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THE GRIGSON 'BILLHOOK' The Grigson name inspired such partisan feelings, that even when his first collected poems appeared in 1963, Derek Parker's review in Poetry Review bubbled with old wounds, reluctantly concluding: 'It is with the utmost ill-nature that I am forced to admit that the only thing I can find to carp about in Mr Grigson's Collected Poems is the price'. |
| After the 1930s, the Grigson billhook would fix repeatedly into targets such as the world of literary academics and the cult of the performance poet: he rightly believed that 'poetry is the poem, or a part of it; nothing else and nowhere else', and that good performance was invariably at the expense of the poem: '...if he is a good poet he mumbles and can't be heard. If you can hear him, if he is a performer, his poems are as a rule worthless'. | |
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