Meeting in the Middle: An Encounter

Heathcote Williams was a controversial poet and dramatist who embraced libertarian and environmental causes. Although a revolutionary character, he had a deep love of traditional English poetry in all its aspects. To advance his attack on militarism, big commerce, ecological crime, he devised a unique form of documentary poetry, in which he would pile up evidence of governmental and commercial guilt and acts of injustice. Among the best-known of these polemical works was Whale Nation, 1988, which proved hugely influential in the cause of wildlife preservation. His poetry was a hard-hitting blend of anger and compassion which impressed me millions of other people. He seemed to have found a new approach to poetry that was firmly anchored in the real world, and yet which made clear references back to historical poets such as Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth and Whitman. My own poetry was completely different: subjective, lyrical, romantic , innocent – all those qualities which can engender a poetry of escapism. Yet strangely enough, Williams admired my work, just as I admired his, in spite of all the surface differences between them. In 2016 we produced this joint selection of our shorter poems, to which are added credal statements about our work. The consensus that we reached was we agreed in our diagnosis about the sickness of modern society, but we each chose our own means to articulate it; hence the title, Meeting in the Middle. We had both acquired the habit of illustrating our poetry with images that brought out the themes which we were dealing with. 100 pages Illustrated £8.00