Alan Jackson (poet)

Alan Jackson (born 1938) is a Scottish poet.

He was born in Liverpool in 1938, to Scottish parents who returned to Edinburgh in 1940. He attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh 1952-1956 and Edinburgh University 1956-1959.

He began a reading career on Edinburgh Festival fringe in 1960, with the London poets Pete Brown, Mike Horovitz and Libby Houston. In 1965 he founded the yearly series of readings during the Edinburgh Festival in the Traverse Theatre (with Tony Jackson, no relation). These readings became a platform for the Liverpool poets Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough and for the older Scottish poets Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Norman McCaig. Hamish Henderson brought folk singers. Pentangle played there, as did The Scaffold. Poets such as Pete Morgan and Pete Roche (editor of the influential 1967 anthology Love Love Love: The New Love Poetry) first appeared at these Traverse readings. Jackson went on from this time till the early seventies to give hundreds of readings throughout Britain, often solo, but mostly with Patten, Mitchell, Morgan, Houston and others of the poets mentioned above.

In 1973 Jackson announced that he was retiring from the ‘reading scene’. The time had come he said ‘to obey the poetry’, rather than merely purveying it to others. This move of Jackson’s only makes sense when it is considered that his poetry had never been one of nature description or social anecdote, but had themes of self-inquisition and self-undoing.

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