Adrian Mitchell: Poet and playwright whose work was driven by his pacifist politics

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people" may well be the most widely quoted observation of the last half-century regarding poetry in Britain. It was Adrian Mitchell's preface to Poems (1964), his first major collection. By the time of Mitchell's death last weekend, more Brits were relishing masses more poetry, because so much more poetry has got involved with so many more people.

This has happened in huge measure due to the non-stop commitment of Mitchell himself to reversing the situation he found so demoralising at the outset of his vocational path. His ground-breaking work as a political and performance poet, songwriter and playwright dedicated to the creative potential of all children and adults will live just as surely, and for just as long, as that of the forebears and contemporaries whose examples he frequently drew on. These include Shakespeare, Burns, Whitman, Lear, Carroll, Owen, Auden, Brecht, Beckett, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Littlewood, Lennon and McCartney, the (black) blues greats, and above all William Blake.

Mitchell's mother Kathleen was a Fabian socialist nursery school teacher who "encouraged me to argue", having lost two of her brothers in the First World War. In "My Father's Hand", Adrian recalls how his father Jock, a research chemist, had also suffered the desolation of the trenches, "Sent, by the King, to hell in a kilt". Many of Mitchell's poems, songs and plays explore and illuminate the extremes of innocence and experience in childhood, etching, shading and colouring in the lines between his own and those of others.

He was badly bullied every day at a prep school in Somerset during the Second World War, and was still pretty traumatised remembering it 65 years later: "I went home one day and said, 'I am not going back, I'd rather be dead'. My mother said, 'Is it the maths?' I said, 'No, it's the torture'. I was getting death threats, and told her what had been happening but not everything, because when you are a victim you feel ashamed". Hence his lifelong non-violent opposition to violence, and poems like "My Mother and Father or Why I Began to Hate War" and "Back in the Playground Blues" ("Heard a deep voice talking, it had that iceberg sound: / It prepares them for Life but I have never found/Any place in my life that's worse than the killing ground.")

After National Service in the RAF, which reinforced his pacifism, and Oxford, where he edited Isis magazine, Mitchell worked as a journalist from 1955 to the mid-1960s, since when his freelance writing and performances went from strength to strength. He wrote four novels If You See Me Comin' (1962), The Bodyguard (1970), Wartime (1973) and Man Friday (1975) some 50 volumes of poetry, and around twice that number of plays and adaptations for stage and TV. In the early 1960s he befriended the actor Celia Hewitt, who soon became the prime personal mover of his remaining 47 years. His collaborations on Peter Brook's multimedic Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Marat/Sade (1964) and US (1966), were seminal both for his subsequent theatrical efflorescence, and for the further evolution of radical-cultural activism worldwide.

US exposed the way sex gets converted into racist carnage by the war machine: witness this chorus from one of Mitchell's lyrics: "I had a dream about going / With Ho Chi Minh/But I'll only be crowing / When I'm zapping Pekin / I'll be spreading my jelly / With a happy song/Cos I'm screwing all Asia / When I'm zapping the Cong". The show was a clear case of grassroots agit-prop that worked. Mitchell observed how "People with short memories wonder why British artists ever imagined they could have any influence on the Vietnam war. At that time there was pressure from the US as well as from intellectuals like Amis and Levin for British troops to be sent to fight alongside the Americans. If the British anti-war movement did nothing else, it squashed that one flat."

Of his more than 30 works for the theatre, Pied Piper ran for three years at the National Theatre, while his adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a much-loved production at the RSC. Another successful adaptation was Gogol's The Government Inspector at the National, and he also wrote songs for Peter Hall's version of Orwell's Animal Farm.

Along with his friends Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, Christopher Logue and the Liverpool poets, and the transatlantic beats and rockers, Mitchell functioned as arch-forerunner and pace-setter to the restoration of voice, body, music and heart to verse in our time.

