Lawrence Upton (born London 1949, of Cornish origins, died at home 16 February 2020), was a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, and director of Writers Forum.
Upton was a performer, continuing and expanding the performance tradition of, amongst others, Bob Cobbing. He was active in London poetry and experimental music from the 1960s. He spent much of the first decade of this century in Cornwall; but was a Fellow of Goldsmiths, University of London from Spring 2008 until Autumn 2015, an AHRC fellow for the first three years and then as a visiting fellow.
Life and work
Lawrence Upton first came to public attention in the early 1970s, performing his poetry widely throughout Britain. That poetry, later largely rejected by the poet himself, was often darkly humorous and disturbing. There were political overtones to much of it. He was also something of an activist, speaking often at meetings of small press operators and at the then Poets Conference. He was Secretary of the Association of Little Presses of Great Britain from 1972-77, working alongside Bill Griffiths.
He abandoned performance for some years. During that period, he reinvented his style and subject matter to speak of natural phenomena - animals of the urban city and people in desolate landscapes. This reinvention of his style has been a feature of his career.
In 1972, his sound poetry on recording tape which he had been making since the middle of the 1960s led to an invitation to be guest composer at Fylkingen in Stockholm where he worked for relatively short periods, on and off, for five years from 1974.
At about the same time, he was elected to the General Council of The Poetry Society and immediately further elected by the Council on to the society's executive. The next year he was elected the society's deputy chairman, a post he held for some time (1974-77). He served under three chairs: Laurence Cotterell, Jeff Nuttall and Barry MacSweeney before resigning (1978). His essay "So many things" discusses issues arising from that period (in "CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s", edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards; Shearsman, Bristol; ). He founded and ran the bookshop of the Society, rebadged the National Poetry Centre and was an active member of The Printshop where he helped to produce the society's publications and those of the general public who came in with manuscripts.
Meanwhile, his reputation had grown, reinvented again as a maker of text-sound composition, with live and recorded performances in Stockholm and elsewhere. He had in 1976 co-founded the very influential sound poetry performance group jgjgjg (with PC Fencott and cris cheek), which blazed a trail through Europe's avant-garde scene and then disbanded in less than 3 years. Cobbing published him in Kroklok magazine and also proposed that the two make a booklet together to be published by Writers Forum. The booklet, called Furst Fruts of 77, was one of the press's best sellers ever.
1978 saw an end to Upton's visits to Fylkingen and a major argument with Cobbing but he continued to make sound works and to perform live multi-media work. This work was poorly documented but audio tapes have been available from the press Typical Characteristic. His books Mutation and Morning Humming from Zimmer Press and Lobby Press respectively date from that period and point to a further change in style. He visited and performed in Canada and the U.S. and was included in McCaffery and Nicholl's Sound Poetry: A Catalogue.
In 1980, Upton completed a BA degree in English Literature and History at Kingston Polytechnic and fell in love with a married woman. Both events had major effects upon his life and writing. Upton had left school with almost no qualifications but acquired a taste for study in the late 1970s. After his BA and a PGCE at Kingston, he went on to take an MA in English and American Literature at King's college, London, and has spoken often of the experience of being taught about Melville by the famous Eric Mottram.
His relationship took him out of circulation in the poetry world for many years. When the two were finally apart, a confidant wrote that "it seems to have lasted as long as a world war, but I feel that more people have died."