But a few times in a generation comes a Poet largely uncluttered by both literary ‘in-trends’, or it could be argued the restrictive baggage of following accepted, stylistic quirks of preceding generations or any particular movement as the wonderfully original writer that is Gordon Hoyles.
Joyous in ploughing his own ‘literary furrow’, Gordon is a maverick, a fact I’ve witnessed with great delight and considerable approval when his direct, no-nonsense wisdom and humour have startled the narrow and staid whilst uplifting the open and discerning amongst those present at poetry readings throughout the land.
True to himself, his brutal honesty, tempered with constructive comparisons, and served up with the modest confidence that encapsulates the man make it a thoroughly rewarding exercise to either read his works or listen to him in a glorious live performance.
I wholeheartedly recommend purchase of his canon of work and also driving the extra mile to hear him both captivate and shock in equal measure a gathered audience.
Gordon Hoyles is a poet worth investigating. As many who have found his poetry have concurred, this is a man whose long life’s literary output should be both cherished and given a modern promotion to enable it to find a wider audience.
Hurray for Gordon Hoyles!
Steve Layzell. Poet, anthology collector, Literary critic.
____________________________________
‘With my life I fight towards the boundary’ – locating GORDON HOYLES
What do you think of the world situation?
We’re somewhere opposite the moon. (from The Tin Book, page Fifty Two)
Ever since a chance walk led me close to their isolated home on the moors above Calder Dale in the mid-1980s, Gordon Hoyles and Blossom, his companion, muse and wife, have been a beacon. The light they cast is not that of moral, and still less of political, correctness. Rather, they together represent and embody a radical integrity that runs counter to what most of us suppose or pretend to be normal. They question what the world around supposes to be unquestionable. They do so all the more profoundly for being unaware of the effect they have. They would have called out the emperor in his new clothes, but equally they would have looked wryly upon the rest of us when we joined in the chorus of derision.
On that autumn afternoon a small hand-written notice placed in the heather advertised organic, home-made teas. I think we were Blossom’s first customers. She told us of Gordon who was out ‘stone walling’ (in such a context that meant building, not stalling) and of his next poetry performance. So a week or two later I took the bus to Doncaster and the function room of a smoky pub and there met the extraordinary and delightful poet who is Gordon Hoyles.
Gordon’s family origins were difficult and deprived but to pity would be to misunderstand: his is a personality that fits in nowhere and stands out everywhere. Meeting him provokes one to wonder, however did we end up trying to be like someone we are not? His poetry emerges from the man and it is difficult for me to consider them apart. I believe the printed words can and will survive their author but I think it will be a rare soul who discerns their depth and their charm who has not had the benefit of meeting him or seeing or hearing the poems as read and moulded by Gordon in his musical Lancashire accent.
Back then, he and Blossom were emerging, hurt and mystified, from the flattering but deceptive ‘arts culture’ that in the 1970s was newly awash with resources, most of which were directed towards friends and flatterers of those who administered the funds. The ‘Tin Book’ had its origins in a hundred poems, each of which had been hand-painted on scrap metal and displayed in cafes, shops or anywhere else they could convey them and whose proprietors would give them space. ‘Page sixty-two’ perhaps reflected his poetic innocence coming up hard against the gate-keepers of ‘correct poetry’:
What they cannot budge though they penetrate
they won’t perpetrate on more
And at once and in each and all things and all ways
they’re constantly seeing the flaw.
But they cannot expand for the air is so crammed
with nonsensical, heart-breaking jaw,
O how many poets have jumped at the chance
to get themselves killed in a war?