One of his most constantly resonant moments will probably remain his cathartic renditions at the first Poetry Internationale at Royal Albert Hall in 1965, some of whose highlights were captured for posterity in Peter Whitehead's film Wholly Communion. Adrian's spot was shorter than any of the 18 others that evening, but (with the possible exception of Ernst Jandl's sound-poems and Ginsberg's finale) elicited the most concerted fellow feeling from around 7,500 auditors. One of his poems, "You Get Used To It" was an implacable cry against murderous racism "in hell or Alabama". The other, "To Whom It May Concern", with its nursery-rhymey counting-out refrain, was to become an anthem for the continuing "Stop the War" movements: "You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out, / You take the human being and you twist it all about / So scrub my skin with women / Chain my tongue with whisky / Stuff my nose with garlic / Coat my eyes with butter / Fill my ears with silver / Stick my legs with plaster / Tell me lies about Vietnam."

It was a classic demonstration of the then new voices' reinvention, as Mitchell put it, of poetry as what "We do together" meaning with our fellow poets and, equally, our diverse audiences. He was probably the British poet I most often featured in the thousands of Live New Departures, Jazz Poetry SuperJam and Poetry Olympics gigs between 1959 and this year, and it came naturally to publish his texts in nearly every issue of my New Departures series and give him pride of place amid the 64 younger bards I anthologised in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969).

He was characteristically prescient in an interview quoted in the "Afterwords" to that book, railing against British military conscription because our boys are "going to have to fight a white man's war, which is what this whole [Vietnam] thing is. And it's leading up to a global white man's war, eventually maybe 20, 30 years away if we're lucky."

Again, his adaptation of Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (1989) set out to raise the still all too fatally under-examined problem that "When people's backs are rubbished against the wall, some of them are going to take up arms; when children are being starved or murdered, wives being raped, husbands jailed and tortured for speaking out, they're liable not only to kill in turn, but can get infected and enjoy nothing better than taking the most bloodthirsty revenge."

At a 1967 "Legalise Pot" rally in Hyde Park he read a poetic oration (also quoted in Children of Albion) of a kind he was to develop more and more charismatically, inflected like his musical stage play Tyger (1971) and TV play Glad Day (1979) with his signature neo-Blakean cadences: "These flowers are for love. / Good. That seems to be what we're alive for. / But is it a vague gas of love which evaporates before it touches another human being / Or is it a love that works? / A love so strong that it can free / A prisoner in Spain or Russia? / A love so bright that it can illuminate forever / The hideous darkness of the African sky? / A love so loud that it can shout BE FREE / To the imprisoned states of South America? . . . Or is it so small a love / That it has no more chance of changing the world / Than a poppy seed planted under the concrete floor / Of a nuclear power station? // It must become a love huge enough / To tear down all the offices / Where poverty, hunger, imprisonment and war are planned. / It must become a love intelligent and vast enough / To build Jerusalem, a million Jerusalems, / A world more loving / Than our most astonishing visions."

His Love Songs of World War Three (1989) synthesise poetry, drama, song and political protest at as high a level as that of any comparable collection I have read. He sees the Third World War as having begun in August 1945 with the gratuitous atom-bomb demolitions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Harry Truman knew full well that Japan had been suing for surrender months before. Admittedly many of the lyrics make such volumes resemble hymn books, only fully fulfilled when they are heard and chanted, as his Little Richard update exemplifies: "You so draggy Ms Maggie / You tore this land apart / With your smile like a laser / And your iceberg heart / You taught the old and jobless / What poverty means / You sent the young men killing Irish and Argentines." But, as in every one of his books, there are gentler and more multiply communicative pieces, such as "For My Son", that reward many silent readings, too.

With hard-won but unfailing stamina, Adrian was giving himself to audiences at each event with ever greater intensity the older he got. And he also got more and more turned on and delighted by turning on and delighting children in particular into both writing and performing verse, songs and drama their own as well as their elders', though not necessarily betters. I know of no other author (though perhaps some will now be considering it?) who forbade any use of any of their writings to be included in any way in examinations or tests: "I think that tests and exams dominate education and squash it. They're an educational experiment that has failed dismally".

Mitchell frequently celebrated his blood family as well as his extended ones, affirming his sense of kinship with nature and all sentient beings in poem after poem: "Long live the Elephants and Sea Horses / the Humming-Birds and the Gorillas / the Dogs and the Cats and Field-Mice / all the surviving Animals / our innocent sisters and brothers // Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking // we have done enough killing // Long live the Man / Long live the Woman / Who use both courage and compassion / Long live their Children".

