Lawrence Upton

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Lawrence Upton (born 1949) Cornwall-based poet and graphic artist currently editing Writers Forum. Upton is remarkable for the range of his genres and forms; and for the political savvy of his writing. He is a performer, continuing and expanding the performance tradition of Bob Cobbing.

Lawrence Upton first came to public attention in the early 1970s, performing his poetry widely throughout Britain. That poetry, now largely rejected by the poet himself, was often darkly humorous and disturbing. There were political overtones to much of it. He was also something of an activist, speaking often at meetings of small press operators and at the then Poets Conference.

He abandoned performance for some years and seems to have travelled particularly in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. During that period, he reinvented his style and subject matter to speak of natural phenomena - animals of the urban city and people in desolate landscapes. This self-reinvention has been a feature of his career.

In 1974, his sound poetry on recording tape which he had been making since the middle of the 1960s won him an invitation to be guest composer at Fylkingen in Stockholm. He was then working as a salesman and used his summer holiday allowance to accept the offer annually for five years in a row.

At about the same time, he was elected to the General Council of The Poetry Society and immediately further elected by the Council on to the society's executive. The next year he was elected the society's deputy chairman, a post he held for some time. He served under three chairs: Laurence Cotterell, Jeff Nuttall and Barry MacSweeney before resigning (1978) when his advice on a policy matter was not accepted by the council.

He founded and ran the bookshop of the Society, now rebadged the National Poetry Centre and was an active member of The Printshop where he helped to produce the society's publications and those of the general public who came in with manuscripts.

Meanwhile his reputation had grown, reinvented again as a maker of text-sound composition, with live and recorded performances in Stockholm and elsewhere. He had in 1976 co-founded the very influential sound poetry performance group jgjgjg, which blazed a trail through Europe's avant-garde scene and then disbanded in less than 3 years. Cobbing published him in Kroklok magazine and also proposed that the two make a booklet together to be published by Writers Forum. The booklet, called First Fruits of 1977, was one of the press's best sellers ever

1978 saw an end to Upton's visits to Fylkingen and a major argument with Cobbing but he continued to make tape works and to perform live multi-media work. This work was poorly documented but audio tapes have been available from the press Typical Characteristic. His books Mutation and Morning Humming from Zimmer Press and Lobby Press respectively date from that period and point to a further change in style. He visited and performed in Canada and the U.S. and was included in McCaffery and Nicholl's Sound Poetry: A Catalogue.

In 1980, Lawrence Upton completed a degree and fell in love with a married woman. Both events had major effects upon his life and writing. Upton had left school with almost no qualifications but acquired a taste for study in the late 70s and has spoken often of the experience of being taught about Melville by the famous Eric Mottram. It could be said that he has been studying ever since.

The relationship took him out of circulation in the poetry world for many years and was notoriously public in its break up in the first half of the nineties. When the two were finally apart, a confidant wrote that "it seems to have lasted as long as a world war, but I feel that more people have died."

In 1981, Upton had a substantial exhibition under the title Deteriorating Texts at LYC in Cumbria. Galloping Dog Press published a book. After that, he self-published if at all, but in his apparent silence as well as living a suburban life he took a varied series of school teaching jobs including Head of Media Studies and a portfolio of courses. Most notably he reappeared with In Praise of John Coltrane which had been largely computer generated with code the poet wrote himself. (By 1992 he was "Head of Academic Computing" at a London college)

In 1990 he founded the magazine RWC and later the press Mainstream. A renewed friendship with Bob Cobbing led to the publication of two volumes of apparently autobiographical verse, Messages To Silence and Unsent Letters which he had been writing since the late 1980s. This was followed by another volume from Form Books, Letters To Eric, different in verse method and apparently more reliably autobiographical with references to marital breakup. In interview however Upton has said that the narrators of all his poems are unreliable

From 1994 until the end of the century he and Cobbing wrote an extraordinary collaborative visual poem called Domestic Ambient Noise, now sadly out of print, which has been highly-praised. It is more than 2000 pages long and came in 300 pamphlets each of which was performed somewhere by the two.

That collaborative writing was done increasingly at a distance as ill-health obliged Upton to flee the city. From the mid 1990s his poems tend to be written in the Pennines and the remoter parts of Cornwall. (His family come predominantly from west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.)

