Peter Riley
Author photo by Tony Frazer, 2003.
Shearsman Titles
Alstonefield Snow Has Settled [...] Bury Me Here
The Dance at Mociu The Llyn Writings The Day's Final Balance
About the author
"I was born in 1940, in Stockport, near Manchester, in an environment of working people, and entered higher education through Britain's post-war socialistic educational policies. After an interesting year selling kitchen furniture and lampshades in Manchester department stores, I went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English. Vocational uncertainty led to over a year in London with varied employment but mostly walking the city and getting married. Having located a thesis subject – the novelist and story-writer T.F. Powys – I moved to Hastings where the Powys family kept a hoard of unpublished manuscripts, and then to Hove, working on the thesis part-time at the University of Sussex and employed occasionally as bus conductor, then language teacher. Having become acquainted with an association of poets centred on Cambridge I subscribed to the privately circulated worksheet The English Intelligencer of historic fame, and took over its editorship for part of 1967.
The thesis was never completed, mainly because the mass of the unpublished texts was too much to handle, but also because the foci of poethood moved me away from the subject as I strove to grasp the mysteries of the Cambridge nova and its companion, the "New American Poetry". In 1969 I got a job as lecturer at the University of Odense (Denmark), then a group of portacabins in a field, and stayed there until 1972. On return to Britain I discovered quickly that working at a Continental university was not considered a wise career-move, and abandoned an academic career, and indeed any other.
In Denmark through knowing Anthony Barnett, who was working with John Tchicai at the time, I discovered avant-garde jazz or free improvised music and for many years afterwards pursued it as listener, essayist and reviewer, focusing increasingly on the work of the guitarist Derek Bailey, who became a friend.
Somewhat adrift now, and separated from poetical intimacies, I got married again and we lived for a while in a worker's cottage in Macclesfield which was due to be demolished, and then achieved a long-held ambition to live in the Peak District, first in a rather splendid Georgian stone farmhouse called Harecops on a low ridge-top overlooking the Dove Valley. While here I undertook a part-time M.A. thesis on Jack Spicer at the University of Keele, supervised by Roy Fisher. In 1978 we moved to the far, eastern, side of the Peak, getting a stone cottage in a small village called Bolehill which clung to the valley side overlooking the town of Wirksworth. While here I discovered that the ever fraught "earning a living" question might be settled by acting as an independent second-hand mail-order book dealer specialising in poetry, mainly by picking up choice items from second-hand bookshops and passing them on at an increased price, and continued doing this until 2005. The business succeeded without ever making any profit worth knowing about, and took up ever increasing amounts of time.
The last move, as yet, was to Cambridge in 1985. The place had remained a centre of independent poetical activity, but this was not the main reason for moving there, which had more to do with access to the University Library and other cultural manifestations such as concerts, films, theatre and possibly a sociality of poets and readers to whom what I did would not be simply wierd... expectations which were only foiled to a degree. The spiritual nervousness of this move is depicted in Ospita. Various marginal poetical activities were indulged, notably, following an initial terrifying encounter with the dying Cambridge Poetry Festival, participation in the running of the annual Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry (CCCP), and publishing the Poetical Histories series. This too stopped, and here is where we find ourselves."
Copyright © Peter Riley, 2007. Text drawn from the author's website, where there is an amplification of the autobiography, and much more besides.