Tony Harrison

Some weeks after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, I found myself asking whether there had been any notable poetical responses to the massacre.  My (limited) search proved fruitless, and I returned to my daily work.  However, the question of a poetical response to these events continued to haunt me, and became entwined in my memory of a powerful performance by Maxine Peake of Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, which now seemed to speak pointedly to contemporary events even though it is primarily a response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Surely Shelley’s poem, extraordinary though it is, is not the most ‘contemporary’ response to today’s events?
With this performance of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ in the background, my paper asks whether we are more comfortable with the voices of dead poets rather than contemporary works responding to the extraordinary happenings of our times. If so, why? Perhaps this is nothing new; after all ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ was not published in England until the 1830’s, after Shelley’s death, having been deemed to be too risky to seek immediate dissemination and publication. 
Shelley was absent in Italy at the time of the massacre, from where he composed ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ in relative repose. Perhaps the connectivity of the global world has gone some way to thwarting contemporary voices, perversely making it difficult for poetry to find a sense of place?  That Peake gave her performance almost at the exact site of the massacre helped connect her audience to an event long since passed from living memory. Contemporary voices responding to today’s events have to acknowledge and function within both the poet’s and the reader’s living memory of the event; possibly the immediacy of response made possible in the digital age functions as much to silence the poet as also to facilitate the dissemination of their work. Phenomenology suggests that memory operates within the tripartite structure of time, body and place.  I suggest that there is also a key fourth overlying component, historical time, which enables poetry to negotiate the events of the day and to respond in a voice that can be heard. Until that component comes in to play, perhaps it is safer to listen to the voices of the dead.

A version of the paper was presented at Goldsmiths 'The Place for Poetry' May 2015

Much attention has been paid to Tony Harrison the poet and
playwright, but much less to his translation activity. While there
have been four substantial monographs written about him in
English by Sandie Byrne, Christine Regan, Antony Rowland and Luke
Spencer, no one has foregrounded the role of translation in his
work. My paper will argue for the importance of his translations in
his poetic career and will show how his method of translation is
influenced by his poetics and ideology. While other prominent
modern poet-translators, such as W. H. Auden, Robert Graves,
Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon and W. B. Yeats have
translated the classics, Harrison’s approach is distinct because he
works collaboratively with directors, translates directly from the
source languages and brings a forceful poetics of his own to bear
upon the text.

Tony Harrison's play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, chosen as one of the 100 best plays of the 20th century by the National Theatre Millennium Poll, came in from the desire to bring the Greek genre of satyr play back to stage, since there are scarce satyr plays when compared with the amount of classical tragedies and comedies. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is a reworking of the papyri fragments of the satyr play Ichneutae (Trackers) by Sophocles, which was inspired by the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. This paper analyses Tony Harrison's version performed at Delphi (1988), focusing on the importance of the role of the nymph Kyllene. Although she neither appears in the Homeric Hymn nor plays a leading role in either Sophocles' version or Harrison's, she represents a noticeable theatrical contrast with the satyrs, who feature heavily in Sophocles' Ichneutae and Harrison's version. Therefore, the character of Kyllene will be examined to find out which elements from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Sophocles' Ichneutae Tony Harrison has kept and which ones he has modified. Furthermore, I will study the reasons why he has carried out these changes and conclude with an interpretive analysis of Harrison's play.

This chapter offers new readings of Sam Selvon and Tony Harrison, two writers whose lives were shaped by the processes of post-war decolonization and whose work emerges from - and tackles directly - the legacy of British colonialism. These readings are contextualized through brief examinations of twentieth-century responses to immigration and racism in working-class literature and of contemporary interdisciplinary and mainstream debates about racism and class in Britain. By historicizing their respective formations as working-class writers and offering new readings of critically misrepresented elements of their work, the discussion aims to reposition Selvon as an important figure in the post-war history of British working-class literature and to argue that Harrison is a working-class writer whose work can only be fully appreciated with the aid of a postcolonial perspective. The discussion will suggest ways in which criticism of working-class literature might productively engage with other critical discourses and, in doing so, resist the division and vilification of the working class in contemporary society.

is a contemporary British author whose poetry is highly influential in encountering the issue of identity and class struggles. As a working-class student, Harrison was subject to prejudice and discrimination for his working-class accent. This paper investigates two of his highly admired poems, "On Not Being Milton" and "Them & [uz]" from a cultural standpoint, mainly concentrated on John Fiske's theory of power and language. The role of language in the context of his poems is probed. The multiaccentuality of language is represented in his poetry and these two poems become the site of struggle for the imperialising and the localising power. It is intended to illuminate the sought space of identity which Harrison is constantly referring to as a member of the English working-class society. Lastly, the social and personal relationship between Harrison and Milton has been explored positing Harrison in a transcendental context in his relationship with Milton.

Tony Harrison has an unusual place in the British cultural landscape: not only does he write poetry, but he is also a prolific playwright and gifted translator of plays; in addition, he has created ‘film-poems’, a form of expression at the crossroads between poetry and film documentary, and he has also assumed the role of journalist-poet for the Guardian newspaper. The multidimensional aspect of Harrison’s writing reflects a persistent desire to express his poetic voice. Coming from a working-class background in Leeds, then granted a scholarship to attend a rather prestigious Grammar School which was to lead him to study Classics at Leeds University, Harrison’s poetry captures the disjunction between his early family life and his later education and professional career. His poetry consequently interlaces differing perspectives: those from his background who seemed to be plagued by issues involving articulation and those of his cherished poets and playwrights from the classical Greek and Roman eras, as well as from more modern times. 

This paper discusses the presence of these voices in two of Harrison’s poems, ‘Them & [uz]’ (1974) and ‘Classics Society’ (1978), both published in his volume The School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978). These two poems exemplify Tony Harrison’s wish to be a spokesperson for the distinct voices which have shaped his life (the voices of authors that he loves, and of relatives that suffered from problems of articulation and modest social conditions). More precisely, his poems act as an enduring imprint of these voices, questioning the social and the cultural constructs within languages via the process of exploring memories and their transmission.

Mots-clés : Tony Harrison – memory – poetry – trauma – transmission – silent voices – identity – language – norms – social classes

List of Illustrations
Preface
Notes on Contributors
Introducing the Literary North; K.Cockin
'The Chimneyed City': Imagining the North in Victorian Literature; J.Guy
'By the People, For the People': The Literary North and the Local Press 1880-1914; J.Hewitt
The Sublime and Satanic North: The Potteries in George Moore's A Mummer's Wife (1885) and Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns (1902); A.Heilmann
Clog-dancers and Clay: The Geography of Arnold Bennett's North in Clayhanger; R.Robbins
'Dirty Old Town': The Presentation of the Northern Cityscape in Ewan MacColl's Landscape with Chimneys; C.Warden
'The North, My World': W.H. Auden's Pennine Ways; A.Sharpe
Northern Yobs: Representations of Youth in 1950s Writing: Hoggart, Sillitoe and Waterhouse; N.Bentley
The Unknown City: Hull and the North in the poetry of Larkin, Dunn and Didsbury; S.O'Brien
'Northern Working-class Spectator Sports': Tony Harrison's Continuous; J.Gill
North-east Childhood: Representations of the North-east of England in the Work of Robert Westall; N.Dalrymple
'Where you going now?': Themes of Alienation and Belonging in the North-east in Children's Literature; R.Lee
The North in Children's Fiction; T.Cosslett
The Literary Response to Moss Side, Manchester: Fact or (Genre) Fiction?; L.Pearce
Locating the Literary North; K.Cockin
Selected Bibliography
Index