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| - This page is an attempt to list the poets who appeared on John Peel's Night Ride programmes, from March 1968 to September 1969. It has been compiled with the help of Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions and various online sources, but the information given is incomplete, mainly because some of the writers featured on the programme are not well-known to the general literary public. During the 1960s, their work appeared in "little magazines", and in limited editions produced by small, specialist publishing houses, or was sometimes even self-published.
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| abstract
| - This page is an attempt to list the poets who appeared on John Peel's Night Ride programmes, from March 1968 to September 1969. It has been compiled with the help of Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions and various online sources, but the information given is incomplete, mainly because some of the writers featured on the programme are not well-known to the general literary public. During the 1960s, their work appeared in "little magazines", and in limited editions produced by small, specialist publishing houses, or was sometimes even self-published. By 1965 the new poetry movement had become big enough to fill the Albert Hall; the "International Poetry Incarnation" reading held there drew 7.000 people and was an early manifestation of what soon became the UK underground culture. Some poets with connections to the scene gained contracts with major publishers and a big enough following to appear on radio and TV. In March 1967 the BBC Third Programme broadcast "The New Sound", described as "An enquiry into the current poetry-reading boom in England". The Radio Times preview of the programme noted that '"there has been an increasing concern among younger poets with the platform rather than the page. Audiences for poetry readings have grown bigger and become younger...." [1]. Many of the poets featured later read their work on Night Ride - as did programme producer George Macbeth. As with punk music a decade later, regional identity became important, and an independent distribution network developed, aided by sympathetic bookshops in many British towns and cities. These bookshops also stocked the underground press, which encouraged the new poetry - in particular, the reviews by (Barry) Miles in International Times became influential. Peel would also recommend new books of poetry to his readers in his columns for the paper. In later years Peel became more sceptical about Night Ride, saying that it featured "people reading bad poetry rather badly" [2], and it was true that some of the guest poets had little or no literary renown and soon faded into obscurity. However, despite the tendency among critics to see this era of British poetry as something separate from (and inferior to) the mainstream poetic tradition, it has been receiving increasing attention in the academic world recently, so anyone with additional information is invited to fill gaps and/or correct mistakes in these listings. In fact, some Night Ride guests were far from obscure; Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten were best-selling poets at the time and remained popular with readers and live audiences into the twenty-first century. Others were associated with the music scene (Pete Brown, Adrian Henri, Mike Evans, Marc Bolan) or the 1960s underground/counter-culture (Piero Heliczer, John Esam). Even a few established literary figures read poems on Night Ride (Stevie Smith, Patric Dickinson, and Roy Fuller, at the time Professor of Poetry at Oxford University). Information on the development of the 1960s British poetry scene can be found in Jonathon Green's Days In The Life (London 1988 and subsequent editions), along with vivid anecdotes from some of those involved.
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