Tom Pickard
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Tom Pickard (born 1946) is a poet, radio and film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival.
Pickard was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and left school at the age of fourteen. He met Basil Bunting and was instrumental in the older poet's return to writing in the early 1960s.
From 1963 to 1972, Pickard ran the Morden Tower Book Room, where he organised a series of readings by British and American modernist tradition poets. He also ran the Ultima Thule Bookshop between 1969 and 1973. During this period, he also travelled in the United States to renew friendships with some of the American Morden Tower readers, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn.
In 1973, Pickard moved to London and started writing radio and documentary film scripts. His film credits include Jarrow March (1976), We Make Ships (1988), Birmingham is What I Think With (1991) and The Shadow and the Substance (1994). He directed the last three of these films. In 1974, his television play Squire was broadcast by the BBC.
Pickard's poetry owes much to his reading of Bunting and of the Black Mountain poets, but it is also rooted in his own working class Northumbrian background. His publications include High on the Walls (1968), The Order of Chance (1971), Hero Dust: New and Selected Poems (1979), Tiepin Eros: New and Selected Poems (1994), and Hole in the Wall: New and Selected Poems (2002).
External links
- Morden Tower (http://mordentower.com/archives.html)
- An interview on Squire (http://www.lindisfarne.de/interviews/ivtp0203.htm)