In the late 1980s Gordon and Blossom migrated from the austere Yorkshire uplands and there was a poetic hiatus. The poetry didn’t cease but its expression in words took a pause. Instead, their lives, it seemed to me, became a poetic performance of considerable power. They lived in the back of a Fiat Panda for one summer of fruit picking before buying the tiniest caravan you ever could imagine in which creative and extensive vegetarian meals were served with generosity and hilarity. They combined day jobs and night jobs. From that they worked even longer hours running newsagents that doubled or trebled in turnover. Thence they bought and revived the Hotel Continental in Dovercourt, Harwich, and ran it with such flair and imagination – and non-stop hard work – that it became itself a poetic creation. Some hated it, some could not understand it, some abused or exploited their kindness (perhaps not least the producers of TV shows) – but very many recognised it was more than just a hotel, it was a parable of generosity: original sculpture and painting in the public areas, each room individually decorated with ingenuity and humour, top-rate cooking at low-rate prices and a locals’ bar serving more draught ale than anywhere else in town. It was inevitable that some were shocked and disdained it but also that some creative sorts would gather around, to make music and share writing, and so eventually Gordon made an occasional return to reciting and writing and he found an additional encouragement in the regular poetry evenings at The Red Lion, Manningtree. Meanwhile, as the financial sharks, smelling blood, gathered ever closer, he had more reason than ever to reflect on life’s ironies, tragedies, and hilarities – and eventually, when selling at a loss was the only option, Gordon and Blossom demonstrated again that theirs is the true poets’ vocation, to risk and venture, to gain and lose all, and never breathe a word about your loss…
Thus, to meet Gordon is the best way to encounter his poetry but to read (or hear) his work will nonetheless work its magic on you. What might you expect to find – and what will puzzle, or perhaps offend, you?
He plays on words with the eloquence and delight of one who is profoundly intelligent but whose education was almost non-existent. There is sex, lots of it: by turns outrageous, funny, touching – but always inspired by an innocent delight rather than sordid preoccupation. A poem that combines both these fascinations is Shipping Forecast:
Attendance all stripping. The Biological
Society wish you’d follow this morning
and pip emma a plenty true theme
rhyme today.
There is a tale warming and dawning of
stripping for see areas
risqué
Fair Isle, Jersey, unfasten it.
White valley
sillies bite
ridge dowsing
warm front high
Mumbles
Wick
sperm point, Orcock Head
rising steady, good,
forth, dogger.
Associated frontal trough
over
try me Prestwick
liking
sole, imminent,
lumpy,
finish there,
soon.
Gordon’s poetry contains indignation, playfulness, insight, self-deprecation, absurdity, sympathy, humanity and sometimes a touch of the divine, and always much, much humour – and, of course, there are some poems that I can’t understand at all. Gordon – part poet, part prophet and I think the funniest, loveliest most singular man I have ever known – is a voice crying in the wilderness of our age of mediocrity and conformism. Do hear his voice, or failing that, read his words.
Revd. Philip Martin. St.Aldhelms, Branksome, Poole, Dorset. April 2021.
____________________________________
1983
After our long Christmas holiday it was good to return to your letter and a very enthusiastic one from Tony Pol. He said it was the best reading ever and thanked me for sending you!
New work will not be easy as my funds are low. It is hard for me to promote with one hand and then refuse to subsidise with the other! Be assured, however, that I will do my best.
(Nuttall – well, yes and I would leave it.)
Happy New Year!
I love the cards – do the bookshops sell them?
(By the way: I’m not in the plump prestigious pigeon business, in fact far more radical than is realised and I hate corn).
After driving my son to school under a blanket of rain I am now able to watch bright sky with sentimental puffy clouds sailing over the just budding ash trees.
Keep on writing,
Yours,
Pamela Clunies-Ross
Director, National Poetry Secretariat
____________________________________________
Very nice to hear from you!
It felt good meeting you both. Thank you for buying ‘Open Windows, Open Doors’; I‘m glad you are enjoying it. And thank you for Gordon’s CD. I listened to it this morning and I found it contains rather serious stuff ! perhaps even more serious than the latest poems you’ve emailed me. I like them too, but some of the pieces in the CD are great; 28 mins of contemporary scop.
I’ve read about the ‘Tin Book’, it is very interesting; similar to Ratushinskaya writing her poems on bars of soap whilst imprisoned l’ll get Gordon’s book in Amazon anon.
Much Love to you both,
V Vie xx
February 2020
www.vanessavie.co.uk
________________________________________________
“An Ideal Political Poet”.
“Readers of letters to the ‘Bridge Times’ will have met his strong and original thought-forms, and may rightly guess him to be a free and responsible citizen of an ideal democracy. A man who dares to express himself in a public space is not an agent for either the sinister or the reactionary spirit forces which contend in collusion for control of the freedom they seek to deny in the name of politics. Gordon is an ideal and original political man, and, naturally, a poet.
“The Tin Book” is a concept, a paperbound book, a collection of poems written on enamelled sheets of metal, and the story of its own publication: a comedy, since the story involves arts councils and cooperatives. The book becomes a symbol of the story of its own gestation, and as such it appears miraculous.