Adrian Mitchell wrote his last poem, "My Literary Career So Far", the day before he died, and it will cheer up anyone who visits his publisher's website, bloodaxebooks.com it was intended as a Christmas gift for all the friends, family and animals he loved, and was post-scripted "Merry Crambo and a Hippy New Year with love (I can't write letters and it's hard to phone as I recover from two months in Pneumonia, so take this new riff with a glass of good wine and drink to Peace in 2009)".

Three more books will be published next year: his final collection of poems, Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005-2008; his collected poems for children Umpteen Poems; and Shapeshifters, his versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

May his soul rest in the infinite peace he spent so much expensive energy spreading around. May his many works go on forever strengthening the resolve and achievements of those who, in Blake's words, work continuously for the rebirth of wonder and the enduring transcendence of Mental over Corporeal War.

Michael Horovitz

Adrian Mitchell, poet, novelist, playwright, songwriter and journalist: born London 24 October 1932; married firstly Daphne Bush (two sons, one daughter), secondly Celia Hewitt (two daughters); died London 20 December 2008.

Obituaries

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008)

ADRIAN Mitchell, who died on 20 December 2008, was very well known in left-wing circles in this country and no doubt further afield as a poet, playwright, librettist, novelist and, as Mike Kustow put it in his obituary for the Guardian, performer. (See http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec21/adrian-mitchell-obituary.) (Anyone who ever saw Ade on stage, as I did at least once, will know how apt that word is as a description of his skill as a communicator.)

There is no point in attempting to give readers of this journal a comprehensive outline of Adrian Mitchells life, apart from a short resum. This appreciation will concentrate on the poetry instead, since this is the side of his work that I know best and which helped me in my own efforts to write. What he did was to set an example of how it is possible to state a contemporary political message in a memorable way without preaching or condescension and with lavish helpings of humour. Hopefully the poems discussed here will show this.

Born in north London, near Hampstead Heath, Adrian Mitchell was the son of Jock Mitchell, a research chemist from Cupar in Fife, and Kathleen Fabian, who was a Frobel-trained nursery school teacher. He successively attended two primary schools, at the second of which his first play, The Animals Brains Trust, was staged. (He was nine years old then.) After boarding school and national service (in those days compulsory on leaving school) in the RAF, he studied English at Oxford, where he was chair of the university poetry society and literary editor of Isis magazine. After graduating he worked as a reporter for the Oxford Mail and later the Evening Standard until a small legacy from his mother enabled him to become a freelance writer. It was at this point that he wrote his first novel, If You See Me Comin, and a first television play, plus articles on pop music he was, it appears, the first to publish an interview with The Beatles and TV for the contemporary press, before quitting journalism in the mid-1960s for a career as (in his own words) free-falling poet, playwright and writer of stories, establishing a reputation for satire whose works became in a measure part of the folklore of the left (in the words of one notable obituary). The best popular poets are remembered not just for what in time become favourite pieces but for certain small observations (obiter dicta) or circumstances which stand out. Just as Spike Milligan will be remembered for a long time for instructing that his tombstone should bear the words, I told you I was ill, Adrian Mitchell deserves recognition for such statements as Most people ignore most poetry, because most poetry ignores most people (from his first volume, Poems, Jonathan Cape, 1964), his response to a commission asking for a poem about Prince Charles and his special relationship (as Prince of Wales) with the people of Wales, which elicited a message for the Prince which ran Royalty is a neurosis. Get well soon., his nomination by Red Pepper magazine as Shadow Poet Laureate in 2002, and his repeated stipulation that none of his writings should be used in connection with any examination whatsoever. The story goes that on one occasion he discovered one of his poems being used in a GCSE exam, and wrote agreeing to overlook the breach of principle provided the examiners let him sit the exam himself incognito they did and he failed it.

It is best to let the man tell his story in his own words. In the introduction to the volume Love Songs of World War Three (Allison & Busby, 1989), Adrian Mitchell says:

I was born on 24 October 1932, so I was a kid during World War Two. I believe that World War Three began in 1945 when we [the forces of Allied imperialism] dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That war has been continuing ever since, in Malaysia, Aden, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Czechoslovakia, Cyprus, Kenya, Suez, Hungary, Israel [Palestine], Nicaragua and so on. The hope must be that it wont escalate. So all my songs have been written in wartime and they probably reflect it. And they are love songs because the main motive for writing them is love the love of words, the love of listening to songs, the love of my family and friends for whom I write the songs and love for this poor planet and its living inhabitants, human and otherwise.

