But they didn’t like the cut of my face either. Left here July 1967, sans honneur, carrying a bad character report in my hand & some poems, returned home to get the sack. Told later it was one of the town planner's landscaping tricks. Spent days looking for some natural spot in the whole synthesis: found it, a small duck pond with sluice and lily-pads and footbridge. Poems were fast and often, but it was bitter and solitary too. I wrote The Boy From The Green Cabaret poems in Harlow, and some political things for the first time. In Newcastle I was always too involved, always leaving pieces of myself against the walls. It was merely a funnel, and events and actions got a natural response from me. My eye, my colour/sluice became arbitrary for the first time. Everything was so clean and clear-cut, and the people, they didn't belong, and had no roots in the town. Its population, commuters with a vengeance. Synthetic new town, a dormitory to London. Began to translate Laforgue, Cros, Corbiere.ġ966-67: newspaper packed me off to Harlow Technical College, Essex, on a full-time journalist diploma course. Then I wd flit off to little stone cottage on the fells and fish for trout, and pick mushrooms. ![]() The city gave words a harshness, like the steel or coal. You can walk out of Newcastle for half an hour and be in greenery. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. ![]() Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. ![]() About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. ‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. From The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother:
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