Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction: Sounding Liverpool
- 1 George Garrett, Merseyside Labour and the Influence of the United States, Joseph Pridmore
- 2 ‘No Struggle but the Home’: James Hanley's The Furys, Patrick Williams
- 3 Paradise Street Blues: Malcolm Lowry's Liverpool, Chris Ackerley
- 4 ‘Unhomely Moments’: The Fictions of Beryl Bainbridge,
- 5 A Man from Elsewhere: The Liminal Presence of Liverpool in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell,
- 6 The Figure in the Carpet: An Interview with Terence Davies,
- 7 ‘Every Time a Thing Is Possessed, It Vanishes’: The Poetry of Brian Patten,
- 8 Finding a Rhyme for Alphabet Soup: An Interview with Roger McGough,
- 9 Rewriting the Narrative: Liverpool Women Writers,
- 10 Jumping Off: An Interview with Linda Grant,
- 11 Ramsey Campbell's Haunted Liverpool,
- 12 ‘We Are a City That Just Likes to Talk’: An Interview with Alan Bleasdale,
- 13 ‘Culture Is Ordinary’: The Legacy of the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 Writers,
- 14 ‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante,
- 15 Manners, Mores and Musicality: An Interview with Willy Russell,
- 16 Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons,
- 17 Putting Down Roots: An Interview with Levi Tafari,
- 18 ‘Out of Transformations’: Liverpool Poetry in the Twenty-first
7 - ‘Every Time a Thing Is Possessed, It Vanishes’: The Poetry of Brian Patten,
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction: Sounding Liverpool
- 1 George Garrett, Merseyside Labour and the Influence of the United States, Joseph Pridmore
- 2 ‘No Struggle but the Home’: James Hanley's The Furys, Patrick Williams
- 3 Paradise Street Blues: Malcolm Lowry's Liverpool, Chris Ackerley
- 4 ‘Unhomely Moments’: The Fictions of Beryl Bainbridge,
- 5 A Man from Elsewhere: The Liminal Presence of Liverpool in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell,
- 6 The Figure in the Carpet: An Interview with Terence Davies,
- 7 ‘Every Time a Thing Is Possessed, It Vanishes’: The Poetry of Brian Patten,
- 8 Finding a Rhyme for Alphabet Soup: An Interview with Roger McGough,
- 9 Rewriting the Narrative: Liverpool Women Writers,
- 10 Jumping Off: An Interview with Linda Grant,
- 11 Ramsey Campbell's Haunted Liverpool,
- 12 ‘We Are a City That Just Likes to Talk’: An Interview with Alan Bleasdale,
- 13 ‘Culture Is Ordinary’: The Legacy of the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 Writers,
- 14 ‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante,
- 15 Manners, Mores and Musicality: An Interview with Willy Russell,
- 16 Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons,
- 17 Putting Down Roots: An Interview with Levi Tafari,
- 18 ‘Out of Transformations’: Liverpool Poetry in the Twenty-first
Summary
The floss of temporal things
Returning briefly to Liverpool in 2005, Brian Patten explained, in an interview with Nerve, a local magazine describing itself as ‘Promoting grassroots arts and culture on Merseyside’:
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.
The unprepossessing detail is characteristic of Patten's writing: the disarming confessional, and the ability to stand simultaneously both outside and within the lived experience; the lack of resentment at personal deprivation, recognizing both its gratuitousness, for the individual, and its cultural determination, never quite establishing, in the words of ‘A Love Poem’, ‘why all that's commonplace / Comes to seem unique’; the insistence on local particularity, moving from the warmth of that acknowledgment to the slightly comic intimation of mortality in the school's conversion into the improbable precision of a ‘Norwegian’ supermarket.
Characteristic, too, is the careful indignation, fusing cynicism and idealism, which amounts to an intervention later in the interview, when asked what he thought of Liverpool being designated European 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 fifty/sixty entries, and you know who they got to organize it? Not a local magazine, but a PR company in Manchester. I was really pissed off. It could have been organized by your magazine, or someone else's magazine, at least someone based in Liverpool.
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- Information
- Writing LiverpoolEssays and Interviews, pp. 117 - 137Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007