He goes on to explain (inter alia) his being drawn to the theatre:

I became committed to the idea of plays with songs, as opposed to musicals. I didnt want enormous budgets and compulsory meaningless chorus lines. I didnt want songs designed for the hit parade rather than for dramatic effect, songs which had to be endlessly plugged in the show. What I wanted was O What A Lovely War [Joan Littlewoods piece about World War One], Behans The Hostage, Alan Platers Close the Coalhouse Door, John McGraths The Fish In The Sea and Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle. What I wanted was the kind of music theatre which Alan Dosser created at the Liverpool Everyman and Richard Eyre at Nottingham Playhouse, both directors in the Littlewood tradition. Eventually I worked with both of them.

A quick glance at Poems shows that Ade could make a parade of literary allusions as well as any accomplished university-educated wit, but could also contrive to be both exuberant and funny. This comes across in Dogs:

Dogs thurber through the whitman grass

On wild shakespearean excursions.

They have no waugh or corneille class

In their lawrence sterne diversions.

They sniff blake blooms and patchen weeds,

They have no time for strindberg doom,

Or walks on firm jane austen leads,

Formal pope gardens or the baudelaire room

As for donne love, while going it,

They lawrence without knowing it.

This shows him already trying to break loose from a literary strait-jacket. Still, it labours under the disadvantage that full appreciation of the poem is dependent on knowledge of the writers concerned. But Adrian Mitchell succeeded in making good his escape, as can be seen from a short poem issuing from that crucially important year 1956, the year of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt at Suez and the suppression of the Hungarian workers uprising:

Remember Suez?England, unlike junior nations,

Wears officers long combinations.

So no embarrassment was felt

By the Church, the Government or the Crown.

But I saw the Thames like a grubby old belt

And Englands trousers falling down.

From Hungary and Suez in 1956 it was but a short step to the emergence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the beginning of the 1960s, and a further step in Adrian Mitchells poetical and political progress. Plenty of people will no doubt quarrel with his political stance in the poem that, for me, exemplifies this, but I challenge anybody to question the effectiveness of poetical technique used here in condemnation of the use of nuclear weapons in support of any cause:

Order me a Transparent Coffin and Dig My Crazy GraveAfter the next war & and the sky

Heaves with contaminated rain.

End to end our bodies lie

Round the world and back again.

Now from their concrete suites below

Statesmen demurely emanate,

And down the lines of millions go

To see the people lie in state.

Nikita Ikes,1 Franco de Gaulles

Officiate and dig the holes,

With Mao tse-Sheks, Macadenauers2Toting artificial flowers.

As they pay tribute each one wishes

The rain was less like tears, less hot, less thick.

They mutter, wise as blind white fishes,

Occasionally they are sick.

But I drily grin from my Perspex coffin

As they trudge till they melt into the wet

And I say: Keep on walking, keep on walking,

You bastards, youve got a hell of a way to walk yet.

Hardly surprisingly, Mitchells verse took a distinct anti-capitalist direction around this time, which was when I first came across it and took heart from it. Strong influence coming from the German poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) can be seen in many of Ades poems the same dry humour, the same love of Anglo-American mass culture (jazz, blues, razzmatazz), satirical sharpness and an elementary anti-authoritarian anarchism, plus a great love of song and theatre. Readers, as witness hereto, still from the 1964 book, I give you:

Time and Motion StudySlow down the film. You see that bit.

Seven days old and no work done.

Two hands clutching nothing but air,

Two legs kicking nothing but air.

That yell. Theres wasted energy there.

No use to himself, no good to the firm.

Make a note of that.

New film. Now look, now hes fourteen.

Work out the energy required

To make him grow that tall.

It could have been used,

It could all have been used

For the good of the firm and he could have stayed small.

Make a note of that.

Age thirty. And the waste continues.

Using his legs for walking. Tiring.

His mouth with talking and eating. Twitching.

Slow it down. Reproducing? I see.

All, I suppose, for the good of the firm.

But hed better change methods. Yes, hed better.

Look at the waste of time and emotion,

Look at the waste. Look. Look.

