Growing up, I didn’t read much but I loved television and watched a lot of it. When I first encountered Tony Harrison, I was in my early twenties. I turned on the TV during the day and there he was: a man reading poems in a pub. The setting seemed real – the people listening looked as if they’d just gone in for a pint at lunchtime – and the poetry was communicative, clear, local, but at the same time crafted, literary and universal. Tony was reading his poems with heart and sincerity – when the camera panned across the audience they were visibly moved, occasionally even crying.
I had developed, for some reason, the idea that poetry had to be printed in a book – but Tony was taking poetry onto the stage and screen, and that was a revelation. Television was seen as cheap and mass produced; the TV set was the “idiot lantern” in the corner of the living room. Poetry was high culture, aloof. Somehow, Tony brought them together.
Not long after that I bought a copy of his selected poems. I was just dabbling at that stage, as a writer, but I knew immediately that he was going to be important for me. His Leeds accent meant I had an immediate affinity with his work, and though as a reader I gravitated towards modernist poetry, I was struck by the fact that Tony’s poems rhymed. They mine a traditional seam but there is also something fresh and unapologetic about his technique. I hadn’t studied literature since I was 17 – I’m homemade – and Tony quickly became part of my tutor group.
Tony waged class war through his writing. He talks in one of his poems about being given the role of the drunken porter in Macbeth because of the way he spoke. He was asking who was entitled to poetry and with what voice – and he was very antagonistic towards the idea that poetry should be something in standard English, that belonged to a kind of club or an elite. It became a paradox in his poetry because he wanted to speak to the working classes but his training and his reading, particularly in the classics, took him away from the general public – to a point where he could barely communicate with his parents. But he fought and won those battles, and his tubthumping allowed people like me to afterwards walk into certain spaces and be ourselves.
There was a lot of noise around Tony’s long poem V when it was broadcast in 1987. There were so many people saying you shouldn’t watch this that everybody wanted to watch it. It blew the doors off, really. I’ve taught in the US, and in one of my classes I thought I would look at V one day. I suddenly realised, you can’t teach that any more. You can’t use that kind of language – those terms of racial abuse, even though they’re coming out of the mouth of a skinhead character – in a university room. Students would just faint, or be outraged.
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I wrote to Tony in the early 1990s, a piece of fan mail asking if he’d come and visit an Arvon course I was teaching. He sent me a comradely postcard back but declined the invitation, concluding in typically curmudgeonly style: “Anyway, I don’t go to Devon – the poet laureate lives in Devon.”
But I did meet him a few times after that and he was very friendly. I remember sitting up with Tony all night in Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s Lake District home, as he read Shelley’s letters out loud over long glasses of whisky. Another time I was at the offices of a film company he was working with, when the fax machine sputtered into life. I recognised Tony’s handwriting on the emerging fax, which read: “Don’t touch one fucking frame of my film.” I interviewed him for BBC Four in 2015: he was funny, and an entertainer, but I always felt careful in his company. He could be vociferous in his views: I remember him saying that TS Eliot had taken English poetry back 100 years. You wouldn’t seek Tony’s disapproval.
He didn’t approve of the laureateship, to put it mildly: he had no time for the institution of the monarchy. But he made sure to publicly rule himself out of the contest when he was never going to be ruled in. If there isn’t already a term for that, perhaps it should be “doing a Harrison”. I don’t think I spent any time with him after I became laureate in 2019, but before accepting the position, I probably did think about it from his point of view, because he’s one of a chorus of voices in the back of my mind. I saw the opportunity – to write on state and nation and the matter of Britain – as being far greater than any limitation. We never got the chance to discuss it, but I doubt he would have accepted my justification.
When you write you’re often looking for ancestors, people who try to articulate their ideas through the same art form as you. Tony and I shared a lot: accents, ideas, the place we came from. I thought of him as part of my poetic family.
Photograph by James Drew Turner/Guardian/eyevine