Lawrence Upton

Lawrence Upton (born London 1949, of Cornish origins) is a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, currently directing Writers Forum. Upton is remarkable for the range of his genres and forms; and for the political savvy of his writing. He is a performer, continuing and expanding the performance tradition of, amongst others, Bob Cobbing. He spent much of the first decade of this century in Cornwall; but was a Fellow of Goldsmiths, University of London from Spring 2008 until Autumn 2015, an AHRC fellow for the first three years and then as a Visiting Fellow. He now lives a peripatetic existence but is an academic member of Athens Institute for Education and Research.

Lawrence Upton first came to public attention in the early 1970s, performing his poetry widely throughout Britain. That poetry, now largely rejected by the poet himself, was often darkly humorous and disturbing. There were political overtones to much of it. He was also something of an activist, speaking often at meetings of small press operators and at the then Poets Conference.

He abandoned performance for some years. During that period, he reinvented his style and subject matter to speak of natural phenomena - animals of the urban city and people in desolate landscapes. This reinvention of his style has been a feature of his career.

In 1972, his sound poetry on recording tape which he had been making since the middle of the 1960s led to an invitation to be guest composer at Fylkingen in Stockholm where he worked for relatively short periods, on and off, for five years from 1974.

At about the same time, he was elected to the General Council of The Poetry Society and immediately further elected by the Council on to the society's executive. The next year he was elected the society's deputy chairman, a post he held for some time. He served under three chairs: Laurence Cotterell, Jeff Nuttall and Barry MacSweeney before resigning (1978). His essay "So many things" discusses issues arising from that period (in "CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s", edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards; Shearsman, Bristol; ). He founded and ran the bookshop of the Society, rebadged the National Poetry Centre and was an active member of The Printshop where he helped to produce the society's publications and those of the general public who came in with manuscripts.

Meanwhile, his reputation had grown, reinvented again as a maker of text-sound composition, with live and recorded performances in and elsewhere. He had in 1976 co-founded the very influential sound poetry performance group jgjgjg (with PC Fencott and cris cheek), which blazed a trail through Europe's avant-garde scene and then disbanded in less than 3 years. Cobbing published him in Kroklok magazine and also proposed that the two make a booklet together to be published by Writers Forum. The booklet, called Furst Fruts of 77, was one of the press's best sellers ever

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