It changed poetry for ever in the UK. It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based: white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines.
"Adrian Mitchell" FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left-wing politics/Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's CND/anti-Bomb movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Vladimir Mayakovsky/Mayakovsky".
Mitchell sought in his work to counteract the implications of his own assertion that, "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."
In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space. In 2002 he was nominated, semi-seriously, Britain's "Shadow Poet Laureate". Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles. His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook's US (stage play)/US and the English version of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous poets! More Adrian Mitchell on Wikipedia.It's about sitting faithfully in England while thousands of miles away terrible atrocities are being committed in our name.
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