“Young Tom Pickard for years ran the Morden Tower readings in Newcastle, Great Britain, and from early 1960s on was chief friend, host & proponent of new-wave American poetics . . . I am an old admirer of his poetry and believe he’s one of the livest truest poets of Great Britain. Under guidance from his friend the elder Basil Bunting he’s writ poetry with condensation, sharp focus and local speech directness, in lineage joining William Carlos Williams and ‘Geordie’ lyric vernacular.” (Allen Ginsberg)
“His ear for rhythm is exceedingly delicate, his syntax strong and terse and his vocabulary free of fancy work. He seems able to select at will the detail which creates a whole scene or action” (Basil Bunting)
Tom Pickard, born in 1946, English poet (and also accomplished documentary filmmaker) remains ever the firebrand and iconoclast and pure lyricist, pure poet.
This, from the jacket of his 1971 book from City Lights:
“A working class dropout from Newcastle-on-Tyne, insisting to Dole authorities that his only “job” is Poetry, Pickard would seem to have written this wild “apprenticeship novel” on the run between bed and board. By turns ribald, caustic, tender, erotic, picaresque, it is his portrait of the young poet as a “flamin’ impudent layabout” born into the “class-trap” of coal-town Middle England.”
and this, from the jacket of 2014’s hoyoot- Collected Poems and Songs, published over forty years later:
Carcanet in 2016 released the collection, Winter Migrants. Read the title poem here
Hear Tom reading at Durham University in 2014 at the Annual Basil Bunting Memorial Reading
and from that same year (with August Kleinzahler, and Maureen McLane), “An Evening of Poetry and Conversation” (at Columbia University‘s Heyman Center)
from 2016 at the Cork International Poetry Festival (with Gerry Murphy)
from 2018 (with graduate-student Leo Dunsker) in the University of California, Berkeley’s Holloway series (Tom”s reading begins approximately twenty minutes in) (an earlier appearance in this series (with graduate-student Hillary Gravendyk – this time Tom appears approximately thirty-minutes in) can be found here)
Notable from 2013 – a presentation at a class in Princeton:
Audio at the University of Warwick – from ’81, a reading from Hero Dust, from ’71, reading from Guttersnipe, from ’75, reading and discussing his poem Dancing Under Fire
See also his reading with Allen and Peter Orlovsky here
Tom is also, it should be noted, a consummate documentarian
Jarrow March came out in 1982
Five years later the book and the film – We Make Ships
Writer-director-producer, his 1994 exploration of the work ethic – The Shadow and The Substance still holds true. That film can be viewed in its entirety here
and from the other side of the camera, Northumbrian Poet, here‘s a short film made about him, back in 1969
Interviews with Tom – “To Reach The Moon You Need A Rocket” – Here‘s a wonderful interview with Alex Niven from 2012
More recently, “No Need For Permission”, with Chris McCabe for Poetry London
Looking to the future – “I’m writing an autobiography Scribbly Jack: Confessions of a Geordie Dole Poet which will also include a load of conversations I recorded with Allen Ginsberg and other folk. A ‘scribbly jack’ is a Northumbrian name for a yellow hammer, but maybe I should call it The Book Of Jobless..”
from “What the Chairman Told Tom” by Basil Bunting – “Poetry? It’s a hobby/I run model trains/Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons/ It’s not work. You don’t sweat./ Nobody pays for it/You could advertise soap…”
