Yes, thanks, Quincy - and Sam and Erik. There's a good deal of visual material with Harrison out there. A friend of mine worked on the four TV programmes that Harrison did about graveyards (this was after "V") entitled "Loving Memory", and he told me that Harrison had decided, ever since he was told as a schoolboy that with his accent he could only play the prose-clown parts in Shakespeare, that he would make a living from poetry - and only poetry. This means he never writes prose and he pretty well renounced the idea of an academic career. And so poetry for the theatre and the screen offered the best chance of earning enough to get by. The programmes vary in quality, obviously, but the best of them are very powerful.
Here's Harrison reading
"Them and [uz]", the poem that tells the story of his English teacher's mockery of his accent; the interviewer is Simon Armitage.
Tony Harrison's V
Linear Mode
