to an end.
Yeah well nearly all of love poetry is like that, I don't know why, but I think male and female love poetry always ends in loss. It's not just me and its not just male, it's a whole gang of us.

But your poetry seems very, very, real - I don't find that in other poems.
Well they are all from personal experience, very much - but it’s like the Rastafarian 'I and I is we' - the I in love poetry is not unique, the I is us and the most common is the most personal. 'You are she through who I step to touch all mankind,' you know - I can't explain it, you know if I could I probably couldn't write it.

The last serious book you've published was 'Armada'. I know you've written children's stories…
Well some of my children's poems are serious, 'Juggling with Gerbils' has some serious bits disguised as children's poems, and there's a book called 'The Story Giant', which is a collection of 50 fables from different parts of the world; which I have gathered when I have travelled to places but I've woven them into one story. And I've dedicated this to Adrian Henri - because I was finishing it when Adrian was dying - so there's a lot of stories about death in it. It's about a group of children who are trying to help a giant to find a missing story, and unless he finds that one story he is going to die. They live in this house on Dartmoor which is decaying. Woven through this are stories from different cultures.

Sounds amazing.
There was this woman whose name was Frieda, a German Jew, who lived in our street just after the second world war. She had a living room, which was crammed with books, there was nothing like it in the neighbourhood, this cave of books. I think when I was writing this book I was going back to this strange ladie’s cave in a house, in a tiny little street, in the shadow of the gasworks with this weird German lady. And I wrote 'The Story Giant' with all this in mind.

In ‘Armada’, unlike the ‘Love Poems’, you seem to move towards a more cynical view of life, a critical view. I'm thinking of 'The Betrayed', 'Neighbourhood Watch' and 'Cinders'.

Poor, poor sweetheart,
This rough white cloth, fresh from the hospital laundry,
Is the only theatre-gown you've ever worn.

No make-up. Hair matted with sweat.
The drip beside your bed discontinued.
Life was never a fairy-tale

Cinders soon.³

'Cinders Soon' was about my mother. She was a charlady, so she was a kind of Cinderella. But there is a poem in ‘Armada’ called 'Ward Sixteen'. And I met a lady last week, a nurse who used to work on that ward, and she said several people have mentioned a presence on that ward. She said this after I'd written the poem. It’s about a visitation of an angel to the ward. As the mother is dying this figure comes in, with skin, thick and crusted like a moth’s wing and full of dust and light, and searches among the beds until it finds the dying; weird stuff, eh?

When ‘Armada’ came out, a friend of mine phoned me up - I'd not seen the book - and he started reading me some of the poems. One line that stuck with me was, 'old at twenty-three, alone, thin overcoat flapping'.
Well she was even younger than that - I remember exactly where we were, that was on Sefton Park rowing lake, but that image is a very true image from a very vivid memory.

Is there any essence to your poetry, any particular message running through your poems?
I don't know, I can't answer that type of question. You can answer that kind of question better than I can. Really, genuinely, I've got no agenda.

Can you give any advice to local writers struggling to make it through?
I wouldn't know what to say; I could say how I could try and help people clarify their work in terms of creativity, but I couldn't really answer that question.

I know you live outside of Liverpool now, but what do you think of Liverpool getting City of Culture?
Well there’s going to be an awful lot of money floating around. I hope they can keep hold of it.
They did this poetry competition with Radio Merseyside about 'Poems on the Sea' or something. They only got 50/60 entries, and you know who they got to organise it? Not a local magazine, but a PR company in Manchester. I was really pissed off. It could have been organised by your magazine, or someone else's magazine, at least someone based in Liverpool.

Have you got any more performances coming up?
A few, but I'm really just trying to write. I'm working on this semi-autobiographical thing.

Brian, cheers for your time.
I'm around after the show if you want to chat more.

‘The Story Giant’, Brian's latest book, is published by Harper Collins.
Brian is performing with Roger McGough in Liverpool on Friday 15 April, 8.00pm at the Metropolitan Crypt.

¹ Love Poems (1992) Paladin
² Ibid
³ Armada (1996) HarperCollins
Pictures: book covers of Love Poems & Armada