Leeds' poetic past

"Some trampled acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,
Stuck with strange-postured dead."

Geoffrey Hill's evocative poem "Funeral Music" imagines the fields of Towton, a few miles east of Leeds, on the bitter cold Palm Sunday of 1461 - the day of the bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil.

Work by the former Professor of English is among the Brotherton Library's extensive archives of manuscripts, correspondence and tape-recordings by poets working at the University. And now a major project is under way to bring these archives together and encourage more people to use them.

A pioneering "poets-in-residence" scheme began in the School of English in 1950 when printer and art-lover Eric Gregory made funds available for the establishment of fellowships in painting, sculpture, poetry and music. Between 1950 and 1980, twelve writers held the position of poet in residence - the first such position in any British university. They include respected poets such as Thomas Blackburn, Wayne Brown, John Heath-Stubbs, James Kirkup, Peter Redgrove and Jon Silkin.

During the same period, other noted names like Geoffrey Hill, Vernon Scannell and Tony Harrison were also lecturers or students here, contributing to a fertile breeding ground within the School of English and a vibrant culture of writing which some have even suggested constituted a "Leeds School" of poetry. Through post-war austerity and Cold War anxiety these were the angry young men of verse.

All of them left a wealth of material in the Brotherton's Special Collections, but its value as a research resource has always been sadly limited. Records were held in different formats, to different standards and at differing levels of detail - and some material was completely unrecorded.

The Leeds Poetry Project, funded by a £140,000 Resource Enhancement grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council is providing a detailed electronic catalogue of the work, standardizing records, cross-referencing between different pieces and making the whole archive far more readily accessible.

The project is led by Professor Edward Larrissy of the School of English and Dr Oliver Pickering of the library, aided by archivists Kathryn Jenner and Stephanie Nield. They are mining a rich and varied archive - from Redgrove's detailed notebooks which chronicle the gradual gestation of a new poem, through dusty reel-to-reel tapes of the poets reading their work, to lengthy videotaped interviews with Silkin.

Silkin was a significant figure, not least because he founded Stand magazine which provided a showcase for poetry, prose and criticism. Early issues of Stand also feature in the archive - and the magazine continues to this day, published quarterly and based in the School of English at Leeds.

Much of the work places the poets firmly in a Yorkshire context. Kirkup's work "A Correct Compassion" describes open heart surgery being performed at Leeds General Infirmary, while in "Them & [uz]", Tony Harrison talks of being taught literature at the city's grammar school where his accent was the subject of a teacher's ridicule:

'Can't have our glorious heritage done to death!'
I played the drunken porter in Macbeth.
'Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!'

Harrison, who studied Classics at Leeds, also famously wrote the poem "v" in which he encounters a foul-mouthed skinhead in the Beeston graveyard where his own parents are buried. Harrison imagines himself buried there and surveying "the ground where Leeds United play, but disappoint their fans week after week".

The website will act as a research tool, offering clips, visuals, and snatches of poetry in addition to a detailed index of the entire collection. "Put simply, it's about telling people what we have - with indexes of names and subjects," said Kathryn. But it is the electronic archive's capacity for cross-referencing between related material that will make it a particularly valuable resource.

"It will be particularly good for interpretive work," said Professor Larrissy. "If someone wanted to write a history of 20th century Yorkshire poetry, for example, or of regional literary groups in general, this will be incredibly useful, and the access so much easier."

Work started on the project last year, and it is due to be completed next September. It is even hoped its success could lead to further work elsewhere in special collections. "We have particularly strong 20th century literary holdings," explained Dr Pickering. "This is definitely something we could look to develop in the future."

Main photo: (from left) Professor Ed Larrissy, Dr Oliver Pickering, Kathryn Jenner and Stephanie Nield