Bill Griffiths: Bio-Note...

Bill was born in Middlesex in 1948. Not a bad time, he considers, for if the 1950s were a bit static, the 1960s brought an outburst in popular culture: music, football, bikes, pop festivals, that made it an exciting time to be growing up. By 1971, his first poems were published in Poetry Review under the editorship of Eric Mottram (later to become Professor of English and American Literature at King's College London). Mottram and Bob Cobbing, the little press professor, and publisher of vast numbers of new titles for new writers, as Writers Forum, were the two immediate influences on Bill in the 1970s, but American poets like Michael McClure and Muriel Rukeyser, realisers of word-potential like Keats, Crabbe and Hopkins, and the literature of Old English have also long claimed his admiration. By the end of the 1970s, innovative little presses and many of the most productive poets of the period had been dislodged and cut off from patronage by an aggressively traditionalist Literature Panel at the Arts Council. Subsidies for readings foundered, and what is often viewed as a 'renaissance' in English poetry was left to dwindle and carry on its work - if anyone could be bothered - for nothing.
In the second half of Bill's life, he made a new start studying Old English at King's College, London, obtaining a PhD in 1987. This led to a fruitful co-operation with Anglo-Saxon Books in Norfolk, and many new titles, including an edition of The Battle of Maldon and a book on the complexities of Anglo-Saxon Magic. In 1990, Bill moved north and settled at Seaham on the Durham coast, where he has produced titles on local history, dialect and place-names. Throughout these years he was also writing poetry, and the latest titles have come not from his own Amra Imprint but as paperback volumes from other little presses: Rousseau and the Wicked (Invisible Books, London, 1996), a joint book with Tom Raworth and Tom Leonard (Etruscan Reader 5, Etruscan Books, Buckfastleigh, 1997) and on his own, Nomad Sense (Talus Editions, London, 1998), A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan Books, 1999), Ushabtis (Talus, 2001), and Durham and other sequences (West House Books, 2002).
After finishing work on cataloguing the Mottram Archive bequeathed to King's College London, Bill returned to Seaham in 1999, where the University of Northumbria's reprint of his Dialect Word List produced unexpected media approval (no, 'approval' is too strong a word... 'mildly amused patronising flickers of attention' would be more accurate...). Recent poems have been printed in Chicago Review vol.44, the Wesleyan University Press anthology, Other, and the Oxford University Press (New York) Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish poetry (2001). A new venture, a series of ghost stories set in the baroque world of English local government, is appearing in numbers of Northern Review based at Newcastle on Tyne.

Readings include: Berlin Festival 1977, International Sound Poetry Festival, Toronto, 1978, Voice Box, Royal Festival Hall London, 1998, Durham Literature Festival 1999.

Positions held include: Printshop Manager at National Poetry Centre, London; Secretary and Chairman of Association of Little Presses; and currently as officer of the Durham & Tyneside Dialect Association and Story of Seaham heritage group.

Poetry publications include: Cycles (Writers Forum & Pirate Press, London, 1974,1976); Building: The New London Hospital (Loot 1:4, Peterborough, 1980); Tract Against The Giants: Selected Poems (Coach House Press, Toronto, 1984); Future Exiles: 3 London Poets with Allen Fisher and Brian Catling (Paladin, London, 1992); Star Fish Jail (Amra Imprint, Seaham, 1993).

Translations from Old English include: Guthlac B (Spectacular Diseases, Peterborough, 1986); The Land Ceremonies Charm and The Nine Herbs Charm (Tern Press, Market Drayton, 1986-1987); The Old English Poem 'Phoenix' (Amra Imprint, Seaham, 1990, and Tern Press, 1999).

Cultural investigations include: A pocket history of the soul (Amra Imprint, 1991); ed/trans. A Text Book of Drama (Writers Forum, London, 1987); Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (Anglo-Saxon Books, 1996).

Press for map of origin

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