And make a note of that.

A nice reductio ad absurdum.

From CND and labour movement politics of the early 1960s it was but another short step to the conflict between US forces and the Stalinist-led national liberation movement in Vietnam, a conflict that showed that US imperialism could, after all, be defeated, but only at enormous cost. Awareness of the total cost came later, but at the time virtually the whole UK left came out against the US operation, with its use of defoliant agents to destroy forests and its pounding of cities, such as Ben Tre, where the military comment was: We had to destroy the city in order to save it. Adrian Mitchell caught the prevailing mood with a poem entitled To Whom It May Concern, also known from its refrain: Tell me lies about Vietnam. The opening verse goes:

I was run over by the truth one day.

Ever since the accident Ive walked this way

So stick my legs in plaster

Tell me lies about Vietnam.

One by one the poets senses are disabled in an ironic hospitalisation process ostensibly welcomed but in fact condemned by him. The finale summarises the whole experience of the war:

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,

You take the human being and you twist it all about

So scrub my skin with women

Chain my tongue with whisky

Stuff my nose with garlic

Coat my eyes with butter

Fill my ears with silver

Stick my legs in plaster

Tell me lies about Vietnam.

(Readers may note a parallel here with Edgell Rickwords poem on the Spanish Civil War entitled To the Wife of Any Non-Intervention Statesman.)

The Scots Anarchist Tom McGrath made a pertinent comment on the aforesaid poem, asking (and answering) two questions:

What lies about Vietnam?

The dead lie about Vietnam.

Who died in Vietnam?

Liars.

Such a judgement may seem excessively harsh on the actual combatants, but McGraths point, just in case you dont get it, was that US free-world dogma and Stalinism are both fallacy-ridden. Many of us agreed with that at the time, and still do, but we supported those Vietnamese fighting the American invading forces because we thought the Vietnamese should have the right to independence from external control. (The irony, of course, is that the subsequent economic power of world imperialism showed that the US could easily have cut its losses and accepted a supposedly communist Vietnam at some time in the second half of the 1960s without incurring ruinous domino effects via the loss of control of Laos, Kampuchea or even maybe Thailand that were touted at the time.)

The anarcho-hilarious aspect of Adrian Mitchells personality comes over in what Robert Burns would have called an epistle to fellow-poet Adrian Henri (written following Yuletide festivities and printed in the collection For Beauty Douglas, which publishers Allison & Busby brought out in 1982. The Beauty Douglas of the dedication was a black South African child buried in the childrens graveyard at Dimbaza. Dimbaza under Apartheid was a black native reserve area, one of the Bantustans where many children died of malnutrition a third of them by the age of two. A film, Last Grave at Dimbaza, featured the graveyard in which rattles, feeding bottles and necklaces are left on the babies graves. There are hundreds of graves. The inscription painted in white on one rough, dark wooden cross reads:

BEAUTY DOUGLAS WAS BORN 7.12.68

SHE DIE 19.1.69

The subject of Mitchells letter is sex. The piece is written following a morning-after festive haze, and Ade confesses:

I never had it

Halfway up a pylon

Never had it

Under the stage during a performance of Ibsens

An Enemy of the PeopleNever had it

In the Whispering Gallery at St Pauls

Never had it

Up against a parking meter

But where it doesnt matter

When it doesnt count

All you got to total

Is the total amount

Theyre doing it for peace

Doing it for war

Theres only one good reason

For doing it for.

Chorus:

Fuck for fun (Fuck fuck, fuck for fun)

Fuck for fun (Fuck fuck, fuck for fun)

Fuck for fun (Fuck fuck, fuck for fun)

Everybody want to (boom boom)

Fuck for fun.

It is important to understand the historical context of all this: after decades of pretty strait-laced Puritanism the UK experienced (partly as a result of the long boom of 1945-65) a sudden flowering of sexual freedom well pin-pointed by Philip Larkins poem Annus Mirabilis. Further, as I read the epistle, it does not advocate unabashed lust. Clearly Adrian Mitchell was a devoted family man, living with his partner Celia Hewitt for 47 years, and being survived by two sons, three daughters and nine grandchildren. Ade understood better than a lot of people that humans need love just as much as sex, if not more so. (Interestingly, as I write this, the 15 May 2009 issue of the Guardian carries a report that a Franciscan monk in Poland has written a manual for Catholics encouraging sexual passion within marriage: apparently this book has been dubbed the Catholic Kama Sutra and is selling very well in Poland.)

