IN THE SPRING of 1965, a 19-year-old poet by the name of Brian Patten joined a famed writer two decades his senior on a visit to Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. The legend goes that Allen Ginsberg and his much younger assocaite dropped acid and wandered around and wondered at the hallowed halls of that venerable Victorian institution.
This psychedelically-enhanced tour of the museum was part of an intense, near ecstatic, experience, over nearly a week’s stay by the Mersey, one that prompted Ginsberg to state that the city was ‘at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe’.
Liverpool, by this point in the mid-1960s, was, arguably, the most celebrated place on the planet with the Beatles, at the apex of their extraordinary global popularity, the principal reason for that international focus. But the city was also a remarkable hothouse of cultural activity beyond rock music: poetry and art and theatre, football, too, were also enjoying a thrilling renaissance.
Brian Patten, who has died aged 79, was a prodigious member of that vibrant world, rubbing shoulders with Lennon, McCartney and co but mainly associated with two other verse stars of this Merseyside firmament: Adrian Henri, also an established painter, and Roger McGough, a writer who would go on to become an unlikely pop singer on the UK charts.
Together and individually, the poetic trio would perform their wry, reflective, sometimes amusing, regularly romantic, stanzas live in the cafés and bars of the city and the rise must be linked to that post-war Zeitgeist in Liverpool where a richly diverse community – Irish, Catholic, Caribbean and Chinese – proved receptive to a new arts wave, rowdily and good-naturedly rejecting the notion that the only worthwhile work was produced in London.
Just as the Beatles took huge influence from America’s rock’n’roll – Little Richard, Buddy Holly – and R&B – the soul sounds of Detroit and Chicago – the Liverpool poets offered more than a nodding acquaintance to the radical poetic forces rallying in the mid-century USA, the Beat writers among them.
Henri, McGough, Patten and others enjoyed the vernacular informality, the interest in the everyday, that Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti demonstrated. But they wanted to replace the references to New York City or San Francisco with commentary on their own city, their own lives as they were truly lived, rather than fanciful simulations of existence in Manhattan or North Beach.
In 1967, their collection as a three-piece The Mersey Sound gathered the best of their material and the volume, in the Penguin Modern Poets series, became the bestselling poetry book ever in the UK. The fact that the title echoed the Merseybeat of the Fab Four and mentioned the sonic rather than the textual was not insignificant. This was touching and entertaining verse to be read on the page, yes, but it was principally penned to be performed and enjoyed in a live forum.
The musical connection, the musical metaphor, was quite speedily made flesh anyway. Henri formed the Liverpool Scene, a collective combining words, jazz and rock on record and on stage, while McGough combined with McCartnery’s brother Mike in a comic vocal act called the Scaffold, who quickly enjoyed national success.
Later, Henri would create GRIMMS, another performance group and Patten would, for a relatively short time, join that outfit himself. But the younger poet was more interested in writing and delivering his verse orally rather than marrying it to musical forms.
Patten, who had left school by the age of 15 – a contrasting experience to Henri, graduate of art college, and McGough with his university degree – was working as a reporter on a local newspaper the Bootle Times and contributing columns to the music mag Mersey Beat while producing his own poetry publication called Underdog. He sold it in Liverpool’s performing haunts and, in time, even included work by Ginsberg and Robert Creeley in its pages.
Youth – and he always seemed to be younger than his contemporary circle – was never a discouragement. His solo debut Little Johnny’s Confession fared well and, as the years went by, he published numerous well-received collections and toured regularly. He also became a successful children’s poet attracting new generations to his writing.
In 2006, I interviewed him for an article commissioned by Tate Liverpool as the gallery organised an exhibition called ‘Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde’. My essay focused on that visit Ginsberg had made to the city more than 40 years before, and the show’s name plainly drew on the oft-quoted phrase the US poet had shared back then.
In our chat, Patten remembered the narcotically-illuminated adventure in the Walker. ‘We both took a tab and spent hours and hours in {the gallery]. We saw it in a new light, in fact many different lights.’ Ginsberg, he added, ‘loved the excitement of the city, full of boy bands, sweaty, tiny stages It was paradise.’
He recalled Ginsberg as a figure of human scale rather than a poetic superstar. ‘He was genuinely accessible, nice man, friendly. Lots of people who were not interested in poetry found him quite fascinating, too.’
In some ways, his assessment of the American, vibrates in relation to Patten himself. Though the Liverpudlian was perhaps less gregarious, more melancholy and self-contained, than Ginsberg ever was, his adolescent energy, his quicksilver style, was the fuelling spirit that brought the Mersey Poets to full flame, a resonant link to Ginsberg and his tireless efforts he made on behalf of his Beat fraternity.
See also: Malcolm Paul’s R&BG conversation with the late poet can be found in these pages. Visit: ‘Interview #18: Brian Patten’, October 23rd, 2023
Met him at a poetry reading in 1968. He gave me his address. I wrote to him with questions about his influences and work practices and he replied with a full page typewritten letter which I ket in my copy of Little Johnny's Confession.