In the late 1990s the Canadian housepress invited him to submit poetry for publication. The result, a poem called "house", led to another invitation and another publication "Sta!". By the time housepress closed, Upton had published over a dozen titles with the press.

In 1998 Writers Forum published Word Score Utterance Choreography edited by Cobbing and Upton and described by Cobbing as a primer for the performance of visual poetry as sound poetry. This is a task no one else has attempted and it has been influential. Though continuing to perform with Cobbing, Upton sought solo performances and collaborations with other artists. His 2001 book Initial Dance led to a research project at Chisenhale Dance Centre in London. He had made many visits to North America and has a wide range of collaborations behind him.

At the same time, the publication of Meadows by Writers Forum in 2000 and of Wire Sculptures by Reality Street in 2003 has confirmed the quality of his writing on the page. It should be noted however that stylistically neither book is much like anything he had published before. The range of his approaches and frequent changes of direction have made acceptance slow. Since taking over direction of Writers Forum upon Cobbing's death, he has published a number of books perhaps tiring of other people's rejection slips.

He continues to surprise his readers by a constant shift of form and content. In the last several years he has spoken and written on the poetry of Bob Cobbing and Alaric Sumner and on the use of digital technology in making poetry. At the time of writing, his most recent collaborations have been with the performance artist R McDermott [Trachea] and with the musician John Drever [Error Studies, Crowded] Another work with Drever is proposed.

Between the occasional performances, Lawrence Upton withdraws, usually into Cornwall where accommodation is provided for him by a friend. It is said that he has become something of an expert on Cornish history. He appeared in London recently wearing a shirt bearing a St Piran's flag and is said to have spoken of "a country which has been under English occupation for 1200 years" but it is difficult to know how serious he would have been.

It is however a matter of record that he is published frequently by Poetry Cornwall. He has edited a number of books by Alaric Sumner and Sumner was a Cornish poet. Much of his current output clearly refers to Cornish landscapes.

[edit] Published works

QEV, Writers Forum 2005
Wire Sculptures, Reality Street Editions 2003
Three Rivers, housepress, 2003
R & K Visual World Poetry, St Petersburg 2003
Dandelion Collaboration (with Bob Cobbing), housepress, 2002
Auditory Experiments, housepress, Canada, October 2001
initial dance, Writers Forum, 2001 (ISBN 184254408)
initial dance, housepress, Canada (ISBN 1894174364)
initial dance, Visual World Poetry, St Petersburg, Russia, 2003
Duets (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 2001
Mutate/Cantate (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 2001
Oi! (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum 2001
Domestic Ambient Noise (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 1994 – 2000 (in 300 separate booklets)
Meadows Only (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, September 2000 (ISBN 086162999X)
Curve (with Jennifer Pike & Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 2000 (ISBN 1842540114)
Game on a line, 1st edition: PaperBrain Press, USA, 2000
Sta!, housepress, Canada, 1999
House, housepress, Canada 1999
Easy Kill, Writers Forum, 1998
Letters to Eric Mottram, Form Books, 1997
Triptych, Writers Forum, 1997
Fuming (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 1997
Collaborations for Peter Finch (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 1997 (ISBN 0861627849)
Mild homage to Terry Gilliam, Call this poetry, 1996
Large painting from Written Graphical, Call this poetry, 1996
Messages to silence, Writers Forum, 1995
Icarus - his first assent, Spanner, Hereford, 1995
DAM DIPTYCH, Writers Forum, 1995
Waves on Porthmeor Beach (with Alaric Sumner), words worth books, 1995
Domestic Ambient Noise ## 1-300 (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 1994-2000
4 Outputs, Pointing Device, 1991
End of an imaginary flipbook, Pointing Device, 1991
Incidents in the life of Apollo Pointing Device, 1990
Creation capers, Pointing Device, 1989
PARTI-collages, ILP, 1988
Cartoon carnival, ILP, 1988
The shopping family, ILP, 1987
Approximate Capacities (with Lilian Ward), 1982
Vivacity, 1982
Loops, Writers Forum, 1979
Views of Lyonnesse, Books 2 & 3, Writers Forum 1978
Morning Humming, Lobby Press 1978
The highways are seawater, Shabby Books, 1977
Views of Lyonnesse, Book 1, Writers Forum, 1977
Mutation Zimmer, Zimmer Press, 1977
Karben fleem is not often, GEP, 1976
Riming couples in series gep, 1975