Bill Griffiths

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William Brian Bransom "Bill" Griffiths (born August 20, 1948 in Kingsbury , London , † September 13, 2007 in Seaham ) was a British author of the British Poetry Revival in the last third of the 20th century. He worked as a rhapsode , poet, historian, draftsman, printer, publisher, editor, linguist and translator.

Life

Beginnings

Bill Griffiths grew up in north London. As early as 1964, at a young age, he had decided to live as a poet. Throughout his life he was enthusiastic about history, language and music. In 1969 he graduated from University College London with a degree in history . He appreciated the old English poets (especially John Donne and Andrew Marvell ) as well as the North American poets Hart Crane and the Beat Generation , Jack Kerouac , Allen Ginsberg . Bill Griffiths played compositions by Johannes Brahms , Robert Schumann , Franz Schubert on his piano , and appreciated the music of Ottorino Respighi and Edward Elgar . One of his ancestors came from Germany and was a horn player with the London Symphony Orchestra. He liked to visit old places and buildings whose architectural decorations and ornamentation particularly attracted him. One of his favorite structures was the Abbey of St. Albans north of London in Hertfordshire. As a young man he owned a motorcycle and rode the Hells Angels around London. About these adventures he wrote the cycle of poems Cycles 1-3 , which appeared in 1972 in the Poetry Review magazine of the Poetry Society , which has existed since 1912 , and was edited by Eric Mottram.

Sound poet

Bill Griffiths joined the National Poetry Society and Bob Cobbing became its mentor. Cobbing developed sound poetry in the 1950s / 1960s. He founded the British Poetry Revival with Eric Mottram and the Writers' Forum with Jeff Nuttall. There, Cobbing offered young authors such as Jeremy Adler , Bill Griffiths, Dick Higgins , Lawrence Upton, PC Fencott, Chris Cheek and others a place to exchange ideas, to perform their texts and scores ( Concrete Poetry ) ( sound poetry ) and to produce them. There were weekly meetings, the International Sound Poetry Festival annually and a small printing workshop (the consortium of London presses) directed by Bill Griffiths; The small self-publishers worked here, and Bill Griffiths founded “Pirate Press” (later “Amra Press”). Works by Ian Hamilton Finlay , John Cage , Allen Ginsberg and others were included. a. laid and created visual templates for their own noise improvisations. Bill Griffiths performed his lyrics in a rhapsodic singsong, accompanied Bob Cobbing in duets and trios with Paula Claire in front of audiences at home and abroad.

Linguist

For Bill Griffiths, real signs and traces were more important than sound composition. He wanted to feel places, things and conditions, put immediate impressions into words and present them like found objects in visual texts. He understood language as a dialect of local history. With John Porter he translated and published sagas and epics (Beowulf, Gilgamesch, The Gododdin, Aron's Saga). He also took over "found texts" z. B. from Jane Austen, E. Moors or Charles Dickens or from scientific works in his poems.

In the summer of 1976, Bill Griffiths lived temporarily in Paderborn to explore the excavations of the Carolingian imperial palace , the history of the Saxon Wars and the supposed locations of the Irminsul . In his two-volume work Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic he presented the religion, rites and way of life of the Anglo-Saxons before their Christianization. In 1979 he visited well-known British artists with Axel Marquard and Manfred Sundermann (including Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard ) and collected works for the exhibition Languages ​​Beyond Poetry (1979, catalog) of the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster , which took place on the occasion of the first Lyrikertreffen Münster in the Westphalian Landesmuseum Münster was opened and shown with a sound poetry concert by Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths. In 1984 he visited Rome and the Etruscan tombs. On the northern edge of London he lived for some time on his small houseboat. After this burned down during a repair, he moved from London to the north-east of England. He lived there until his death in his home at 21 Alfred Street, Seaham, a port town in County Durham. He received a scholarship from King's College London , which awarded him a doctorate in 1987 for his research on an Old Anglo-Saxon dialect. He archived the estate of Eric Mottram, participated in the exploration of the port city of Seaham and archived the history of the Royal Northern Sinfonia.

Ken Edwards edited the poems by Bill Griffiths, composed between 1966 and 1996, in three anthologies (Reality Street Verlag, Hastings, 2010, 2014 and 2016).

Works

  • Cycles 1–3, in: Poetry Review, London 1972
  • Cycles 1-7, London 1970-1974
  • Cycles 8-16, London n.d.
  • MrJames Ghost stories, London undated
  • Spook book, London undated
  • North Atlantic Texts: 1 - Translation Work (Eds. Bill Griffiths and John Porter)
  • Was w. Windsor, visual texts Sean O'Huigin, London 1974
  • Cycles, title page PC Fencott, London 1976
  • Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon Text with modern English Parallel, cover drawing by Jeff Nuttall
  • Reprinted and current poems (I), London 1976
  • The Song of the Hunnish Victory of Pippin the kKng, earthgrip press 1976
  • Sections - Part one, in: Curtal Sails, London 1976
  • Two award songs, London 1976 (translated by Jeremy Adler and Manfred Sundermann)
  • Six walks around Tenby, earth grip press 1976, ISBN 0-905194-03-9 .
  • Twenty-Five Pages, London 1977
  • Forming four dock poems, London 1977
  • Three, Jeremy Adler, PC Fencott, Bill Griffiths, London 1978
  • A Preliminary Account of North Rhine-Westphalia etc., Todmorden 1978
  • A history of the solar system, Fragments: A history of the solar system, London 1978
  • Anglo-saxon times, a study of the early calendar, London undated , ISBN 0-905194-12-8 .
  • Morning Lands, London undated , ISBN 0-905194-10-1 .
  • On Plotinus, London undated , ISBN 0-905194-13-6 .
  • The old English poem, the phoenix, translated by Bill Griffiths, London n.d. ISBN 0-905194-14-4 .
  • Sun-card, showing sunrises, Writers Forum chapbook no. Ten (visual text, Din A 4 folded)
  • The study of the flood from Gilgamesh, visual text on the front and back PC Fencott, London undated
  • Book of the boat, London undated , ISBN 0-86162-416-5 .
  • Idylls of the King & other poems, London undated
  • Nomad sense, 1998
  • Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic, 1996, 2003 (revised edition)
  • New Castle from a van window, in: Tyne texts, Tom Pickard / Bill Griffiths, Newcastle up on Tyne, 2003
  • Collected Earlier Poems (1966-80), Hastings 2010
  • Collected Poems & Sequences (1981–91), Hastings 2014
  • Collected Poems Volume 3 (1992-96), Hastings 2016

literature

  • Languages ​​beyond poetry. Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster 1979, OCLC 7197844 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Rowe: Bill Griffiths. In: The Guardian . September 22, 2007, accessed August 24, 2016.
  2. ↑ Bill Griffiths, Chris Cheek et al. a .: Some Tributes to Bob Cobbing. LOLLIPOP ARCHIVE, 2004, accessed March 8, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Griffiths, Bill
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Griffiths, William Brian Bransom (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British author
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingsbury , London
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 2007
Place of death Seaham