On its publication I wrote a short adulatory review for last month’s Calder Valley Press of the Tin Book miracle. That review did not appear. We are talking about a poet and his place in public. It’s clear enough that this newspaper will prefer to organise itself as a coherent and collective pressure than as a collection of disparate and original individuals active in the art of writing. Which of these forms may be the honester approach to public space would be a debate the truth is bound to lose. If this attempt to review Gordon’s book is more cautious in its praise for the poet, then it’s also more distanced from any identity with the newspaper in which it appears.
G.W.Hoyles’ starting point and tradition is that of the English popular poem, with its roots in nursery rhyme, street ballad and Methodist hymn. Such a poem will lollop clumsily and unpromisingly by obvious rhythm to obstinate rhyme. At times, as if taken over by a genial and innocent giant, Gordon lets such stupidity with benign harmlessness dance the dance of the dumb, unhumiliated by speech:
“Friddley middley upsaddy ho”
At other times intelligence is raised to improvise against the poet’s chosen rhythm ditties of complexity and subtlety. Too often though rhythm captures the spirit and the product of thought dies to the prospect of freedom. The finest lines of the finest poems owe little or nothing to the jingles of popular tradition:
“But the drunken know the facts they face disgrace them.”
The book is provincial in its faults but strong as a bearer of local truth. Here are social satires of flagrant justice. The central figure is the poet in this actual landscape distorted as it is by civic mistrust, false councillors, and un-coperatives. Some of the best poems mean the poet: they are acrostics of GWHoyles standing honest and without improper arrogance in the area his vocation gives him care for…………..
Mike Haslam/ Calder Valley Press November 1979
_________________________________________________
Gordon Hoyles.
What can I say about this man, a poet like no other.
He has the ability to “Hit the Nail on the Head”.
A man that speaks reams in just a few words.
Succinct, to the point, deep feeling, funny, sad,
shocking, jolly.
Each piece is different, enjoyable and unexpected.
I have read and listened to this man and have never
come away disappointed.
There are so many of his poems that I can relate to.
I could not explain my thoughts and feelings associated to
my life, in a more aphoristic way.
Pick any one of Gordon’s books, and I promise you will
not be disappointed.
Shirley Reed.
October 2020.
Joyous in ploughing his own ‘literary furrow’, Gordon is a maverick, a fact I’ve witnessed with great delight and considerable approval when his direct, no-nonsense wisdom and humour have startled the narrow and staid whilst uplifting the open and discerning amongst those present at poetry readings throughout the land.
True to himself, his brutal honesty, tempered with constructive comparisons, and served up with the modest confidence that encapsulates the man make it a thoroughly rewarding exercise to either read his works or listen to him in a glorious live performance.
I wholeheartedly recommend purchase of his canon of work and also driving the extra mile to hear him both captivate and shock in equal measure a gathered audience.
Gordon Hoyles is a poet worth investigating. As many who have found his poetry have concurred, this is a man whose long life’s literary output should be both cherished and given a modern promotion to enable it to find a wider audience.
Hurray for Gordon Hoyles!
Steve Layzell. Poet, anthology collector, Literary critic.
____________________________________
‘With my life I fight towards the boundary’ – locating GORDON HOYLES
What do you think of the world situation?
We’re somewhere opposite the moon. (from The Tin Book, page Fifty Two)
Ever since a chance walk led me close to their isolated home on the moors above Calder Dale in the mid-1980s, Gordon Hoyles and Blossom, his companion, muse and wife, have been a beacon. The light they cast is not that of moral, and still less of political, correctness. Rather, they together represent and embody a radical integrity that runs counter to what most of us suppose or pretend to be normal. They question what the world around supposes to be unquestionable. They do so all the more profoundly for being unaware of the effect they have. They would have called out the emperor in his new clothes, but equally they would have looked wryly upon the rest of us when we joined in the chorus of derision.
On that autumn afternoon a small hand-written notice placed in the heather advertised organic, home-made teas. I think we were Blossom’s first customers. She told us of Gordon who was out ‘stone walling’ (in such a context that meant building, not stalling) and of his next poetry performance. So a week or two later I took the bus to Doncaster and the function room of a smoky pub and there met the extraordinary and delightful poet who is Gordon Hoyles.