A comparison inevitably arises between Adrian Mitchell and his contemporary and friend Christopher Logue, another left-wing poet of altogether more serious cast of mind. If I were to give a prize for the best socialist poem written in England prior to the appearance of Billy Braggs song Between the Wars, it would be for Logues Know Thy Enemy (for which see The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, edited by Alan Bold and published by Penguin in 1970). Know Thy Enemy is an almost perfect piece of prose-poetical advice, which, speaking of the person whom Marx called Monsieur le Capital, warns that:

Sooner than lose the things he owns

He will destroy the world.

I have only one point of criticism: where Logue gives the slogan Smash Capital Now! he should have written Act to smash capital now! (Capital certainly cannot be destroyed at one blow, even with the necessary forces at our disposal.)

Logue we can respect, but Adrian Mitchell elicited our love in his writing and in his performances. Mike Kustow quotes the late poem My Literary Career So Far in his obituary: I make bold to reproduce it here:

My Literary Career So FarAs I prowled through Parentheses

I met an Robin and a Owl

My Grammarboots they thrilled

Like bees

My Vowelhat did gladly growl

Tis my delight each Friedegg Night

To chomp a Verbal Sandwich

Scots Consonants light up my Pants

And marinade my Heart in Language

Alphabet Soup was all my joy!

From Dreadfast up to Winnertime

I swam, a naked Pushkinboy

Up vodka vaterfalls of rhyme

And reached the summit of Blue Howl

To find a shining Suit of Words

And joined an Robin and a Owl

In good Duke Ellingtons Band of Birds.

And Adrian Mitchell had his own prophetic insight, given in a poem included in the volume Penguin Modern Poets 22: John Fuller, Peter Levi, Adrian Mitchell, which appeared in 1973. I have not had time to check, but it would seem likely that it was first published in Mitchells collection Ride The Nightmare in 1971. This poem has a chorus running:

Ride the nightmare

Jump upon its hairy back

Ride the nightmare

Ride until your mind goes black

Its the Twenty-First Century Werewolf

And its coming this way.

It looks very much as if, what with the credit crunch, the world-wide recession and the ecological crisis facing us, that this nightmare has well and truly arrived. Hold tight, comrades, and bite the monster in the best Mitchell manner.

Chris GrayNotes1. That is, KhrushchevEisenhowers.

2. That is, Mao Tse-tungChiang Kai-sheks, combinations of Harold Macmillan and Konrad Adenauer

Chris Gray is a member of the Highgate Poets, and has had poems published in their magazine Kites, as well as in Peace News and by the Brixton Poets.

What is the relationship between your speaking voice and your writing voice?I'd like the voice in which I speak poems to people to certainly be my own voice. I don't want to turn it into a solemn poetry voice, which I detest. I hate that kind of pompous, serious, "This is poetry so listen" voice. Can't do it. I hate it. I want it to be real. And I want it to use my own rhythms, my own speech rhythms, but I intensify them for poetry, and what I'm aiming at is somewhere in between speaking and singing. That's what I'm going for when I'm doing poems out loud. Sometimes I use my own voice, sometimes I use voices of other people - people I've met, enemies, friends, famous people - different styles, like I do some Country and Western poems sometimes, and I have to do an accent for that, and I've got a Scottish poem that I do, using my father's Scottish accent as far as possible, and I get away with it in Scotland. So, you know, it varies, I like to vary it. When I'm doing a poetry reading it's a variety show: I like to have a sad poem and then a serious poem and then a funny poem and then an angry poem. I like a patchwork quilt of different moods and different kinds of poems, so, yeah, different voices for different poems.

