THE LIVERPOOL POETS

Even though there were still quite a number of other poets writing and performing in Liverpool, publication of the Penguin anthology in 1967 meant that Patten, McGough and Henri inevitably became the Liverpool Poets from then on.

The label has perhaps brought rather more disadvantages than advantages over the years. The city has become – through the Beatles – almost inextricably linked in the national (and even international) consciousness with the 1960s, a decade which itself comes complete with a standard set of related – and very superficial – images of flower power, drug culture, ‘free love’ and so on. As an initial label of place, therefore, ‘Liverpool’ has had the effect by association of also anchoring the poets both to a particular time and to an assumed set of values. Interestingly, apart from the odd reference to ‘getting stoned on milk’ (‘Schoolboy’ in Little Johnny's Confession / Grinning Jack) and the occasional unwise foray into psychedelic musings (such as ‘Old Crock’ in Notes to the Hurrying Man / Grinning Jack), the poetry Patten wrote in the 1960s is considerably less locked into that culture than is generally assumed. ‘Little Johnny Takes a Trip to Another Planet’, for example, in Little Johnny's Confession / Grinning Jack, is almost universally taken to refer to an LSD hallucination – a reading that the poet insists is incorrect:

Similarly, the poem ‘Through the Tall Grass In Your Head’ in Notes to the Hurrying Man / Grinning Jack has a hippie-sounding title, but is in fact a poem about Patten's grandfather.

If it is potentially misleading to approach even the poetry Patten originally wrote in the 1960s with too many preconceptions based on general assumptions about the era, it is clearly even less productive to approach his later poetry from this perspective. In that respect, therefore, the ‘Liverpool’ tag has become something of a millstone.