THE LIGHTS OF LEEDS

 Barry Tebb

   Barry Tebb is a wild card, a delightfully awkward old cuss, as anyone who is lucky or unlucky enough to regularly receive his spirit duplicated, Sixties Press UK published 'Poetry Now' pamphlet, will already know. The fact that the pamphlets were almost illegible was a source of hilarity and they helplessly invited satirical comment (they have much improved now as Barry Tebb has moved on to Xerox). Those pamphlets generally contain a few poems by Barry himself, one or two by his girlfriend, a poem by one of his heroes (often Kirkup) and, best of all, wonderful tirades against the poetry establishments, both main- stream and avant garde, which are bitter, funny, spot on or as wayward as possible (depending on whether you agree with him or not) and always entertaining. Barry Tebb has a particular dislike for the New Gen crowd and their cronies, but he has been just as rude about everyone else too. Myself and Terrible Work have been on the receiving end of both his praise and disgust though which makes us peculiarly suited to giving an objective opinion about him.

   My opinion of Tebb has been high from the start. I enjoy his poems immensely, unlike most of Terrible Work's clientele, and have published him and reviewed his work positively, but this did not prevent me from earning his ire because Gordon Wardman wrote a very negative review which we published, even though I disagreed strongly enough to add a footnote, giving my support to Barry's poetry, but it often seems to be the very things that get up other reader's backs that make his poems so appealing to me. I love their extreme nostalgia, their over-the-top fearlessness, their loose freedom that is used to carry such emotional opinion, their romantic sex-recall, their obsession and most of all their continuous slippage that sees verses about his childhood in Leeds, segue into rants against James Fenton.

   Barry Tebb was born and brought up in Leeds; something he is proud of and reminds us at every opportunity. He was published in Horovitz's 'Children of Albion' and then disappeared from poetry only to pop up again a few years back like one of those Japanese soldiers suddenly found on an uninhabited island who didn't know the war was over. 'Bloody hell', he blinked, 'what has happened to poetry?'

He had long left Leeds to follow a teaching career down south and on retiring returned to writing poetry through suddenly remembering his past, in particular his childhood love, Margaret, his muse, his 'light' of Leeds. It is this muse which gives so many of his readers problems. Even a strong supporter of his poetry, Andy Croft, advised him against publishing the verses that recall his sexual relations with the girl some fifty years ago. His obsession has been called unhealthy in more than one review and downright perverse in others. What can I say, I think these people have the problem, not Barry Tebb. It is the intensity of his feelings for the memory of Margaret which are both the source and target of his renewed inspiration and his celebration of the energy of love and emotion is brilliantly executed and should be completely free of the snide and prudish (and downright stupid in my opinion) attacks it has received.

'The Lights of Leeds' is an original and stunning little collection and for those who attack it for its 'romance' or 'emotion' or for its lack of modern cynical sensiblity all I can say is 'get a life.' Barry Tebb is a stubborn survivor whose life is full of poetry in every sense.

   Treasure it!

 Tim Allen

TERRIBLE WORK

Redbeck: 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH

£7.95. 112 pages. ISBN 0-946980-68-3

BARRY TEBB: An Unquiet Voice

When I wrote to Barry Tebb and told him we were considering doing a feature on him, I remember telling him to feel free to send us any further material to have a look at. He obliged me in liberal fashion! As I continued my research I realised that I shouldn't have been surprised - Barry Tebb sends out. In fact, he is like some literary transmitter in Sutton, Surrey. And it's not just poetry that issues forth: he's also a very vocal opponent of the so-called 'Establishment' of poetry in this country. Sounds familiar? Well, he holds that in common with Brenda Williams. Moreover, they once lived together in a cottage near Huddersfield, before moving to Leeds.

