The term "Liverpool
poets" signifies a group of writers from Liverpool who became
popular in the 1960s and 1970s. They are representatives of the pop
movement in poetry. For their poetry, which they conceived for reading
aloud to a large audience, they turned to everyday experience as their subject
matter; also they used a language that is easy to grasp and that the audience
was familiar with. Their achievement was to remove a large part of poetry's
exclusiveness, to present poetry as something everybody might enjoy. Their
public readings became part of the Liverpool
pop scene.
The Liverpool Poets are:
ADRIAN HENRY (1932-2000)
studied art and worked as a painter of modern art. In 1967 he founded
the poetry and pop group Liverpool Scene and
soon turned to full-time writing. He felt inspired by the economical use
of the language of the modern media: the language
of advertising, the slogans of newspaper headlines and the sound
patterns of pop songs. ADRIAN HENRY's
poem The Entry of Christ into Liverpool presents
the everyday scenery of the city partly as an enumeration of objects visible,
partly as a collage of well-known slogans.
ROGER MCGOUGH (* 1937) studied
geography and French in order to become a teacher. In the 1960s he joined
the satirical pop group The Scaffold. He has
produced poems, a number of plays and a mini-novel. For example, he wrote The Cats' Protection League, a
poem both for children and adults.
In his poem, The Icingbus, ROGER MCGOUGH explores
experimental ways of expressing ideas by writing words together. For example,
the term "hunchbackedback" merges
two words (hunchback + -ed ending + back) into one long word, emphasizing
the unusual shape of the handicapped person's back.
BRIAN PATTEN (* 1946) has become well known as a writer of poetry, children's books and modern fables. In his opinion "poetry is a private thing in itself … it's nothing to do with educating or saying anything." Poems by BRIAN PATTEN are Into My Mirror has walked (a love poem), The Most Unforgettable Character, Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworth's (1967), Little Johnny's Final Letter (a poem about growing up) from the collection of poems Little Johnny's Confession (1967).