Robert Shaw (poet)

Life

Born in Coventry, he grew up in Wyken, a suburb dominated by Morris Motors, where his father was a machine-setter. (The district was often a target in the Coventry Blitz of 1940–41.) At King Henry VIII School, he responded to the maverick style of headmaster A. A. C. Burton, but not to his conventional successor, H.Walker. He trained as a reporter on The Coventry Standard, under the painstakingly prosaic editorship of Edgar Letts, who was prone to ask of Shaw's copy, "Is this true?". He then studied at The University of Leeds, supplementing his grant with work as a correspondent for the Manchester office of Melody Maker and as a freelance for the Yorkshire Evening Post. His honours degree included a "first" in English Literature. (Among his tutors was the much admired scholar G. Wilson Knight,whose tutorial speculations tended to centre on his spiritualist experiences. Another focus of literary interest was the Professor of English, Bonamy Dobree, regarded by many literary critics as the original of Professor Welch in Lucky Jim.) Shaw's two years as a conscript in the Army included periods at the Joint Services School for Linguists run by the Services' Intelligence arm, and, briefly, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, on posting from which he reverted to private. His final year's service - at the Cavalry Barracks, York - was marked by offences "against military order and good discipline". For some years he then taught English in schools and adult education for the Workers' Educational Association. From 1964 to 1968 he combined being Head of English and Sixth Form at the Leeds Modern School, with a part-time Tutorship at Leeds University and a Visiting Fellowship at The University of York. From 1968 to 1972 he was Lecturer at The University of Southampton. In 1972 he became a freelance, returning to Yorkshire, to the Pennine village of Haworth where his wife, the studio-potter Anne Shaw, had set up Haworth Pottery. He toured Britain, from the Isle of Wight to Pitlochry, giving "readings" of his poems, sometimes with jazz. Sponsors included W H Smith, The Arts Council of Great Britain, Boots UK, and The Department of Education. He also reviewed, wrote for television and radio, contributed literary criticism and edited The Yorkshire Review for the regional arts association. The magazine was reviewed by Robert Nye in The Times as "distinguished" with "an attractive catholicity". As editor he published many lesser known and previously unpublished writers as well as major figures like Stan Barstow, Barry Hines, Henry Livings, Norman MacCaig, James Kirkup and Douglas Dunn. (All contributors were paid.) His summary dismissal, without notice, followed his rejection of contributions from two members of the controlling Literature Panel. His numerous creative attachments included the USA's Northwest University, new towns, community projects and academic institutions. From 1992 to 2011 his creative energies were diverted again into playing jazz, spending long periods performing in France, Spain and the Irish Republic. (In the United Kingdom in this period he performed mainly a repertoire of jazz "standards " at arts centres and festivals as well as corporate venues like Thistle Hotels, Haven Holidays, and Pizza Express.)

Poetry – and Jazz

His first poems were published in periodicals while a student at Leeds. However, becoming heavily involved in the late fifties and early sixties, in anti-nuclear protest, with the Committee of 100 and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with his wife, Anne Shaw, a Civil Disobedience activist who illegally distributed the government's secret Spies for Peace document, he did not resume literary work again until 1965. His early work – Private Time, Public Time,1969, illustrated by Rigby Graham and published with the financial support of The Arts Council of Great Britain, Causes,1972, and Work in Progress, 1975, – was complex and cerebral, with considerable use of ambiguity -William Empson and Robert Lowell were influences, but The Wrath Valley Anthology, 1981, (taking its cue from The Epigrams of Martial and The Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters!)), with Grindley's Bairns, 1988, marked a more direct, colloquial, even "reductive" approach to irony . The Times Literary Supplement commented, "His wry humour produces a refreshing antidote to the bleak treatment that region (The Pennines) regularly provokes. He can include in his characteristic irony a sense of the predicament of suburban exile. His charmless eccentrics are treated with respect as well as irony." Despite interest from mainstream publishing houses, his major works (except Causes, from The Byron Press) continued to be published by Alan Tarling's Poet & Printer, a small publishing house with a distinguished, eclectic list that included Ted Hughes, Jonathan Williams, Christopher Logue, Peter Redgrove, and Iain Crichton Smith. In addition, smaller collections like Poems from Haworth, The Lead Age, and Masquerade appeared from fugitive private presses. Shaw also contributed poems to BBC radio and TV arts programmes and leading periodicals like Spectator, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Phoenix , Cambridge Review, Tribune (magazine) and The Scotsman. He compiled and edited, with a critical survey, the anthology of modern British poetry, Flash Point, 1964, and was himself anthologised in Brian Patten and Pat Krett's The House that Jack Built. Two of his poems – we are going to need poems and A North Country Lass Tells Her Sorrows – were designed as poster-poems by Rigby Graham and Roy Sandford. In 1981 the BBC commissioned a long poem. His reading of this was used as background to a BBC 2 television film about his work in its Pennine setting. His last published collection, in 2000, was Catullus: The Love-Hate Poems Translated by Robert Shaw, in free verse.