Barry Tebb was, in fact, born in Leeds in 1942. He became a teacher and, in those heady days of the Sixties, Tebb discovered his poetic self- or perhaps it found him. Barry Tebb had begun. But then he stopped. Was it something to do with the way the world was turning as the Sixties ended? In A Hope for Poetry: Remembering the Sixties (from The Road to Haworth Moor, Feather Books, ISBN 1 84175 061 1, priced £3.00), we get ‘There was a hope for poetry in the sixties/and for education and society, teachers free/to do as they wanted; I could and did teach/ poetry and art all day and little else -/that was my way.' Was the creative side snuffed out by what came next? The years spanning 1970 to 1995 were certainly a poetic abyss. Not surprising then, that when Barry Tebb emerged from it, the output was in the form of a torrent. His constant stream has been re-defining the landscape ever since. In so doing, he has drawn from the well – to extend the pun - of those unproductive years. There are just too many poems, pamphlets, magazines, etc - contributed or self-published material - to mention, and it would be pointless to try to do so. But, in The Road to Haworth Moor, we have good examples of Barry Tebb's different writing styles and influences. I love the simple and certain For My Son (for Isaiah, born November 21st, 1972): 'Laying in my arms/he watches with saucer eyes/infinitely trusting/infinite as the stars/ burning the night away/our love holds him.' Below, we feature two extracts from the long poem that carries the title of the collection.

THE ROAD TO HAWORTH MOOR

for Brenda Williams                                               '

The dawn cracked with ice, with fire grumbling in the grate,

With ire in the homes we had left, but still somehow

We made a nook in the crooked corner of Hall Ings,

A Wordsworthian dream with sheep nibbling by every crumbling

Dry-stone wall, smoke inching from the chimney pot beside the

Turning lane, the packhorse road with every stone intact that bound

The corner tight then up and off to Thurstonland, past the weathered

Walls of the abandoned quarry, beyond Ings Farm where Rover ran

His furious challenge to our call.

Only a week ago you took me to the house you came from

Thirty years before. Together we stood as strangers in a room

Filled with plastic saccharine furniture, vinyl gloss, cabinets

Of china dogs and photographs of a departed wife and child.

All that remained of your family was a hidden coat of red paint

Beneath the kitchen windowsill and on a faded page the number for

Your long-gone neighbour, Lilly Clarke, ninety if she lives at all,

The memory of a lilac tree, the Anderson shelter hidden by the fence,

And the incomer's invitation to call again and then and then...

The opening stanza is truly something other poets can learn from. More importantly, it is beautiful. The poem as a whole then becomes something more disturbing, although the exact meaning isn't completely clear (should it always be with poetry??). But what we get is a rollercoaster of a ride and something to ponder on!

    Winterlight features in Poems in the Waiting Room (PO Box 488, Richmond, TW9 4SW - free), a small anthology of poems in which Barry Tebb keeps company with the likes of Thomas Hood, AE Houseman and Edie Suarez. The concept is a wonderful one ('10,000 copies sent to waiting rooms from Land's End to the Shetland Isles,' says Barry). And Winterlight makes a worthy contribution. If you want to look at a poem that, in just a few lines, takes you on a journey, fills you with images and colour, and really makes you feel and see things anew, read this one.

Winterlight

Let us, this December night, leave the ring

Of heat, the lapping flames around the fire's heart,

Move with bodies tensed against the light

Towards the moon's pull and the cloud's hand.

Arms of angels hold us, lend our bodies

Height of stars and planets' whirl,

Grant us sufficiency of light so we may enter

The twisting lanes to lost villages.

So we may stare in the mirror of silent pools

By long-deserted greens, deepen our sight

Of what lies beyond the things that seem

And make our vision clear as winterlight.

Winterlight also appears in Closing Nostalgia Road - Selected Poems 1962-2002: Barry Tebb / Sixties Press (available from 89 Connaught Road, Sutton SM13RJ,UK

£5.00). Barry Tebb has also had work appear on the Internet (on the brilliantly named Terrible Work website). And he edits (and contributes to) Leeds Poetry Weekly Magazine(available from Sixties Press, 89 Connaught Road, Sutton, Surrey, SM1 3PJ). Unquiet is our Barry. And I think that we'll be hearing much more from him yet.