What do you think should be the relationship between a poet and the society he or she lives in?I used to dream about the bomb and I sometimes still dream about the bomb because the bomb hasn't gone away to fairy-land - it's still above our heads. So I react to these things. And I react to the fact that we've got an incredible number of poor people in this country, and throughout the world there are an awful lot of poor people, and there's a war between the rich and poor people, and so I take notice of these things. I try to write about everything. I write about nature, I write about dogs, I write about high art, I write about low art, I write about the people I love especially, and I write about politics and war, and peace. Peace most of all. But I can't tell anyone else what to do, and I wouldn't want to. Poetry is a free country, a really free country: you've never been in such a free country. And there's room for everybody. Well, just about, I mean I'd kick you out if I thought you were a racist. Or a fascist. Or you were trying to tell me what to write. No, don't let's do that to each other. When people ask me "can I do this in a poem?" I say "yes". I spend a lot of my time saying "yes". When I work with children, they say "Can I write about my dog?", "Can I write about my football team?" Yes. Yes yes yes yes. So I like to say yes. My poetry likes to say yes. And I'm sorry so much of my poetry says no, but so much of the world is poisoned and painful and dangerous, so I say no as well as yes.

Do you think poetry ignores more or fewer people now than when you first started writing?Way back, I said and wrote, "Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people." And at that time I'm sure it was true in England: published poetry was very much the prerogative of male, middle class, university-educated poets. Now there have always been a lot of poets who are none of these things, but they weren't getting a shake, they weren't getting the exposure, they weren't getting their books published. Well, luckily, Michael Horovitz came along in 1959 and ran a magazine called New Departures, and then started a sort of circus for poets to go round performing, called Live New Departures, and that led to a huge explosion of poetry readings in this country. There were very few when I was young: there were about ten poetry readings in Britain a year. And now there are thousands. And this has led to an expansion of poetry in all senses - I mean we have all kinds of poets being published, and some of them are intellectual and academic, but not all of them by any means, and that's right because the days when only very difficult poetry could be published are gone, are gone for good, and now we know that a poet can be quite clear in what he or she is saying or they can be very complicated and it doesn't matter if the poetry's good. As long as the poetry's good. As long as the poetry's good there's room for everyone - there's room for all good poets, whatever kind - whatever belief, whatever colour, whatever sexual preference, whatever - you know. There's room for everyone.

What advice was most helpful to you when you began to write?I think it was Allen Ginsberg on New Year's Day, 1964, in New York City, and it was the morning, and I'd been asked to do a reading in a New York coffee house at about ten o'clock in the morning. New Year's Day, hey - who's going to turn out? Well, a couple of English friends turned out, and about six Americans, who included Allen Ginsberg, and his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. And Allen was very kind. He stayed, he listened, and at the end he said "Well, I think a lot of your poems are very uptight because you're writing in such strict form and things like that. It doesn't seem natural. But I think you should listen to the way you talk and take those rhythms and use them. You've got to listen to those rhythms in your own voice and use them to drive the poem along, use them to find out how long the lines of your poem ought be, and so on. And there's this poem you've done about your mother, which is in free verse, and I like it better than any of the others." And I said, "Well, it's not finished." And he said "Well, no, but, maybe it is!" And, yeah, Allen was very understanding, was a very understanding poet. He was a great poet, and he helped a lot of people. So that was the best advice I had.

Do you write with a specific audience in mind?When I'm writing, I quite often beat out the rhythm or walk around trying to get the right rhythm on the poem, and so I do think about the audience a bit. Sometimes I write a poem specifically for somebody, and sometimes I name them, sometimes I just think "Hey, would Albert understand this, or would Celia like this bit, would it make them laugh?" With plays, of course, it's even more: when I'm writing a play for children, I think about my grandchildren and I think "Would Lola understand this? What would Lola like in this play? She likes ponies very much: maybe I could get a pony in this play..." And so it's very good, I think, to write for a particular person, to have that person at the back of your mind - not necessarily when you're writing your first draft but when you're thinking about your first draft and rewriting and thinking "Would this work for this person?" Because all the great children's writers, for instance, wrote for particular children -Lewis Carroll wrote for Alice, the real-life Alice, Edward Lear wrote for the children of his friends, Beatrix Potter wrote for specific children that she knew. And that's a good guide, I think: you don't write for children in general because it doesn't work, there aren't any children in general. You don't write for adults in general, you write for your friends. Or your enemies, if you like. Write with somebody in mind, maybe. Or re-write with somebody in mind. Because poetry is a gift, so the only point is to give it. I mean, just writing for yourself, well it may satisfy you, but it's no use to me or anyone else. Poetry is a gift so give it with open hands.