Brian Patten (born 7 February 1946) is an English poet and author. [1] He came to prominence in the 1960s as one of the Liverpool poets, and writes primarily lyrical poetry about human relationships. His famous works include "Little Johnny's Confessions", "The Irrelevant Song", "Vanishing Trick", "Emma's Doll", and "Impossible Parents".
Patten was born in Bootle, Liverpool, England. [2] He attended Sefton Park School in the Smithdown Road area of Liverpool, where his early poetic writing was encouraged. [1] He left school at fifteen and began work for The Bootle Times writing a column on popular music. At age 18, he moved to Paris, where he lived rough for a time, earning money by writing poems in chalk on the pavements. [3]
Together with the other two Liverpool poets, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, Patten published The Mersey Sound in 1967. One of the best-selling poetry anthologies of modern times, The Mersey Sound aimed to make poetry accessible to a broader audience. It has been described as "the most significant anthology of the twentieth century". [4] Together with Henri and McGough, Patten was awarded the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in 2001. [5]
Patten's first published volumes of poems were Little Johnny's Confession (1967) and Notes to the Hurrying Man (1969). They were followed by The Irrelevant Song (1971), Vanishing Trick (1976) and Grave Gossip (1979). In 1983, along with Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, Patten published the follow-up to The Mersey Sound with New Volume. Patten's later solo collections, Storm Damage (1988) and Armada (1996), are more varied, the latter featuring a sequence of poems concerning the death of his mother and memories of his childhood. Armada is perhaps Patten's most mature and formal book, dispensing with much of the playfulness of former work. He has also written comic verse for children, notably Gargling With Jelly and Thawing Frozen Frogs.
Patten's style is generally lyrical and his subjects are primarily love and relationships. His 1986 collection Love Poems draws together his best work in this area from the previous sixteen years. Charles Causley commented that he "reveals a sensibility profoundly aware of the ever-present possibility of the magical and the miraculous, as well as of the granite-hard realities. These are undiluted poems, beautifully calculated, informed - even in their darkest moments - with courage and hope." [6]
The actor Paul Bettany, in his contribution to the poetry collection Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (2014), said of Patten's work: "Reading Brian Patten's poetry does that trick that art should do, which is to sort of adhere you to the surface of the planet, just long enough that you don't go spinning off into the loneliness of space - 'Somebody else has felt this too', you think. And you breathe a little easier". [7]
Patten's poem "So Many Different Lengths of Time" has, in recent times, become a popular poem recited at funerals. At the service to remember Ken Dodd in Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, the actor Stephanie Cole read "So Many Different Lengths of Time" to a congregation of thousands within and outside the building. Opening his poem with verse by Pablo Neruda, Patten's poem argues that it is the act of remembrance which offers family members the best antidote to the anguish of loss. In tackling the subject of grief, Patten views poetry as performing an important social function: "Poetry helps us understand what we’ve forgotten to remember. It reminds us of things that are important to us when the world overtakes us emotionally." [8]
Roger Joseph McGough is an English poet, performance poet, broadcaster, children's author and playwright. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please, as well as performing his own poetry. McGough was one of the leading members of the Liverpool poets, a group of young poets influenced by Beat poetry and the popular music and culture of 1960s Liverpool. He is an honorary fellow of Liverpool John Moores University, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of the Poetry Society.
Arthur Seymour John Tessimond was an English poet.
GRIMMS were an English pop rock, comedy, and poetry group, originally formed as a merger of The Scaffold with two members of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Liverpool Scene for two concerts in 1971 at the suggestion of John Gorman.
Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL was a Cornish poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse is a poetry anthology edited by Philip Larkin. It was published in 1973 by Oxford University Press with ISBN 0-19-812137-7. Larkin writes in the short preface that the selection is wide rather than deep; and also notes that for the post-1914 period it is more a collection of poems, than of poets. The remit was limited by him to poets with a period of residence in the British Isles. Larkin's generous selection of Thomas Hardy's poems has been noted for its influence on Hardy's later reputation. On the other hand, he was criticized, notably by Donald Davie, for his inclusion of "pop" poets such as Brian Patten. The volume contains works by 207 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 volume was stated to be "an attempt to introduce contemporary poetry to the general reader". The series added up to a substantial survey of English-language poetry of the time.
British Poetry since 1945 is a poetry anthology edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, published in 1970 by Penguin Books, with a second and last edition in 1985. The anthology is a careful attempt to take account of the whole span of post-war British poetry, including poets from The Group, a London-centred workshop that Lucie-Smith himself had once been chairman of, following the departure of founder Philip Hobsbaum.
The Liverpool poets are a number of influential 1960s poets from Liverpool, England, influenced by 1950s Beat poetry.
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 Merseybeat zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. He was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry since 1945 as the "theoretician" of the three. His characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth. He was influenced by the French Symbolist school of poetry and surrealist art.
The Mersey Sound is an anthology of poems by Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri 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 depictions of intimacy.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Matt Harvey is a British humourist and performance poet who has published a number of books and makes regular contributions to radio broadcasts.
Jim Bennett is a British poet. He performed alongside Roger McGough and Adrian Henri in the late 1960s.
Alan Jackson is a Scottish poet.
Matt Simpson was an English poet and literary critic. He published six full poetry collections, and after retiring from a senior lectureship in English at Liverpool Hope University, wrote numerous books of literary criticism.
The culture of Liverpool incorporates a wide range of activities within the city of Liverpool, England. The city is an important centre for culture not just in the northwest of England, but also the United Kingdom more broadly. Its contributions to culture internationally were recognised in 2008, when it was named the European Capital of Culture.
Peter Edwards,, is a British painter. He won the 1994 BP Portrait Award.
Leo Boix is an Argentine-British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He is the author of an English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant and two Spanish collections, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017). Boix has won the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award and the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry.
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