Shaw is also a journeyman jazz saxophonist, chiefly on tenor (with clarinet), sometimes alto and, unusually, c-melody. His approach to tone and harmony derived from the later, less influential style of Lester Young. (His teachers included Hotel Leofric bandleader and tenorman, Barry Phelps, whose virtuosity on the clarinet had been honed in the Central Band of the Royal Air Force, and "cool school" tenormen Pete Warner and Brian Gray, who originated in Coventry and seemed ever present in the touring "name" big bands of the fifties.) He had had a youthful, essential jazz education in the influential rehearsal big band of top trumpeter, Cyril Narbeth. It was then almost inevitable that he should experiment in combining poetry with jazz in public performance. However, Shaw's role in the poetry&jazz project - he was the only poet - was originator, director and poet, as well as performer of poems. He hired musicians, discussed the poems with them, and sketched the possible jazz responses but left the final musical detail to them. He wanted their improvisation, the defining characteristic of jazz, to interact with his "readings" in public performance. (This was in contrast to much contemporary fusion which used pre-arranged jazz "settings" for the poems.) He was not, though occasionally categorised as such, a "performance poet" in the modern narrow sense of creating "spontaneous" ditties. His poems were composed with an eye to dramatic projection of the words, to The Event, but equally they had to be able to work as poems. (The poems ranged from those influenced by jazz forms like the "blues" and the ballad to complex literary structures.) Similarly the jazz sought the harmonic order of jazz -it was not a "freak-out"! The poetry and the jazz had to fuse but at the same time retain their intrinsic identities – a sensitive balance. The jazzmen were drawn from leading modern jazz groups like those of Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth and Mike Westbrook and the British band of Maynard Ferguson. (Bassist Jeff Clyne, who played a number of engagements with the poetry&jazz touring outfit in 1974, was a member of the Stan Tracey Quartet which made the 1965 classic jazz album inspired by Under Milk Wood.) Shaw also brought into the limelight some jazzmen who were "local legends", like Bradford's "cool school" altoist, Joe Markey. A typical programme included straight jazz, poems on their own and, the major ingredient, poetry&jazz fusion. The package broadcast and played a variety of arts and jazz venues, touring Britain extensively from 1972 to 1983, as New Poetry&Jazz (in London, The South and Midlands) and Northern Poetry&Jazz (in The North and Scotland) attracting new followers to both forms. The most settled collaboration was the two years with the Dick Hawdon Quintet. A representative performance (which received three stars in The Virgin Encyclopedia of Jazz) can be heard on The Yorkshire Arts Association LP, Poetry&Jazz on Record – The Dick Hawden (sic) Quintet with Pete Morgan and Robert Shaw. (Pete Morgan was a guest on the recording.) During a brief revival of touring in the East Midlands 2000–2002 a recording was made of new material, a sequence of verse portraits by Shaw of great jazzmen set against a duo performance of a number associated with each. The duo consisted of Shaw on reeds and Angharad Griffiths on keyboard. A limited edition CD of this,Take a Jazz Journey, was sold at live venues. In the early 80's Leeds College of Music recorded an Electro-Acoustic Setting by Bill Charleson of 3 Poems by Robert Shaw. Subsequently it was used as part of a thesis presented at the University of York by Charleson.