James Simmons (poet)

Last updated

James Stewart Alexander Simmons (1933–2001) was a poet, literary critic and songwriter from Derry, Northern Ireland.

Contents

Biography

Simmons was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Derry in 1933 and attended Campbell College in Belfast before moving to the University of Leeds to read for a degree in English. He married Laura Stinson and returned to Northern Ireland to teach at Friends' School Lisburn for five years. His final foreign excursion was a position at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, where he worked for three years. During this time they had five children: Rachael, Sarah, Adam, Helen and Penelope. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1968, accepting a position at the recently opened New University of Ulster in Coleraine, where he remained until his retirement in 1984. [1]

During the early '70s – the bloodiest times of all in NI – he was the inspiration and leading light for The Resistance Cabaret, a satirical revue combining song, poetry and political comment on 'the troubles' and life in general, written and performed by Simmons and some of his students. Arguably, Simmons – whose passion for poetry was equaled only by his yearning to make it accessible to all the people – felt most at home in this setting, connecting with an audience that was moved to talk back.

Near the end of his teaching career at the University of Ulster, Simmons and his first wife Laura divorced. He married Imelda Foley, the sister of Derry poet and fiction writer Michael Foley, and had one child, Anna. After this marriage to Imelda ended, he had a son Ben with his third wife, fellow-poet Janice Fitzpatrick. Simmons and Fitzpatrick started The Poets' House, initially in Islandmagee in County Antrim, later in Falcarragh in County Donegal. [2]

Career

When Simmons returned to Northern Ireland he took part in The Belfast Group, together with such notables as Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. In 1968, with his nephew Michael Stephens, Simmons went on a tour of universities in England. When he returned to Ireland, he established The Honest Ulsterman, the most important Irish literary journal of the next 35 years.[ citation needed ] Simmons served as the editor for 17 of the first 19 issues; he then passed control of the magazine onto a series of younger editors. The Honest Ulsterman published a series of more than 30 poetry chapbooks, including the first collections of work by Paul Muldoon ("Knowing My Place"), Michael Foley ("The Acne and the Ecstasy"), and Michael Stephens ("Blues for Chocolate Doherty"). Members of the Belfast Group frequently published in The Honest Ulsterman. [1]

Whereas John Hewitt, the Ulster poet whom Simmons called 'the grandaddy of us all', ground out his truth by placing himself in the mortar and pestle of nature, Simmons ground his out by placing himself under a self-imposed public scrutiny. Using his own life for material, he explored his frailties in his poetry with the clinical detachment of a laboratory technician, the humour of a big soul, and the vulnerability of a lover. Perhaps his best epitaph is his own:

"Hiding in humility, In irony, and wit, It would be very hard to prove That Simmons is a shit"

He won several prizes for his poetry including the Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards.

He also wrote a critical biography of Seán O'Casey (London: Macmillan).

Throughout his career Simmons wrote and performed exquisitely provocative, yet hilarious and humane, songs about every aspect of contemporary life. In 1970 he founded a new platform for bringing these to a wider audience, the satirical revue – The Resistance Cabaret – with Garvin Crawford, Victor Thompson, David Templeton, Eithne Murphy, Jim Brown, Mike Graves, Jon Marshall and Heather Hutchinson. In varying line-ups, they performed their unique repertoire regularly at venues throughout Northern Ireland until 1976. His poetry collection, West Strand Visions, contains some of the repertoire. He recorded three collections of his own songs – City & Eastern, Love In The Post, The Rostrevor Sessions – and produced a Resistance Cabaret album with the other members. He also set a number of Yeats' poems to music which he released on a tape cassette. The album was called Women's Company and included original songs and a selection of jazz standards.

Since his death Simmons' work has been increasingly marginalised – few anthologies include him – and a 'Collected Poems' is yet to appear. His songs, however, continue to challenge and delight appreciative audiences of The Resistance Cabaret around Northern Ireland - most often sung by Garvin Crawford in The Dufferin Arms, Killyleagh.

Publications

Prizes

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seamus Heaney</span> Irish poet, playwright, and translator (1939–2013)

Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Muldoon</span> Irish poet

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. At Princeton University he is currently both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and has also served as president of the Poetry Society (UK) and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Rowley (writer)</span>

Richard Rowley was the pseudonym of Richard Valentine Williams, born at 79 Dublin Road, Belfast, Ireland, who wrote poetry, plays and stories.

Francis Arthur Ormsby is a Northern Irish author and poet.

Peter McDonald is a poet, university lecturer, and writer of literary criticism. He holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Longley</span> Anglo-Irish poet

Michael Longley,, is an Anglo-Irish poet.

Ciaran Gerard Carson was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist.

The Belfast Group was a poets' workshop which was organized by Philip Hobsbaum when he moved to Belfast in October 1963 to lecture in English at Queen's University.

Andrew Waterman (1940–2022) was an English poet.

The Honest Ulsterman is a long-running Northern Ireland literary magazine that was established by James Simmons in 1968. It was then edited for twenty years by Frank Ormsby. It has returned as an online publication from 2014 onwards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medbh McGuckian</span> Poet from Northern Ireland (born 1950)

Medbh McGuckian is a poet from Northern Ireland.

Padraic Fiacc was an Irish poet, and member of Aosdána, the exclusive Irish Arts Academy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hewitt (poet)</span>

John Harold Hewitt was perhaps the most significant Belfast poet to emerge before the 1960s generation of Northern Irish poets that included Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. He was appointed the first writer-in-residence at Queen's University Belfast in 1976. His collections include The Day of the Corncrake (1969) and Out of My Time: Poems 1969 to 1974 (1974). He was also made a Freeman of the City of Belfast in 1983, and was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast.

<i>North</i> (poetry collection) 1975 poetry collection by Seamus Heaney

North (1975) is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first of his works that directly dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it looks frequently to the past for images and symbols relevant to the violence and political unrest of that time. Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.

Edna Longley is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literature of Northern Ireland</span>

That part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland was created in 1922, with the partition of the island of Ireland. The majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted to remain within the United Kingdom. Most of these were the Protestant descendants of settlers from Great Britain.

Fred Johnston is an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic and musician. He is the founder and current director of the Western Writers' Centre in Galway. He co-founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative in 1974, and founded Galway's annual Cúirt International Festival of Literature in 1986.

Kevin Kiely is a poet, critic, author and playwright whose writings and public statements have met with controversy and also with support.

Ruth Carr, also known as Ruth Hooley, is a Northern Irish writer.

Robert McKinstryOBE, ARIBA was a Northern Irish architect who specialised in conservation and restoration work. McKinstry worked on many prestigious projects including the restoration of St Anne's Cathedral, the Crown Liquor Saloon, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery, and the Grand Opera House, Belfast.

References

  1. 1 2 McCormack, W.J. (13 July 2001). "Obituary". The Independent . Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  2. Peter Pegnall (9 July 2001). "The Guardian Obituary-James Simmons". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  3. "Past winners of the Eric Gregory Awards". Society of Authors. Retrieved 6 October 2019.

See also