John Goodridge's blog

Gathering information for the Database is an immense and seemingly eternal task. The Database began with an informal checklist I made thirty years ago, during my doctoral research on Stephen Duck and Mary Collier, by the end of which I guess I had got a handlist of about 300 identifiably labouring-class poets. It all took a huge leap forward when the ‘Elsie’ group was formed, shortly before the millennium, to compile the six-volume Pickering and Chatto anthologies of the poetry, and we began pooling all the stuff we each had on our computers.

This posting is about a working-class writer who won’t be listed on our Database of Labouring-class Poets any time soon, even though he was a coalminer’s son and an immensely successful and popular writer (and even had an interesting link to our project). He would of course be ‘OP’, or ‘out of our period’. But more importantly my friend and colleague Graham Joyce, who died on September 9th aged 59, loudly disdained what he saw as the pretentiousness and self-absorption of poets, and indeed art writers of all sorts.