Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, a writer whose work shifted territory with time, from land to city, from Yorkshire, America and London to war-ravaged Eastern Europe. He was called ‘the godfather of the new poetry’ because his politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry influenced a whole generation of younger British poets.
Ken Smith was born in Rudston, East Yorkshire, the son of an itinerant farm labourer. He worked in Britain and America as a teacher, freelance writer, barman, magazine editor, potato picker, BBC reader and creative writing fellow, and was writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1985-87. He received America’s highly prestigious Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1997, followed by a Cholmondeley Award in 1998.
Ken Smith was the first poet to be published by Bloodaxe, with his pamphlet Tristan Crazy in 1978. Smith’s first book, The Pity, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1967, and his second, Work, distances/poems, by Swallow Press, Chicago, in 1972. His early books span a transition from his preoccupation with land and myth (when he lived in Yorkshire, Devon and America) to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection (when he lived in East London). His first retrospective, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (Bloodaxe Books, 1982) covered the first half of his writing career.
In 1986 Ken Smith’s collection Terra was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 1987 Bloodaxe published his collected prose, A Book of Chinese Whispers. Four of his collections, Terra (1986), Wormwood (1987), The heart, the border (1990) and Tender to the Queen of Spain (1993), were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His last separate collection, Wild Root (1998), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. All these collections were included in his second Bloodaxe retrospective, Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002).
In 1989 Harrap published Inside Time, Ken Smith’s book about imprisonment, about Wormwood Scrubs and the men he met there. This was published in paperback by Mandarin in 1990. Ken Smith was working in Berlin when the Wall came down, writing a book about East and West Berlin: this turned into Berlin: Coming in from the Cold (Hamish Hamilton, 1990; Penguin paperback, 1991). He edited Klaonica: poems for Bosnia (Bloodaxe Books/The Independent, 1993) with Judi Benson, and with Matthew Sweeney co-edited Beyond Bedlam (Anvil Press Poetry, 1997), a book of poems by mentally ill people.
He died on 27 June 2003 from a hospital infection caught while being treated for Legionnaires’ Disease, which he had contracted months earlier in Cuba. His last poems were published in You Again: last poems & other words (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) along with other uncollected work, tributes from other poets, photographs, a biographical portrait, an essay by Colin Raw with extracts from letters, and interviews covering the whole range of his life and work; this is the most comprehensive source of critical writings on his poetry. His Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in October 2018, coinciding with his 80th birthday and with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe’s first title, Ken Smith’s Tristan Crazy (1978).