Jim Moore

TLS (NB)

Can we trust them?

There is nothing quite like Leeds Poetry Weekly Magazine. No websites or fancy graphics here.

LPW is typewritten in different faces, offset- printed on unnumbered A4 pages of various colours, and stapled together (with one staple).

The editor, Barry Tebb, scribbles recommendations above the work of contributors: "A greatly undervalued but hugely talented poet", he writes next to the name of Brian Hinton. "A poet of genius", are his barely legible words over another. This is how the poetry scene used to be. However, the cover of the "Easter Double Issue" of LPW carries the portrait of an ominously smiling Stalin. It appears to be related to the editorial, in which Mr Tebb explains that a poet called Brenda Williams was rejected by an anthologist compiling a book on the theme of "mental distress". We Have Come Through, edited by Alison Combes, is to be published by Bloodaxe. Ms Williams appears to have spent time in mental institutions, and cannot understand why the commissar (Ms Combes) refuses to acknowledge her suffering. Ms Combes's letter of rejection is printed (without her permission, probably); her conversation with Ms Williams is related (in Ms Williams's version); a poem about Ms Combes by Ms Williams is published. It ends: "You, who left me to anonymity, / Are tarred with literary infamy".

    Phew. Did we say the poetry scene used to be like this? Alison Combes ended her conversation with Ms Williams by saying, "I don’t want to get into a long debate". Neither do we.

Leeds Poetry Weekly Magazine is available from 89 Connaught Road, Sutton, Surrey SM1 3PJ. UK

Pennine Platform

No 54             2003

Collected Poems Barry Tebb. Sixties Press, 89 Connaught Rd. Sutton, Surrey, SM1 3PJ £10

Barry Tebb appeared in Children of Albion and at the Albert Hall In the '60s, and he has largely remained true to these roots. That is to say, he is a romantic (as his nostalgia and his love poems show) and a rebel (as his angry tirades against people in authority and the culture of the times show). Barry Tebb's great love affair seems to be with the Leeds of his youth. Largely, his poems derive from his quarrel w the world rather than any quarrel with himself. And he conducts l quarrel with wonderful energy! Tebb has no notion that there could be anything questionable about teaching poetry all day, everyday, in a Primary classroom, as he did. Only life-deniers, he seems to think would complain. One does not read Tebb for the examined life but to enjoy the personality of the man and the anecdotalised life. At his best, Barry Tebb makes one think of Ginsberg and Lawrence - he is a wild card, for whom what he wants to say and the energy with which says it are the paramount considerations. Barry Tebb's heart remains forever young, with all the self-centeredness of youth.

THE GUEST ARTISTS OF OUR PCMS

BARRY TEBB  see also http://www. waddysweb.freeuk.com

Born Leeds 1942. Educated Leeds Training College 1961 -64. Taught Wyther Park Primary School 1964-67. Lived in a cottage near Huddersfield with poet Brenda .Williams, writing poetry and going for long walks. Lived in Leeds. Had 2 children. Didn't have inspiration for 25 years (1970-1995) then 'block' gone and didn't stop writing since (?). "The lights of Leeds" published by Redbeck Press in 2001. Poetry in Pef Productions: Shut up Shop (a hand written version), and The Singing School,...

In 1966 he edited a pamphlet anthology Five Quiet Shouters for Poet and Printer. One 'unknown" he included was Angela Carter who was later to become a novelist of world stature. Said about the earlier work, reviewing his first collection: "The

Quarrel with Ourselves": Mr. Tebb mixes innocence and experience compellingly (John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford). Poems by Barry Tebb were included in plenty of Anthologies as there are the Penguin's 'Children of

Albion', United Press anthologies such as: 'Songs of Spring' & 'National Poetry Anthology 2000',... And also of course in plenty of magazines like; KRAX, The Bad Poetry Quarterly, The Yorkshire Evening Post, Blueprint, Dial 174, Iota,... In 2001 editor of Seven Unquiet Shouters including the work of 7 poets.