Gordon’s family origins were difficult and deprived but to pity would be to misunderstand: his is a personality that fits in nowhere and stands out everywhere. Meeting him provokes one to wonder, however did we end up trying to be like someone we are not? His poetry emerges from the man and it is difficult for me to consider them apart. I believe the printed words can and will survive their author but I think it will be a rare soul who discerns their depth and their charm who has not had the benefit of meeting him or seeing or hearing the poems as read and moulded by Gordon in his musical Lancashire accent.
Back then, he and Blossom were emerging, hurt and mystified, from the flattering but deceptive ‘arts culture’ that in the 1970s was newly awash with resources, most of which were directed towards friends and flatterers of those who administered the funds. The ‘Tin Book’ had its origins in a hundred poems, each of which had been hand-painted on scrap metal and displayed in cafes, shops or anywhere else they could convey them and whose proprietors would give them space. ‘Page sixty-two’ perhaps reflected his poetic innocence coming up hard against the gate-keepers of ‘correct poetry’:
What they cannot budge though they penetrate
they won’t perpetrate on more
And at once and in each and all things and all ways
they’re constantly seeing the flaw.
But they cannot expand for the air is so crammed
with nonsensical, heart-breaking jaw,
O how many poets have jumped at the chance
to get themselves killed in a war?
In the late 1980s Gordon and Blossom migrated from the austere Yorkshire uplands and there was a poetic hiatus. The poetry didn’t cease but its expression in words took a pause. Instead, their lives, it seemed to me, became a poetic performance of considerable power. They lived in the back of a Fiat Panda for one summer of fruit picking before buying the tiniest caravan you ever could imagine in which creative and extensive vegetarian meals were served with generosity and hilarity. They combined day jobs and night jobs. From that they worked even longer hours running newsagents that doubled or trebled in turnover. Thence they bought and revived the Hotel Continental in Dovercourt, Harwich, and ran it with such flair and imagination – and non-stop hard work – that it became itself a poetic creation. Some hated it, some could not understand it, some abused or exploited their kindness (perhaps not least the producers of TV shows) – but very many recognised it was more than just a hotel, it was a parable of generosity: original sculpture and painting in the public areas, each room individually decorated with ingenuity and humour, top-rate cooking at low-rate prices and a locals’ bar serving more draught ale than anywhere else in town. It was inevitable that some were shocked and disdained it but also that some creative sorts would gather around, to make music and share writing, and so eventually Gordon made an occasional return to reciting and writing and he found an additional encouragement in the regular poetry evenings at The Red Lion, Manningtree. Meanwhile, as the financial sharks, smelling blood, gathered ever closer, he had more reason than ever to reflect on life’s ironies, tragedies, and hilarities – and eventually, when selling at a loss was the only option, Gordon and Blossom demonstrated again that theirs is the true poets’ vocation, to risk and venture, to gain and lose all, and never breathe a word about your loss…
Thus, to meet Gordon is the best way to encounter his poetry but to read (or hear) his work will nonetheless work its magic on you. What might you expect to find – and what will puzzle, or perhaps offend, you?
He plays on words with the eloquence and delight of one who is profoundly intelligent but whose education was almost non-existent. There is sex, lots of it: by turns outrageous, funny, touching – but always inspired by an innocent delight rather than sordid preoccupation. A poem that combines both these fascinations is Shipping Forecast:
Attendance all stripping. The Biological
Society wish you’d follow this morning
and pip emma a plenty true theme
rhyme today.
There is a tale warming and dawning of
stripping for see areas
risqué
Fair Isle, Jersey, unfasten it.
White valley
sillies bite
ridge dowsing
warm front high
Mumbles
Wick
sperm point, Orcock Head
rising steady, good,
forth, dogger.
Associated frontal trough
over
try me Prestwick
liking
sole, imminent,
lumpy,
finish there,
soon.
Gordon’s poetry contains indignation, playfulness, insight, self-deprecation, absurdity, sympathy, humanity and sometimes a touch of the divine, and always much, much humour – and, of course, there are some poems that I can’t understand at all. Gordon – part poet, part prophet and I think the funniest, loveliest most singular man I have ever known – is a voice crying in the wilderness of our age of mediocrity and conformism. Do hear his voice, or failing that, read his words.
Revd. Philip Martin. St.Aldhelms, Branksome, Poole, Dorset. April 2021.
