Interpoetry

Bill Griffiths

William Rowe
Saturday September 22, 2007
The Guardian

Bill Griffiths, who has died aged 59, was a poet, scholar, translator, pamphleteer and publisher.
It will take time before the real significance of his life and work is appreciated, since it so clearly exceeds any of the usual measures of those
things.

He published more than 80 volumes of poetry, but never lived much above the poverty line - and a good deal of his life was spent below it.
Years of poor diet no doubt hastened his death. The absence of public support for the British poetry revival of the 1970s certainly did not help.
For more than one fellow poet, he was the only one of whom they would use the word genius. It is a scandal that a poet of such exceptional
powers should have received so little support. Born in Middlesex, Griffiths attended Kingsbury grammar school and read history
at University College London, graduating in 1969. Early involvements included a brief flirtation with the Hells Angels - he became a biker
at 15 and rode with the Harrow Roadrats in north-west London. Following his arrest under the stop and search laws, he endured a short spell
in Brixton prison, though he was never charged with any offence.

His first book of poetry, Cycles (1976), bursts into life with a scene at Dover borstal. "Ictus!/ as I ain't like ever to be still but/ kaleidoscope,/
lock and knock my sleeping." A whole world is suddenly there, the beat of a particular reality. No other British poet of his time possessed so keen
an ability to make of poetry a "negative system" capable of telling the truth from the other side of our liberal humanist society.

In the 1970s, Griffiths became manager of the Poetry Society print shop, which a group of non-mainstream poets had turned into the
National Poetry Centre, a focus of what came to be known as the British poetry revival. He typed (he was tremendously fast), and ran the Gestetner
and offset machines,and it was there that many lasting friendships were consolidated, among them Bob Cobbing (obituary, October 7 2002),
one of the leading sound poets of the 20th century, and Eric Mottram, editor of Poetry Review (obituary, January 26 1995).
Both were formative influences. With Cobbing and Paula Claire, Griffiths made up the group Konkrete Canticle, which took performances
of sound and visual poetry to Canada, Sweden, Germany and many venues in the UK. Griffiths was active on a range of fronts: publishing books
out of his own small press (Pirate Press, later Amra), writing political pamphlets and essays on the arts in society,
listing poetry publications for Palpi (the Association of Little Presses' newsletter), translating Gilgamesh as well as Romany,
Welsh and Anglo-Saxon works and publishing a steady stream of his own poetry. People who knew him at the time remember a bearded
young man, with tattoos – LOVE and HATE - on his fingers, unorthodoxly learned, possessing an intense gaze that was embedded in some inner
place of delicate shyness. The first thing one received on meeting him was his solemn handshake, respectful and courteous. Very early on,
he had decided that writing poetry was what he did, and everything else was secondary. Whatever the hardships or difficulties, and there were
plenty, it all went into the poetry.

In a typically laconic interview in 1977, he described himself as "born 1948... earlier interest the piano... switched to poetry in 1964...
much more freedom with words." He was, in fact, an accomplished pianist, owner of several old pianos, which took up most of the space in the
small maisonette in Seaham, County Durham, where he lived until his death.

In 1987 he gained a PhD in Old English at King's College London. But his hope that this might lead to a new career did not work out,
most probably because his intellectual anarchism did not blend in with the rather Anglican habitat of Old English. He was living at the time on
a houseboat in Uxbridge, Middlesex, - which caught fire with most of his books and papers on board.

At the end of the 1980s he decided to move away from what he called "Thatcherite London" to the north-east,where he became deeply involved in
the collection and archiving of local dialect materials. He published a dialect dictionary, Pitmatic, and several collections of dialect
literature and recipes, plus a history of the Northern Sinfonia, as well as turning his hand to writing ghost stories, whose first protagonists were
local councillors caught in dubious machinations. Every year he was a special guest at the Durham miners' gala.At the end of the 1990s,
Bill spent two years cataloguing the Mottram archive, bequeathed to King's College London after Mottram's death. This period coincided with the
writing of A Book of Spilt Cities, his most intellectually complex work. Iain Sinclair writes in the introduction:
"The poet/bard has a preternatural ability to run multiple tracks, schizophrenic babblings (overheard, solicited, imagined),
and to formulate a coherent argument," and quotes him in a letter saying that he had "unwillingly satirised those hopes of the 1970s that love would
redeem the world".

Griffiths' books that are in print, or are likely to be found in libraries, include: A Tract Against the Giants (Coach House, 1984),
Durham and Other Sequences (West House, 1992), Future Exiles (Paladin, 1992), Binaries.
Not Sonnets (Etruscan Reader V, 1997), A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan, 1999), The Mud Fort (Salt, 2004).
The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths, published last month, offers essays, memoirs, an interview and a bibliography of his work.

Martin Wainwright adds: Dialect is not everyone's cup of tea (char/crib/tay), especially when you see it written down and the result seems
quaint or leaden. But hear Bill Griffiths in full, brimming-over flow, and you were instantly converted. His relish of the richness of local words
was combined with a deep, scholarly knowledge of their roots, of Geordie in particular, way back in Northumbria's misty history of virtuous
monks and long-haired kings. Was he really from Middlesex? Hard to believe, when you saw him ensconced at Seaham harbour, in his own little
cottage version of the great castles at Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh and Lindisfarne. He got on famously with everyone on his travels round the region
in search of old words and new ways of saying things.

His final book tackled the off-putting, mechanically named "language" of Pitmatic, developed by north-east colliers and in danger of extinction.
It sounds unlikely to claim that descriptions of heavy machinery and underground working practices can be poetic. Griffiths proved otherwise.
His love of the sound of the vocabulary is infectious; open a page and you catch it. He untangled the web of origins, Old English, Norse, Dutch
and many more, which led to, for example, the word "caviling", which means the allocation of different quality seams to faceworkers by lot, to see
fair play.

Bill was very fond of cake/stotty/arval/fatty, especially Battenburg; just cake to many of us, but to him it was a fascinating alloy of eggs, milk,
apricot, marzipan, icing sugar, butter, self-raising flour, history, the royal family and much, much else. Ditto his life.

Brian Bransom "Bill" Griffiths, poet, born August 20 1948; died September 13 2007