Barry Tebb is living care for the brilliant poet Brenda Williams suffering from sever long-term depression. And was taken in account personal experience more than ever, 'happy' we didn't miss out the Low NHS standards on our worst thing list of City Poet.

Tebb, himself was very pleased with us choosing The Singing School for publication.

By the same author published by Poet & Printer: The Quarrel with ourselves (1966), Three Regional Voices (1968), Crosscurrents (1970), Five Quiet Shouters (Editor of, 1966). By Sixties Press: The Bridge over the Aire (1997), Summer with Margaret (1997), Windsong (2001). Further; In Memory of My Mother (2000, Feather Books), The Lights of Leeds (2000, Redhpck Press).

LEEDS POETRY WEEKLY OCTOBER 2003

At first glance this stapled twenty odd pages sank my heart a little — a second glance began to revive it — John Heath-Stubbs and some other familiar names! On reading the first few lines of his first poem it again descended — TO EDMUND BLUNDEN ON HIS 60th BIRTHDAY:

                Thyris, or Meliboewus, or old Damoetas —

                I must address you

                By some such green, Virgilian-vowelle name —

                You, the last and truly-tempered voice

                Of all our lovely, dead, and pastoral England:

Two of the other pieces are couched in similar language: remote, overtly erudite and — this is a common criticism of Heath-Stubbs' work — too literary; although Larkin thought him not literary enough (because, one assumes, the main aim of literature is to engage).

The best poem out of the four, by far, is THE DIVIDED WAYS — IN MEMORY OF SIDNEY KEYES:

                He has gone down into the dark cellar

                To talk with the bright-faced Spirit with silver hair;

                But I shall never know what word was spoken there.

                My friend is out of earshot. Our ways divided

                Before we even knew we had missed each other.

                For he advanced

                Into a stony wilderness of the heart,

                Under a hostile and a red-clawed sun;

                All that dry day, until the darkness fell,

                I heard him going, and shouting among the canyons.

Now this is 'literary' in the right manner; yes, it is sedate and massive in style, but it avoids, as the others do not, hints of cliché or grand generalization (or of sounding thus). The piece connects.

Brian G. D'Arcy'S sonnet GONE LIKE DREAMS is well managed and suitably Gothic (an imagined soliloquy spoken by Charlotte Brontë:

                Bramwell — Emily — Anne are gone like dreams

                                unfinished on the partly written page,

                while my accusing grief and mounting rage

                lay waste my soul with silent inner screams.

My eye hit upon 23 FITZROY ROAD by Brenda Williams (a road I once knew well) but again a 'sinking of the heart' on reading the first line:

                I stand before a house...

Echoes of 'Once upon a time" here — surely Ms Williams could have found something a little more dynamic with which to begin her longish poem; and isn't there something wrong with her lining?:

                And the street leading off into Primrose

                Hill spanned almost by a tree's winter girth,

The best of the poems are the four by the editor, Barry Tebb. I like the insightful particularity of MONDAY IN SURREY:

                I wish I was three hundred miles from here

                This damp September morning, suburbia stirring

                with stacked copies of 'The Sun', a million cars ready to run

Barry Tebb achieves both an easy communication and a 'literary' quality in these pieces. Again in urban mode (as are the other two) he gives us the goods, this time with an attractive, self deprecating humour — from DIARY OF A JOURNEY:

                I puzzled in Kings Cross as Qa on the sign board

                Had another platform been built on the QT?

                Or was it an acronym I couldn't fathom

                Or a semantic signifier that put me in a whirl?

                The bad luck was that which brought madness to our camp

                I have that language, too,

                I read the illness in the patient's face

                Gesture and the spaces of their pacing gait, the double blanks

                of smile and frown ...

                For me some little fame will have to be enough.

                A good book, a better fuck perhaps

                Would be a final piece of luck.

The magazine also features an extract from his uncompleted 'novella', EXALTATION.

reviewer: Michael Bangerter.

New Hope International Review