____________________________________
1983
After our long Christmas holiday it was good to return to your letter and a very enthusiastic one from Tony Pol. He said it was the best reading ever and thanked me for sending you!
New work will not be easy as my funds are low. It is hard for me to promote with one hand and then refuse to subsidise with the other! Be assured, however, that I will do my best.
(Nuttall – well, yes and I would leave it.)
Happy New Year!
I love the cards – do the bookshops sell them?
(By the way: I’m not in the plump prestigious pigeon business, in fact far more radical than is realised and I hate corn).
After driving my son to school under a blanket of rain I am now able to watch bright sky with sentimental puffy clouds sailing over the just budding ash trees.
Keep on writing,
Yours,
Pamela Clunies-Ross
Director, National Poetry Secretariat
____________________________________________
Very nice to hear from you!
It felt good meeting you both. Thank you for buying ‘Open Windows, Open Doors’; I‘m glad you are enjoying it. And thank you for Gordon’s CD. I listened to it this morning and I found it contains rather serious stuff ! perhaps even more serious than the latest poems you’ve emailed me. I like them too, but some of the pieces in the CD are great; 28 mins of contemporary scop.
I’ve read about the ‘Tin Book’, it is very interesting; similar to Ratushinskaya writing her poems on bars of soap whilst imprisoned l’ll get Gordon’s book in Amazon anon.
Much Love to you both,
V Vie xx
February 2020
www.vanessavie.co.uk
________________________________________________
“An Ideal Political Poet”.
“Readers of letters to the ‘Bridge Times’ will have met his strong and original thought-forms, and may rightly guess him to be a free and responsible citizen of an ideal democracy. A man who dares to express himself in a public space is not an agent for either the sinister or the reactionary spirit forces which contend in collusion for control of the freedom they seek to deny in the name of politics. Gordon is an ideal and original political man, and, naturally, a poet.
“The Tin Book” is a concept, a paperbound book, a collection of poems written on enamelled sheets of metal, and the story of its own publication: a comedy, since the story involves arts councils and cooperatives. The book becomes a symbol of the story of its own gestation, and as such it appears miraculous.
On its publication I wrote a short adulatory review for last month’s Calder Valley Press of the Tin Book miracle. That review did not appear. We are talking about a poet and his place in public. It’s clear enough that this newspaper will prefer to organise itself as a coherent and collective pressure than as a collection of disparate and original individuals active in the art of writing. Which of these forms may be the honester approach to public space would be a debate the truth is bound to lose. If this attempt to review Gordon’s book is more cautious in its praise for the poet, then it’s also more distanced from any identity with the newspaper in which it appears.
G.W.Hoyles’ starting point and tradition is that of the English popular poem, with its roots in nursery rhyme, street ballad and Methodist hymn. Such a poem will lollop clumsily and unpromisingly by obvious rhythm to obstinate rhyme. At times, as if taken over by a genial and innocent giant, Gordon lets such stupidity with benign harmlessness dance the dance of the dumb, unhumiliated by speech:
“Friddley middley upsaddy ho”
At other times intelligence is raised to improvise against the poet’s chosen rhythm ditties of complexity and subtlety. Too often though rhythm captures the spirit and the product of thought dies to the prospect of freedom. The finest lines of the finest poems owe little or nothing to the jingles of popular tradition:
“But the drunken know the facts they face disgrace them.”
The book is provincial in its faults but strong as a bearer of local truth. Here are social satires of flagrant justice. The central figure is the poet in this actual landscape distorted as it is by civic mistrust, false councillors, and un-coperatives. Some of the best poems mean the poet: they are acrostics of GWHoyles standing honest and without improper arrogance in the area his vocation gives him care for…………..
Mike Haslam/ Calder Valley Press November 1979
_________________________________________________
Gordon Hoyles.
What can I say about this man, a poet like no other.
He has the ability to “Hit the Nail on the Head”.
A man that speaks reams in just a few words.
Succinct, to the point, deep feeling, funny, sad,
shocking, jolly.
Each piece is different, enjoyable and unexpected.
I have read and listened to this man and have never
come away disappointed.
There are so many of his poems that I can relate to.
I could not explain my thoughts and feelings associated to
my life, in a more aphoristic way.
Pick any one of Gordon’s books, and I promise you will
not be disappointed.
Shirley Reed.
October 2020.